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By Root 1766 0

him would certainly be reduced once he, Morel, was married to the girl. This marriage was the urgent thing, because of his love, and in the interest of his freedom. He asked Jupien for his niece’s hand, and Jupien consulted her. This was wholly unnecessary. The girl’s passion for the violinist streamed around her, like her hair when she let it down, as did the joy in her beaming eyes. In Morel, almost everything that was agreeable or advantageous to him awakened moral emotions and words to correspond, sometimes even melting him to tears. It was therefore sincerely—if such a word can be applied to him—that he addressed to Jupien’s niece speeches as steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are the speeches that so many young noblemen who look forward to a life of idleness address to some charming daughter of a bourgeois plutocrat) as the theories he had expounded to M. de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of virgins had been steeped in unmitigated vileness. However, there was another side to this virtuous enthusiasm for a person who afforded him pleasure and to the solemn promises that he made to her. As soon as the person ceased to cause him pleasure, or indeed if, for example, the obligation to fulfil the promises that he had made caused him displeasure, she at once became the object of an antipathy which he sought to justify in his own eyes and which, after some neurasthenic disturbance, enabled him to prove to himself, as soon as the balance of his nervous system was restored, that, even looking at the matter from a purely virtuous point of view, he was released from any obligation.

Thus, towards the end of his stay at Balbec, he had managed somehow to lose all his money and, not daring to mention the matter to M. de Charlus, looked about for someone to whom he might appeal. He had learned from his father (who at the same time had forbidden him ever to become a “sponger”) that in such circumstances the correct thing is to write to the person whom you intend to ask for a loan saying that you have a “business matter to discuss with him,” that you would like to make a “business appointment.” This magic formula had so enchanted Morel that he would, I believe, have been glad to lose his money, simply to have the pleasure of asking for a “business” appointment. In the course of his life he had found that the formula did not have quite the magic power that he supposed. He had discovered that certain people, to whom otherwise he would never have written at all, did not reply within five minutes of receiving his letter asking to “talk business” to them. If the afternoon went by without his receiving an answer, it never occurred to him that, even on the most optimistic assumption, it was quite possible that the gentleman addressed had not yet come home, or had had other letters to write, if indeed he had not gone away, or fallen ill, or something of that sort. If, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, Morel was given an appointment for the following morning, he would accost his intended creditor with: “I was quite surprised not to get an answer, and I wondered whether there was anything wrong; but I’m glad to see you’re quite well,” and so forth. So, at Balbec, without telling me that he wished to talk “business” to him, he had asked me to introduce him to that very Bloch to whom he had been so unpleasant a week earlier in the train. Bloch had not hesitated to lend him—or rather to get M. Nissim Bernard to lend him—five thousand francs. From that moment Morel had worshipped Bloch. He asked himself with tears in his eyes how he could show his gratitude to a person who had saved his life. Finally, I undertook to ask on his behalf for a thousand francs a month from M. de Charlus, a sum which he would at once forward to Bloch who would thus find himself repaid within quite a short time. The first month, Morel, still under the impact of Bloch’s generosity, sent him the thousand francs immediately, but after this he doubtless decided that the remaining four thousand francs might be put to more satisfactory use, for he began