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By Root 752 0

as a friend and in the family. He even, in a way, has much more heart than my aunt, who is a saint but makes him terribly aware of it. Only he is a dreadful husband, who has never ceased to be unfaithful to his wife, to insult her, to bully her, to keep her short of money. It would be so natural for her to leave him that that is a reason for the story to be true, but also a reason why it may not be true—the idea occurs to people and inevitably they talk about it. And then she has put up with him for so long! Of course I know quite well that there are lots of things which are reported falsely, and then denied, but later do become true.” This put it into my head to ask him whether there had ever been any question of his marrying Mlle de Guermantes. He seemed amazed and assured me that there had not, that it was merely one of those rumours of the fashionable world which arise from time to time one does not know why and vanish in the same way, without their falsity causing those who believed them to be any more cautious when a new rumour arises, of an engagement or a divorce, or a political rumour, in giving credence to it and spreading it.

Forty-eight hours had not elapsed before certain facts which I learnt proved to me that I had been absolutely wrong in my interpretation of Robert’s words: “If a man is not at the front, it is because he is afraid.” Saint-Loup had said this in order to shine in conversation, to appear in the role of an original psychologist, so long as he was not sure that his own enlistment would be accepted. But meanwhile he was moving heaven and earth to bring this about and showing himself in this less “original,” in the meaning that he thought it necessary to give to the word, but more profoundly a Frenchman of Saint-André-des-Champs, more in conformity with all that at this moment was best in the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, lords, citizens and serfs—feudally respectful serfs and serfs in revolt, those two divisions, both equally French, of the same family, the Françoise branch and the Morel branch, from which two arrows were now converging upon a common target, the frontier. Bloch had been enchanted to hear a confession of cowardice from a nationalist (who was, as a matter of fact, so little of a nationalist) and when Saint-Loup had asked him whether he himself would soon be off, had assumed a high-priestly air and replied: “Short-sighted.”

But Bloch had completely changed his mind about the war a few days later, when he came to see me in a state of frenzy. Although short-sighted, he had been passed fit for service. I was accompanying him home when we met Saint-Loup, who was on his way to an interview at the Ministry of War with a colonel to whom he was to be introduced by a retired officer—“M. de Cambremer,” he said to me, and added: “Oh! but of course, he is an old acquaintance of yours. You know Cancan as well as I do.” I replied that I did indeed know him and his wife too, and that I didn’t have a particularly high opinion of them. But I was so much in the habit, ever since I had first met them, of considering the wife as in her way a remarkable woman, who knew her Schopenhauer and at least had access to an intellectual sphere which was closed to her boorish husband, that I was at first astonished to hear Saint-Loup reply: “His wife is idiotic, I won’t try to defend her. But he is an excellent man—he was talented once and is still a very pleasant person.” By the “idiocy” of the wife, Saint-Loup meant no doubt her desperate desire to move in grand society, which is the thing that grand society judges most severely; by the good qualities of the husband, he meant perhaps something of the qualities that were recognised in him by his mother when she declared that he was the best of the family. He, at least, did not worry about duchesses, though this it must be admitted is a form of “intelligence” which differs as much from the intelligence that characterises thinkers as the “intelligence” admired by the public in this or that rich man who has “been clever enough to make a fortune.” However,