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By Root 753 0

secret, unpredictable is the truth. Afraid of reasoning like a bourgeois, and of seeing Charlusism where it was not, he had missed the fact that the woman was flushing out the game. “She came often enough to find me,” said the lift-boy. “But she saw at once who it was she was dealing with. I refused categorically, I don’t go in for that sort of monkey business. I told her I found it wholly objectionable. It’s enough for one person to talk, word gets around, and you can’t find another place anywhere.” These last reasons weakened the virtuous declarations with which the lift-boy had begun, for they implied that he would have obliged had he been assured of discretion. Such must not have been the case where Saint-Loup was concerned. It is probable that even the rich man and his mistress and friends had been luckier, since the lift-boy quoted many conversations between him and them, held at various times, something that happens rarely when one has declined so categorically. For instance, the rich man’s mistress had come to him to make the acquaintance of a page with whom he was close friends. “I don’t think you know him, you weren’t here then. Victor, they called him. Of course,” the lift-boy added with the air of referring to inviolable and faintly secret laws, “you can’t say no to a comrade who isn’t well off.” I remembered the invitation the rich man’s noble friend had extended to me a few days before I left Balbec. But most likely this had nothing to do with it, and was dictated purely by amiability.)

“And tell me about poor Françoise, has she succeeded in getting her nephew exempted?” But Françoise, who for a long time had been making every effort to achieve this, and who, when she had been offered through the Guermantes a recommendation to General de Saint-Joseph, had replied in a tone of despair: “Oh no, that would be quite useless, there’s nothing to be got from that old fogy, he’s as bad as could be, he’s patriotic,” Françoise, as soon as there had been any question of war, however much she suffered at the thought of it, was of the opinion that it would be wrong to abandon the “poor Russians” since we were “allianced” to them. The butler, who in any case was convinced that the war would only last ten days and would end in a brilliant victory for France, would not have dared, for fear of being contradicted by events—and would not even have had enough imagination—to predict a long and indecisive war. But from this complete and immediate victory he tried at least to extract in advance the maximum of suffering for Françoise. “Things may well take an ugly turn, because it seems there are lots who refuse to march, boys of sixteen in floods of tears.” And this habit of telling her disagreeable things in order to “vex” her was what he called “putting the wind up her,” “making her flesh creep,” “giving her a bit of a jolt.” “Sixteen, Holy Mother!” said Françoise, and then suspicious for a moment: “But they said they only took them at twenty, at sixteen they’re still children.” “Naturally the papers have been told to say nothing about it. Anyhow, the young men, one and all, will be off to the front and there won’t be many to come back. In one way it’ll do some good. A good blood-letting, you know, is useful now and again. And then it will help trade. And I promise you, if there are any lads who are a bit soft and think twice about it, they’ll be for the firing-squad, bang, bang, bang! I suppose it has to be done. And then, the officers, what does it matter to them? They get paid their screw, that’s all they ask.” Françoise turned so pale whenever one of these conversations took place that we were afraid the butler might cause her death from a heart attack.

But this did not mean that she had lost her old faults. Whenever I had a visit from a girl, however much her old servant’s legs might be hurting her, if I happened to leave my room for a moment there she was at the top of a step-ladder in the dressing-room, searching, so she said, for some overcoat of mine to see if the moths had got into it, but really in order to eavesdrop.