• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 798 0

symptoms which it would be exaggerated to take tragically but wise to take seriously’; ‘to work for the King of Prussia’ (this last, inevitably, has come to life again). Well, since then, alas, how many of the species have I seen born and die! We have had ‘the scrap of paper,’ ‘the Empires of Prey,’ ‘the famous Kultur which consists in massacring defenceless women and children,’ ‘victory belongs, as the Japanese say, to the side which can hold out for a quarter of an hour longer than the other,’ ‘the Germano-Turanians,’ ‘scientific barbarism,’ ‘if we want to win the war, as Mr Lloyd George has forcibly said’ (but that’s out of date now), and ‘the fighting spirit of our troops’ or ‘the pluck of our troops.’ Even the syntax of the excellent Norpois has undergone in consequence of the war as profound a change as the baking of bread or the speed of transport. Have you observed that the excellent man, wanting to proclaim his own desires as a truth on the verge of being realised, does not dare nevertheless to employ the future pure and simple, since this would run the risk of being contradicted by events, but has adopted as a sign of future tense the verb ‘to know’?”

I confessed to M. de Charlus that I did not quite understand what he meant.

(I ought to mention here that the Duc de Guermantes by no means shared his brother’s pessimism. Furthermore, he was as anglophile as M. de Charlus was anglophobe. And he regarded M. Caillaux as a traitor who deserved a thousand times over to be shot. When his brother asked him for proofs of the man’s treason, M. de Guermantes replied that, if we were only to convict people who signed a statement saying “I am a traitor,” the crime of treason would never be punished. But in case I should not have occasion to return to the subject, I will mention also that a few years later, when Caillaux was on trial, the Duc de Guermantes, animated as he was by the purest anti-Caillautism, met an English military attaché and his wife, an exceptionally cultivated couple with whom he made friends, as he had done at the time of the Dreyfus case with the three charming ladies; that on the first day of the acquaintance he was astounded, talking of Caillaux, whom he regarded as obviously guilty and certain to be convicted, to hear the cultivated and charming couple say: “But he will probably be acquitted, there is absolutely no evidence against him.” M. de Guermantes tried to argue that M. de Norpois, in the witness box, had fixed the unhappy Caillaux with his gaze and said to him: “You are the Giolitti of France, yes, Monsieur Caillaux, you are the Giolitti of France.” But the cultivated and charming couple had smiled, made fun of M. de Norpois, cited proofs of his senility and concluded that, though Le Figaro might have said that he had addressed these words to “the unhappy M. Caillaux,” he had probably in fact addressed them to a highly amused M. Caillaux. The Duc de Guermantes lost no time in changing his opinions. That this change could be brought about by the influence of an Englishwoman is not so extraordinary as one might have supposed had it been foretold even as late as 1919, when the English still spoke of the Germans only as “the Huns” and demanded savage penalties for the guilty. For their opinions too had changed and now—less than a year later—they approved every decision which was likely to distress France and be of help to Germany.)

To return to M. de Charlus: “Yes,” he said, in reply to my confession that I did not quite understand. “I mean exactly what I say: ‘to know,’ in the articles of Norpois, indicates the future, it indicates, that is to say, the desires of Norpois, and indeed the desires of us all,” he added, perhaps without complete sincerity. “I am sure you will agree with me. If ‘to know’ had not become simply a sign of the future tense, one might just find it intelligible for the subject of this verb to be a country. For instance, every time Norpois says: ‘America would not know how to remain indifferent to these repeated violations of international law,’ ‘the Dual Monarchy would not