In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [64]
hardly wait for the hour of dinner when she would unloose the torrential laughter of her guests. “Well, what do you say to tonight’s Brichot? I thought of you when I read the quotation from Cuvier. I honestly think the man is going mad.” “I haven’t read it yet,” Cottard would say. “What, you haven’t read it yet? But you don’t know what delights you are missing. I promise you you will die of laughter.” And pleased at heart that someone had not yet read the latest Brichot, since this meant that she herself could call attention to the ludicrous things in it, Mme Verdurin would tell the butler to bring Le Temps and would herself read the article aloud, lingering with emphasis on the most simple phrases. After dinner, for the whole of the evening, the anti-Brichot campaign would continue, but with hypocritical reservations. “I won’t say it too loud because I am afraid that over there,” she would say, indicating Comtesse Molé, “there is a good deal of admiration for this stuff. Fashionable people are more foolish than is generally supposed.” In saying this she did her best, by speaking just loud enough, to let Mme Molé hear that she was being talked about, and at the same time to convey to her, by occasionally lowering her voice, that she did not want her to hear what she was saying. Mme Molé was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in fact she thought the equal of Michelet. She said that of course Mme Verdurin was right, and so as to end by nevertheless saying something which seemed to her incontestably true, added: “What one must allow him, is that it is well written.” “You call that well written?” said Mme Verdurin. “Personally, I consider that it might have been written by a pig”—an audacity which always made her fashionable guests laugh, particularly as Mme Verdurin, as though she herself were frightened by the word “pig,” uttered it in a whisper, holding her hand to her lips. Her rage against Brichot was still further increased by the naïve fashion in which he displayed his pleasure at his success, in spite of the fits of ill-humour provoked in him by the censorship every time that it—as he expressed it, for he liked to employ new words in order to show that he was not too donnish—“blue-pencilled” part of his article. In his presence, however, Mme Verdurin did not reveal too clearly, save by a certain grumpiness which might have been a warning to a more perspicacious man, the poor opinion which she had of the writings of “Cho-chotte.” Only once did she criticise him, for using the word “I” too often. And it was true that he was in the habit of using it continually, firstly because, with his professorial habits, he was constantly employing phrases like “I grant that” and even (in the sense of “I am willing to admit that”) “I am willing that,” as for instance: “I am willing that the vast development of the fronts should necessitate, etc.,” but principally because, as a militant antiDreyfusard of the old days who had had suspicions of German preparations long before the war, he had frequently had occasion to write: “Since 1897 I have been denouncing;” “I pointed out in 1901;” “In my little pamphlet, of the greatest rarity today (habent sua fata libelli) I drew attention,” and the habit, once formed, had remained with him. He turned crimson at Mme Verdurin’s remark, which had been made with acerbity. “You are right, Madame. A man who had no more love for the Jesuits than M. Combes—although he never had the honour of a preface from our sweet master of delicious scepticism, Anatole France, who was, if I am not mistaken, my adversary … before the Flood—observed that the first person singular is always odious.”6 From that moment Brichot replaced “I” by “one,” but one did not prevent the reader from seeing that the author was speaking of himself, indeed it permitted him to speak of himself more frequently than ever, to comment on the most insignificant of his own phrases, to build a whole article round a single negative statement, always behind the protective screen of one. If for example Brichot had said, in another article perhaps,