Let this digression about Mme de Forcheville, while I am walking along the boulevard side by side with M. de Charlus, justify a longer one, to elucidate the relations of Mme Verdurin with Brichot at this period. If poor Brichot, like Norpois, was judged with little indulgence by M. de Charlus (because the latter was at once extremely acute and, unconsciously, more or less Germanophile) he was actually treated much worse by the Verdurins. The latter were, of course, chauvinist, and they ought to have liked Brichot’s articles which, for that matter, were not inferior to many publications considered delectable by Mme Verdurin. The reader will, perhaps, recall that, even in the days of La Raspelière, Brichot had become, instead of the great man they used to think him, if not a Turk’s head like Saniette, at all events the object of their thinly disguised raillery. Nevertheless, he was still one of the “faithfuls” which assured him some of the advantages tacitly allotted by the statutes to all the foundation and associated members of the little group. But as, gradually, perhaps owing to the war or through the rapid crystallisation of the long-delayed fashionableness with which all the necessary but till then invisible elements had long since saturated the Verdurin Salon, that salon had been opened to a new society and as the “faithfuls”, at first the bait for this new society, had ended by being less and less frequently invited, so a parallel phenomenon was taking place in Brichot’s case. In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of the Institute, his fame had, until the war, not outgrown the limits of the Verdurin salon. But when almost daily he began writing articles embellished with that false brilliance we have so often seen him lavishly dispensing for the benefit of the “faithful” and as he possessed a real erudition which, as a true Sorbonian, he did not seek to hide under some of the graces he gave to it, society was literally dazzled. For once, moreover, it accorded its favour to a man who was far from being a nonentity and who could claim attention owing to the fertility of his intelligence and the resources of his memory.
And while three duchesses went to spend the evening at Mme Verdurin’s, three others contested the honour of having the great man at their table; and when the invitation of one of them was accepted, she felt herself the freer because Mme Verdurin, exasperated by the success of his articles in the faubourg Saint-Germain, had taken care not to have him at her house when there was any likelihood of his encountering there some brilliant personage whom he did not yet know and who would hasten to capture him. Brichot in his old age was satisfied to bestow on journalism in exchange for liberal emoluments, all the distinction he had wasted gratis and unrecognised in the Verdurins’ salon (for his articles gave him no more trouble than his conversation, so good a talker and so learned was he) and this might have brought him unrivalled fame and at one moment seemed on the eve of doing so, had it not been for Mme Verdurin. Certainly Brichot’s articles were far from being as remarkable as society people believed them to be. The vulgarity of the man was manifest at every instant under the pedantry of the scholar. And over and above imagery which meant nothing at all (“the Germans can no longer look the statue of Beethoven in the face”, “Schiller must have turned in his grave”, “the ink which initialled the neutrality of Belgium was hardly dry”, “Lenin’s words mean no more than the wind over the steppes”) there were trivialities such as “Twenty thousand prisoners, that’s something like a figure”.
“Our Command will know how to keep its eyes open once for all”. “We mean to win; one point, that’s all”. But mixed up with that nonsense, there were so much knowledge, intelligence and good reasoning. Now Mme Verdurin never began one of Brichot’s articles without the anticipatory satisfaction of expecting to find absurdities in it and read it with concentrated attention so as to be certain not to let any of them escape her. Unfortunately there always were some, one hardly had to wait. The most felicitous quotation from an almost unknown author, unknown at all events, by the writer of the work Brichot referred to, was made use of to prove his unjustifiable pedantry and Mme Verdurin awaited the dinner-hour with impatience so that she could let loose her guests’ shrieks of laughter, “Well! What about our Brichot this evening? I thought of you when I was reading the quotation from Cuvier. Upon my word, I believe he’s going crazy.” “I haven’t read it yet,” said a “faithful”. “What, you haven’t read it yet? You don’t know the delights in store for you. It’s so perfectly idiotic that I nearly died of laughing.” And delighted that someone or other had not yet read the particular article so that she could expose Brichot’s absurdities herself, Mme Verdurin told the butler to bring the Temps and began to read it aloud, emphasising the most simple phrases. After dinner, throughout the evening, the anti-Brichot campaign continued, but with a pretence of reserve. “I’m not reading this too loud because I’m afraid that down there,” she pointed at the Comtesse Molé, “there’s a lingering admiration for this rubbish. Society people are simpler than one would think.” While they wanted Mme Molé to hear what they were saying about her, they pretended the contrary by lowering their voices, and she, in cowardly fashion, disowned Brichot whom in reality she considered the equal of Michelet. She agreed with Mme Verdurin and yet, so as to end on a note which seemed to her incontrovertible, added, “One cannot deny that it is well written.” “You call that well written,” rejoined Mme Verdurin, “I consider that it’s written like a pig,” a sally which raised a society laugh, chiefly because Mme Verdurin, rather abashed by the word “pig”, had uttered it in a whisper, with her hand over her lips. Her vindictiveness towards Brichot increased the more because he naively displayed satisfaction at his success in spite of ill-humour provoked by the censorship each time, as he said, with his habitual use of slang to show he was not too don-like, it had caviardé a part of his article.
To his face Mme Verdurin did not let him perceive how poor an opinion she had of his articles except by a sullen demeanour which would have enlightened a more perceptive man. Once only she reproached him with using “I” so often. As a matter of fact he did so, partly from professional habit; expressions like: “I admit that”, “I am aware that the enormous development of the fronts necessitates”, et cetera, et cetera imposed themselves on him but still more because as a former militant anti-Dreyfusard who had surmised the German preparations long before the war, he had grown accustomed to continually writing: “I have denounced them since 1897”, “I pointed it out in 1901”, “I. warned them in my little brochure, very scarce to-day ‘habent sua fata libelli’” and thus the habit had taken root. He blushed deeply at Mme Verdurin’s bitter observation. “You are right, madame. One who loved the Jesuits as little as M. Combes, before he had been privileged with a preface by our charming master in delightful scepticism, Anatole France, who, unless I err, was my adversary—before the deluge, said that the ‘I’ was always detestable.” From that moment Brichot replaced “I” by “we”, but “we” did not prevent the reader from seeing that the writer was speaking about himself, on the contrary it enabled him never to cease talking about himself, making a running commentary out of his least significant sentences and composing an article simply on a negation, invariably protected by “we”. For instance, Brichot had stated, maybe, in another article that the German armies had lost some of their value, he would then begin as follows: “’We’ are not going to disguise the truth. ‘We’ have said that these German armies had lost some of their value. ‘We’ have not said that they were not still of great value. Still less shall ‘we’ say that they have no value at all, any more than ‘we’ should say that ground is gained which is not gained, et cetera, et cetera.”
In short, Brichot would have been able, merely by enunciating everything he would not say and by recalling everything that he had been saying for years and what Clausewitz, Ovid, Apollonius of Tyana had said so and so many centuries ago, easily to constitute the material of a large volume. It is a pity he did not publish it because those articles crammed with erudition are now difficult to obtain. The faubourg Saint-Germain, instructed by Mme Verdurin, began laughing at Brichot at her house, but, once they got away from the little clan, they continued to admire him. Then laughing at him became the fashion as it had been
