I went downstairs and entered the little ante-room where Maurice, uncertain whether they would call him back or not and whom Jupien had told to wait, was about to join in a game of cards with one of his friends. They were much excited about a croix-de-guerre which had been found on the floor and did not know who had lost it or to whom to send it back so that the rightful owner should not be worried about it. They then started talking about the bravery of an officer who had been killed trying to save his orderly. “All the same there are good people amongst the rich. I would have got killed with pleasure for such a man as that!” exclaimed Maurice who evidently only managed to inflict his ghastly flagellations on the Baron from mechanical habit, ignorance, need of money and preference for making it without working although, perhaps, it gave him more trouble. And as M. de Charlus had feared, he was possibly a good-hearted fellow, and certainly he seemed plucky. Tears almost came into his eyes when he spoke of the death of the officer and the young man of twenty-two was equally moved. “Ah! They’re fine fellows! Poor devils like us have nothing to lose. But a gentleman who’s got lots of stuff, who can go and take his aperitif every day at six o’clock, it’s really a bit thick. One can jaw as much as one likes, but when one sees chaps like that die, really it’s pretty stiff. God oughtn’t to let rich people like that die, besides, they’re useful to working people. The damned Boches ought to be killed to the last man of them for doing in a man like that.
And look what they’ve done at Louvain, cutting off the heads of little children! I don’t know, I am not any better than anyone else but I’d rather have my throat cut than obey savages like that; they aren’t men, they are out and out savages, you can’t deny it.” In fact all these boys were patriots. One, only slightly wounded in the arm, was not on such a high level as the others as he said, having shortly to return to the front: “Damn it, I wish it had been a proper wound” (one which procures exemption) just as Mme Swann formerly used to say, “I’ve succeeded in catching a tiresome influenza.” The door opened again for the chauffeur who had gone to take the air for a moment. “Hullo!” he said, “is it over already? It wasn’t long!” noticing Maurice who, he supposed, was engaged in whipping the man they nick-named after a newspaper of that period, “The man in chains.” “It may not seem long to you who’ve been out for a walk,” answered Maurice, annoyed for it to be known that he had not pleased the customer upstairs, “but if you’d been obliged to keep on whipping like me in this heat! If it weren’t for the fifty francs he gives–!” “Besides, he’s a man who talks well, one feels he’s had an education.
Did he say it would soon be over?” “He said we shan’t get them, that it will end without either side winning.” “Bon sang de bon sang! He must be a Boche.” “I told you you were talking too loud,” said a man older than the others, noticing me. “Have you done with your room?” “Shut up, you’re not master here.” “Yes, I’ve finished and I’ve come to pay.” “You’d better pay the patron. Maurice, go and fetch him.” “I don’t want to disturb you.” “It doesn’t disturb me.” Maurice went upstairs and came back. “The patron is coming down,” he said. I gave him two francs for his trouble. He blushed with pleasure: “Thank you very much. I shall send them to my brother who’s a prisoner. No, he’s all right, it depends on the camp.” Meanwhile, two extremely elegant customers in dress coats and white ties under their overcoats, they seemed Russians from their slight accent, were standing in the doorway deliberating if they should enter. It was visibly the first time they had come there. They must have been told where the place was and seemed divided between desire, temptation and extreme fright. One of the two, a handsome young man, kept repeating every minute to the other, with a half-questioning, half-persuasive smile, “After all, we don’t care a damn.” He might say he did not mind the consequences, but he was not so indifferent as his words suggested for his remark did not result in his entering but on the contrary, in another glance at his friend, followed by the same smile and the same, “After all we don’t care a damn.”
It was this “we don’t care a damn,” an example among thousands of that expressive language so different from what we generally speak, in which emotion makes us vary what we meant to say and in its place make use of phrases emerging from an unknown lake where live expressions without relation to one’s thought and for that very reason reveal it. I remember that Albertine once, when Françoise noiselessly entered the room just at the moment when my friend was lying beside me nude, exclaimed in spite of herself, to warn me: “Ah! here’s that beauty Françoise.” Françoise, whose sight was not good, and who was crossing the room some distance from us, apparently saw nothing. But the abnormal words “that beauty Françoise” which Albertine had never used in her life, spontaneously revealed their origin; Françoise knew they had escaped Albertine through emotion and understanding without seeing, went off muttering in her patois, the word “poutana”. Much later on, when Bloch having become the father of a family, married one of his daughters to a Catholic, an ill-bred person informed her that he had heard she was the daughter of a Jew and asked her what her name had been. The young woman who had been Miss Bloch since her birth, answered, pronouncing Bloch in the German fashion as the Duc de Guermantes might have done, that is, pronouncing the Ch not like “K” but with the Germanic “ch”.
To go back to the scene of the hotel, (into which the two Russians had finally decided to penetrate—“after all we don’t care a damn”) the patron had not yet come back when Jupien entered and rated them for talking too loud, saying that the neighbours would complain. But he stood dumbfounded on seeing me. “Get out all of you this instant!” he cried. Immediately all of them jumped up, whereupon I said: “It would be better if these young men stayed here and I went outside with you a moment.” He followed me, much troubled, and I explained to him why I had come. One could hear customers asking the patron if he could not introduce them to a footman, a choir boy, a negro chauffeur. All professions interested these old madmen; soldiers of all arms and the allies of all nations. Some especially favoured Canadians, feeling the charm of their accent which was so slight that they did not know whether it was of old France or of England.
On account of their kilts and because of the lacustrine dreams associated with such lusts, Scotchmen were at a premium, and as every mania owes its peculiar character, if not its aggravation, to circumstances, an old man, whose prurient cravings had all been sated, demanded with insistence to be made acquainted with a mutilated soldier. Steps were heard on the stairs. With the indiscretion which was natural to him, Jupien could not resist telling me it was the Baron who was coming down, that he must not on any account see me but if I would enter the little room contiguous to the passage where the young men were, he would open the shutter, a trick he had invented for the Baron to see and hear without being seen and which would now operate in my favour against him. “Only don’t make a noise,” he said. And half pushing me into the darkness, he left me. Moreover, he had no other room to offer me, his hotel, in spite of the war, being full. The room I had just left had been taken by the Vicomte de Courvoisier who, having been able to leave the Red Cross at X—- for two days,
