Saint-Loup had not for a long time been able to come to Paris, whether, as he himself explained, on account of his military duties, or, as was more likely, on account of the trouble that he was having with his mistress, with whom he had twice now been on the point of breaking off relations. He had often told me what a pleasure it would be to him if I came to visit him at that garrison town, the name of which, a couple of days after his leaving Balbec, had caused me so much joy when I had read it on the envelope of the first letter I received from my friend. It was (not so far from Balbec as its wholly inland surroundings might have led one to think) one of those little fortified towns, aristocratic and military, set in a broad expanse of country over which on fine days there floats so 88often into the distance a sort of intermittent haze of sound which—as a screen of poplars by its sinuosities outlines the course of a river which one cannot see—indicates the movements of a regiment on parade that the very atmosphere of its streets, avenues and squares has been gradually tuned to a sort of perpetual vibration, musical and martial, while the most ordinary note of cartwheel or tramway is prolonged in vague trumpet calls, indefinitely repeated, to the hallucinated ear, by the silence. It was not too far away from Paris for me to be able, if I took the express, to return, join my mother and grandmother and sleep in my own bed. As soon as I realised this, troubled by a painful longing, I had too little will power to decide not to return to Paris but rather to stay in this town; but also too little to prevent a porter from carrying my luggage to a cab and not to adopt, as I walked behind him, the unburdened mind of a traveller who is looking after his luggage and for whom no grandmother is waiting anywhere at home, to get into the carriage with the complete detachment of a person who, having ceased to think of what it is that he wants, has the air of knowing what he wants, and to give the driver the address of the cavalry barracks. I thought that Saint-Loup might come to sleep that night at the hotel at which I should be staying, so as to make less painful for me the first shock of contact with this strange town. One of the guard went to find him, and I waited at the barrack gate, before that huge ship of stone, booming with the November wind, out of which, every moment, for it was now six o’clock, men were emerging in pairs into the street, staggering as if they were coming ashore in some foreign port in which they found themselves temporarily anchored.
89Saint-Loup appeared, moving like a whirlwind, his eyeglass spinning in the air before him; I had not given my name, I was eager to enjoy his surprise and delight. “Oh! What a bore!” he exclaimed, suddenly catching sight of me, and blushing to the tips of his ears. “I have just had a week’s leave, and I shan’t be off duty again for another week.”
And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this first night alone, for he knew better than anyone my bed-time agonies, which he had often remarked and soothed at Balbec, he broke off his lamentation to turn and look at me, coax me with little smiles, with tender though unsymmetrical glances, half of them coming directly from his eye, the other half through his eyeglass, but both sorts alike an allusion to the emotion that he felt on seeing me again, an allusion also to that important matter which I did not always understand but which concerned me now vitally, our friendship.
“I say! Where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t recommend the hotel where we mess; it is next to the Exhibition ground, where there’s a show just starting; you’ll find it beastly crowded. No, you’ld better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it is a little eighteenth-century palace with old tapestries. It ‘makes’ quite an ‘old world residence’.”
Saint-Loup employed in every connexion the word “makes” for “has the air of”, because the spoken language, like the written, feels from time to time the need of these alterations in the meanings of words, these refinements of expression. And just as journalists often have not the least idea from what school of literature come the “turns of speech” that they borrow, so the vocabulary, 90the very diction of Saint-Loup were formed in imitation of three different aesthetes, none of whom he knew personally but whose way of speaking had been indirectly instilled into him. “Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted to your supersensitiveness of hearing. You will have no neighbours. I quite see that it is a slender advantage, and as, after all, another visitor may arrive to-morrow, it would not be worth your while to choose that particular hotel with so precarious an object in view. No, it is for its appeal to the eye that I recommend it. The rooms are quite attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there is something reassuring about that.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure that an attractive house could give was superficial, almost non-existent, and could not calm my growing anguish, as painful as that which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which smelt of flowering grasses. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed gaze.
“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about tapestries which you won’t have the heart to look at, even. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most enlivening, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand; I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”
At that moment a serjeant who was exercising a horse on the square, entirely absorbed in making the animal 91jump, disregarding the salutes of passing troopers, but hurling volleys of oaths at such as got in his way, turned with a smile to Saint-Loup and, seeing that he had a friend with him, saluted us. But his horse at once reared. Saint-Loup flung himself at its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in quieting it and returned to my side.
“Yes,” he resumed; “I assure you that I fully understand; I feel for you as keenly as you do yourself. I am wretched,” he went on, laying his hand lovingly on my shoulder, “when I think that if I could have stayed with you to-night, I might have been able, if we talked till morning, to relieve you of a little of your unhappiness. I can lend you any number of books, but you won’t want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I shan’t be able to get anyone else to take my duty here; I’ve been off now twice running because my girl came down to see me.”
And he knitted his brows partly with vexation and also in the effort to decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply to my disease.
“Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a trooper who passed us. “Hurry up; get a move on!”
After which he turned once more to me, and his eyeglass and his peering, myopic gaze hinted an allusion to our great friendship.
“No! To see you here, in these barracks where I have spent so much time thinking about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes. I must be dreaming. And how are you? Better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang about too long on the square, there’s the devil of a draught; I don’t feel it now myself, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching cold. And what about your work; 92have you started yet? No? You are a quaint fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing? What a pity it is that it’s the useless fellows like me who
