“Don’t you think,” I suggested, turning half towards Saint-Loup so as not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, as well as towards his friend, and so that we might all three join in the conversation, “that the influence we ascribe to environment is particularly true of intellectual environment. One is the man of one’s idea. There are far fewer ideas than men, therefore all men with similar ideas are alike. As there is nothing material in an idea, so the people who are only materially neighbours of the man with an idea can do nothing to alter it.”
At this point I was interrupted by Saint-Loup, because another of the young men had leaned across to him with a smile and, pointing to me, exclaimed: “Duroc! Duroc all over!” I had no idea what this might mean, but I felt the expression on the shy young face to be more 139than friendly. While I was speaking, the approbation of the party seemed to Saint-Loup superfluous; he insisted on silence. And just as a conductor stops his orchestra with a rap from his baton because some one in the audience has made a noise, so he rebuked the author of this disturbance: “Gibergue, you must keep your mouth shut when people are speaking. You can tell us about it afterwards.” And to me: “Please go on.”
I gave a sigh of relief, for I had been afraid that he was going to make me begin all over again.
“And as an idea,” I went on, “is a thing that cannot participate in human interests and would be incapable of deriving any benefit from them, the men who are governed by an idea are not influenced by material considerations.”
When I had finished, “That’s one in the eye for you, my boys,” exclaimed Saint-Loup, who had been following me with his gaze with the same anxious solicitude as if I had been walking upon a tight-rope. “What were you going to say, Gibergue?”
“I was just saying that your friend reminded me of Major Duroc. I seemed to hear him speaking.”
“Why, I’ve often thought so myself,” replied Saint-Loup; “they have several points in common, but you’ll find there are a thousand things in this fellow that Duroc hasn’t got.”
Saint-Loup was not satisfied with this comparison. In an ecstasy of joy, into which there no doubt entered the joy that he felt in making me shine before his friends, with extreme volubility, stroking me as though he were rubbing down a horse that had just come first past the post, he reiterated: “You’re the cleverest man I know, do you hear?” He corrected himself, and added: “You 140and Elstir.—You don’t mind my bracketing him with you, I hope. You understand—punctiliousness. It’s like this: I say it to you as one might have said to Balzac: ‘You are the greatest novelist of the century—you and Stendhal.’ Excessive punctiliousness, don’t you know, and at heart an immense admiration. No? You don’t admit Stendhal?” he went on, with an ingenuous confidence in my judgment which found expression in a charming, smiling, almost childish glance of interrogation from his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side; Bloch can’t stand Stendhal. I think it’s idiotic of him. The Chartreuse is after all an immense work, don’t you think? I am so glad you agree with me. What is it you like best in the Chartreuse, answer me?” he appealed to me with a boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his physical strength made the question almost terrifying. “Mosca? Fabrice?” I answered timidly that Mosca reminded me a little of M. de Norpois. Whereupon peals of laughter from the young Siegfried Saint-Loup. And while I was going on to explain: “But Mosca is far more intelligent, not so pedantic,” I heard Robert cry: “Bravo!” actually clapping his hands, and, helpless with laughter, gasp: “Oh, perfect! Admirable! You really are astounding.”
I took a particular pleasure in talking to this young man, as for that matter to all Robert’s friends and to Robert himself, about their barracks, the officers of the garrison, and the army in general. Thanks to the immensely enlarged scale on which we see the things, however petty they may be, in the midst of which we eat, and talk, and lead our real life; thanks to that formidable enlargement which they undergo, and the effect of which is that the rest of the world, not being present, cannot 141compete with them, and assumes in comparison the unsubstantiality of a dream, I had begun to take an interest in the various personalities of the barracks, in the officers whom I saw in the square when I went to visit Saint-Loup, or, if I was awake then, when the regiment passed beneath my windows. I should have liked to know more about the major whom Saint-Loup so greatly admired, and about the course of military history which would have appealed to me “even from an aesthetic point of view”. I knew that with Robert the spoken word was, only too often, a trifle hollow, but at other times implied the assimilation of valuable ideas which he was fully capable of grasping. Unfortunately, from the military point of view Robert was exclusively preoccupied at this time with the case of Dreyfus. He spoke little about it, since he alone of the party at table was a Dreyfusard; the others were violently opposed to the idea of a fresh trial, except my other neighbour, my new friend, and his opinions appeared to be somewhat vague. A firm admirer of the colonel, who was regarded as an exceptionally competent officer and had denounced the current agitation against the Army in several of his regimental orders, which won him the reputation of being an anti-Dreyfusard, my neighbour had heard that his commanding officer had let fall certain remarks which had led to the supposition that he had his doubts as to the guilt of Dreyfus and retained his admiration for Picquart. In the latter respect, at any rate, the rumour of Dreyfusism as applied to the colonel was as ill-founded as are all the rumours, springing from none knows where, which float around any great scandal. For, shortly afterwards, this colonel having been detailed to interrogate the former Chief of the Intelligence Branch, 142had treated him with a brutality and contempt the like of which had never been known before. However this might be (and naturally he had not taken the liberty of going direct to the colonel for his information), my neighbour had paid Saint-Loup the compliment of telling him—in the tone in which a Catholic lady might tell a Jewish lady that her parish priest denounced the pogroms in Russia and might openly admire the generosity of certain Israelites—that their colonel was not, with regard to Dreyfusism—to a certain kind of Dreyfusism, at least—the fanatical, narrow opponent that he had been made out to be.
“I am not surprised,” was Saint-Loup’s comment; “for he’s a sensible man. But in spite of that he is blinded by the prejudices of his caste, and above all by his clericalism. Now,” he turned to me, “Major Duroc, the lecturer on military history I was telling you about; there’s a man who is whole-heartedly in support of our views, or so I’m told. And I should have been surprised to hear that he wasn’t, for he’s not only a brilliantly clever man, but a Radical-Socialist and a freemason.”
Partly out of courtesy to his friends, whom these expressions of Saint-Loup’s faith in Dreyfus made uncomfortable, and also because the subject was of more interest to myself, I asked my neighbour if it were true that this major gave a demonstration of military history which had a genuine aesthetic beauty. “It is absolutely true.”
“But what do you mean by that?”
“Well, all that you read, let us say, in the narrative of a military historian, the smallest facts, the most trivial happenings, are only the outward signs of an idea which has to be analysed, and which often brings to light other 143ideas, like a palimpsest. So that you have a field for study as intellectual as any science you care to name, or any art, and one that is satisfying to the mind.”
“Give me an example or two, if you don’t mind.”
“It is not very easy to explain,” Saint-Loup broke in. “You read, let us say, that this or that Corps has tried … but before we go any farther, the serial number of the Corps, its order of battle are not without their significance. If it is not the first time that the operation has been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a different Corps being brought up, it is perhaps
