For if I found him a Saint-Loup more than anything else, he remained a Guermantes as well and owing to that, among the many motives which excited his courage there were some dissimilar to those of his Doncières friends, those young men with a passion for their profession with whom I had dined every evening and of whom so many were killed leading their men at the Battle of the Marne or elsewhere. Such young socialists as might have been at Doncières when I was there, whom I did not know because they were not in Saint-Loup’s set, were able to satisfy themselves that the officers in that set were in no way “aristos” in the arrogantly proud and basely pleasure-loving sense which the “populo” officers from the ranks, and the Freemasons, gave to the word. And equally, the aristocratic officer discovered the same patriotism amongst those Socialists whom when I was at Doncières in the midst of the Affair Dreyfus, I heard them accuse of being anti-patriotic. The deep and sincere patriotism of soldiers had taken a definite form which they believed intangible and which it enraged them to see aspersed, whereas the Radical-Socialists who were, in a sense, unconscious patriots, independents, without a defined religion of patriotism, did not realise what a profound reality underlay what they believed to be vain and hateful formulas. Without doubt, Saint-Loup, like them, had grown accustomed to developing as the truest part of himself, the exploration and the conception of better schemes in view of greater strategic and tactical success, so that for him as for them the life of the body was of relatively small importance and could be lightly sacrificed to that inner life, the vital kernel around which personal existence had only the value of a protective epidermis. I told Saint-Loup about his friend, the director of the Balbec Grand Hotel, who, it appeared had, at the outbreak of war, alleged that there had been disaffection in certain French regiments which he called “defec-tuosity” and had accused what he termed “Prussian militarists” of provoking it, remarking with a laugh, “My brother’s in the trenches.
They’re only thirty meters from the Boches” until it was discovered that he was a Boche himself and they put him in a concentration camp. “Apropos of Balbec, do you remember the former lift-boy of the hotel?” Saint-Loup asked me in the tone of one who seems not to know much about the person concerned and was counting upon me for enlightenment. “He’s joining up and wrote me to get him entered in the aviation corps.” Doubtless the lift-boy was tired of going up and down in the closed cage of the lift and the heights of the staircase of the Grand Hotel no longer sufficed for him. He was going to “get his stripes” otherwise than as a concierge, for our destiny is not always what we had believed. “I shall certainly support his application,” Saint-Loup said, “I told Gilberte again this morning, we shall never have enough aeroplanes. It is through them we shall observe what the enemy is up to; they will deprive him of the chief advantage m an attack, surprise; the best army will perhaps be the one that has the best eyes. Has poor Françoise succeeded in getting her nephew exempted?” Françoise who had for a long while done everything in her power to get her nephew exempted, on a recommendation through the Guermantes to General de St. Joseph being proposed to her, had replied despairingly: “Oh! That would be no use there’s nothing to be done with that old fellow, he’s the worst sort of all, he’s patriotic!” From the beginning of the war, Françoise whatever sorrow it had brought her, was of opinion that the “poor Russians” must not be abandoned since we were “allianced”.
The butler, persuaded that the war would not last more than ten days and would end by the signal victory of France, would not have dared, for fear of being contradicted by events, to predict a long and indecisive one, nor would he have had enough imagination. But, out of this complete and immediate victory he tried to extract beforehand whatever might cause anxiety to Françoise. “It may turn out pretty rotten; it appears there are many who don’t want to go to the front, boys of sixteen are crying about it.” He also tried to provoke her by saying all sorts of disagreeable things, what he called “pulling her leg” by “pitching an apostrophe at her” or “flinging her a pun.” “Sixteen years old! Sainted Mary!” exclaimed Françoise, and then, with momentary suspicion, “But they said they only took them after they were twenty, they’re only children at sixteen.” “Naturally, the papers are ordered to say that. For that matter, the whole youth of the country will be at the front and not many will come back. In one way that will be a good thing, a good bleeding is useful from time to time, it makes business better. Yes, indeed, if some of these boys are a bit soft and chicken-hearted and hesitate, they shoot them immediately, a dozen bullets through the skin and that’s that. In a way it’s got to be done and what does it matter to the officers?
They get their pesetas all the same and that’s all they care about.” Françoise got so pale during these conversations that one might well fear the butler would cause her death from heart disease. But she did not on that account lose her defects. When a girl came to see me, however much the old servant’s legs hurt her, if ever I went out of my room for a moment I saw her on the top of the steps, in the hanging cupboard, in the act, she pretended, of looking for one of my coats to see if the moths had got into it, in reality to spy upon us. In spite of all my remonstrances, she kept up her insidious manner of asking indirect questions and for some time had been making use of the phrase “because doubtless.” Not daring to ask me, “Has that lady a house of her own?” she would say with her eyes lifted timidly like those of a gentle dog, “Because doubtless that lady has a house of her own,” avoiding the flagrant interrogation in order to be polite and not to seem inquisitive. And further, since those servants we most care for—especially if they can no longer render us much service or even do their work—remain, alas, servants and mark more clearly the limits (which we should like to efface) of their caste in proportion to the extent to which they believe they are penetrating ours, Françoise often gave vent to strange comments about my person (in order to tease me, the butler would have said) which people in our own world would not make.
For instance, with a delight as dissimulated but also as deep as if it had been a case of serious illness, if I happened to be hot and the perspiration (to which I paid no attention) was trickling down my forehead, she would say, “My word! You’re drenched” as though she were astonished by a strange phenomenon, smiling with that contempt for something indecorous with which she might have remarked, “Why, you’re going out without your collar!” while adopting a concerned tone intended to cause one discomfort. One would have thought I was the only person in the universe who had ever been “drenched”. For, in her humility, in her tender admiration for beings infinitely inferior to her, she adopted their ugly forms of expression. Her daughter complained of her to me, “She’s always got something to say, that I don’t close the doors properly and patatipatali et patatapatala.” Françoise doubtless thought it was only her insufficient education that had deprived her until now of this beautiful expression. And on her lips, on which formerly flowered the purest French, I heard several times a day, “Et patati patall patata patala.” As to that it is curious how little variation there is not only in the expressions but in the thoughts of the same individual. The butler, being accustomed to declare that M. Poincaré
