My father has it from an absolutely first-class source.” Absolutely first-class sources were the only ones to which M. Bloch senior paid any attention, and it was always with such a source that thanks to his “important connexions” he was fortunate enough to be in touch, when he heard before anyone else that Foreign Bonds were going to go up or that De Beers were going to fall. However, if just at that moment De Beers had a rise or Foreign Bonds “came on offer,” if the market in the former was “firm and active” and that in the latter “hesitant and weak, with a note of caution,” the first-class source did not, for that reason, cease to be a first-class source. So Bloch informed us of the death of the Kaiser with an air of mystery and self-importance, but also of fury. He was exasperated beyond measure at hearing Robert say: “the Emperor William.” I believe that under the blade of the guillotine Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes could not have spoken otherwise. Two men of “society,” surviving alone on a desert island where they would have nobody to impress by a display of good manners, would recognise each other by these little signs of breeding, just as two Latinists in the same circumstances would continue to quote Virgil correctly. Saint-Loup, even under torture at the hands of the Germans, could never have used any other expression than “the Emperor William.” And this good breeding, whatever else one may think of it, is a symptom of formidable mental shackles. The man who cannot throw them off can never be more than a man of the world. However, his elegant mediocrity—particularly when it is allied, as is often the case, with hidden generosity and unexpressed heroism—is a delightful quality in comparison with the vulgarity of Bloch, at once coward and braggart, who started now to scream at Saint-Loup: “Can’t you simply say William? The trouble is you’ve got the wind up. Even in Paris you crawl on your belly before him! Pooh! we’re going to have some fine soldiers at the frontier, they’ll lick the boots of the Boches. You and your friends in fancy uniforms, you’re fit to parade in a tournament and that’s about all.”

“Poor Bloch is absolutely determined that I am to do nothing but strut about on parade,” said Saint-Loup to me with a smile, when we had left our friend. And I sensed that this was not at all what Robert wished to do, although at the time I did not realise what his intentions were as clearly as I did later when, as the cavalry remained inactive, he got leave to serve as an officer in the infantry and then in the light infantry, or when, later still, there came the sequel which the reader will learn in due course. But Robert’s patriotism was something that Bloch was unaware of simply because Robert chose not to display it. If Bloch had treated us to a viciously anti-militarist profession of faith once he had been passed as “fit,” he had previously made the most chauvinistic statements when he thought that he would be discharged on the grounds of short sight. But Saint-Loup would have been incapable of making these statements; in the first place from that sort of moral delicacy which prevents people from expressing sentiments that lie too deep within them and that seem to them quite natural. My mother, in the past, would not only not have hesitated for a second to die for my grandmother, but would have suffered horribly if anyone had prevented her from doing so. Nevertheless, I cannot retrospectively imagine on her lips any such phrase as “I would give my life for my mother.” And the same reticence, in his love of France, was displayed by Robert, who at this moment seemed to me much more Saint-Loup (in so far as I could form a picture of his father) than Guermantes. And then Robert would also have been saved from expressing the chauvinistic sentiments of Bloch by the fact that his intelligence was in itself to some extent a moral quality. Among intelligent and genuinely serious workers there is a certain aversion for those who make literature out of the subject they are engaged on, those who use it for self-display. Robert and I had not been at the Lycée or at the Sorbonne together, but we had attended, independently, certain courses of lectures by the same teachers, and I remember the smile he had for the ones who—as happens sometimes when a man is giving a remarkable series of lectures—tried to pass themselves off as geniuses by giving their theories an ambitious name. We only had to mention them for Robert to burst out laughing. Our personal and instinctive preference was, naturally, not for the Cottards or the Brichots, but we had nevertheless a certain respect for any man with a really thorough knowledge of Greek or medicine who did not for that reason think himself entitled to behave as a charlatan. I have said that, if in the past all Mamma’s actions had as their basis the sentiment that she would have given her life for her mother, she had yet never formulated this sentiment to herself, and that in any case it would have seemed to her not merely unnecessary and ridiculous but shocking and shameful to express it to others; in the same way it was impossible for me to imagine on the lips of Saint-Loup—talking to me about his equipment, the things he had to do in Paris, our chances of victory, the weakness of the Russian army, how England would act—it is impossible for me to imagine on his lips even the most eloquent phrase that even the most deservedly popular minister might have addressed to a wildly cheering Chamber of Deputies. I cannot, however, say that in this negativeness which checked him from expressing the noble sentiments that he felt, he was not to some extent influenced by the “Guermantes spirit,” of which we have seen so many similar instances in Swann. For, if I found him more Saint-Loup than anything else, he was, nevertheless, also Guermantes, and consequently, among the numerous motives which animated his courage, there were some which did not exist for his friends of Doncières, those young men enamoured of their profession with whom I had dined night after night and of whom so many went to their deaths at the battle of the Marne or elsewhere, leading their men into action.

As for the young socialists who were at Doncières when I was there but whom I did not get to know because they did not belong to the same set as Saint-Loup, they could see now for themselves that the officers of that set were by no means “nobs,” with the implications of haughty pride and base self-indulgence which the “plebs,” the ex-ranker officers, the freemasons attached to that word. And conversely, this same patriotism was found by the officers of aristocratic birth to exist in full measure among the socialists whom I had heard them accuse, while I was at Doncières at the height of the Dreyfus case, of being “men without a country.” The patriotism of the military caste, as sincere and profound as any other, had assumed a fixed form which the members of that caste regarded as sacrosanct and which they were infuriated to see heaped with “opprobrium,” but the radical-socialists, who were independent and to some extent unconscious patriots without any fixed patriotic religion, had failed to perceive the profound and living reality that lay behind what they thought were empty and malignant formulas.

No doubt, like his friends, Saint-Loup had formed the habit of inwardly cultivating, as the truest part of himself, the search for and the elaboration of the best possible manoeuvres which would lead to the greatest strategic and tactical successes, so that, for him as for them, the life of the body was something relatively unimportant which could easily be sacrificed to this inner part of the self, the real vital core within them, around which their personal existence was of value only as a protective outer skin. But in Saint-Loup’s courage there were also more individual elements, and amongst these it would have been easy to recognise the generosity which in its early days had constituted the charm of our friendship, and also the hereditary vice which had later awoken from dormancy in him and which, at the particular intellectual level which he had not been able to transcend, caused him not only to admire courage but to exaggerate his horror of effeminacy into a sort of intoxication at any contact with virility. He derived, chastely no doubt, from spending days and nights in the open with Senegalese soldiers who might at any moment be called upon to sacrifice their lives, a cerebral gratification of desire into which there entered a vigorous contempt for “little scented gentlemen” and which, however contrary it might seem, was not so very different from that which he had obtained from the cocaine in which he had indulged excessively at Tansonville and of which heroism—one drug taking the place of another—was now curing him. And another essential part of his courage was that double habit of courtesy which, on the one hand, caused him to bestow praise on others but where he himself was concerned made him content to do what had to be done and say nothing about it—the opposite of a Bloch, who had said to him just now “You—of course you’d funk it,” and yet was doing nothing himself—and on the other hand impelled him to hold as of no value the things that he himself possessed, his fortune, his rank, and even his life, so that he was ready to give them away: in a word, the true nobility of his nature.

“Are we in for a long war?” I said to Saint-Loup.