In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV Read Online Free PDF Page B

slight in comparison with the inward constraint imposed upon them by their vice, or what is improperly so called, not so much in relation to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice. But certain among them, more practical, busier men who have not the time to go and drive their bargains, or to dispense with the simplification of life and the saving of time which may result from co-operation, have formed two societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons similar to themselves.
    This is noticeable in those who are poor and have come up from the country, without friends, with nothing but their ambition to be some day a celebrated doctor or barrister, with a mind still barren of opinions, a person devoid of social graces which they intend as soon as possible to adorn, just as they might buy furniture for their little attic in the Latin Quarter, modelling themselves on what they observe among those who have already “arrived” in the useful and serious profession in which they also intend to establish themselves and to become famous; in these their special predisposition, unconsciously inherited like a proclivity for drawing, for music, a tendency towards blindness, is perhaps the only inveterate and overriding peculiarity—which on certain evenings compels them to miss some meeting, advantageous to their career, with people whose ways of speaking, thinking, dressing, parting their hair, they otherwise adopt. In their neighbourhood, where for the rest they mix only with brother students, teachers or some fellow-provincial who has graduated and can help them on, they have speedily discovered other young men who are drawn to them by the same special inclination, as in a small town the assistant schoolmaster and the solicitor are brought together by a common interest in chamber music or mediaeval ivories; applying to the object of their distraction the same utilitarian instinct, the same professional spirit which guides them in their career, they meet these young men at gatherings to which no outsider is admitted any more than to those that bring together collectors of old snuff-boxes, Japanese prints or rare flowers, and at which, what with the pleasure of gaining information, the practical value of making exchanges and the fear of competition, there prevail simultaneously, as in a stamp market, the close co-operation of specialists and the fierce rivalries of collectors. Moreover no one in the café where they have their table knows what the gathering is, whether it is that of an angling club, of an editorial staff, or of the “Sons of the Indre,” so correct is their attire, so cold and reserved their manner, so modestly do they refrain from any but the most covert glance at the young men of fashion, the young “lions” who, a few feet away, are boasting about their mistresses, and among whom those who now admire them without venturing to raise their eyes will learn only twenty years later, when some are on the eve of admission to the Academy, and others middle-aged clubmen, that the most attractive among them, now a stout and grizzled Charlus, was in reality one of themselves, but elsewhere, in another circle of society, beneath other external symbols, with different signs whose unfamiliarity misled them. But these groups are at varying stages of evolution; and, just as the “Union of the Left” differs from the “Socialist Federation” or some Mendelssohnian musical club from the Schola Cantorum, on certain evenings, at another table, there are extremists who allow a bracelet to slip down from beneath a cuff, or sometimes a necklace to gleam in the gap of a collar, who by their persistent stares, their cooings, their laughter, their mutual caresses, oblige a band of students to depart in hot haste, and are served with a civility beneath which indignation smoulders by a waiter who, as on the evenings when he has to serve Dreyfusards, would have the greatest