In Search of Lost Time, Volume II by Marcel Proust Read Free Book Online

as considerable the inferior incomes of his friends, with, however, a happy and comforting reference to the superiority of his own. On the other hand, he did not hesitate to congratulate my father on the “composition” of his portfolio, selected “with so sure, so delicate, so fine a taste.” It was as though he attributed to the relative values of shares, and even to shares themselves, something akin to aesthetic merit. Of one, comparatively recent and still little known, which my father mentioned, M. de Norpois, like the people who have always read the books of which you imagined you alone had ever heard, said at once, “Ah, yes, I used to amuse myself for a time following it in the share index; it was not uninteresting,” with the retrospective smile of a regular subscriber who has read the latest novel already, in monthly instalments, in his magazine. “It wouldn’t be at all a bad idea to apply for some of this new issue. It’s distinctly attractive; they’re offering it at a most tempting discount.” But when he came to some of the older investments, my father, who could not remember their exact names, which it was easy to confuse with others of the same kind, opened a drawer and showed the securities themselves to the Ambassador. The sight of them enchanted me. They were ornamented with cathedral spires and allegorical figures, like some of the old romantic editions that I had pored over as a child. All the products of one period resemble one another; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me more strongly of the instalments of
Notre-Dame de Paris
and of various works of Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer’s door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a registered share in the Water Company.
    The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by affection that, in practice, his attitude towards everything I did was one of blind indulgence. And so he had no qualm about sending me to fetch a little prose poem which I had made up years before at Combray on coming home from a walk. I had written it in a state of exaltation which must, I felt certain, communicate itself to everyone who read it. But it was not destined to captivate M. de Norpois, for he handed it back to me without a word.
    My mother, who was full of respect for all my father’s occupations, came in now to ask timidly whether dinner might be served. She was afraid to interrupt a conversation in which she herself could have no part. And indeed my father was continually reminding the Marquis of some useful measure which they had decided to support at the next meeting of the Commission, speaking in the peculiar tone always adopted in a strange environment by a pair of colleagues—akin, in this respect, to a pair of schoolfellows—whose professional routine has furnished them with a common fund of memories to which others have no access and to which they apologise for referring in their presence.
    But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At length my father became uneasy: “I had thought,” he ventured, after an endless preamble, “of asking the advice of the Commission . . .” Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had maintained the passivity of an orchestral player whose moment has not yet come, there emerged with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words: “of which you will not hesitate, of course, to call a meeting, more especially as the members are all known to you personally and can easily make themselves available.” It was not in itself a very remarkable ending. But the immobility that had