No doubt he was sorry afterwards for this speech, for some time later I received--in a morocco binding on the front of which was inlaid a panel of tooled leather representing in demi-relief a spray of forget-me-not--the book which he had lent me, and I had sent back to him, not by Aimé who was apparently "off duty", but by the lift-boy. M. de Charlus having gone, Robert and I were free at last to dine with Bloch. And I realised during this little party that the stories too readily admitted by our friend as funny were favourite stories of M. Bloch senior, and that the son's "really remarkable person" was always one of his father's friends whom he had so classified. There are a certain number of people whom we admire in our boyhood, a father with better brains than the rest of the family, a teacher who acquires credit in our eyes from the philosophy he reveals to us, a schoolfellow more advanced than we are (which was what Bloch had been to me), who despises the Musset of the _Espoir en Dieu_ when we still admire it, and when we have reached Leconte or Claudel will be in ecstasies only over: A Saint-Biaise, à la Zuecca Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise: with which he will include: Padoue est un fort bel endroit Où de très grands docteurs en droit. . . . Mais j'aime mieux la polenta. . . . Passe dans mon domino noir La Toppatelle and of all the _Nuits_ will remember only: Au Havre, devant l'Atlantique A Venise, à l'affreux Lido. Où vient sur l'herbe d'un tombeau Mourir la pâle Adriatique. So, whenever we confidently admire anyone, we collect from him, we quote with admiration sayings vastly inferior to the sort which, left to our own judgment, we would sternly reject, just as the writer of a novel puts into it, on the pretext that they are true, things which people have actually said, which in the living context are like a dead weight, form the dull part of the work. Saint-Simon's portraits composed by himself (and very likely without his admiring them himself) are admirable, whereas what he cites as the charming wit of his clever friends is frankly dull where it has not become meaningless. He would have scorned to invent what he reports as so pointed or so coloured when said by Mme. Cornuel or Louis XIV, a point which is to be remarked also in many other writers, and is capable of various interpretations, of which it is enough to note but one for the present: namely, that in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.