...of scorn

Sometimes - but it's so unlike me, so little in my line, so remote from the kind of thing I usually do that I can hardly believe I could have taken such a risk, it seems to me that I must have seen somebody else do it or even have dreamed it, while I walked along beside him, swallowing docilely - sometimes in a moment of sudden intrepidity or oblivion, I stop suddenly, and there, right in the middle of the meadow, beside the brook, dilating my nostrils, I make so bold as to breathe in the odour of new-mown hay, look at the distant hills and the pine woods and say... "Listen to that... those twinkling bells... the brook... Look over there at the line of those woods... that little hut..." The respite afforded me by this act of bravura is a very brief one. He turns his head, half-closes his eyes, casts an impatient, furious glance at the little brook, says nothing: a thick, heavy silence that quickly crushes the tinkle of bells and the ripple of the brook. Calling my entire strength into play, I probe his silence. My hearing - as well-trained as that of a trapper who, laying his ear to the ground, can catch the far-off gallop of horses - detects in it certain disquieting movements. Soon his silence becomes more deafening than the din of the most violent upbraiding and shouting. In my stupid unawareness, in my mad temerity, I have touched upon something very dangerous, something absolutely forbidden; I have committed the greatest offence. I have dared to give him a lesson, I have taunted him. Nature-lover, eh? The little blue flower? Purity?... All those dreamers and failures who go walking through meadows breathing in the perfume of flowers, pressing plants and pasting them in an album, chasing after butterflies... The countless idiots and good-for-nothings in whose stead people like himself do all the thinking, all the struggling, and they have the nerve - such dirty work as that, I should say not - to scorn the firm, hard work in which real men fight their battles for them, for the entire incompetent, lazy, irritable, fastidious, "esthetic" lot of them... he knows them... each one a bundle of self-conceit and vanity... wearing his wretched little feelings tenderly, gingerly, in a sling... and they're the ones who would like to teach him how to live, who want to set him an example of purity and unworldliness, no, really, it's enough to make you die laughing...

[Martereau, Sarraute, N.]