In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

Meanwhile I was studying Saint-Loup, and my thoughts took a line of their own. They were in this café, I had myself known at other times, plenty of foreigners, intellectuals, budding geniuses of all sorts, resigned to the laughter excited by their pretentious capes, their 1830 neckties and still more by the clumsiness of their movements, going so far as to provoke that laughter in order to shew that they paid no heed to it, who yet were men of real intellectual and moral worth, of an extreme sensibility. They repelled — the Jews among them principally, the unassimilated Jews, that is to say, for with the other kind we are not concerned — those who could not endure any oddity or eccentricity of appearance (as Bloch repelled Al-bertine). Generally speaking, one realised afterwards that if they had against them hair worn too long, noses and eyes that were too big, stilted theatrical gestures, it was puerile to judge them by these only, they had plenty of intelligence and spirit and were men to whom, in the long run, one could become closely attached.