In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

I tell you I know what I am talking about because I have got it from someone who has seen him.” But in the case of “the faithful” it was different. She did not want them to go and alluded to the war as a “boring business” that took them away from her; and she took all possible steps to prevent them going which gave her the double pleasure of having them at dinner and, when they did not come or had gone, of abusing them behind their backs for their pusillanimity. The “faithful” had to lend themselves to this embusquage and she was distressed when Morel pretended to be recalcitrant and told him, “By serving in the Press Bureau you are doing your bit, and more so than if you were at the front. What is required is to be useful, really to take part in the war, to be of it. There are those who are of it and embusqués; you are of it and don’t you bother, everyone knows you are and no one can have a word to say against you.”