“Great God, with what uncertain tread”

“Great God, with what uncertain tread” is a line from Racine’s choral verse in Esther and Athalie, introduced as a solemn gloss on the young waiter whom M. Nissim Bernard pursues at the Grand Hotel. The quotation’s language of endangered virtue and innocence gives the episode a moral and theatrical frame; as the narrative continues through further Racine allusions, that frame becomes pointedly ironic, accompanying the boy’s changed circumstances and Bernard’s efforts to secure him a better position.

Source and Dramatic Register

The narrator identifies the lines as coming from the choruses of Esther and Athalie and reproduces a four-line passage beginning, “Great God, with what uncertain tread / A budding virtue ‘mid such perils goes!” Its invocation of a soul seeking innocence supplies the episode with an elevated, almost tragic vocabulary. The waiter is presented as a young person whose circumstances expose him to dangers, and the quotation gives that vulnerability the scale of a drama about virtue under pressure.

The allusion is not detached literary ornament. It is attached directly to Bernard’s pursuit of the young waiter, whose age is contrasted with Bernard’s forty-year difference from him. The solemn choral voice makes the disparity appear as a peril to innocence, while its formal grandeur also sharpens the contrast between classical tragedy and the daily business of a hotel dining room.

How the Allusion Develops

The Racine material extends beyond the phrase used as the expression’s title. Before quoting the chorus, the narrator notes that the waiter was brought up “in seclusion from the world” in the Temple-Palace of Balbec, then invokes Joad’s warning against trusting in riches and gold. The young man’s possible justification, that the wicked cover the earth, further places his choices inside a borrowed moral drama. Together, these references make the episode’s account of temptation and advantage sound like a comic, dislocated version of sacred and tragic literature.

The quoted sequence then advances with the events. On the first day, the waiter responds to Bernard; on the second, Bernard takes him out, and the narrator describes the result through another line from the tragedy. From then on, the account shifts from threatened innocence to altered conduct: although the waiter continues to carry bread and salt as his superior directs, his expression is associated with a verse celebrating the movement “From flowers to flowers, from joys to joys.” The progression through Racine’s lines gives the relationship a miniature dramatic arc, from peril to a new sense of possibility, without making the classical moral language a straightforward judgment on either man.

Irony and the Hotel Setting

The passage’s central irony lies in the mismatch between the grandeur of the quotation and the routine setting in which the relationship unfolds. Bernard comes to occupy his regular seat at lunch, watches the waiter move around the restaurant, and takes pleasure in the boy’s attentions. The narrator likens this repeated scene to a performance, even imagining that Bernard would have wanted a more substantial part for his protégé if the ceremony had been an actual production of Esther or Athalie. The classical allusion thus becomes a way of describing a social ritual that has no playwright but is nonetheless sustained by repetition and expectation.

The same irony governs the contrast between public position and private arrangement. Bernard is on good terms with the hotel manager and with Aimé, and he seeks to have the waiter promoted to under-waiter or given charge of a row of tables. A post in the cellars is declined because it would prevent the waiter from appearing in the dining room, where Bernard can continue to watch him. The career prospect and the spectacle are therefore joined: advancement matters, but its value in this arrangement depends on preserving their daily encounter. In that context, the chorus’s language of virtue and peril sounds at once compassionate, theatrical, and incongruous.

Narrative Significance

The expression’s significance comes from the way it lends the episode a borrowed moral seriousness while the narrative steadily reveals the material and social circumstances beneath it. Racine’s chorus supplies words for vulnerability; the hotel supplies the practical details of a young employee’s work, Bernard’s financial and social influence, and the promotion he seeks on the waiter’s behalf. The allusion does not resolve these tensions into a simple verdict. Instead, its recurrence makes the scene legible as an improvised performance in which classical language, patronage, employment, and personal attachment overlap.

By extending the quotation into a sequence of choral echoes, the narrative also makes literary form part of the episode’s action. The lines do not merely describe what has happened: they mark its stages, shifting from uncertain virtue to the waiter’s altered outlook and then to the repeated lunch-table ritual. The grand register and ordinary setting remain side by side. That disparity is the source of the passage’s comic edge and of its more serious attention to how a young person’s choices and prospects can be shaped by another person’s protection and attention.