marcel proust - the verdurins quarrel(chap. 2) كلمات الأغنية
chapter two
the verdurins quarrel with m. de charlus
after dinner, i told albertine that, since i was out of bed, i might as well take the opportunity to go and see some of my friends, mme. de villeparisis, mme. de guermantes, the cambremers, anyone in short whom i might find at home. i omitted to mention only the people whom i did intend to see, the verdurins. i asked her if she would not come with me. she pleaded that she had no suitable clothes. “besides, my hair is so awful. do you really wish me to go on doing it like this?” and by way of farewell she held out her hand to me in that abrupt fashion, the arm outstretched, the shoulders thrust back, which she used to adopt on the beach at balbec and had since then entirely abandoned. this forgotten gesture retransformed the body which it animated into that of the albertine who as yet scarcely knew me. it restored to albertine, ceremonious beneath an air of rudeness, her first novelty, her strangeness, even her setting. i saw the sea behind this girl whom i had never seen shake hands with me in this fashion since i was at the seaside. “my aunt thinks it makes me older,” she added with a sullen air. “oh that her aunt may be right!” thought i. “that albertine by looking like a child should make mme. bontemps appear younger than she is, is all that her aunt would ask, and also that albertine shall cost her nothing between now and the day when, by marrying me, she will repay what has been spent on her.” but that albertine should appear less young, less pretty, should turn fewer heads in the street, that is what i, on the contrary, hoped. for the age of a duenna is less re-ssuring to a jealous lover than the age of the woman’s face whom he loves. i regretted only that the style in which i had asked her to do her hair should appear to albertine an additional bolt on the door of her prison. and it was henceforward this new domestic sentiment that never ceased, even when i was parted from albertine, to form a bond attaching me to her
i said to albertine, who was not dressed, or so she told me, to accompany me to the guermantes’ or the cambremers’, that i could not be certain where i should go, and set off for the verdurins’. at the moment when the thought of the concert that i was going to hear brought back to my mind the scene that afternoon: “grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue,”— a scene of disappointed love, of jealous love perhaps, but if so as b-st–l as the scene to which a woman might be subjected by, so to speak, an orang-outang that was, if one may use the expression, in love with her — at the moment when, having reached the street, i was just going to hail a cab, i heard the sound of sobs which a man who was sitting upon a curbstone was endeavouring to stifle. i came nearer; the man, who had buried his face in his hands, appeared to be quite young, and i was surprised to see, from the gleam of white in the opening of his cloak, that he was wearing evening clothes and a white tie. as he heard my step he uncovered a face bathed in tears, but at once, having recognised me, turned away. it was morel. he guessed that i had recognised him and, checking his tears with an effort, told me that he had stopped to rest for a moment, he was in such pain. “i have grossly insulted, only to-day,” he said, “a person for whom i had the very highest regard. it was a cowardly thing to do, for she loves me.” “she will forget perhaps, as time goes on,” i replied, without realising that by speaking thus i made it apparent that i had overheard the scene that afternoon. but he was so much absorbed in his own grief that it never even occurred to him that i might know something about the affair. “she may forget, perhaps,” he said. “but i myself can never forget. i am too conscious of my degradation, i am disgusted with myself! however, what i have said i have said, and nothing can unsay it. when people make me lose my temper, i don’t know what i am doing. and it is so bad for me, my nerves are all on edge,” for, like all neurasthenics, he was keenly interested in his own health. if, during the afternoon, i had witnessed the amorous rage of an infuriated animal, this evening, within a few hours, centuries had elapsed and a fresh sentiment, a sentiment of shame, regret, grief, shewed that a great stage had been p-ssed in the evolution of the beast destined to be transformed into a human being. nevertheless, i still heard ringing in my ears his ‘grand pied de grue‘ and dreaded an imminent return to the savage state. i had only a very vague impression, however, of what had been happening, and this was but natural, for m. de charlus himself was totally unaware that for some days past, and especially that day, even before the shameful episode which was not a direct consequence of the violinist’s condition, morel had been suffering from a recurrence of his neurasthenia. as a matter of fact, he had, in the previous month, proceeded as rapidly as he had been able, a great deal less rapidly than he would have liked, towards the seduction of jupien’s niece with whom he was at liberty, now that they were engaged, to go out whenever he chose. but whenever he had gone a trifle far in his attempts at violation, and especially when he suggested to his betrothed that she might make friends with other girls whom she would then procure for himself, he had met with a resistance that made him furious. all at once (whether she would have proved too chaste, or on the contrary would have surrendered herself) his desire had subsided. he had decided to break with her, but feeling that the baron, vicious as he might be, was far more moral than himself, he was afraid lest, in the event of a rupture, m. de charlus might turn him out of the house. and so he had decided, a fortnight ago, that he would not see the girl again, would leave m. de charlus and jupien to clean up the mess (he employed a more realistic term) by themselves, and, before announcing the rupture, to ‘b ——-off’ to an unknown destination
for all that his conduct towards jupien’s niece coincided exactly, in its minutest details, with the plan of conduct which he had outlined to the baron as they were dining together at saint-mars le vêtu, it is probable that his intention was entirely different, and that sentiments of a less atrocious nature, which he had not foreseen in his theory of conduct, had improved, had tinged it with sentiment in practice. the sole point in which, on the contrary, the practice was worse than the theory is this, that in theory it had not appeared to him possible that he could remain in paris after such an act of betrayal. now, on the contrary, actually to ‘b ——— off’ for so small a matter seemed to him quite unnecessary. it meant leaving the baron who would probably be furious, and forfeiting his own position. he would lose all the money that the baron was now giving him. the thought that this was inevitable made his nerves give away altogether, he cried for hours on end, and in order not to think about it any more dosed himself cautiously with morphine. then suddenly he hit upon an idea which no doubt had gradually been taking shape in his mind and gaining strength there for some time, and this was that a rupture with the girl would not inevitably mean a complete break with m. de charlus. to lose all the baron’s money was a serious thing in itself. morel in his uncertainty remained for some days a prey to dark thoughts, such as came to him at the sight of bloch. then he decided that jupien and his niece had been trying to set a trap for him, that they might consider themselves lucky to be rid of him so cheaply. he found in short that the girl had been in the wrong in being so clumsy, in not having managed to keep him attached to her by a sensual attraction. not only did the sacrifice of his position with m. de charlus seem to him absurd, he even regretted the expensive dinners he had given the girl since they became engaged, the exact cost of which he knew by heart, being a true son of the valet who used to bring his ‘book’ every month for my uncle’s inspection. for the word book, in the singular, which means a printed volume to humanity in general, loses that meaning among royal princes and servants. to the latter it means their housekeeping book, to the former the register in which we inscribe our names. (at balbec one day when the princesse de luxembourg told me that she had not brought a book with her, i was about to offer her le pêcheur d’islande and tartarîn de tarascon, when i realised that she had meant not that she would p-ss the time less agreeably, but that i should find it more difficult to pay a call upon her.)
notwithstanding the change in morel’s point of view with regard to the consequences of his behaviour, albeit that behaviour would have seemed to him abominable two months earlier, when he was p-ssionately in love with jupien’s niece, whereas during the last fortnight he had never ceased to -ssure himself that the same behaviour was natural, praiseworthy, it continued to intensify the state of nervous unrest in which, finally, he had announced the rupture that afternoon. and he was quite prepared to vent his anger, if not (save in a momentary outburst) upon the girl, for whom he still felt that lingering fear, the last trace of love, at any rate upon the baron. he took care, however, not to say anything to him before dinner, for, valuing his own professional sk!ll above everything, whenever he had any difficult music to play (as this evening at the verdurins’) he avoided (as far as possible, and the scene that afternoon was already more than ample) anything that might impair the flexibility of his wrists. similarly a surgeon who is an enthusiastic motorist, does not drive when he has an operation to perform. this accounts to me for the fact that, while he was speaking to me, he kept bending his fingers gently one after another to see whether they had regained their suppleness. a slight frown seemed to indicate that there was still a trace of nervous stiffness. but, so as not to increase it, he relaxed his features, as we forbid ourself to grow irritated at not being able to sleep or to prevail upon a woman, for fear lest our rage itself may r-t-rd the moment of sleep or of satisfaction. and so, anxious to regain his serenity so that he might, as was his habit, absorb himself entirely in what he was going to play at the verdurins’, and anxious, so long as i was watching him, to let me see how unhappy he was, he decided that the simplest course was to beg me to leave him immediately. his request was superfluous, and it was a relief to me to get away from him. i had trembled lest, as we were due at the same house, within a few minutes, he might ask me to take him with me, my memory of the scene that afternoon being too vivid not to give me a certain distaste for the idea of having morel by my side during the drive. it is quite possible that the love, and afterwards the indifference or hatred felt by morel for jupien’s niece had been sincere. unfortunately, it was not the first time that he had behaved thus, that he had suddenly ‘dropped’ a girl to whom he had sworn undying love, going so far as to produce a loaded revolver, telling her that he would blow out his brains if ever he was mean enough to desert her. he did nevertheless desert her in time, and felt instead of remorse, a sort of rancour against her. it was not the first time that he had behaved thus, it was not to be the last, with the result that the heads of many girls — girls less forgetful of him than he was of them — suffered — as jupien’s niece’s head continued long afterwards to suffer, still in love with morel although she despised him — suffered, ready to burst with the shooting of an internal pain because in each of them — like a fragment of a greek carving — an aspect of morel’s face, hard as marble and beautiful as an antique sculpture, was embedded in her brain, with his blossoming hair, his fine eyes, his straight nose, forming a protuberance in a cranium not shaped to receive it, upon which no operation was possible. but in the fulness of time these stony fragments end by slipping into a place where they cause no undue discomfort, from which they never stir again; we are no longer conscious of their presence: i mean forgetfulness, or an indifferent memory
meanwhile i had gained two things in the course of the day. on the one hand, thanks to the calm that was produced in me by albertine’s docility, i found it possible, and therefore made up my mind, to break with her. there was on the other hand, the fruit of my reflexions during the interval that i had spent waiting for her, at the piano, the idea that art, to which i would try to devote my reconquered liberty, was not a thing that justified one in making a sacrifice, a thing above and beyond life, that did not share in its fatuity and futility; the appearance of real individuality obtained in works of art being due merely to the illusion created by the artist’s technical sk!ll. if my afternoon had left behind it other deposits, possibly more profound, they were not to come to my knowledge until much later. as for the two which i was able thus to weigh, they were not to be permanent; for, from this very evening my ideas about art were to rise above the depression to which they had been subjected in the afternoon, while on the other hand my calm, and consequently the freedom that would enable me to devote myself to it, was once again to be withdrawn from me
as my cab, following the line of the embankment, was coming near the verdurins’ house, i made the driver pull up. i had just seen brichot alighting from the tram at the foot of the rue bonaparte, after which he dusted his shoes with an old newspaper and put on a pair of pearl grey gloves. i went up to him on foot. for some time past, his sight having grown steadily weaker, he had been endowed — as richly as an observatory — with new spectacles of a powerful and complicated kind, which, like astronomical instruments, seemed to be screwed into his eyes; he focussed their exaggerated blaze upon myself and recognised me. they — the spectacles — were in marvellous condition. but behind them i could see, minute, pallid, convulsive, expiring, a remote gaze placed under this powerful apparatus, as, in a laboratory equipped out of all proportion to the work that is done in it, you may watch the last throes of some insignificant animalcule through the latest and most perfect type of microscope. i offered him my arm to guide him on his way. “this time it is not by great cherbourg that we meet,” he said to me, “but by little dunkerque,” a remark which i found extremely tiresome, as i failed to understand what he meant; and yet i dared not ask brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his explanations. i replied that i was longing to see the room in which swann used to meet odette every evening. “what, so you know that old story, do you?” he said. “and yet from those days to the death of swann is what the poet rightly calls: ‘grande spatium mortalis aevi.’”
the death of swann had been a crushing blow to me at the time. the death of swann! swann, in this phrase, is something more than a noun in the possessive case. i mean by it his own particular death, the death allotted by destiny to the service of swann. for we talk of ‘death’ for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people. we are not equipped with a sense that would enable us to see, moving at every speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. often there are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later. they come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a swann, then depart to attend to their other duties, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operation, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh. then comes the moment when we read in the gaulois that swann’s health has been causing anxiety but that he is now making an excellent recovery. then, a few minutes before the breath leaves our body, death, like a sister of charity who has come to nurse, rather than to destroy us, enters to preside over our last moments, crowns with a supreme halo the cold and stiffening creature whose heart has ceased to beat. and it is this diversity among deaths, the mystery of their circuits, the colour of their fatal badge, that makes so impressive a paragraph in the newspapers such as this:
“we regret to learn that m. charles swann p-ssed away yesterday at his residence in paris, after a long and painful illness. a parisian whose intellectual gifts were widely appreciated, a discriminating but steadfastly loyal friend, he will be universally regretted, in those literary and artistic circles where the soundness and refinement of his taste made him a willing and a welcome guest, as well as at the jockey club of which he was one of the oldest and most respected members. he belonged also to the union and agricole. he had recently resigned his membership of the rue royale. his personal appearance and eminently distinguished bearing never failed to arouse public interest at all the great events of the musical and artistic seasons, especially at private views, at which he was a regular attendant until, during the last years of his life, he became almost entirely confined to the house. the funeral will take place, etc.”
from this point of view, if one is not ‘somebody,’ the absence of a well known t-tle makes the process of decomposition even more rapid. no doubt it is more or less anonymously, without any personal ident-ty, that a man still remains duc d’uzès. but the ducal coronet does for some time hold the elements together, as their moulds keep together those artistically designed ices which albertine admired, whereas the names of ultra-fashionable commoners, as soon as they are dead, dissolve and lose their shape. we have seen m. de bréauté speak of cartier as the most intimate friend of the duc de la trémoïlle, as a man greatly in demand in aristocratic circles. to a later generation, cartier has become something so formless that it would almost be adding to his importance to make him out as related to the jeweller cartier, with whom he would have smiled to think that anybody could be so ignorant as to confuse him! swann on the contrary was a remarkable personality, in both the intellectual and the artistic worlds; and even although he had ‘produced’ nothing, still he had a chance of surviving a little longer. and yet, my dear charles ——-, whom i used to know when i was still so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because he whom you must have regarded as a little fool has made you the hero of one of his volumes that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live. if in tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the rue royale club, where you figure with galliffet, edmond polignac and saint-maurice, people are always drawing attention to yourself, it is because they know that there are some traces of you in the character of swann
to return to more general realities, it was of this foretold and yet unforeseen death of swann that i had heard him speak himself to the d-ch-sse de guermantes, on the evening of her cousin’s party. it was the same death whose striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as i ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines interpolated there out of place. they had sufficed to make of a living man some one who can never again respond to what you say to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written name, that has p-ssed in a moment from the real world to the realm of silence. it was they that even now made me anxious to make myself familiar with the house in which the verdurins had lived, and where swann, who at that time was not merely a row of five letters printed in a newspaper, had dined so often with odette. i must add also (and this is what for a long time made swann’s death more painful than any other, albeit these reasons bore no relation to the individual strangeness of his death) that i had never gone to see gilberte, as i promised him at the princesse de guermantes’s, that he had never told me what the ‘other reason’ was, to which he alluded that evening, for his selecting me as the recipient of his conversation with the prince, that a thousand questions occurred to me (as bubbles rise from the bottom of a pond) which i longed to ask him about the most different subjects: vermeer, m. de mouchy, swann himself, a boucher tapestry, combray, questions that doubtless were not very vital since i had put off asking them from day to day, but which seemed to me of capital importance now that, his lips being sealed, no answer would ever come
“no,” brichot went on, “it was not here that swann met his future wife, or rather it was here only in the very latest period, after the disaster that partially destroyed mme. verdurin’s former home.”
unfortunately, in my fear of displaying before the eyes of brichot an extravagance which seemed to me out of place, since the professor had no share in its enjoyment, i had alighted too hastily from the carriage and the driver had not understood the words i had flung at him over my shoulder in order that i might be well clear of the carriage before brichot caught sight of me. the consequence was that the driver followed us and asked me whether he was to call for me later; i answered hurriedly in the affirmative, and was regarded with a vastly increased respect by the professor who had come by omnibus
“ah! so you were in a carriage,” he said in solemn tones. “only by the purest accident. i never take one as a rule. i always travel by omnibus or on foot. however, it may perhaps ent-tle me to the great honour of taking you home to-night if you will oblige me by consenting to enter that rattletrap; we shall be packed rather tight. but you are always so considerate to me.” alas, in making him this offer, i am depriving myself of nothing (i reflected) since in any case i shall be obliged to go home for albertine’s sake. her presence in my house, at an hour when n0body could possibly call to see her, allowed me to dispose as freely of my time as i had that afternoon, when, seated at the piano, i knew that she was on her way back from the trocadéro and that i was in no hurry to see her again. but furthermore, as also in the afternoon, i felt that i had a woman in the house and that on returning home i should not taste the fortifying thrill of solitude. “i accept with great good will,” replied brichot. “at the period to which you allude, our friends occupied in the rue montalivet a magnificent ground floor apartment with an upper landing, and a garden behind, less sumptuous of course, and yet to my mind preferable to the old venetian emb-ssy.” brichot informed me that this evening there was to be at ‘quai conti’ (thus it was that the faithful spoke of the verdurin drawing-room since it had been transferred to that address) a great musical ‘tow-row-row’ got up by m. de charlus. he went on to say that in the old days to which i had referred, the little nucleus had been different, and its tone not at all the same, not only because the faithful had then been younger. he told me of elaborate jokes played by elstir (what he called ‘pure buffooneries’), as for instance one day when the painter, having pretended to fail at the last moment, had come disguised as an extra waiter and, as he handed round the dishes, whispered gallant speeches in the ear of the extremely proper baroness putbus, crimson with anger and alarm; then disappearing before the end of dinner he had had a hip-bath carried into the drawing-room, out of which, when the party left the table, he had emerged stark naked uttering fearful oaths; and also of supper parties to which the guests came in paper costumes, designed, cut out and coloured by elstir, which were masterpieces in themselves, brichot having worn on one occasion that of a great n0bleman of the court of charles vii, with long turned-up points to his shoes, and another time that of napoleon i, for which elstir had fashioned a grand cordon of the legion of honour out of sealing-wax. in short brichot, seeing again with the eyes of memory the drawing-room of those days with its high windows, its low sofas devoured by the midday sun which had had to be replaced, declared that he preferred it to the drawing-room of to-day. of course, i quite understood that by ‘drawing-room’ brichot meant — as the word church implies not merely the religious edifice but the congregation of worshippers — not merely the apartment, but the people who visited it, the special pleasures that they came to enjoy there, to which, in his memory, those sofas had imparted their form upon which, when you called to see mme. verdurin in the afternoon, you waited until she was ready, while the blossom on the horse chestnuts outside, and on the mantelpiece carnations in vases seemed, with a charming and kindly thought for the visitor expressed in the smiling welcome of their rosy hues, to be watching anxiously for the tardy appearance of the lady of the house. but if the drawing-room seemed to him superior to what it was now, it was perhaps because our mind is the old proteus who cannot remain the slave of any one shape and, even in the social world, suddenly abandons a house which has slowly and with difficulty risen to the pitch of perfection to prefer another which is less brilliant, just as the ‘touched-up’ photographs which odette had had taken at otto’s, in which she queened it in a ‘princess’ gown, her hair waved by lenthéric, did not appeal to swann so much as a little ‘cabinet picture’ taken at nice, in which, in a cloth cape, her loosely dressed hair protruding beneath a straw hat trimmed with pansies and a bow of black ribbon, instead of being twenty years younger (for women as a rule look all the older in a photograph, the earlier it is), she looked like a little servant girl twenty years older than she now was. perhaps too he derived some pleasure from praising to me what i myself had never known, from shewing me that he had tasted delights that i could never enjoy. if so, he was successful, for merely by mentioning the names of two or three people who were no longer alive and to each of whom he imparted something mysterious by his way of referring to them, to that delicious intimacy, he made me ask myself what it could have been like; i felt that everything that had been told me about the verdurins was far too co-rs-; and indeed, in the case of swann whom i had known, i reproached myself with not having paid him sufficient attention, with not having paid attention to him in a sufficiently disinterested spirit, with not having listened to him properly when he used to entertain me while we waited for his wife to come home for luncheon and he shewed me his treasures, now that i knew that he was to be cl-ssed with the most brilliant talkers of the past. just as we were coming to mme. verdurin’s doorstep, i caught sight of m. de charlus, steering towards us the bulk of his huge body, drawing unwillingly in his wake one of those blackmailers or mendicants who nowadays, whenever he appeared, sprang up without fail even in what were to all appearance the most deserted corners, by whom this powerful monster was, evidently against his will, invariably escorted, although at a certain distance, as is the shark by its pilot, in short contrasting so markedly with the haughty stranger of my first visit to balbec, with his stern aspect, his affectation of virility, that i seemed to be discovering, accompanied by its satellite, a planet at a wholly different period of its revolution, when one begins to see it full, or a sick man now devoured by the malady which a few years ago was but a tiny spot which was easily concealed and the gravity of which was never suspected. although the operation that brichot had undergone had restored a tiny portion of the sight which he had thought to be lost for ever, i do not think he had observed the ruffian following in the baron’s steps. not that this mattered, for, ever since la raspelière, and notwithstanding the professor’s friendly regard for m. de charlus, the sight of the latter always made him feel ill at ease. no doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths which he does not suspect. falsehood, however, so often treacherous, upon which all conversation is based, conceals less perfectly a feeling of hostility, or of sordid interest, or a visit which we wish to look as though we had not paid, or an escapade with the mistress of a day which we are anxious to keep from our wife, than a good reputation covers up — so as not to let their existence be guessed — evil habits. they may remain unknown to us for a lifetime; an accidental encounter upon a pier, at night, will disclose them; even then this accidental discovery is frequently misunderstood and we require a third person, who is in the secret, to supply the unimaginable clue of which everyone is unaware. but, once we know about them, they alarm us because we feel that that way madness lies, far more than by their immorality. mme. de surgis did not possess the slightest trace of any moral feeling, and would have admitted anything of her sons that could be degraded and explained by material interest, which is comprehensible to all mankind! but she forbade them to go on visiting m. de charlus when she learned that, by a sort of internal clockwork, he was inevitably drawn upon each of their visits, to pinch their chins and to make each of them pinch his brother’s. she felt that uneasy sense of a physical mystery which makes us ask ourself whether the neighbour with whom we have been on friendly terms is not tainted with cannibalism, and to the baron’s repeated inquiry: “when am i going to see your sons again?” she would reply, conscious of the thunderbolts that she was attracting to her defenceless head, that they were very busy working for examinations, preparing to go abroad, and so forth. irresponsibility aggravates faults, and even crimes, whatever anyone may say. landru (-ssuming that he really did k!ll his wives) if he did so from a financial motive, which it is possible to resist, may be pardoned, but not if his crime was due to an irresistible sadism
brichot’s co-rs- pleasantries, in the early days of his friendship with the baron, had given place, as soon as it was a question, not of uttering commonplaces, but of understanding, to an awkward feeling which concealed a certain merriment. he re-ssured himself by recalling pages of plato, lines of virgil, because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in those days to fall in love with a young man was like, in our day (socrates’s jokes reveal this more clearly than plato’s theories), keeping a dancing girl before one marries and settles down. m. de charlus himself would not have understood, he who confused his mania with friendship, which does not resemble it in the least, and the athletes of praxiteles with obliging boxers. he refused to see that for the last nineteen hundred years (“a pious courtier under a pious prince would have been an atheist under an atheist prince,” as labruyère reminds us) all conventional h0m-s-xuality — that of plato’s young friends as well as that of virgil’s shepherds — has disappeared, that what survives and increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which we conceal from other people and disguise to ourselves. and m. de charlus would have been wrong in not denying frankly the pagan genealogy. in exchange for a little plastic beauty, how vast the moral superiority! the shepherd in theocritus who sighs for love of a boy, later on will have no reason to be less hard of heart, less dull of wit than the other shepherd whose flute sounds for amaryllis. for the former is not suffering from a malady, he is conforming to the customs of his time. it is the h0m-s-xuality that survives in spite of obstacles, a thing of scorn and loathing, that is the only true form, the only form that can be found conjoined in a person with an enhancement of his moral qualities. we are appalled at the apparently close relation between these and our bodily attributes, when we think of the slight dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of the senses, which explain why the world of poets and musicians, so firmly barred against the duc de guermantes, opens its portals to m. de charlus. that the latter should shew taste in the furnishing of his home, which is that of an eclectic housewife, need not surprise us; but the narrow loophole that opens upon beethoven and veronese! this does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake, through his wife’s machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon him, concludes as follows: “you see that man who is waiting to speak to me on the lawn, whom i am obliged to put up with; he thinks that he is jesus christ. that alone will shew you the sort of lunatics that i have to live among; he cannot be christ, for i am christ myself!” a moment earlier, you were on the point of going to -ssure the governor that a mistake had been made. at this final speech, even if you bear in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every day, you shrink from him, as mme. de surgis’s sons shrank from m. de charlus, not that he would have done them any harm, but because of his ceaseless invitations, the ultimate purpose of which was to pinch their chins. the poet is to be pitied, who must, with no virgil to guide him, p-ss through the circles of an inferno of sulphur and brimstone, to cast himself into the fire that falls from heaven, in order to rescue a few of the inhabitants of sodom! no charm in his work; the same severity in his life as in those of the unfrocked priests who follow the strictest rule of celibacy so that no one may be able to ascribe to anything but loss of faith their discarding of the c-ssock
making a pretence of not seeing the seedy individual who was following in his wake (whenever the baron ventured into the boulevards or crossed the waiting-room in saint-lazarre station, these followers might be counted by the dozen who, in the hope of ‘touching him for a dollar,’ never let him out of their sight), and afraid at the same time that the other might have the audacity to accost him, the baron had devoutly lowered his darkened eyelids which, in contrast to his rice-powdered cheeks, gave him the appearance of a grand inquisitor painted by el greco. but this priestly expression caused alarm, and he looked like an unfrocked priest, various compromises to which he had been driven by the need to apologise for his taste and to keep it secret having had the effect of bringing to the surface of his face precisely what the baron sought to conceal, a debauched life indicated by moral decay. this last, indeed, whatever be its cause, is easily detected, for it is never slow in taking bodily form and proliferates upon a face, especially on the cheeks and round the eyes, as physically as the ochreous yellows acc-mulate there in a case of jaundice or repulsive reds in a case of skin disease. nor was it merely in the cheeks, or rather the chaps of this painted face, in the mammiferous chest, the aggressive rump of this body allowed to deteriorate and invaded by obesity, upon which there now floated iridescent as a film of oil, the vice at one time so jealously confined by m. de charlus in the most secret chamber of his heart. now it overflowed in all his speech
“so this is how you prowl the streets at night, brichot, with a good-looking young man,” he said as he joined us, while the disappointed ruffian made off. “a fine example. we must tell your young pupils at the sorbonne that this is how you behave. but, i must say, the society of youth seems to be good for you, monsieur le professeur, you are as fresh as a rosebud. i have interrupted you, you looked as though you were enjoying yourselves like a pair of giddy girls, and had no need of an old granny k!lljoy like myself. i shan’t take it to the confessional, since you are almost at your destination.” the baron’s mood was all the more blithe since he knew nothing whatever about the scene that afternoon, jupien having decided that it was better to protect his niece against a repet-tion of the onslaught than to inform m. de charlus. and so the baron was still looking forward to the marriage, and delighting in the thought of it. one would suppose that it is a consolation to these great solitaries to give their tragic celibacy the relief of a fict-tious fatherhood. “but, upon my word, brichot,” he went on, turning with a laugh to gaze at us, “i feel quite awkward when i see you in such gallant company. you were like a pair of lovers. going along arm in arm, i say, brichot, you do go the pace!” ought one to ascribe this speech to the senility of a particular state of mind, less capable than in the past of controlling its reflexes, which in moments of automatism lets out a secret that has been so carefully hidden for forty years? or rather to that contempt for plebeian opinion which all the guermantes felt in their hearts, and of which m. de charlus’s brother, the duke, was displaying a variant form when, regardless of the fact that my mother could see him, he used to shave standing by his bedroom window in his unb-ttoned nightshirt. had m. de charlus contracted, during the roasting journeys between doncières and douville, the dangerous habit of making himself at ease, and, just as he would push back his straw hat in order to cool his huge forehead, of unfastening — at first, for a few moments only — the mask that for too long had been rigorously imposed upon his true face? his conjugal att-tude towards morel might well have astonished anyone who had observed it in its full extent. but m. de charlus had reached the stage when the monotony of the pleasures that his vice has to offer became wearying. he had sought instinctively for novel displays, and, growing tired of the strangers whom he picked up, had p-ssed to the opposite pole, to what he used to imagine that he would always loathe, the imitation of family life, or of fatherhood. sometimes even this did not suffice him, he required novelty, and would go and spend the night with a woman, just as a normal man may, once in his life, have wished to go to bed with a boy, from a curiosity similar though inverse, and in either case equally unhealthy. the baron’s existence as one of the ‘faithful,’ living, for charlie’s sake, entirely among the little clan, had had, in stultifying the efforts that he had been making for years to keep up lying appearances, the same influence that a voyage of exploration or residence in the colonies has upon certain europeans who discard the ruling principles by which they were guided at home. and yet, the internal revolution of a mind, ignorant at first of the anomaly contained in its body, then appalled at it after the discovery, and finally growing so used to it as to fail to perceive that it is not safe to confess to other people what the sinner has come in time to confess without shame to himself, had been even more effective in liberating m. de charlus from the last vestiges of social constraint than the time that he spent at the verdurins’. no banishment, indeed, to the south pole, or to the summit of mont blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged residence in the seclusion of a secret vice, that is to say of a state of mind that is different from theirs. a vice (so m. de charlus used at one time to style it) to which the baron now gave the genial aspect of a mere failing, extremely common, attractive on the whole and almost amusing, like laziness, absent-mindedness or greed. conscious of the curiosity that his own striking personality aroused, m. de charlus derived a certain pleasure from satisfying, whetting, sustaining it. just as a jewish journalist will come forward day after day as the champion of catholicism, not, probably, with any hope of being taken seriously, but simply in order not to disappoint the good-natured amus-m-nt of his readers, m. de charlus would genially denounce evil habits among the little clan, as he would have mimicked a person speaking english or imitated mounet-sully, without waiting to be asked, so as to pay his scot with a good grace, by displaying an amateur talent in society; so that m. de charlus now threatened brichot that he would report to the sorbonne that he was in the habit of walking about with young men, exactly as the circ-mcised scribe keeps referring in and out of season to the ‘eldest daughter of the church’ and the ‘sacred heart of jesus,’ that is to say without the least trace of hypocrisy, but with a distinctly histrionic effect. it was not only the change in the words themselves, so different from those that he allowed himself to use in the past, that seemed to require some explanation, there was also the change that had occurred in his intonations, his gestures, all of which now singularly resembled the type m. de charlus used most fiercely to castigate; he would now utter unconsciously almost the same little cries (unconscious in him, and all the more deep-rooted) as are uttered consciously by the inverts who refer to one another as ‘she’; as though this deliberate ‘camping,’ against which m. de charlus had for so long set his face, were after all merely a brilliant and faithful imitation of the manner that men of the charlus type, whatever they may say, are compelled to adopt when they have reached a certain stage in their malady, just as sufferers from general paralysis or locomotor ataxia inevitably end by displaying certain symptoms. as a matter of fact — and this is what this purely unconscious ‘camping’ revealed — the difference between the stern charlus, dressed all in black, with his stiffly brushed hair, whom i had known, and the painted young men, loaded with rings, was no more than the purely imaginary difference that exists between an excited person who talks fast, keeps moving all the time, and a neurotic who talks slowly, preserves a perpetual phlegm, but is tainted with the same neurasthenia in the eyes of the physician who knows that each of the two is devoured by the same anguish and marred by the same defects. at the same time one could tell that m. de charlus had aged from wholly different signs, such as the extraordinary frequency in his conversation of certain expressions that had taken root in it and used now to crop up at every moment (for instance: ‘the chain of circ-mstances’) upon which the baron’s speech leaned in sentence after sentence as upon a necessary prop. “is charlie here yet?” brichot asked m. de charlus as we came in sight of the door. “oh, i don’t know,” said the baron, raising his arms and half-shutting his eyes with the air of a person who does not wish anyone to accuse him of being indiscreet, all the more so as he had probably been reproached by morel for things which he had said and which the other, as timorous as he was vain, and as ready to deny m. de charlus as he was to boast of his friendship, had considered serious albeit they were quite unimportant. “you know, he never tells me what he’s going to do.” if the conversations of two people bound by a tie of intimacy are full of falsehood, this occurs no less spontaneously in the conversations that a third person holds with a lover on the subject of the person with whom the latter is in love, whatever be the s-x of that person
“have you seen him lately?” i asked m. de charlus, with the object of seeming at once not to be afraid of mentioning morel to him and not to believe that they were actually living together. “he came in, as it happened, for five minutes this morning while i was still half asleep, and sat down on the side of my bed, as though he wanted to ravish me.” i guessed at once that m. de charlus had seen charlie within the last hour, for if we ask a woman when she last saw the man whom we know to be — and whom she may perhaps suppose that we suspect of being — her lover, if she has just taken tea with him, she replies: “i saw him for an instant before luncheon.” between these two incidents the only difference is that one is false and the other true, but both are equally innocent, or, if you prefer it, equally culpable. and so we should be unable to understand why the mistress (in this case, m. de charlus) always chooses the false version, did we not know that such replies are determined, unknown to the person who utters them, by a number of factors which appear so out of proportion to the triviality of the incident that we do not take the trouble to consider them. but to a physicist the sp-ce occupied by the tiniest ball of pith is explained by the harmony of action, the conflict or equilibrium, of laws of attraction or repulsion which govern far greater worlds. just as many different laws acting in opposite directions dictate the more general responses with regard to the innocence, the ‘platonism,’ or on the contrary the carnal reality of the relations that one has with the person whom one says one saw in the morning when one has seen him or her in the evening. here we need merely record, without pausing to consider them, the desire to appear natural and fearless, the instinctive impulse to conceal a secret -ssignation, a blend of modesty and ostentation, the need to confess what one finds so delightful and to shew that one is loved, a divination of what the other person knows or guesses — but does not say — a divination which, exceeding or falling short of the other person’s, makes one now exaggerate, now under-estimate it, the spontaneous longing to play with fire and the determination to rescue something from the blaze. at the same time, speaking generally, let us say that m. de charlus, notwithstanding the aggravation of his malady which perpetually urged him to reveal, to insinuate, sometimes boldly to invent compromising details, did intend, during this period in his life, to make it known that charlie was not a man of the same sort as himself and that they were friends and nothing more. this did not prevent him (even though it may quite possibly have been true) from contradicting himself at times (as with regard to the hour at which they had last met), whether he forgot himself at such moments and told the truth, or invented a lie, boastingly or from a sentimental affectation or because he thought it amusing to baffle his questioner. “you know that he is to me,” the baron went on, “the best of comrades, for whom i have the greatest affection, as i am certain” (was he uncertain of it, then, that he felt the need to say that he was certain?) “he has for me, but there is nothing at all between us, nothing of that sort, you understand, nothing of that sort,” said the baron, as naturally as though he had been speaking of a woman. “yes, he came in this morning to pull me out of bed. though he knows that i hate anybody to see me in bed. you don’t mind? oh, it’s horrible, it’s so disturbing, one looks so perfectly hideous, of course i’m no longer five-and-twenty, they won’t choose me to be queen of the may, still one does like to feel that one is looking one’s best.”
it is possible that the baron was in earnest when he spoke of morel as a good comrade, and that he was being even more truthful than he supposed when he said: “i never know what he’s doing; he tells me nothing about his life.”
indeed we may mention (interrupting for a few moments our narrative, which shall be resumed immediately after the closure of this parenthesis which opens at the moment when m. de charlus, brichot and myself are arriving at mme. verdurin’s front door), we may mention that shortly before this evening the baron had been plunged in grief and stupefaction by a letter which he had opened by mistake and which was addressed to morel. this letter, which by a repercussion was to cause intense misery to myself also, was written by the actress léa, notorious for her exclusive interest in women. and yet her letter to morel (whom m. de charlus had never suspected of knowing her, even) was written in the most imp-ssioned tone. its indelicacy prevents us from reproducing it here, but we may mention that léa addressed him throughout in the feminine gender, with such expressions as: “go on, you bad woman!” or “of course you are so, my pretty, you know you are.” and in this letter reference was made to various other women who seemed to be no less morel’s friends than léa’s. on the other hand, morel’s sarcasm at the baron’s expense and léa’s at that of an officer who was keeping her, and of whom she said: “he keeps writing me letters begging me to be careful! what do you say to that, my little white p-ss,” revealed to m. de charlus a state of things no less unsuspected by him than were morel’s peculiar and intimate relations with léa. what most disturbed the baron was the word ‘so.’ ignorant at first of its application, he had eventually, at a time already remote in the past, learned that he himself was ‘so.’ and now the notion that he had acquired of this word was again put to the challenge. when he had discovered that he was ‘so,’ he had supposed this to mean that his tastes, as saint-simon says, did not lie in the direction of women. and here was this word ‘so’ applied to morel with an extension of meaning of which m. de charlus was unaware, so much so that morel gave proof, according to this letter, of his being ‘so’ by having the same taste as certain women for other women. from that moment the baron’s jealousy had no longer any reason to confine itself to the men of morel’s acquaintance, but began to extend to the women also. so that the people who were ‘so’ were not merely those that he had supposed to be ‘so,’ but a whole and vast section of the inhabitants of the planet, consisting of women as well as of men, loving not merely men but women also, and the baron, in the face of this novel meaning of a word that was so familiar to him, felt himself tormented by an anxiety of the mind as well as of the heart, born of this twofold mystery which combined an extension of the field of his jealousy with the sudden inadequacy of a definition
m. de charlus had never in his life been anything but an amateur. that is to say, incidents of this sort could never be of any use to him. he worked off the painful impression that they might make upon him in violent scenes in which he was a past-master of eloquence, or in crafty intrigues. but to a person endowed with the qualities of a bergotte, for instance, they might have been of inestimable value. this may indeed explain, to a certain extent (since we have to grope blindfold, but choose, like the lower animals, the herb that is good for us), why men like bergotte have generally lived in the company of persons who were ordinary, false and malicious. their beauty is sufficient for the writer’s imagination, enhances his generosity, but does not in any way alter the nature of his companion, whose life, situated thousands of feet below the level of his own, her incredible stories, her lies carried farther, and, what is more, in another direction than what might have been expected, appear in occasional flashes. the lie, the perfect lie, about people whom we know, about the relations that we have had with them, about our motive for some action, a motive which we express in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to the person who loves us and believes that she has fashioned us in her own image because she keeps on kissing us morning, noon and night, that lie is one of the only things in the world that can open a window for us upon what is novel, unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses to the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known. we are bound to say, in so far as m. de charlus is concerned, that, if he was stupefied to learn with regard to morel a certain number of things which the latter had carefully concealed from him, he was not justified in concluding from this that it was a mistake to -ssociate too closely with the lower orders. we shall indeed see, in the concluding section of this work, m. de charlus himself engaged in doing things which would have stupefied the members of his family and his friends far more than he could possibly have been stupefied by the revelations of léa. (the revelation that he had found most painful had been that of a tour which morel had made with léa, whereas at the time he had -ssured m. de charlus that he was studying music in germany. he had found support for this falsehood in obliging friends in germany to whom he had sent his letters, to be forwarded from there to m. de charlus, who, as it happened, was so positive that morel was there that he had not even looked at the postmark.) but it is time to rejoin the baron as he advances with brichot and myself towards the verdurins’ door
“and what,” he went on, turning to myself, “has become of your young hebrew friend, whom we met at douville? it occurred to me that, if you liked, one might perhaps invite him to the house one evening.” for m. de charlus, who did not shrink from employing a private detective to spy upon every word and action of morel, for all the world like a husband or a lover, had not ceased to pay attention to other young men. the vigilance which he made one of his old servants maintain, through an agency, upon morel, was so indiscreet that his footmen thought they were being watched, and one of the housemaids could not endure the suspense, never ventured into the street, always expecting to find a policeman at her heels. “she can do whatever she likes! it would be a waste of time and money to follow her! as if her goings on mattered to us!” the old servant ironically exclaimed, for he was so p-ssionately devoted to his master that, albeit he in no way shared the baron’s tastes, he had come in time, with such ardour did he employ himself in their service, to speak of them as though they were his own. “he is the very best of good fellows,” m. de charlus would say of this old servant, for we never appreciate anyone so much as those who combine with other great virtues that of placing themselves unconditionally at the disposal of our vices. it was moreover of men alone that m. de charlus was capable of feeling any jealousy so far as morel was concerned. women inspired in him no jealousy whatever. this is indeed an almost universal rule with the charlus type. the love of the man with whom they are in love for women is something different, which occurs in another animal species (a lion does not interfere with tigers); does not distress them; if anything, re-ssures them. sometimes, it is true, in the case of those who exalt their inversion to the level of a priesthood, this love creates disgust. these men resent their friends’ having succ-mbed to it, not as a betrayal but as a lapse from virtue. a charlus, of a different variety from the baron, would have been as indignant at the discovery of morel’s relations with a woman as upon reading in a newspaper that he, the interpreter of bach and handel, was going to play puccini. it is, by the way, for this reason that the young men who, with an eye to their own personal advantage, condescend to the love of men like charlus, -ssure them that women inspire them only with disgust, just as they would tell a doctor that they never touch alcohol, and care only for spring water. but m. de charlus, in this respect, departed to some extent from the general rule. since he admired everything about morel, the latter’s successes with women caused him no annoyance, gave him the same joy as his successes on the platform, or at écarté. “but do you know, my dear fellow, he has women,” he would say, with an air of disclosure, of scandal, possibly of envy, above all of admiration. “he is extraordinary,” he would continue. “everywhere, the most famous wh0r-s can look at n0body but him. they stare at him everywhere, whether, it’s on the underground or in the theatre. it’s becoming a nuisance! i can’t go out with him to a restaurant without the waiter bringing him notes from at least three women. and always pretty women too. not that there’s anything surprising in that. i was watching him yesterday, i can quite understand it, he has become so beautiful, he looks just like a bronzino, he is really marvellous.” but m. de charlus liked to shew that he was in love with morel, to persuade other people, possibly to persuade himself, that morel was in love with him. he applied to the purpose of having morel always with him (notwithstanding the harm that the young fellow might do to the baron’s social position) a sort of self-esteem. for (and this is frequent among men of good position, who are sn0bs, and, in their vanity, sever all their social ties in order to be seen everywhere with a mistress, a person of doubtful or a lady of tarnished reputation, whom n0body will invite, and with whom nevertheless it seems to them flattering to be -ssociated) he had arrived at that stage at which self-esteem devotes all its energy to destroying the goals to which it has attained, whether because, under the influence of love, a man finds a prestige which he is alone in perceiving in ostentatious relations with the beloved object, or because, by the waning of social ambitions that have been gratified, and the rising of a tide of subsidiary curiosities all the more absorbing the more platonic they are, the latter have not only reached but have p-ssed the level at which the former found it difficult to remain
as for young men in general, m. de charlus found that to his fondness for them morel’s existence was not an obstacle, and that indeed his brilliant reputation as a violinist or his growing fame as a composer and journalist might in certain instances prove an attraction. did anyone introduce to the baron a young composer of an agreeable type, it was in morel’s talents that he sought an opportunity of doing the stranger a favour. “you must,” he would tell him, “bring me some of your work so that morel can play it at a concert or on tour. there is hardly any decent music written, now, for the violin. it is a godsend to find anything new. and abroad they appreciate that sort of thing enormously. even in the provinces there are little musical societies where they love music with a fervour and intelligence that are quite admirable.” without any greater sincerity (for all this could serve only as a bait and it was seldom that morel condescended to fulfil these promises), bloch having confessed that he was something of a poet (when he was ‘in the mood,’ he had added with the sarcastic laugh with which he would accompany a plat-tude, when he could think of nothing original), m. de charlus said to me: “you must tell your young israelite, since he writes verses, that he must really bring me some for morel. for a composer, that is always the stumbling block, to find something decent to set to music. one might even consider a libretto. it would not be without interest, and would acquire a certain value from the distinction of the poet, from my patronage, from a whole chain of auxiliary circ-mstances, among which morel’s talent would take the chief place, for he is composing a lot just now, and writing too, and very pleasantly, i must talk to you about it. as for his talent as a performer (there, as you know, he is already a past-master), you shall see this evening how well the lad plays vinteuil’s music; he overwhelms me; at his age, to have such an understanding while he is still such a boy, such a kid! oh, this evening is only to be a little rehearsal. the big affair is to come off in two or three days. but it will be much more distinguished this evening. and so we are delighted that you have come,” he went on, employing the plural pr-noun doubtless because a king says: “it is our wish.” “the programme is so magnificent that i have advised mme. verdurin to give two parties. one in a few days’ time, at which she will have all her own friends, the other to-night at which the hostess is, to use a legal expression, ‘disseized.’ it is i who have issued the invitations, and i have collected a few people from another sphere, who may be useful to charlie, and whom it will be nice for the verdurins to meet. don’t you agree, it is all very well to have the finest music played by the greatest artists, the effect of the performance remains m-ffled in cotton-wool, if the audience is composed of the milliner from across the way and the grocer from round the corner. you know what i think of the intellectual level of people in society, still they can play certain quite important parts, among others that which in public events devolves upon the press, and which is that of being an organ of publicity. you know what i mean; i have for instance invited my sister-in-law oriane; it is not certain that she will come, but it is on the other hand certain that, if she does come, she will understand absolutely nothing. but one does not ask her to understand, which is beyond her capacity, but to talk, a task which is admirably suited to her, and which she never fails to perform. what is the result? to-morrow as ever is, instead of the silence of the milliner and the grocer, an animated conversation at the mortemarts’ with oriane telling everyone that she has heard the most marvellous music, that a certain morel, and so forth; unspeakable rage of the people not invited, who will say: ‘palamède thought, no doubt, that we were unworthy; anyhow, who are these people who were giving the party?’ a counterblast quite as useful as oriane’s praises, because morel’s name keeps cropping up all the time and is finally engraved in the memory like a lesson that one has read over a dozen times. all this forms a chain of circ-mstances which may be of value to the artist, to the hostess, may serve as a sort of megaphone for a performance which will thus be made audible to a remote public. really, it is worth the trouble; you shall see what progress charlie has made. and what is more, we have discovered a new talent in him, my dear fellow, he writes like an angel. like an angel, i tell you.” m. de charlus omitted to say that for some time past he had been employing morel, like those great n0blemen of the seventeenth century who scorned to sign and even to write their own slanderous attacks, to compose certain vilely calumnious little paragraphs at the expense of comtesse mole. their insolence apparent even to those who merely glanced at them, how much more cruel were they to the young woman herself, who found in them, so skilfully introduced that n0body but herself saw the point, certain p-ssages from her own correspondence, textually quoted, but interpreted in a sense which made them as deadly as the cruellest revenge. they k!lled the lady. but there is edited every day in paris, balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper, more terrible than its printed rivals. we shall see later on that this verbal press reduced to nothing the power of a charlus who had fallen out of fashion, and exalted far above him a morel who was not worth the millionth part of his former patron. is this intellectual fashion really so simple, and does it sincerely believe in the nullity of a charlus of g*nius, in the incontestable authority of a cr-ss morel? the baron was not so innocent in his implacable vengeance. whence, no doubt, that bitter venom on his tongue, the spreading of which seemed to dye his cheeks with jaundice when he was in a rage. “you who knew bergotte,” m. de charlus went on, “i thought at one time that you might, perhaps, by refreshing his memory with regard to the youngster’s writings, collaborate in short with myself, help me to -ssist a twofold talent, that of a musician and a writer, which may one day acquire the prestige of that of berlioz. as you know, the ill-strious have often other things to think about, they are smothered in flattery, they take little interest except in themselves. but bergotte, who was genuinely unpretentious and obliging, promised me that he would get into the gaulois, or some such paper, those little articles, a blend of the humourist and the musician, which he really does quite charmingly now, and i am really very glad that charlie should combine with his violin this little stroke of ingres’s pen. i know that i am pr-ne to exaggeration, when he is concerned, like all the old fairy godmothers of the conservatoire. what, my dear fellow, didn’t you know that? you have never observed my little weakness. i pace up and down for hours on end outside the examination hall. i’m as happy as a queen. as for charlie’s prose, bergotte -ssured me that it was really very good indeed.”
m. de charlus, who had long been acquainted with bergotte through swann, had indeed gone to see him a few days before his death, to ask him to find an opening for morel in some newspaper for a sort of commentary, half humorous, upon the music of the day. in doing so, m. de charlus had felt some remorse, for, himself a great admirer of bergotte, he was conscious that he never went to see him for his own sake, but in order, thanks to the respect, partly intellectual, partly social, that bergotte felt for him, to be able to do a great service to morel, or to some other of his friends. that he no longer made use of people in society for any other purpose did not shock m. de charlus, but to treat bergotte thus had appeared to him more offensive, for he felt that bergotte had not the calculating nature of people in society, and deserved better treatment. only, his was a busy life, and he could never find time for anything except when he was greatly interested in something, when, for instance, it affected morel. what was more, as he was himself extremely intelligent, the conversation of an intelligent man left him comparatively cold, especially that of bergotte who was too much the man of letters for his liking and belonged to another clan, did not share his point of view. as for bergotte, he had observed the calculated motive of m. de charlus’s visits, but had felt no resentment, for he had been incapable, throughout his life, of any consecutive generosity, but anxious to give pleasure, broadminded, insensitive to the pleasure of administering a rebuke. as for m. de charlus’s vice, he had never partaken of it to the smallest extent, but had found in it rather an element of colour in the person affected, fas et nefas, for an artist, consisting not in moral examples but in memories of plato or of sodom. “but you, fair youth, we never see you at quai conti. you don’t abuse their hospitality!” i explained that i went out as a rule with my cousin. “do you hear that! he goes out with his cousin! what a most particularly pure young man!” said m. de charlus to brichot. then, turning again to myself: “but we are not asking you to give an account of your life, my boy. you are free to do anything that amuses you. we merely regret that we have no share in it. besides, you shew very good taste, your cousin is charming, ask brichot, she quite turned his head at douville. we shall regret her absence this evening. but you did just as well, perhaps, not to bring her with you. vinteuil’s music is delightful. but i have heard that we are to meet the composer’s daughter and her friend, who have a terrible reputation. that sort of thing is always awkward for a girl. they are sure to be there, unless the ladies have been detained in the country, for they were to have been present without fail all afternoon at a rehearsal which mme. verdurin was giving to-day, to which she had invited only the bores, her family, the people whom she could not very well have this evening. but a moment ago, before dinner, charlie told us that the sisters vinteuil. as we call them, for whom they were all waiting, never came.” notwithstanding the intense pain that i had felt at the sudden -ssociation with its effect, of which alone i had been aware, of the cause, at length discovered, of albertine’s anxiety to be there that afternoon, the presence publicly announced (but of which i had been ignorant) of mlle. vinteuil and her friend, my mind was still sufficiently detached to remark that m. de charlus, who had told us, a few minutes earlier, that he had not seen charlie since the morning, was now brazenly admitting that he had seen him before dinner. my pain became visible. “why, what is the matter with you?” said the baron. “you are quite green; come, let us go in, you will catch cold, you don’t look at all well.” it was not any doubt as to albertine’s virtue that m. de charlus’s words had awakened in me. many other doubts had penetrated my mind already; at each fresh doubt we feel that the measure is heaped full, that we cannot cope with it, then we manage to find room for it all the same, and once it is introduced into our vital essence it enters into compet-tion there with so many longings to believe, so many reasons to forget, that we speedily become accustomed to it, and end by ceasing to pay it any attention. there remains only, like a partly healed pain, the menace of possible suffering, which, the counterpart of desire, a feeling of the same order, and like it become the centre of our thoughts, radiates through them to an infinite circ-mference a wistful melancholy, as desire radiates pleasures whose origin we fail to perceive, wherever anything may suggest the idea of the person with whom we are in love. but pain revives as soon as a fresh doubt enters our mind complete; even if we -ssure ourself almost immediately: “i shall deal with this, there must be some method by which i need not suffer, it cannot be true,” nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it. if we had merely members, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable; unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable by everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie — that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, if the lie be told by ourselves or by strangers — coming from that person, causes the little heart, which surgeons ought really to be able to excise from us, intolerable anguish. let us not speak of the brain, for our mind may go on reasoning interminably in the course of this ansuish, it does no more to mitigate it than by taking thought can we soothe an aching tooth. it is true that this person is to blame for having lied to us, for she had sworn to us that she would always tell us the truth. but we know from our own shortcomings, towards other people, how little an oath is worth. and we have deliberately believed them when they came from her, the very person to whose interest it has always been to lie to us, and whom, moreover, we did not select for her virtues. it is true that, later on, she would almost cease to have any need to lie to us — at the moment when our heart will have grown indifferent to her falsehood — because then we shall not feel any interest in her life. we know this, and, notwithstanding, we deliberately sacrifice our own lives, either by k!lling ourselves for her sake, or by letting ourselves be sentenced to death for having murdered her, or simply by spending, in the course of a few evenings, our whole fortune upon her, which will oblige us presently to commit suicide because we have not a penny in the world. besides, however calm we may imagine ourselves when we are in love, we always have love in our heart in a state of unstable equilibrium. a trifle is sufficient to exalt it to the position of happiness, we radiate happiness, we smother in our affection not her whom we love, but those who have given us merit in her eyes, who have protected her from every evil temptation; we think that our mind is at ease, and a word is sufficient: ‘gilberte is not coming,’ ‘mademoiselle vinteuil is expected,’ to make all the preconceived happiness towards which we were rising collapse, to make the sun hide his face, to open the bag of the winds and let loose the internal tempest which one day we shall be incapable of resisting. that day, the day upon which the heart has become so frail, our friends who respect us are pained that such trifles, that certain persons, can so affect us, can bring us to death’s door. but what are they to do? if a poet is dying of septic pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is a man of talent and that it ought to let him recover? my doubt, in so far as it referred to mlle. vinteuil, was not entirely novel. but to a certain extent, my jealousy of the afternoon, inspired by léa and her friends, had abolished it. once that peril of the trocadéro was removed, i had felt that i had recaptured for all time complete peace of mind. but what was entirely novel to me was a certain excursion as to which andrée had told me: “we went to this place and that, we didn’t meet anyone,” and during which, on the contrary, mlle. vinteuil had evidently arranged to meet albertine at mme. verdurin’s. at this moment i would gladly have allowed albertine to go out by herself, to go wherever she might choose, provided that i might lock up mlle. vinteuil and her friend somewhere and be certain that albertine would not meet them. the fact is that jealousy is, as a rule, partial, of intermittent application, whether because it is the painful extension of an anxiety which is provoked now by one person, now by another with whom our mistress may be in love, or because of the exiguity of our thought which is able to realise only what it can represent to itself and leaves everything else in an obscurity which can cause us only a proportionately modified anguish
just as we were about to ring the bell we were overtaken by saniette who informed us that princess sherbatoff had died at six o’clock, and added that he had not at first recognised us. “i envisaged you, however, for some time,” he told us in a breathless voice. “is it aught but curious that i should have hesitated?” to say “is it not curious” would have seemed to him wrong, and he had acquired a familiarity with obsolete forms of speech that was becoming exasperating. “not but what you are people whom one may acknowledge as friends.” his grey complexion seemed to be illuminated by the livid glow of a storm. his breathlessness, which had been noticeable, as recently as last summer, only when m. verdurin ‘jumped down his throat,’ was now continuous. “i understand that an unknown work of vinteuil is to be performed by excellent artists, and singularly by morel.” “why singularly?” inquired the baron who detected a criticism in the adverb. “our friend saniette,” brichot made haste to exclaim, acting as interpreter, “is pr-ne to speak, like the excellent scholar that he is, the language of an age in which ‘singularly’ was equivalent to our ‘especially.’”
as we entered the verdurins’ hall, m. de charlus asked me whether i was engaged upon any work and as i told him that i was not, but that i was greatly interested at the moment in old dinner-services of plate and porcelain, he -ssured me that i could not see any finer than those that the verdurins had; that moreover i might have seen them at la raspelière, since, on the pretext that one’s possessions are also one’s friends, they were so silly as to cart everything down there with them; it would be less convenient to bring everything out for my benefit on the evening of a party; still, he would tell them to shew me anything that i wished to see. i begged him not to do anything of the sort. m. de charlus unb-ttoned his greatcoat, took off his hat, and i saw that the top of his head had now turned silver in patches. but like a precious shrub which is not only coloured with autumn tints but certain leaves of which are protected by bandages of wadding or incrustations of plaster, m. de charlus received from these few white hairs at his crest only a further variegation added to those of his face. and yet, even beneath the layers of different expressions, paint and hypocrisy which formed such a bad ‘make-up,’ his face continued to hide from almost everyone the secret that it seemed to me to be crying aloud. i was almost put to shame by his eyes in which i was afraid of his surprising me in the act of reading it, as from an open book, by his voice which seemed to me to be repeating it in every tone, with an untiring indecency. but secrets are well kept by such people, for everyone who comes in contact with them is deaf and blind. the people who learned the truth from some one else, from the verdurins for instance, believed it, but only for so long as they had not met m. de charlus. his face, so far from spreading, dissipated every scandalous rumour. for we form so extravagant an idea of certain characters that we would be incapable of identifying one of them with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance. and we find it difficult to believe in such a person’s vices, just as we can never believe in the g*nius of a person with whom we went to the opera last night
m. de charlus was engaged in handing over his greatcoat with the instructions of a familiar guest. but the footman to whom he was handing it was a newcomer, and quite young. now m. de charlus had by this time begun, as people say, to ‘lose his bearings’ and did not always remember what might and what might not be done. the praiseworthy desire that he had felt at balbec to shew that certain topics did not alarm him, that he was not afraid to declare with regard to some one or other: “he is a nice-looking boy,” to utter, in short, the same words as might have been uttered by somebody who was not like himself, this desire he had now begun to express by saying on the contrary things which n0body could ever have said who was not like him, things upon which his mind was so constantly fixed that he forgot that they do not form part of the habitual preoccupation of people in general. and so, as he gazed at the new footman, he raised his forefinger in the air in a menacing fashion and, thinking that he was making an excellent joke: “you are not to make eyes at me like that, do you hear?” said the baron, and, turning to brichot: “he has a quaint little face, that boy, his nose is rather fun,” and, completing his joke, or yielding to a desire, he lowered his forefinger horizontally, hesitated for an instant, then, unable to control himself any longer, thrust it irresistibly forwards at the footman and touched the tip of his nose, saying “pif!” “that’s a rum card,” the footman said to himself, and inquired of his companions whether it was a joke or what it was. “it is just a way he has,” said the butler (who regarded the baron as slightly ‘touched,’ ‘a bit balmy’), “but he is one of madame’s friends for whom i have always had the greatest respect, he has a good heart.”
“are you coming back this year to incarville?” brichot asked me. “i believe that our hostess has taken la raspelière again, for all that she has had a crow to pick with her landlords. but that is nothing, it is a cloud that p-sses,” he added in the optimistic tone of the newspapers that say: “mistakes have been made, it is true, but who does not make mistakes at times?” but i remembered the state of anguish in which i had left balbec, and felt no desire to return there. i kept putting off to the morrow my plans for albertine. “why, of course he is coming back, we need him, he is indispensable to us,” declared m. de charlus with the authoritative and uncomprehending egoism of friendliness
at this moment m. verdurin appeared to welcome us. when we expressed our sympathy over princess sherbatoff, he said: “yes, i believe she is rather ill.” “no, no, she died at six o’clock,” exclaimed saniette. “oh, you exaggerate everything,” was m. verdurin’s brutal retort, for, since he had not cancelled his party, he preferred the hypothesis of illness, imitating unconsciously the duc de guermantes. saniette, not without fear of catching cold, for the outer door was continually being opened, stood waiting resignedly for some one to take his hat and coat. “what are you hanging about there for, like a whipped dog?” m. verdurin asked him. “i am waiting until one of the persons who are charged with the cloakroom can take my coat and give me a number.” “what is that you say?” demanded m. verdurin with a stern expression. “‘charged with the cloakroom?’ are you going off your head? ‘in charge of the cloakroom,’ is what we say, if we’ve got to teach you to speak your own language, like a man who has had a stroke.” “charged with a thing is the correct form,” murmured saniette in a stifled tone; “the abbé le batteux. . . . ” “you make me tired, you do,” cried m. verdurin in a voice of thunder. “how you do wheezel have you been running upstairs to an attic?” the effect of m. verdurin’s rudeness was that the servants in the cloakroom allowed other guests to take precedence of saniette and, when he tried to hand over his things, replied: “wait for your turn, sir, don’t be in such a hurry.” “there’s system for you, competent fellows, that’s right, my lads,” said m. verdurin with an approving smile, in order to encourage them in their tendency to keep saniette waiting till the end. “come along,” he said to us, “the creature wants us all to catch our death hanging about in his beloved draught. come and get warm in the drawing-room. ‘charged with the cloakroom,’ indeed, what an idiot!” “he is inclined to be a little precious, but he’s not a bad fellow,” said brichot. “i never said that he was a bad fellow, i said that he was an idiot,” was m. verdurin’s harsh retort
meanwhile mme. verdurin was busily engaged with cottard and ski. morel had just declined (because m. de charlus could not be present) an invitation from some friends of hers to whom she had promised the services of the violinist. the reason for morel’s refusal to perform at the party which the verdurins’ friends were giving, a reason which we shall presently see reinforced by others of a far more serious kind, might have found its justification in a habit common to the leisured cl-sses in general but specially distinctive of the little nucleus. to be sure, if mme. verdurin intercepted between a newcomer and one of the faithful a whispered speech which might let it be supposed that they were already acquainted, or wished to become more intimate (“on friday, then, at so-and-so’s,” or “come to the studio any day you like; i am always there until five o’clock, i shall look forward to seeing you”), agitated, supposing the newcomer to occupy a ‘position’ which would make him a brilliant recruit to the little clan, the mistress, while pretending not to have heard anything, and preserving in her fine eyes, shadowed by the habit of listening to debussy more than they would have been by that of sniffing cocaine, the extenuated expression that they derived from musical intoxication alone, revolved nevertheless behind her splendid brow, inflated by all those quartets and the headaches that were their consequence, thoughts which were not exclusively polyphonic, and unable to contain herself any longer, unable to postpone the injection for another instant, flung herself upon the speakers, drew them apart, and said to the newcomer, pointing to the ‘faithful’ one: “you wouldn’t care to come and dine to meet him, next sat-rday, shall we say, or any day you like, with some really nice people! don’t speak too loud, as i don’t want to invite all this mob” (a word used to denote for five minutes the little nucleus, disdained for the moment in favour of the newcomer in whom so many hqpes were placed)
but this infatuated impulse, this need to make friendly overtures, had its counterpart. -ssiduous attendance at their wednesdays aroused in the verdurins an opposite tendency. this was the desire to quarrel, to hold aloof. it had been strengthened, had almost been wrought to a frenzy during the months spent at la raspelière, where they were all together morning, noon and night. m. verdurin went out of his way to prove one of his guests in the wrong, to spin webs in which he might hand over to his comrade spider some innocent fly. failing a grievance, he would invent some absurdity. as soon as one of the faithful had been out of the house for half an hour, they would make fun of him in front of the others, would feign surprise that their guests had not noticed how his t–th were never clean, or how on the contrary he had a mania for brushing them twenty times a day. if any one took the liberty of opening a window, this want of breeding would cause a glance of disgust to p-ss between host and hostess. a moment later mme. verdurin would ask for a shawl, which gave m. verdurin an excuse for saying in a tone of fury: “no, i shall close the window, i wonder who had the impertinence to open it,” in the hearing of the guilty wretch who blushed to the roots of his hair. you were rebuked indirectly for the quant-ty of wine that you had drunk. “it won’t do you any harm. navvies thrive on it!” if two of the faithful went out together without first obtaining permission from the mistress, their excursions led to endless comments, however innocent they might be. those of m. de charlus with morel were not innocent. it was only the fact that m. de charlus was not staying at la raspelière (because morel was obliged to live near his barracks) that r-t-rded the hour of satiety, disgust, retching. that hour was, however, about to strike
mme. verdurin was furious and determined to ‘enlighten’ morel as to the ridiculous and detestable part that m. de charlus was making him play. “i must add,” she went on (mme. verdurin, when she felt that she owed anyone a debt of grat-tude which would be a burden to him, and was unable to rid herself of it by k!lling him, would discover a serious defect in him which would honourably dispense her from shewing her grat-tude), “i must add that he gives himself airs in my house which i do not at all like.” the truth was that mme. verdurin had another more serious reason than morel’s refusal to play at her friends’ party for picking a quarrel with m. de charlus. the latter, overcome by the honour he was doing the mistress in bringing to quai conti people who after all would never have come there for her sake, had, on hearing the first names that mme. verdurin had suggested as those of people who ought to be invited, pr-nounced the most categorical ban upon them in a peremptory tone which blended the rancorous pride of a crotchety n0bleman with the dogmatism of the expert artist in questions of entertainment who would cancel his programme and withhold his collaboration sooner than agree to concessions which, in his opinion, would endanger the success of the whole. m. de charlus had given his approval, hedging it round with reservations, to saintine alone, with whom, in order not to be bothered with his wife, mme. de guermantes had p-ssed, from a daily intimacy, to a complete severance of relations, but whom m. de charlus, finding him intelligent, continued to see. true, it was among a middle-cl-ss set, with a cross-breeding of the minor n0bility, where people are merely very rich and connected with an aristocracy whom the true aristocracy does not know, that saintine, at one time the flower of the guermantes set, had gone to seek his fortune and, he imagined, a social foothold. but mme. verdurin, knowing the blue-blooded pretensions of the wife’s circle, and failing to take into account the husband’s position (for it is what is immediately over our head that gives us the impression of alt-tude and not what is almost invisible to us, so far is it lost in the clouds), felt that she ought to justify an invitation of saintine by pointing out that he knew a great many people, “having married mlle. ——-.” the ignorance which this -ssertion, the direct opposite of the truth, revealed in mme. verdurin caused the baron’s painted lips to part in a smile of indulgent scorn and wide comprehension. he disdained a direct answer, but as he was always ready to express in social examples theories which shewed the fertility of his mind and the arrogance of his pride, with the inherited frivolity of his occupations: “saintine ought to have come to me before marrying,” he said, “there is such a thing as social as well as physiological eugenics, and i am perhaps the only specialist in existence. saintine’s case aroused no discussion, it was clear that, in making the marriage that he made, he was tying a stone to his neck, and hiding his light under a bushel. his social career was at an end. i should have explained this to him, and he would have understood me, for he is quite intelligent. on the other hand, there was a person who had everything that he required to make his position exalted, predominant, world-wide, only a terrible cable bound him to the earth. i helped him, partly by pressure, partly by force, to break his bonds and now he has won, with a triumphant joy, the freedom, the omnipotence that he owes to me; it required, perhaps, a little determination on his part, but what a reward! thus a man can himself, when he has the sense to listen to me, become the midwife of his destiny.” it was only too clear that m. de charlus had not been able to influence his own; action is a different thing from speech, even eloquent speech, and from thought, even the thoughts of g*nius. “but, so far as i am concerned, i live the life of a philosopher who looks on with interest at the social reactions which i have foretold, but who does not -ssist them. and so i have continued to visit saintine, who has always received me with the whole-hearted deference which is my due. i have even dined with him in his new abode, where one is heavily bored, in the midst of the most sumptuous splendour, as one used to be amused in the old days when, living from hand to mouth, he used to -ssemble the best society in a wretched attic. him, then, you may invite, i give you leave, but i rule out with my veto all the other names that you have mentioned. and you will thank me for it, for, if i am an expert in arranging marriages, i am no less an expert in arranging parties. i know the rising people who give tone to a gathering, make it go; and i know also the names that will bring it down to the ground, make it fall flat.” these exclusions were not always founded upon the baron’s personal resentments nor upon his artistic refinements, but upon his sk!ll as an actor. when he had perfected, at the expense of somebody or something, an entirely successful epigram, he was anxious to let it be heard by the largest possible audience, but took care not to admit to the second performance the audience of the first who could have borne witness that the novelty was not novel. he would then rearrange his drawing-room, simply because he did not alter his programme, and, when he had scored a success in conversation, would, if need be, have organised a tour, and given exhibitions in the provinces. whatever may have been the various motives for these exclusions, they did not merely annoy mme. verdurin, who felt her authority as a hostess impaired, they also did her great damage socially, and for two reasons. the first was that m. de charlus, even more susceptible than jupien, used to quarrel, without anyone’s ever knowing why, with the people who were most suited to be his friends. naturally, one of the first punishments that he could inflict upon them was that of not allowing them to be invited to a party which he was giving at the verdurins’. now these pariahs were often people who are in the habit of ruling the roost, as the saying is, but who in m. de charlus’s eyes had ceased to rule it from the day on which he had quarrelled with them. for his imagination, in addition to finding people in the wrong in order to quarrel with them, was no less ingenious in stripping them of all importance as soon as they ceased to be his friends. if, for instance, the guilty person came of an extremely old family, whose dukedom, however, dates only from the nineteenth century, such a family as the montesquieu, from that moment all that counted for m. de charlus was the precedence of the dukedom, the family becoming nothing. “they are not even dukes,” he would exclaim. “it is the t-tle of the abbé de montesquieu which p-ssed most irregularly to a collateral, less than eighty years ago. the present duke, if duke he can be called, is the third. you may talk to me if you like of people like the uzès, the la trémoïlîe, the luynes, who are tenth or fourteenth dukes, or my brother who is twelfth duc de guermantes and seventeenth prince of cordova. the montesquieu are descended from an old family, what would that prove, supposing that it were proved? they have descended so far that they have reached the fourteenth storey below stairs.” had he on the contrary quarrelled with a gentleman who possessed an ancient dukedom, who boasted the most magnificent connexions, was related to ruling princes, but to whose line this distinction had come quite suddenly without any length of pedigree, a luynes for instance, the case was altered, pedigree alone counted. “i ask you — m. alberti, who does not emerge from the mire until louis xiii. what can it matter to us that favouritism at court allowed them to pick up dukedoms to which they have no right?” what was more, with m. de charlus, the fall came immediately after the exaltation because of that tendency peculiar to the guermantes to expect from conversation, from friendship, something that these are incapable of giving, as well as the symptomatic fear of becoming the objects of slander. and the fall was all the greater, the higher the exaltation had been. now n0body had ever found such favour with the baron as he had markedly shewn for comtesse mole. by what sign of indifference did she reveal, one fine day, that she had been unworthy of it? the comtesse always maintained that she had never been able to solve the problem. the fact remains that the mere sound of her name aroused in the baron the most violent rage, provoked the most eloquent but the most terrible philippics. mme. verdurin, to whom mme. molé had been very kind, and who was founding, as we shall see, great hopes upon her and had rejoiced in antic-p-tion at the thought that the comtesse would meet in her house all the n0blest names, as the mistress said, “of france and navarre,” at once proposed to invite “madame de molé.” “oh, my god! everyone has his own taste,” m. de charlus had replied, “and if you, madame, feel a desire to converse with mme. pipelet, mme. gibout and mme. joseph prudhomme, i ask nothing better, but let it be on an evening when i am not present. i could see as soon as you opened your mouth that we do not speak the same language, since i was mentioning the names of the n0bility, and you retort with the most obscure names of professional and tradespeople, dirty scandalmongering little bounders, little women who imagine themselves patronesses of the arts because they repeat, an octave lower, the manners of my guermantes sister-in-law, like a jay that thinks it is imitating a peac-ck. i must add that it would be positively indecent to admit to a party which i am pleased to give at mme. verdurin’s a person whom i have with good reason excluded from my society, a sheep devoid of birth, loyalty, intelligence, who is so idiotic as to suppose that she is capable of playing the d-ch-sse de guermantes and the princesse de guermantes, a combination which is in itself idiotic, since the d-ch-sse de guermantes and the princesse de guermantes are poles apart. it is as though a person should pretend to be at once reichenberg and sarah bernhardt. in any case, even if it were not impossible, it would be extremely ridiculous. even though i may, myself, smile at times at the exaggeration of one and regret the limitations of the other, that is my right. but that upstart little frog trying to blow herself out to the magnitude of two great ladies who, at all events, always reveal the incomparable distinction of blood, it is enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh. the molé! that is a name which must not be uttered in my hearing, or else i must simply withdraw,” he concluded with a smile, in the tone of a doctor, who, thinking of his patient’s interests in spite of that same patient’s opposition, lets it be understood that he will not tolerate the collaboration of a h0m-eopath. on the other hand, certain persons whom m. de charlus regarded as negligible might indeed be so for him but not for mme. verdurin. m. de charlus, with his exalted birth, could afford to dispense with people in the height of fashion, the -ssemblage of whom would have made mme. verdurin’s drawing-room one of the first in paris. she, at the same time, was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the coach, not to mention the enormous r-t-rdation that the social error of the dreyfus case had inflicted upon her, not without doing her a service all the same. i forget whether i have mentioned the disapproval with which the d-ch-sse de guermantes had observed certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the case, excluded fashionable women from their drawing-rooms and admitted others who were not fashionable, because they were for or against the fresh trial, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies, as lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social distinctions above the national interests; may i appeal to the reader, as to a friend with regard to whom one completely forgets, at the end of a conversation, whether one has remembered, or had an opportunity to tell him something important? whether i have done so or not, the att-tude of the d-ch-sse de guermantes can easily be imagined, and indeed if we look at it in the light of subsequent history may appear, from the social point of view, perfectly correct. m. de cambremer regarded the dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the intelligence service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the french people, to pave the way for invasion. literature being, apart from a few of la fontaine’s fables, a sealed book to the marquis, he left it to his wife to prove that the cruelly introspective writers of the day had, by creating a spirit of irreverence, arrived by a parallel course at a similar result. “m. reinach and m. hervieu are in the plot,” she would say. n0body will accuse the dreyfus case of having premeditated such dark designs upon society. but there it certainly has broken down the hedges. the social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. society is like the s-xual appet-te; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations. the reason that they were nationalists gave the faubourg saint-germain the habit of entertaining ladies from another cl-ss of society; the reason vanished with nationalism, the habit remained. mme. verdurin, by the bond of dreyfusism, had attracted to her house certain writers of distinction who for the moment were of no advantage to her socially, because they were dreyfusards. but political p-ssions are like all the rest, they do not last. fresh generations arise which are incapable of understanding them. even the generation that felt them changes, feels political p-ssions which, not being modelled exactly upon their predecessors, make it rehabilitate some of the excluded, the reason for exclusion having altered. monarchists no longer cared, at the time of the dreyfus case, whether a man had been a republican, that is to say a radical, that is to say anticlerical, provided that he was an anti-semite and a nationalist. should a war ever come, patriotism would -ssume another form and if a writer was chauvinistic n0body would stop to think whether he had or had not been a dreyfusard. it was thus that, at each political crisis, at each artistic revival, mme. verdurin had collected one by one, like a bird building its nest, the several items, useless for the moment, of what would one day be her salon. the dreyfus case had p-ssed, anatole france remained. mme. verdurin’s strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble that she used to take for her faithful, the marvellous dinners that she gave for them alone, without inviting anyone from the world of fashion. each of the faithful was treated at her table as bergotte had been treated at mme. swann’s. when a boon companion of this sort had turned into an ill-strious man whom everybody was longing to meet, his presence at mme. verdurin’s had none of the artificial, composite effect of a dish at an official or farewell banquet, cooked by potel or chabot, but was merely a delicious ‘ordinary’ which you would have found there in the same perfection on a day when there was no party at all. at mme. verdurin’s the cast was trained to perfection, the repertory most select, all that was lacking was an audience. and now that the public taste had begun to turn from the rational and french art of a bergotte, and to go in, above all things, for exotic forms of music, mme. verdurin, a sort of official representative in paris of all foreign artists, was not long in making her appearance, by the side of the exquisite princess yourbeletief, an aged fairy godmother, grim but all-powerful, to the russian dancers. this charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of critics protested, infected paris, as we know, with a fever of curiosity less burning, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused by the dreyfus case. there again mme. verdurin, but with a very different result socially, was to take her place in the front row. just as she had been seen by the side of mme. zola, immediately under the bench, during the trial in the -ssize court, so when the new generation of humanity, in their enthusiasm for the russian ballet, thronged to the opera, crowned with the latest novelty in aigrettes, they invariably saw in a stage box mme. verdurin by the side of princess yourbeletief. and just as, after the emotions of the law courts, people used to go in the evening to mme. verdurin’s, to meet picquart or labori in the flesh and what was more to hear the latest news of the case, to learn what hopes might be placed in zurlinden, loubet, colonel jouaust, the regulations, so now, little inclined for sleep after the enthusiasm aroused by the scheherazade or prince igor, they repaired to mme. verdurin’s, where under the auspices of princess yourbeletief and their hostess an exquisite supper brought together every night the dancers themselves, who had abstained from dinner so as to be more resilient, their director, their designers, the great composers igor stravinski and richard strauss, a permanent little nucleus, around which, as round the supper-table of m. and mme. helvétius, the greatest ladies in paris and foreign royalties were not too proud to gather. even those people in society who professed to be endowed with taste and drew unnecessary distinctions between the various russian ballets, regarding the setting of the sylphides as somehow ‘purer’ than that of scheherazade, which they were almost prepared to attribute to negro inspiration, were enchanted to meet face to face the great revivers of theatrical taste, who in an art that is perhaps a little more artificial than that of the easel had created a revolution as profound as impressionism itself
to revert to m. de charlus, mme. verdurin would not have minded so much if he had placed on his index only comtesse molé and mme. bontemps, whom she had picked out at odette’s on the strength of her love of the fine arts, and who during the dreyfus case had come to dinner occasionally bringing her husband, whom mme. verdurin called ‘lukewarm,’ because he was not making any move for a fresh trial, but who, being extremely intelligent, and glad to form relations in every camp, was delighted to shew his independence by dining at the same table as labori, to whom he listened without uttering a word that might compromise himself, but managed to slip in at the right moment a tribute to the loyalty, recognised by all parties, of jaurès. but the baron had similarly proscribed several ladies of the aristocracy whose acquaintance mme. verdurin, on the occasion of some musical festivity or a collection for charity, had recently formed and who, whatever m. de charlus might think of them, would have been, far more than himself, essential to the formation of a fresh nucleus at mme. verdurin’s, this time aristocratic. mme. verdurin had indeed been reckoning upon this party, to which m. de charlus would be bringing her women of the same set, to mix her new friends with them, and had been relishing in antic-p-tion the surprise that the latter would feel upon meeting at quai conti their own friends or relatives invited there by the baron. she was disappointed and furious at his veto. it remained to be seen whether the evening, in these conditions, would result in profit or loss to herself. the loss would not be too serious if only m. de charlus’s guests came with so friendly a feeling for mme. verdurin that they would become her friends in the future. in this case the mischief would be only half done, these two sections of the fashionable world, which the baron had insisted upon keeping apart, would be united later on, he himself being excluded, of course, when the time came. and so mme. verdurin was awaiting the baron’s guests with a certain emotion. she would not be slow in discovering the state of mind in which they came, and the degree of intimacy to which she might hope to attain. while she waited, mme. verdurin took counsel with the faithful, but, upon seeing m. de charlus enter the room with brichot and myself, stopped short. greatly to our astonishment, when brichot told her how sorry he was to learn that her dear friend was so seriously ill, mme. verdurin replied: “listen, i am obliged to confess that i am not at all sorry. it is useless to pretend to feel what one does not feel.” no doubt she spoke thus from want of energy, because she shrank from the idea of wearing a long face throughout her party, from pride, in order not to appear to be seeking excuses for not having cancelled her invitations, from self-respect also and social apt-tude, because the absence of grief which she displayed was more honourable if it could be attributed to a peculiar antipathy, suddenly revealed, to the princess, rather than to a universal insensibility, and because her hearers could not fail to be disarmed by a sincerity as to which there could be no doubt. if mme. verdurin had not been genuinely unaffected by the death of the princess, would she have gone on to excuse herself for giving the party, by accusing herself of a far more serious fault? besides, one was apt to forget that mme. verdurin would thus have admitted, while confessing her grief, that she had not had the strength of mind to forego a pleasure; whereas the indifference of the friend was something more shocking, more immoral, but less humiliating, and consequently easier to confess than the frivolity of the hostess. in matters of crime, where the culprit is in danger, it is his material interest that prompts the confession. where the fault incurs no penalty, it is self-esteem. whether it was that, doubtless feeling the pretext to be too hackneyed of the people who, so as not to allow a bereavement to interrupt their life of pleasure, go about saying that it seems to them useless to display the outward signs of a grief which they feel in their hearts, mme. verdurin preferred to imitate those intelligent culprits who are revolted by the commonplaces of innocence and whose defence — a partial admission, though they do not know it — consists in saying that they would see no harm in doing what they are accused of doing, although, as it happens, they have had no occasion to do it; or that, having adopted, to explain her conduct, the theory of indifference, she found, once she had started upon the downward slope of her unnatural feeling, that it was distinctly original to have felt it, that she displayed a rare perspicacity in having managed to diagnose her own symptoms, and a certain ‘nerve’ in proclaiming them; anyhow, mme. verdurin kept dwelling upon her want of grief, not without a certain proud satisfaction, as of a paradoxical psychologist and daring dramatist. “yes, it is very funny,” she said, “i hardly felt it. of course, i don’t mean to say that i wouldn’t rather she were still alive, she was not a bad person.” “yes, she was,” put in m. verdurin. “ah! he doesn’t approve of her because he thought that i was doing myself harm by having her here, but he is quite pig-headed about that.” “do me the justice to admit,” said m. verdurin, “that i never approved of your having her. i always told you that she had a bad reputation.” “but i have never heard a thing against her,” protested saniette. “what!” exclaimed mme. verdurin, “everybody knew; bad isn’t the word, it was scandalous, appalling. no, it has nothing to do with that. i couldn’t explain, myself, what i felt; i didn’t dislike her, but i took so little interest in her that, when we heard that she was seriously ill, my husband himself was quite surprised, and said: ‘anyone would think that you didn’t mind.’ why, this evening, he offered to put off the party, and i insisted upon having it, because i should have thought it a farce to shew a grief which i do not feel.” she said this because she felt that it had a curious smack of the ‘independent theatre,’ and was at the same time singularly convenient; for an admitted insensibility or immorality simplifies life as much as does easy virtue; it converts reproachable actions, for which one no longer need seek any excuse, into a duty imposed by sincerity. and the faithful listened to mme. verdurin’s speech with the blend of admiration and misgiving which certain cruelly realistic plays, that shewed a profound observation, used at one time to cause, and, while they marvelled to see their beloved mistress display a novel aspect of her rect-tude and independence, more than one of them, albeit he -ssured himself that after all it would not be the same thing, thought of his own death, and asked himself whether, on the day when death came to him, they would draw the blinds or give a party at quai conti. “i am very glad that the party has not been put off, for my guests’ sake,” said m. de charlus, not realising that in expressing himself thus he was offending mme. verdurin. meanwhile i was struck, as was everybody who approached mme. verdurin that evening, by a far from pleasant odour of rhinogomenol. the reason was as follows. we know that mme. verdurin never expressed her artistic feelings in a moral, but always in a physical fashion, so that they might appear more inevitable and more profound. so, if one spoke to her of vinteuil’s music, her favourite, she remained unmoved, as though she expected to derive no emotion from it. but after a few minutes of a fixed, almost abstracted gaze, in a sharp, matter of fact, scarcely civil tone (as though she had said to you: “i don’t in the least mind your smoking, it’s because of the carpet; it’s a very fine one [not that that matters either], but it’s highly inflammable, i’m dreadfully afraid of fire, and i shouldn’t like to see you all roasted because some one had carelessly dropped a cigarette end on it”), she replied: “i have no fault to find with vinteuil; to my mind, he is the greatest composer of the age, only i can never listen to that sort of stuff without weeping all the time” (she did not apply any pathos to the word ‘weeping,’ she would have used precisely the same tone for ‘sleeping’; certain slandermongers used indeed to insist that the latter verb would have been more applicable, though no one could ever be certain, for she listened to the music with her face buried in her hands, and certain snoring sounds might after all have been sobs). “i don’t mind weeping, not in the least; only i get the most appalling colds afterwards. it stuffs up my mucous membrane, and the day after i look like nothing on earth. i have to inhale for days on end before i can utter. however, one of cottard’s pupils, a charming person, has been treating me for it. he goes by quite an original rule: ‘prevention is better than cure.’ and he greases my nose before the music begins. it is radical. i can weep like all the mothers who ever lost a child, not a trace of a cold. sometimes a little conjunctivitis, that’s all. it is absolutely efficacious. otherwise i could never have gone on listening to vinteuil. i was just going from one bronchitis to another.” i could not refrain from alluding to mlle. vinteuil. “isn’t the composer’s daughter to be here,” i asked mme. verdurin, “with one of her friends?” “no, i have just had a telegram,” mme. verdurin said evasively, “they have been obliged to remain in the country.” i felt a momentary hope that there might never have been any question of their leaving it and that mme. verdurin had announced the presence of these representatives of the composer only in order to make a favourable impression upon the performers and their audience. “what, didn’t they come, then, to the rehearsal this afternoon?” came with a feigned curiosity from the baron who was anxious to let it appear that he had not seen charlie. the latter came up to greet me. i whispered a question in his ear about mlle. vinteuil; he seemed to me to know little or nothing about her. i signalled to him not to let himself be heard and told him that we should discuss the question later on. he bowed, and -ssured me that he would be delighted to place himself entirely at my disposal. i observed that he was far more polite, more respectful, than he had been in the past. i spoke warmly of him — who might perhaps be able to help me to clear up my suspicions — to m. de charlus who replied: “he only does what is natural, there would be no point in his living among respectable people if he didn’t learn good manners.” these, according to m. de charlus, were the old manners of france, untainted by any british bluntness. thus when charlie, returning from a tour in the provinces or abroad, arrived in his travelling suit at the baron’s, the latter, if there were not too many people present, would kiss him without ceremony upon both cheeks, perhaps a little in order to banish by so ostentatious a display of his affection any idea of its being criminal, perhaps because he could not deny himself a pleasure, but still more, doubtless, from a literary sense, as upholding and ill-strating the traditional manners of france, and, just as he would have countered the munich or modern style of furniture by keeping in his rooms old armchairs that had come to him from a great-grandmother, countering the british phlegm with the affection of a warm-hearted father of the eighteenth century, unable to conceal his joy at beholding his son once more. was there indeed a trace of incest in this paternal affection? it is more probable that the way in which m. de charlus habitually appeased his vicious cravings, as to which we shall learn something in due course, was not sufficient for the need of affection, which had remained unsatisfied since the death of his wife; the fact remains that after having thought more than once of a second marriage, he was now devoured by a maniacal desire to adopt an heir. people said that he was going to adopt morel, and there was nothing extraordinary in that. the invert who has been unable to feed his p-ssion save on a literature written for women-loving men, who used to think of men when he read mussel’snuits, feels the need to partake, nevertheless, in all the social activities of the man who is not an invert, to keep a lover, as the old frequenter of the opera keeps ballet-girls, to settle down, to marry or form a permanent tie, to become a father
m. de charlus took morel aside on the pretext of making him tell him what was going to be played, but above all finding a great consolation, while charlie shewed him his music, in displaying thus publicly their secret intimacy. in the meantime i myself felt a certain charm. for albeit the little clan included few girls, on the other hand girls were abundantly invited on the big evenings. there were a number present, and very pretty girls too, whom i knew. they wafted smiles of greeting to me across the room. the air was thus decorated at every moment with the charming smile of some girl. that is the manifold, occasional ornament of evening parties, as it is of days. we remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it
many people might have been greatly surprised had they overheard the furtive remarks which m. de charlus exchanged with a number of important gentlemen at this party. these were two dukes, a distinguished general, a great writer, a great physician, a great barrister. and the remarks in question were: “by the way, did you notice the footman, i mean the little fellow they take on the carriage? at our cousin guermantes’, you don’t know of anyone?” “at the moment, no.” “i say, though, outside the door, where the carriages stop, there used to be a fair little person, in breeches, who seemed to me most attractive. she called my carriage most charmingly, i would gladly have prolonged the conversation.” “yes, but i believe she’s altogether against it, besides, she puts on airs, you like to get to business at once, you would loathe her. anyhow, i know there’s nothing doing, a friend of mine tried.” “that is a pity, i thought the profile very fine, and the hair superb.” “really, as much as that? i think, if you had seen a little more of her, you would have been disillusioned. no, in the supper-room, only two months ago you would have seen a real marvel, a great fellow six foot six, a perfect skin, and loves it, too. but he’s gone off to poland.” “ah, that is rather a long way.” “you never know, he may come back, perhaps. one always meets again somewhere.” there is no great social function that does not, if, in taking a section of it, we contrive to cut sufficiently deep, resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never shew that they were mad did they not whisper in our ear, pointing to some old gentleman who goes past: “that’s joan of arc.”
“i feel that it is our duty to enlighten him,” mme. verdurin said to brichot. “not that i have anything against charlus, far from it. he is a pleasant fellow and as for his reputation, i don’t mind saying that it is not of a sort that can do me any harm! as far as i’m concerned, in our little clan, in our table-talk, as i detest flirts, the men who talk nonsense to a woman in a corner instead of discussing interesting topics, i’ve never had any fear with charlus of what happened to me with swann, and elstir, and lots of them. with him i was quite safe, he would come to my dinners, all the women in the world might be there, you could be certain that the general conversation would not be disturbed by flirtations and whisperings. charlus is in a cl-ss of his own, one doesn’t worry, he might be a priest. only, he must not be allowed to take it upon himself to order about the young men who come to the house and make a nuisance of himself in our little nucleus, or he’ll be worse than a man who runs after women.” and mme. verdurin was sincere in thus proclaiming her indulgence towards charlism. like every ecclesiastical power she regarded human frailties as less dangerous than anything that might undermine the principle of authority, impair the orthodoxy, modify the ancient creed of her little church. “if he does, then i shall bare my t–th. what do you say to a gentleman who tried to prevent charlie from coming to a rehearsal because he himself was not invited? so he’s going to be taught a lesson, i hope he’ll profit by it, otherwise he can simply take his hat and go. he keeps the boy under lock and key, upon my word he does.” and, using exactly the same expressions that almost anyone else might have used, for there are certain not in common currency which some particular subject, some given circ-mstance recalls almost inevitably to the mind of the speaker, who imagines that he is giving free expression to his thought when he is merely repeating mechanically the universal lesson, she went on: “it’s impossible to see morel nowadays without that great lout hanging round him, like an armed escort.” m. verdurin offered to take charlie out of the room for a minute to explain things to him, on the pretext of asking him a question. mme. verdurin was afraid that this might upset him, and that he would play badly in consequence. it would be better to postpone this performance until after the other. perhaps even until a later occasion. for however mme. verdurin might look forward to the delicious emotion that she would feel when she knew that her husband was engaged in enlightening charlie in the next room, she was afraid, if the shot missed fire, that he would lose his temper and would fail to reappear on the sixteenth
what ruined m. de charlus that evening was the ill-breeding — so common in their cl-ss — of the people whom he had invited and who were now beginning to arrive. having come there partly out of friendship for m. de charlus and also out of curiosity to explore these novel surroundings, each d-ch-ss made straight for the baron as though it were he who was giving the party and said, within a yard of the verdurins, who could hear every word: “shew me which is mother verdurin; do you think i really need speak to her? i do hope at least, that she won’t put my name in the paper to-morrow, n0body would ever speak to me again. what! that woman with the white hair, but she looks quite presentable.” hearing some mention of mlle. vinteuil, who, however, was not in the room, more than one of them said: “ah! the sonata-man’s daughter? shew me her” and, each finding a number of her friends, they formed a group by themselves, watched, sparkling with ironical curiosity, the arrival of the faithful, able at the most to point a finger at the odd way in which a person had done her hair, who, a few years later, was to make this the fashion in the very best society, and, in short, regretted that they did not find this house as different from the houses that they knew, as they had hoped to find it, feeling the disappointment of people in society who, having gone to the boîte à bruant in the hope that the singer would make a b-tt of them, find themselves greeted on their arrival with a polite bow instead of the expected:
ah! voyez c’te gueule, c’te binette
ah! voyez c’te gueule qu’elle a
m. de charlus had, at balbec, given me a perspicacious criticism of mme. de vaugoubert who, notwithstanding her keen intellect, had brought about, after his unexpected prosperity, the irremediable disgrace of her husband. the rulers to whose court m. de vaugoubert was accredited, king theodosius and queen eudoxia, having returned to paris, but this time for a prolonged visit, daily festivities had been held in their honour, in the course of which the queen, on the friendliest terms with mme. de vaugoubert, whom she had seen for the last ten years in her own capital, and knowing neither the wife of the president of the republic nor those of his ministers, had neglected these ladies and kept entirely aloof with the amb-ssadress. this lady, believing her own position to be un-ssailable — m. de vaugoubert having been responsible for the alliance between king theodosius and france — had derived from the preference that the queen shewed for her society a proud satisfaction but no anxiety at the peril that threatened her, which took shape a few months later in the fact, wrongly considered impossible by the too confident couple, of the brutal dismissal from the service of m. de vaugoubert. m. de charlus, remarking in the ‘crawler’ upon the downfall of his lifelong friend, expressed his astonishment that an intelligent woman had not, in such circ-mstances, brought all her influence with the king and queen to bear, so as to secure that she might not seem to possess any influence, and to make them transfer to the wives of the president and his ministers a civility by which those ladies would have been all the more flattered, that is to say which would have made them more inclined, in their satisfaction, to be grateful to the vaugouberts, inasmuch as they would have supposed that civility to be spontaneous, and not dictated by them. but the man who can see the mistakes of others need only be exhilarated by circ-mstances in order to succ-mb to them himself. and m, de charlus, while his guests fought their way towards him, to come and congratulate him, thank him, as though he were the master of the house, never thought of asking them to say a few words to mme. verdurin. only the queen of naples, in whom survived the same n0ble blood that had flowed in the veins of her sisters the empress elisabeth and the d-ch-sse d’alençon, made a point of talking to mme. verdurin as though she had come for the pleasure of meeting her rather than for the music and for m. de charlus, made endless pretty speeches to her hostess, could not cease from telling her for how long she had been wishing to make her acquaintance, expressed her admiration for the house and spoke to her of all manner of subjects as though she were paying a call. she would so much have liked to bring her niece elisabeth, she said (the niece who shortly afterwards was to marry prince albert of belgium), who would be so sorry. she stopped talking when she saw the musicians mount the platform, asking which of them was morel. she can scarcely have been under any illusion as to the motives that led m. de charlus to desire that the young virtuoso should be surrounded with so much glory. but the venerable wisdom of a sovereign in whose veins flowed the blood of one of the n0blest races in history, one of the richest in experience, scepticism and pride, made her merely regard the inevitable defects of the people whom she loved best, such as her cousin charlus (whose mother had been, like herself, a ‘d-ch-ss in bavaria’), as misfortunes that rendered more precious to them the support that they might find in herself and consequently made it even more pleasant to her to provide that support. she knew that m. de charlus would be doubly touched by her having taken the trouble to come, in the circ-mstances. only, being as good as she had long ago shewn herself brave, this heroic woman who, a soldier-queen, had herself fired her musket from the ramparts of gaeta, always ready to take her place chivalrously by the weaker side, seeing mme. verdurin alone and abandoned, and unaware (for that matter) that she ought not to leave the queen, had sought to pretend that for her, the queen of naples, the centre of this party, the lodestone that had made her come was mme. verdurin. she expressed her regret that she would not be able to remain until the end, as she had, although she never went anywhere, to go on to another party, and begged that on no account, when she had to go, should any fuss be made for her, thus discharging mme. verdurin of the honours which the latter did not even know that she ought to render
one must, however, do m. de charlus the justice of saying that, if he entirely forgot mme. verdurin and allowed her to be ignored, to a scandalous extent, by the people ‘of his own world’ whom he had invited, he did, on the other hand, realise that he must not allow these people to display, during the ‘symphonic recital’ itself, the bad manners which they were exhibiting towards the mistress. morel had already mounted the platform, the musicians were -ssembling, and one could still hear conversations, not to say laughter, speeches such as “it appears, one has to be initiated to understand it.” immediately m. de charlus, drawing himself erect, as though he had entered a different body from that which i had seen, not an hour ago, crawling towards mme. verdurin’s door, -ssumed a prophetic expression and regarded the -ssembly with an earnestness which indicated that this was not the moment for laughter, whereupon one saw a rapid blush tinge the cheeks of more than one lady thus publicly rebuked, like a schoolgirl scolded by her teacher in front of the whole cl-ss. to my mind, m. de charlus’s att-tude, n0ble as it was, was somehow slightly comic; for at one moment he pulverised his guests with a flaming glare, at another, in order to indicate to them as with a vade mec-m the religious silence that ought to be observed, the detachment from every worldly consideration, he furnished in himself, as he raised to his fine brow his white-gloved hands, a model (to which they must conform) of gravity, already almost of ecstasy, without acknowledging the greetings of late-comers so indelicate as not to understand that it was now the time for high art. they were all hypnotised; no one dared utter a sound, move a chair; respect for music — by virtue of palamède’s prestige — had been instantaneously inculcated in a crowd as ill-bred as it was exclusive
when i saw appear on the little platform, not only morel and a pianist, but performers upon other instruments as well, i supposed that the programme was to begin with works of composers other than vinteuil. for i imagined that the only work of his in existence was his sonata for piano and violin
mme. verdurin sat in a place apart, the twin hemispheres of her pale, slightly roseate brow magnificently curved, her hair drawn back, partly in imitation of an eighteenth century portrait, partly from the desire for coolness of a fever-stricken patient whom modesty forbids to reveal her condition, aloof, a deity presiding over musical rites, patron saint of wagnerism and sick-headaches, a sort of almost tragic norn, evoked by the spell of g*nius in the midst of all these bores, in whose presence she would more than ordinarily scorn to express her feelings upon hearing a piece of music which she knew better than they. the concert began, i did not know what they were playing, i found myself in a strange land. where was i to locate it? into what composer’s country had i come? i should have been glad to know, and, seeing n0body near me whom i might question, i should have liked to be a character in those arabian nights which i never tired of reading and in which, in moments of uncertainty, there arose a genie or a maiden of ravishing beauty, invisible to everyone else but not to the embarr-ssed hero to whom she reveals exactly what he wishes to learn. well, at this very moment i was favoured with precisely such a magical apparition. as, in a stretch of country which we suppose to be strange to us and which as a matter of fact we have approached from a new angle, when after turning out of one road we find ourself emerging suddenly upon another every inch of which is familiar only we have not been in the habit of entering it from that end, we say to ourself immediately: “why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the x—— i shall be there in a minute,” and there, indeed, is their daughter at the gate, come out to greet us as we p-ss; so, all of a sudden, i found myself, in the midst of this music that was novel to me, right in the heart of vinteuil’s sonata; and, more marvellous than any maiden, the little phrase, enveloped, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant effects of sound, as light and soft as silken scarves, came towards me, recognisable in this new guise. my joy at having found it again was enhanced by the accent, so friendlily familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, albeit without dimming the shimmering beauty with which it was resplendent. its intention, however, was, this time, merely to shew me the way, which was not the way of the sonata, for this was an unpublished work of vinteuil in which he had merely amused himself, by an allusion which was explained at this point by a sentence in the programme which one ought to have been reading simultaneously, in making the little phrase reappear for a moment. no sooner was it thus recalled than it vanished, and i found myself once more in an unknown world, but i knew now, and everything that followed only confirmed my knowledge, that this world was one of those which i had never even been capable of imagining that vinteuil could have created, for when, weary of the sonata which was to me a universe thoroughly explored, i tried to imagine others equally beautiful but different, i was merely doing what those poets do who fill their artificial paradise with meadows, flowers and streams which duplicate those existing already upon earth. what was now before me made me feel as keen a joy as the sonata would have given me if i had not already known it, and consequently, while no less beautiful, was different. whereas the sonata opened upon a dawn of lilied meadows, parting its slender whiteness to suspend itself over the frail and yet consistent mingling of a rustic bower of honeysuckle with white geraniums, it was upon continuous, level surfaces like those of the sea that, in the midst of a stormy morning beneath an already lurid sky, there began, in an eery silence, in an infinite void, this hew masterpiece, and it was into a roseate dawn that, in order to construct itself progressively before me, this unknown universe was drawn from silence and from night. this so novel redness, so absent from the tender, rustic, pale sonata, tinged all the sky, as dawn does, with a mysterious hope. and a song already thrilled the air, a song on seven notes, but the strangest, the most different from any that i had ever imagined, from any that i could ever have been able to imagine, at once ineffable and piercing, no longer the cooing of a dove as in the sonata, but rending the air, as vivid as the scarlet tinge in which the opening bars had been bathed, something like the mystical crow of a c-ck, an ineffable but over-shrill appeal of the eternal morning. the cold atmosphere, soaked in rain, electric — of a quality so different, feeling wholly other pressures, in a world so remote from that, virginal and endowed only with vegetable life, of the sonata — changed at every moment, obliterating the empurpled promise of the dawn. at noon, however, beneath a scorching though transitory sun, it seemed to fulfil itself in a dull, almost rustic bliss in which the peal of clanging, racing bells (like those which kindled the blaze of the square outside the church of combray, which vinteuil, who must often have heard them, had perhaps discovered at that moment in his memory like a colour which the painter’s hand has conveyed to his palette) seemed to materialise the co-rs-st joy. to be honest, from the aesthetic point of view, this joyous motive did not appeal to me, i found it almost ugly, its rhythm dragged so laboriously along the ground that one might have succeeded in imitating almost everything that was essential to it by merely making a noise, sounds, by the tapping of drumsticks upon a table. it seemed to me that vinteuil had been lacking, here, in inspiration, and consequently i was a little lacking also in the power of attention
i looked at the mistress, whose sullen immobility seemed to be protesting against the noddings — in time with the music — of the empty heads of the ladies of the faubourg. she did not say: “you understand that i know something about this music, and more than a little! if i had to express all that i feel, you would never hear the end of it!” she did not say this. but her upright, motionless body, her expressionless eyes, her straying locks said it for her. they spoke also of her courage, said that the musicians might go on, need not spare her nerves, that she would not flinch at the andante, would not cry out at the allegro. i looked at the musicians. the violoncellist dominated the instrument which he clutched between his knees, bowing his head to which its co-rs- features gave, in moments of mannerism, an involuntary expression of disgust; he leaned over it, fingered it with the same domestic patience with which he might have plucked a cabbage, while by his side the harpist (a mere girl) in a short skirt, bounded on either side by the lines of her golden quadrilateral like those which, in the magic chamber of a sibyl, would arbitrarily denote the ether, according to the consecrated rules, seemed to be going in quest, here and there, at the point required, of an exquisite sound, just as though, a little allegorical deity, placed in front of the golden trellis of the heavenly vault, she were gathering, one by one, its stars. as for morel, a lock, hitherto invisible and lost in the rest of his hair, had fallen loose and formed a curl upon his brow. i turned my head slightly towards the audience to discover what m. de charlus might be feeling at the sight of this curl. but my eyes encountered only the face, or rather the hands of mme. verdurin, for the former was entirely buried in the latter
but very soon, the triumphant motive of the bells having been banished, dispersed by others, i succ-mbed once again to the music; and i began to realise that if, in the body of this septet, different elements presented themselves in turn, to combine at the close, so also vinteuil’s sonata, and, as i was to find later on, his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, towards the triumphant and complete masterpiece which was revealed to me at this moment. and so too, i could not help recalling how i had thought of the other worlds which vinteuil might have created as of so many universes as hermetically sealed as each of my own love-affairs, whereas in reality i was obliged to admit that in the volume of my latest love — that is to say, my love for albertine — my first inklings of love for her (at balbec at the very beginning, then after the game of ferret, then on the night when she slept at the hotel, then in paris on the foggy afternoon, then on the night of the guermantes’ party, then at balbec again, and finally in paris where my life was now closely linked to her own) had been nothing more than experiments; indeed, if i were to consider, not my love for albertine, but my life as a whole, my earlier love-affairs had themselves been but slight and timid essays, experiments, which paved the way to this vaster love: my love for albertine. and i ceased to follow the music, in order to ask myself once again whether albertine had or had not seen mlle. vinteuil during the last few days, as we interrogate afresh an internal pain, from which we have been distracted for a moment. for it was in myself that albertine’s possible actions were performed. of each of the people whom we know we possess a double, but it is generally situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory; it remains more or less external to ourselves, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance, which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision. the things that affect these people we perceive in a contemplative fashion, we are able to deplore them in appropriate language which gives other people a sense of our kindness of heart, we do not feel them; but since the wound inflicted on me at balbec, it was in my heart, at a great depth, difficult to extract, that albertine’s double was lodged. what i saw of her hurt me, as a sick man would be hurt whose senses were so seriously deranged that the sight of a colour would be felt by him internally like a knife-thrust in his living flesh. it was fortunate that i had not already yielded to the temptation to break with albertine; the boring thought that i should have to see her again presently, when i went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that i should have felt if the separation had been permanent at this moment when i felt a doubt about her before she had had time to become immaterial to me. at the moment when i pictured her thus to myself waiting for me at home, like a beloved wife who found the time of waiting long, and had perhaps fallen asleep for a moment in her room, i was caressed by the p-ssage of a tender phrase, homely and domestic, of the septet. perhaps — everything is so interwoven and superimposed in our inward life — it had been inspired in vinteuil by his daughter’s sleep — his daughter, the cause to-day of all my troubles — when it enveloped in its quiet, on peaceful evenings, the work of the composer, this phrase which calmed me so, by the same soft background of silence which pacifies certain of schumann’s reveries, during which, even when ‘the poet is speaking,’ one can tell that ‘the child is asleep.’ asleep, awake, i should find her again this evening, when i chose to return home, albertine, my little child. and yet, i said to myself, something more mysterious than albertine’s love seemed to be promised at the outset of this work, in those first cries of dawn. i endeavoured to banish the thought of my mistress, so as to think only of the composer. indeed, he seemed to be present. one would have said that, reincarnate, the composer lived for all time in his music; one could feel the joy with which he was choosing the colour of some sound, harmonising it with the rest. for with other and more profound gifts vinteuil combined that which few composers, and indeed few painters have possessed, of using colours not merely so lasting but so personal that, just as time has been powerless to fade them, so the disciples who imitate him who discovered them, and even the masters who surp-ss him do not pale their originality. the revolution that their apparition has effected does not live to see its results merge unacknowledged in the work of subsequent generations; it is liberated, it breaks out again, and alone, whenever the innovator’s works are performed in all time to come. each note underlined itself in a colour which all the rules in the world could not have taught the most learned composers to imitate, with the result that vinteuil, albeit he had appeared at his hour and was fixed in his place in the evolution of music, would always leave that place to stand in the forefront, whenever any of his compositions was performed, which would owe its appearance of having blossomed after the works of other more recent composers to this quality, apparently paradoxical and actually deceiving, of permanent novelty. a page of symphonic music by vinteuil, familiar already on the piano, when one heard it rendered by an orchestra, like a ray of summer sunlight which the prism of the window disintegrates before it enters a dark dining-room, revealed like an unsuspected, myriad-hued treasure all the jewels of the arabian nights. but how can one compare to that motionless brilliance of light what was life, perpetual and blissful motion? this vinteuil, whom i had known so timid and sad, had been capable — when he had to select a tone, to blend another with it — of audacities, had enjoyed a good fortune, in the full sense of the word, as to which the hearing of any of his works left one in no doubt. the joy that such chords had aroused in him, the increase of strength that it had given him wherewith to discover others led the listener on also from one discovery to another, or rather it was the composer himself who guided him, deriving from the colours that he had invented a wild joy which gave him the strength to discover, to fling himself upon the others which they seemed to evoke, enraptured, quivering, as though from the shock of an electric spark, when the sublime came spontaneously to life at the clang of the br-ss, panting, drunken, maddened, dizzy, while he painted his great musical fresco, like michelangelo strapped to his scaffold and dashing, from his supine position, tumultuous brush-strokes upon the ceiling of the sistine chapel. vinteuil had been dead for many years; but in the sound of these instruments which he had animated, it had been given him to prolong, for an unlimited time, a part at least of his life. of his life as a man merely? if art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worth while to sacrifice anything to it, was it not as unreal as life itself? if i was to listen properly to this septet, i could not pause to consider the question. no doubt the glowing septet differed singularly from the candid sonata; the timid question to which the little phrase replied, from the breathless supplication to find the fulfilment of the strange promise that had resounded, so harsh, so supernatural, so brief, setting athrob the still inert crimson of the morning sky, above the sea. and yet these so widely different phrases were composed of the same elements, for just as there was a certain universe, perceptible by us in those fragments scattered here and there, in private houses, in public galleries, which were elstir’s universe, the universe which he saw, in which he lived, so to the music of vinteuil extended, note by note, key by key, the unknown colourings of an inestimable, unsuspected universe, made fragmentary by the gaps that occurred between the different occasions of hearing his work performed; those two so dissimilar questions which commanded the so different movements of the sonata and the septet, the former breaking into short appeals a line continuous and pure, the latter welding together into an indivisible structure a medley of scattered fragments, were nevertheless, one so calm and timid, almost detached and as though philosophic, the other so anxious, pressing, imploring, were nevertheless the same prayer, poured forth before different risings of the inward sun and merely refracted through the different mediums of other thoughts, of artistic researches carried on through the years in which he had tried to create something new. a prayer, a hope which was at heart the same, distinguishable beneath these disguises in the various works of vinteuil, and on the other hand not to be found elsewhere than in his works. for these phrases historians of music might indeed find affinities, a pedigree in the works of other great composers, but merely for subordinate reasons, from external resemblances, from -n-logies which were ingeniously discovered by reasoning rather than felt by a direct impression. the impression that these phrases of vinteuil imparted was different from any other, as though, notwithstanding the conclusions to which science seems to point, the individual did really exist. and it was precisely when he was seeking vigorously to be something new that one recognised beneath the apparent differences the profound similarities; and the deliberate resemblances that existed in the body of a work, when vinteuil repeated once and again a single phrase, diversified it, amused himself by altering its rhythm, by making it reappear in its original form, these deliberate resemblances, the work of the intellect, inevitably superficial, never succeeded in being as striking as those resemblances, concealed, involuntary, which broke out in different colours, between the two separate masterpieces; for then vinteuil, seeking to do something new, questioned himself, with all the force of his creative effort, reached his own essential nature at those depths, where, whatever be the question asked, it is in the same accent, that is to say its own, that it replies. such an accent, the accent of vinteuil, is separated from the accents of other composers by a difference far greater than that which we perceive between the voices of two people, even between the cries of two species of animal: by the difference that exists between the thoughts of those other composers and the eternal investigations of vinteuil, the question that he put to himself in so many forms, his habitual speculation, but as free from -n-lytical formulas of reasoning as if it were being carried out in the world of the angels, so that we can measure its depth, but without being any more able to translate it into human speech than are disincarnate spirits when, evoked by a medium, he questions them as to the mysteries of death. and even when i bore in mind the acquired originality which had struck me that afternoon, that kinship which musical critics might discover among them, it is indeed a unique accent to which rise, and return in spite of themselves those great singers that original composers are, which is a proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul. though vinteuil might try to make more solemn, more grand, or to make more sprightly and g-y what he saw reflected in the mind of his audience, yet, in spite of himself, he submerged it all beneath an undercurrent which makes his song eternal and at once recognisable. this song, different from those of other singers, similar to all his own, where had vinteuil learned, where had he heard it? each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist. when all is said, vinteuil, in his latest works, seemed to have drawn nearer to that unknown country. the atmosphere was no longer the same as in the sonata, the questioning phrases became more pressing, more uneasy, the answers more mysterious; the clean-washed air of morning and evening seemed to influence even the instruments. morel might be playing marvellously, the sounds that came from his violin seemed to me singularly piercing, almost blatant. this harshness was pleasing, and, as in certain voices, one felt in it a sort of moral virtue and intellectual superiority. but this might give offence. when his vision of the universe is modified, purified, becomes more adapted to his memory of the country of his heart, it is only natural that this should be expressed by a general alteration of sounds in the musician, as of colours in the painter. anyhow, the more intelligent section of the public is not misled, since people declared later on that vinteuil’s last compositions were the most profound. now no programme, no subject supplied any intellectual basis for judgment. one guessed therefore that it was a question of transposition, an increasing profundity of sound
this lost country composers do not actually remember, but each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs of his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back upon it, and it is only when he despises it that he finds it when he utters, whatever the subject with which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony of which — for whatever its subject it remains identical in itself — proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. but is it not the fact then that from those elements, all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by master to disciple, by lover to mistress, that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with his fellows only by limiting himself to external points common to us all and of no interest, art, the art of a vinteuil like that of an elstir, makes the man himself apparent, rendering externally visible in the colours of the spectrum that intimate composition of those worlds which we call individual persons and which, without the aid of art, we should never know? a pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite sp-ce, would in no way help us, for, if we visited mars or venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. the only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an elstir, with a vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star. the andante had just ended upon a phrase filled with a tenderness to which i had entirely abandoned myself; there followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. a duke, in order to shew that he knew what he was talking about, declared: “it is a difficult thing to play well.” other more entertaining people conversed for a moment with myself. but what were their words, which like every human and external word, left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which i had just been engaged? i was indeed like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality. and, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, i asked myself if music were not the unique example of what might have been — if there had not come the invention of language, the formation of words, the -n-lysis of ideas — the means of communication between one spirit and another. it is like a possibility which has ended in nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. but this return to the un-n-lysed was so inebriating, that on emerging from that paradise, contact with people who were more or less intelligent seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. people — i had been able during the music to remember them, to blend them with it; or rather i had blended with the music little more than the memory of one person only, which was albertine. and the phrase that ended the andante seemed to me so sublime that i said to myself that it was a pity that albertine did not know it, and, had she known it, would not have understood what an honour it was to be blended with anything so great as this phrase which brought us together, and the pathetic voice of which she seemed to have borrowed. but, once the music was interrupted, the people who were present seemed utterly lifeless. refreshments were handed round. m. de charlus accosted a footman now and then with: “how are you? did you get my note? can you come?” no doubt there was in these remarks the freedom of the great n0bleman who thinks he is flattering his hearer and is himself more one of the people than a man of the middle cl-sses; there was also the cunning of the criminal who imagines that anything which he volunteers is on that account regarded as innocent. and he added, in the guermantes tone of mme. de villeparisis: “he’s a good young fellow, such a good sort, i often employ him at home.” but his adroitness turned against the baron, for people thought his intimate conversation and correspondence with footmen extraordinary. the footmen themselves were not so much flattered as embarr-ssed, in the presence of their comrades. meanwhile the septet had begun again and was moving towards its close; again and again one phrase or another from the sonata recurred, but always changed, its rhythm and harmony different, the same and yet something else, as things recur in life; and they were phrases of the sort which, without our being able to understand what affinity -ssigns to them as their sole and necessary home the past life of a certain composer, are to be found only in his work, and appear constantly in it, where they are the fairies, the dryads, the household gods; i had at the start distinguished in the septet two or three which reminded me of the sonata. presently — bathed in the violet mist which rose particularly in vinteuil’s later work, so much so that, even when he introduced a dance measure, it remained captive in the heart of an opal — i caught the sound of another phrase from the sonata, still hovering so remote that i barely recognised it; hesitating, it approached, vanished as though in alarm, then returned, joined hands with others, come, as i learned later on, from other works, summoned yet others which became in their turn attractive and persuasive, as soon as they were tamed, and took their places in the ring, a ring divine but permanently invisible to the bulk of the audience, who, having before their eyes only a thick veil through which they saw nothing, punctuated arbitrarily with admiring exclamations a continuous boredom which was becoming deadly. then they withdrew, save one which i saw reappear five times or six, without being able to distinguish its features, but so caressing, so different — as was no doubt the little phrase in swann’s sonata — from anything that any woman had ever made me desire, that this phrase which offered me in so sweet a voice a happiness which would really have been worth the struggle to obtain it, is perhaps — this invisible creature whose language i did not know and whom i understood so well — the only stranger that it has ever been my good fortune to meet. then this phrase broke up, was transformed, like the little phrase in the sonata, and became the mysterious appeal of the start. a phrase of a plaintive kind rose in opposition to it, but so profound, so vague, so internal, almost so organic and visceral that one could not tell at each of its repet-tions whether they were those of a theme or of an attack of neuralgia. presently these two motives were wrestling together in a close fight in which now one disappeared entirely, and now the listener could catch only a fragment of the other. a wrestling match of energies only, to tell the truth; for if these creatures attacked one another, it was rid of their physical bodies, of their appearance, of their names, and finding in me an inward spectator, himself indifferent also to their names and to all details, interested only in their immaterial and dynamic combat and following with p-ssion its sonorous changes. in the end the joyous motive was left triumphant; it was no longer an almost anxious appeal addressed to an empty sky, it was an ineffable joy which seemed to come from paradise, a joy as different from that of the sonata as from a grave and gentle angel by bellini, playing the theorbo, would be some archangel by mantegna sounding a trump. i might be sure that this new tone of joy, this appeal to a super-terrestrial joy, was a thing that i would never forget. but should i be able, ever, to realise it? this question seemed to me all the more important, inasmuch as this phrase was what might have seemed most definitely to characterise — from its sharp contrast with all the rest of my life, with the visible world — those impressions which at remote intervals i recaptured in my life as starting-points, foundation-stones for the construction of a true life: the impression that i had felt at the sight of the steeples of martinville, or of a line of trees near balbec. in any case, to return to the particular accent of this phrase, how strange it was that the presentiment most different from what life -ssigns to us on earth, the boldest approximation to the bliss of the world beyond should have been materialised precisely in the melancholy, respectable little old man whom we used to meet in the month of mary at combray; but, stranger still, how did it come about that this revelation, the strangest that i had yet received, of an unknown type of joy, should have come to me from him, since, it was understood, when he died he left nothing behind him but his sonata, all the rest being non-existent in indecipherable scribbljngs. indecipherable they may have been, but they had nevertheless been in the end deciphered, by dint of patience, intelligence and respect, by the only person who had lived sufficiently in vinteuil’s company to understand his method of working, to interpret his orchestral indications: mlle. vinteuil’s friend. even in the lifetime of the great composer, she had acquired from his daughter the reverence that the latter felt for her father. it was because of this reverence that, in those moments in which people run counter to their natural inclinations, the two girls had been able to find an insane pleasure in the profanations which have already been narrated. (her adoration of her father was the primary condition of his daughter’s sacrilege. and no doubt they ought to have foregone the delight of that sacrilege, but it did not express the whole of their natures.) and, what is more, the profanations had become rarefied until they disappeared altogether, in proportion as their morbid carnal relations, that troubled, smouldering fire, had given place to the flame of a pure and lofty friendship. mlle. vinteuil’s friend was sometimes worried by the importunate thought that she had perhaps hastened the death of vinteuil. at any rate, by spending years in poring over the cryptic scroll left by him, in establishing the correct reading of those illegible hieroglyphs, mlle. vinteuil’s friend had the consolation of -ssuring the composer whose grey hairs she had sent in sorrow to the grave an immortal and compensating glory. relations which are not consecrated by the laws establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, even more solid than those which spring from marriage. indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based upon genuine love, does not upset the family sentiment, the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them. adultery brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter. a good-natured girl who merely from convention will wear mourning for her mother’s second husband has not tears enough to shed for the man whom her mother has chosen out of all the world as her lover. anyhow, mlle. vinteuil had acted only in a spirit of sadism, which did not excuse her, but it gave me a certain consolation to think so later on. she must indeed have realised, i told myself, at the moment when she and her friend profaned her father’s photograph, that what they were doing was merely morbidity, silliness, and not the true and joyous wickedness which she would have liked to feel. this idea that it was merely a pretence of wickedness spoiled her pleasure. but if this idea recurred to her mind later on, as it had spoiled her pleasure, so it must then have diminished her grief. “it was not i,” she must have told herself, “i was out of my mind. i myself mean still to pray for my father’s soul, not to despair of his forgiveness.” only it is possible that this idea, which had certainly presented itself to her in her pleasure, may not have presented itself in her grief. i would have liked to be able to put it into her mind. i am sure that i should have done her good and that i should have been able to reestablish between her and the memory of her father a pleasant channel of communication
as in the illegible note-books in which a chemist of g*nius, who does not know that death is at hand, jots down discoveries which will perhaps remain forever unknown, mlle. vinteuil’s friend had disentangled, from papers more illegible than strips of papyrus, dotted with a cuneiform script, the formula eternally true, forever fertile, of this unknown joy, the mystic hope of the crimson angel of the dawn. and i to whom, albeit not so much perhaps as to vinteuil, she had been also, she had been once more this very evening, by reviving afresh my jealousy of albertine, she was above all in the future to be the cause of so many sufferings, it was thanks to her, in compensation, that there had been able to come to my ears the strange appeal which i should never for a moment cease to hear, as the promise and proof that there existed something other, realisable no doubt by art, than the nullity that i had found in all my pleasures and in love itself, and that if my life seemed to me so empty, at least there were still regions unexplored
what she had enabled us, thanks to her labour, to know of vinteuil was, to tell the truth, the whole of vinteuil’s work. compared with this septet, certain phrases from the sonata which alone the public knew appeared so commonplace that one failed to understand how they could have aroused so much admiration. similarly we are surprised that for years past, pieces as trivial as the evening star or elisabeth’s prayer can have aroused in the concert-hall fanatical worshippers who wore themselves out in applause and in crying encore at the end of what after all is poor and trite to us who know tristan, the rheingold and themeistersinger. we are left to suppose that those featureless melodies contained already nevertheless in infinitesimal, and for that reason, perhaps, more easily -ssimilable quant-ties, something of the originality of the masterpieces which, in retrospect, are alone of importance to us, but which their very perfection may perhaps have prevented from being understood; they have been able to prepare the way for them in our hearts. anyhow it is true that, if they gave a confused presentiment of the beauties to come, they left these in a state of complete obscurity. it was the same with vinteuil; if at his death he had left behind him — excepting certain parts of the sonata — only what he had been able to complete, what we should have known of him would have been, in relation to his true greatness, as little as, in the case of, say, victor hugo, if he had died after the pas d’armes du roi jean, the fiancée du timbalier and sarah la baigneuse, without having written a line of the légende des siècles or the contemplations: what is to us his real work would have remained purely potential, as unknown as those universes to which our perception does not attain, of which we shall never form any idea
anyhow, the apparent contrast, that profound union between g*nius (talent too and even virtue) and the sheath of vices in which, as had happened in the case of vinteuil, it is so frequently contained, preserved, was legible, as in a popular allegory, in the mere -ssembly of the guests among whom i found myself once again when the music had come to an end. this -ssembly, albeit limited this time to mme. verdurin’s drawing-room, resembled many others, the ingredients of which are unknown to the general public, and which philosophical journalists, if they are at all well-informed, call parisian, or panamist, or dreyfusard, never suspecting that they may equally well be found in petersburg, berlin, madrid, and at every epoch; if as a matter of fact the under secretary of state for fine arts, an artist to his fingertips, well-bred and smart, several d-ch-sses and three amb-ssadors with their wives were present this evening at mme. verdurin’s, the proximate, immediate cause of their presence lay in the relations that existed between m. de charlus and morel, relations which made the baron anxious to give as wide a celebrity as possible to the artistic triumphs of his young idol, and to obtain for him the cross of the legion of honour; the remoter cause which had made this -ssembly possible was that a girl living with mlle. vinteuil in the same way as the baron was living with charlie had brought to light a whole series of works of g*nius which had been such a revelation that before long a subscription was to be opened under the patronage of the minister of education, with the object of erecting a statue of vinteuil. moreover, these works had been -ssisted, no less than by mlle. vinteuil’s relations with her friend, by the baron’s relations with charlie, a sort of cross-road, a short cut, thanks to which the world was enabled to overtake these works without the preliminary circuit, if not of a want of comprehension which would long persist, at least of a complete ignorance which might have lasted for years. whenever an event occurs which is within the range of the vulgar mind of the moralising journalist, a political event as a rule, the moralising journalists are convinced that there has been some great change in france, that we shall never see such evenings again, that no one will ever again admire ibsen, renan, dostoïevski, d’annunzio, tolstoi, wagner, strauss. for moralising journalists take their text from the equivocal undercurrents of these official manifestations, in order to find something decadent in the art which is there celebrated and which as often as not is more austere than any other. but there is no name among those most revered by these moralising journalists which has not quite naturally given rise to some such strange gathering, although its strangeness may have been less flagrant and better concealed. in the case of this gathering, the impure elements that -ssociated themselves with it struck me from another aspect; to be sure, i was as well able as anyone to dissociate them, having learned to know them separately, but anyhow it came to p-ss that some of them, those which concerned mlle. vinteuil and her friend, speaking to me of combray, spoke to me also of albertine, that is to say of balbec, since it was because i had long ago seen mlle. vinteuil at montjouvain and had learned of her friend’s intimacy with albertine, that i was presently, when i returned home, to find, instead of solitude, albertine awaiting me, and that the others, those which concerned morel and m. de charlus, speaking to me of balbec, where i had seen, on the platform at doncières, their intimacy begin, spoke to me of combray and of its two ‘ways,’ for m. de charlus was one of those guermantes, counts of combray, inhabiting combray without having any dwelling there, between earth and heaven, like gilbert the bad in his window: while, after all, morel was the son of that old valet who had enabled me to know the lady in pink, and had permitted me, years after, to identify her with mme. swann
m. de charlus repeated, when, the music at an end, his guests came, to say good-bye to him, the same error that he had made when they arrived. he did not ask them to shake hands with their hostess, to include her and her husband in the grat-tude that was being showered on himself. there was a long queue waiting, but a queue that led to the baron alone, a fact of which he must have been conscious, for as he said to me a little later: “the form of the artistic celebration ended in a ‘few-words-in-the-vestry’ touch that was quite amusing.” the guests even prolonged their expressions of grat-tude with indiscriminate remarks which enabled them to remain for a moment longer in the baron’s presence, while those who had not yet congratulated him on the success of his party hung wearily in the rear. a stray husband or two may have announced his intention of going; but his wife, a sn0b as well as a d-ch-ss, protested: “no, no, even if we are kept waiting an hour, we cannot go away without thanking palamède, who has taken so much trouble. there is n0body else left now who can give entertainments like this.” n0body would have thought of asking to be introduced to mme. verdurin any more than to the attendant in a theatre to which some great lady has for one evening brought the whole aristocracy. “were you at eliane de montmorency’s yesterday, cousin?” asked mme. de mortemart, seeking an excuse to prolong their conversation. “good gracious, no; i like eliane, but i never can understand her invitations. i must be very stupid, i’m afraid,” he went on, parting his lips in a broad smile, while mme. de mortemart realised that she was to be made the first recipient of ‘one of palamède’s’ as she had often been of ‘one of oriane’s.’“i did indeed receive a card a fortnight ago from the charming eliane. above the questionably authentic name of ‘montmorency’ was the following kind invitation: ‘my dear cousin, will you please remember me next friday at half-past nine.’ beneath were written two less gratifying words: ‘czech quartet.’ these seemed to me incomprehensible, and in any case to have no more connexion with the sentence above than the words ‘my dear ——-,’ which you find on the back of a letter, with nothing else after them, when the writer has already begun again on the other side, and has not taken a fresh sheet, either from carelessness or in order to save paper. i am fond of eliane: and so i felt no annoyance, i merely ignored the strange and inappropriate allusion to a czech quartet, and, as i am a methodical man, i placed on my chimney-piece the invitation to remember madame de montmorency on friday at half-past nine. although renowned for my obedient, punctual and meek nature, as buffon says of the camel”— at this, laughter seemed to radiate from m. de charlus who knew that on the contrary he was regarded as the most impossible person to live with —“i was a few minutes late (it took me a few minutes to change my clothes), and without any undue remorse, thinking that half-past nine meant ten, at the stroke of ten in a comfortable dressing-gown, with warm slippers on my feet, i sat down in my chimney corner to remember eliane as she had asked me and with a concentration which began to relax only at half-past ten. tell her please that i complied strictly with her audacious request. i am sure she will be gratified.” mme. de mortemart was helpless with laughter, in which m. de charlus joined. “and to-morrow,” she went on, forgetting that she had already long exceeded the time that might be allotted to her, “are you going to our la rochefoucauld cousins?” “oh, that, now, is quite impossible, they have invited me, and you too, i see, to a thing it is utterly impossible to imagine, which is called, if i am to believe their card of invitation, a ‘dancing tea.’ i used to be considered pretty nimble when i was young, but i doubt whether i could ever decently have drunk a cup of tea while i was dancing. no, i have never cared for eating or drinking in unnatural positions. you will remind me that my dancing days are done. but even sitting down comfortably to drink my tea — of the quality of which i am suspicious since it is called ‘dancing’— i should be afraid lest other guests younger than myself, and less nimble possibly than i was at their age, might spill their cups over my clothes which would interfere with my pleasure in draining my own.” nor indeed was m. de charlus content with leaving mme. verdurin out of the conversation while he spoke of all manner of subjects which he seemed to be taking pleasure in developing and varying, that cruel pleasure which he had always enjoyed of keeping indefinitely on their feet the friends who were waiting with an excruciating patience for their turn to come; he even criticised all that part of the entertainment for which mme. verdurin was responsible. “but, talking about cups, what in the world are those strange little bowls which remind me of the vessels in which, when i was a young man, people used to get sorbets from poiré-blanche. somebody said to me just now that they were for ‘iced coffee.’ but if it comes to that, i have seen neither coffee nor ice. what curious little objects — so very ambiguous.” in saying this m. de charlus had placed his white-gloved hands vertically over his lips and had modestly circ-mscribed his indicative stare as though he were afraid of being heard, or even seen by his host and hostess. but this was a mere feint, for in a few minutes he would be offering the same criticisms to the mistress herself, and a little later would be insolently enjoining: “no more iced-coffee cups, remember! give them to one of your friends whose house you wish to disfigure. but warn her not to have them in the drawing-room, or people might think that they had come into the wrong room, the things are so exactly like chamberpots.” “but, cousin,” said the guest, lowering her own voice also, and casting a questioning glance at m. de charlus, for she was afraid of offending not mme. verdurin but him, “perhaps she doesn’t quite know yet. . . . ” “she shall be taught.” “oh!” laughed the guest, “she couldn’t have a better teacher! she is lucky! if you are in charge, one can be sure there won’t be a false note.” “there wasn’t one, if it comes to that, in the music.” “oh! it was sublime. one of those pleasures which can never be forgotten. talking of that marvellous violinist,” she went on, imagining in her innocence that m. de charlus was interested in the violin ‘pure and simple,’“do you happen to know one whom i heard the other day playing too wonderfully a sonata by fauré, his name is frank. . . . ” “oh, he’s a horror,” replied m. de charlus, overlooking the rudeness of a contradiction which implied that his cousin was lacking in taste. “as far as violinists are concerned, i advise you to confine yourself to mine.” this paved the way to a fresh exchange of glances, at once furtive and scrutinous, between m. de charlus and his cousin, for, blushing and seeking by her zeal to atone for her blunder, mme. de mortemart went on to suggest to m. de charlus that she might give a party, to hear morel play. now, so far as she was concerned, this party had not the object of bringing an unknown talent into prominence, an object which she would, however, pretend to have in mind, and which was indeed that of m. de charlus. she regarded it only as an opportunity for giving a particularly smart party and was calculating already whom she would invite and whom she would reject. this business of selection, the chief preoccupation of people who give parties (even the people whom ‘society’ journalists are so impudent or so foolish as to call ‘the élite’), alters at once the expression — and the handwriting — of a hostess more profoundly than any hypnotic suggestion. before she had even thought of what morel was to play (which she regarded, and rightly, as a secondary consideration, for even if everybody this evening, from fear of m. de charlus, had observed a polite silence during the music, it would never have occurred to anyone to listen to it), mme. de mortemart, having decided that mme. de valcourt was not to be one of the elect, had automatically -ssumed that air of conspiracy, of a secret plotting which so degrades even those women in society who can most easily afford to ignore what ‘people will say.’“wouldn’t it be possible for me to give a party, for people to hear your friend play?” murmured mme. de mortemart, who, while addressing herself exclusively to m. de charlus, could not refrain, as though under a fascination, from casting a glance at mme. de valcourt (the rejected) in order to make certain that the other was too far away to hear her. “no she cannot possibly hear what i am saying,” mme. de mortemart concluded inwardly, re-ssured by her own glance which as a matter of fact had had a totally different effect upon mme. de valcourt from that intended: “why,” mme. de valcourt had said to herself when she caught this glance, “marie-thérèse is planning something with palamède which i am not to be told.” “you mean my protégé,” m. de charlus corrected, as merciless to his cousin’s choice of words as he was to her musical endowments. then without paying the slightest attention to her silent prayers, as she made a smiling apology: “why, yes . . . ” he said in a loud tone, audible throughout the room, “although there is always a risk in that sort of exportation of a fascinating personality into surroundings that must inevitably diminish his transcendent gifts and would in any case have to be adapted to them.” madame de mortemart told herself that the aside, the pianissimo of her question had been a waste of trouble, after the megaphone through which the answer had issued. she was mistaken. mme. de valcourt heard nothing, for the simple reason that she did not understand a single word. her anxiety diminished and would rapidly have been extinguished had not mme. de mortemart, afraid that she might have been given away and afraid of having to invite mme. de valcourt, with whom she was on too intimate terms to be able to leave her out if the other knew about her party beforehand, raised her eyelids once again in edith’s direction, as though not to lose sight of a threatening peril, lowering them again briskly so as not to commit herself. she intended, on the morning after the party, to write her one of those letters, the complement of the revealing glance, letters which people suppose to be subtle and which are tantamount to a full and signed confession. for instance: “dear edith, i am so sorry about you, i did not really expect you last night” (“how could she have expected me,” edith would ask herself, “since she never invited me?”) “as i know that you are not very fond of parties of that sort, which rather bore you. we should have been greatly honoured, all the same, by your company” (never did mme. de mortemart employ the word ‘honoured,’ except in the letters in which she attempted to cloak a lie in the semblance of truth). “you know that you are always at home in our house, however, you were quite right, as it was a complete failure, like everything that is got up at a moment’s notice.” but already the second furtive glance darted at her had enabled edith to grasp everything that was concealed by the complicated language of m. de charlus. this glance was indeed so violent that, after it had struck mme. de valcourt, the obvious secrecy and mischievous intention that it embodied rebounded upon a young peruvian whom mme. de mortemart intended, on the contrary, to invite. but being of a suspicious nature, seeing all too plainly the mystery that was being made without realising that it was not intended to mystify him, he at once conceived a violent hatred of mme. de mortemart and determined to play all sorts of tricks upon her, such as ordering fifty iced coffees to be sent to her house on a day when she was not giving a party, or, when she was, inserting a paragraph in the newspapers announcing that the party was postponed, and publishing false reports of her other parties, in which would figure the notorious names of all the people whom, for various reasons, a hostess does not invite or even allow to be introduced to her. mme. de mortemart need not have bothered herself about mme. de valcourt. m. de charlus was about to spoil, far more effectively than the other’s presence could spoil it, the projected party. “but, my dear cousin,” she said in response to the expression ‘adapting the surroundings,’ the meaning of which her momentary state of hyperaesthesia had enabled her to discern, “we shall save you all the trouble. i undertake to ask gilbert to arrange everything.” “not on any account, all the more as he must not be invited to it. nothing can be arranged except by myself. the first thing is to exclude all the people who have ears and hear not.” m. de charlus’s cousin, who had been reckoning upon morel as an attraction in order to give a party at which she could say that, unlike so many of her kinswomen, she had ‘had palamède,’ carried her thoughts abruptly, from this prestige of m. de charlus, to all sorts of people with whom he would get her into trouble if he began interfering with the list of her guests. the thought that the prince de guermantes (on whose account, partly, she was anxious to exclude mme. de valcourt, whom he declined to meet) was not to be invited, alarmed her. her eyes -ssumed an uneasy expression. “is the light, which is rather too strong, hurting you?” inquired m. de charlus with an apparent seriousness the underlying irony of which she failed to perceive. “no, not at all, i was thinking of the difficulty, not for myself of course, but for my family, if gilbert were to hear that i had given a party without inviting him, when he never has a cat on his housetop without. . . . ” “why of course, we must begin by eliminating the cat on the housetop, which could only miaow; i suppose that the din of talk has prevented you from realising that it was a question not of doing the civilities of a hostess but of proceeding to the rites customary at every true celebration.” then, deciding, not that the next person had been kept waiting too long, but that it did not do to exaggerate the favours shewn to one who had in mind not so much morel as her own visiting-list, m. de charlus, like a physician who cuts short a consultation when he considers that it has lasted long enough, gave his cousin a signal to withdraw, not by bidding her good night but by turning to the person immediately behind her. “good evening, madame de montesquieu, marvellous, wasn’t it? i have not seen hélène, tell her that every general abstention, even the most n0ble, that is to say her own, must include exceptions, if they are brilliant, as has been the case to-night. to shew that one is rare is all very well, but to subordinate one’s rarity, which is only negative, to what is precious is better still. in your sister’s case, and i value more than anyone her systematic absence from places where what is in store for her is not worthy of her, here to-night, on the contrary, her presence at so memorable an exhibition as this would have been aprésidence, and would have given your sister, already so distinguished, an additional distinction.” then he turned to a third person, m. d’argencourt. i was greatly astonished to see in this room, as friendly and flattering towards m. de charlus as he was severe with him elsewhere, insisting upon morel’s being introduced to him and telling him that he hoped he would come and see him, m. d’argencourt, that terrible scourge of men such as m. de charlus. at the moment he was living in the thick of them. it was certainly not because he had in any sense become one of them himself. but for some time past he had practically deserted his wife for a young woman in society whom he adored. being intelligent herself, she made him share her taste for intelligent people, and was most anxious to have m. de charlus in her house. but above all m. d’argencourt, extremely jealous and not unduly potent, feeling that he was failing to satisfy his captive and anxious at once to introduce her to people and to keep her amused, could do so without risk to himself only by surrounding her with innocuous men, whom he thus cast for the part of guardians of his seraglio. these men found that he had become quite pleasant and declared that he was a great deal more intelligent than they had supposed, a discovery that delighted him and his mistress
the remainder of m. de charlus’s guests drifted away fairly rapidly. several of them said: “i don’t want to call at the vestry” (the little room in which the baron, with charlie by his side, was receiving congratulations, and to which he himself had given the name), “but i must let palamède see me so that he shall know that i stayed to the end.” n0body paid the slightest attention to mme. verdurin. some pretended not to know which was she and said good night by mistake to mme. cottard, appealing to me for confirmation with a “that is mme. verdurin, ain’t it?” mme. d’arpajon asked me, in the hearing of our hostess: “tell me, has there ever been a monsieur verdurin?” the d-ch-sses, finding none of the oddities that they expected in this place which they had hoped to find more different from anything that they already knew, made the best of a bad job by going into fits of laughter in front of elstir’s paintings; for all the rest of the entertainment, which they found more in keeping than they had expected with the style with which they were familiar, they gave the credit to m. de charlus, saying: “how clever palamède is at arranging things; if he were to stage an opera in a stable or a bathroom, it would still be perfectly charming.” the most n0ble ladies were those who shewed most fervour in congratulating m. de charlus upon the success of a party, of the secret motive of which some of them were by no means unaware, without, however, being embarr-ssed by the knowledge, this cl-ss of society — remembering perhaps certain epochs in history when their own family had already arrived at an identical stage of brazenly conscious effrontery — carrying their contempt for scruples almost as far as their respect for etiquette. several of them engaged charlie on the spot for different evenings on which he was to come and play them vinteuil’s septet, but it never occurred to any of them to invite mme. verdurin. this last was already blind with fury when m. de charlus who, his head in the clouds, was incapable of perceiving her condition, decided that it would be only decent to invite the mistress to share his joy. and it was perhaps yielding to his literary preciosity rather than to an overflow of pride that this specialist in artistic entertainments said to mme. verdurin: “well, are you satisfied? i think you have reason to be; you see that when i set to work to give a party there are no half-measures. i do not know whether your heraldic knowledge enables you to gauge the precise importance of the display, the weight that i have lifted, the volume of air that i have displaced for you. you have had the queen of naples, the brother of the king of bavaria, the three premier peers. if vinteuil is mahomet, we may say that we have brought to him some of the least movable of mountains. bear in mind that to attend your party the queen of naples has come up from neuilly, which is a great deal more difficult for her than evacuating the two sicilies,” he went on, with a deliberate sneer, notwithstanding his admiration for the queen. “it is an historic event. just think that it is perhaps the first time she has gone anywhere since the fall of gaeta. it is probable that the dictionaries of dates will record as culminating points the day of the fall of gaeta and that of the verdurins’ party. the fan that she laid down, the better to applaud vinteuil, deserves to become more famous than the fan that mme. de metternich broke because the audience hissed wagner.” “why, she has left it here,” said mme. verdurin, momentarily appeased by the memory of the queen’s kindness to herself, and she shewed m. de charlus the fan which was lying upon a chair. “oh! what a touching spectacle!” exclaimed m. de charlus, approaching the relic with veneration. “it is all the more touching, it is so hideous; poor little violette is incredible!” and spasms of emotion and irony coursed through him alternately. “oh dear, i don’t know whether you feel this sort of thing as i do. swann would positively have died of convulsions if he had seen it. i am sure, whatever price it fetches, i shall buy the fan at the queen’s sale. for she is bound to be sold up, she hasn’t a penny,” he went on, for he never ceased to intersperse the cruellest slanders with the most sincere veneration, albeit these sprang from two opposing natures, which, however, were combined in himself. they might even be brought to bear alternately upon the same incident. for m. de charlus who in his comfortable state as a wealthy man ridiculed the poverty of the queen was himself often to be heard extolling that poverty and, when anyone spoke of princesse murât, queen of the two sicilies, would reply: “i do not know to whom you are alluding. there is only one queen of naples, who is a sublime person and does not keep a carriage. but from her omnibus she annihilates every vehicle on the street and one could kneel down in the dust on seeing her drive past.” “i shall bequeath it to a museum. in the meantime, it must be sent back to her, so that she need not hire a cab to come and fetch it. the wisest thing, in view of the historical interest of such an object, would be to steal the fan. but that would be awkward for her — since it is probable that she does not possess another!” he added, with a shout of laughter. “anyhow, you see that for my sake she came. and that is not the only miracle that i have performed. i do not believe that anyone at the present day has the power to move the people whom i have brought here. however, everyone must be given his due. charlie and the rest of the musicians played divinely. and, my dear mistress,” he added condescendingly, “you yourself have played your part on this occasion. your name will not be unrecorded. history has preserved that of the page who armed joan of arc when she set out for battle; indeed you have served as a connecting link, you have made possible the fusion between vinteuil’s music and its inspired interpreter, you have had the intelligence to appreciate the capital importance of the whole chain of circ-mstances which would enable the interpreter to benefit by the whole weight of a considerable — if i were not referring to myself, i would say providential — personage, whom you were clever enough to ask to ensure the success of the gathering, to bring before morel’s violin the ears directly attached to the tongues that have the widest hearing; no, no, it is not a small matter. there can be no small matter in so complete a realisation. everything has its part. the duras was marvellous. in fact, everything; that is why,” he concluded, for he loved to administer a rebuke, “i set my face against your inviting those persons — divisors who, among the overwhelming people whom i brought you would have played the part of the decimal points in a sum, reducing the others to a merely fractional value. i have a very exact appreciation of that sort of thing. you understand, we must avoid blunders when we are giving a party which ought to be worthy of vinteuil, of his inspired interpreter, of yourself, and, i venture to say, of me. you were prepared to invite the molé, and everything would have been spoiled. it would have been the little contrary, neutralising drop which deprives a potion of its virtue. the electric lights would have fused, the pastry would not have come in time, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomachache. she was the one person not to invite. at the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-tale, not a note would have issued from the br-ss; the flute and the hautboy would have been stricken with a sudden silence. morel himself, even if he had succeeded in playing a few bars, would not have been in tune, and instead of vinteuil’s septet you would have had a parody of it by beckmesser, ending amid catcalls. i, who believe strongly in personal influence, could feel quite plainly in the expansion of a certain largo, which opened itself right out like a flower, in the supreme satisfaction of the finale, which was not merely allegro but incomparably allegro, that the absence of the molé was inspiring the musicians and was diffusing joy among the very instruments themselves. in any case, when one is at home to queens one does not invite one’s hall-portress.” in calling her ‘the molé’ (as for that matter he said quite affectionately ‘the duras’) m. de charlus was doing the lady justice. for all these women were the actresses of society and it is true also that, even regarding her from this point of view, comtesse molé did not justify the extraordinary reputation for intelligence that she had acquired, which made one think of those mediocre actors or novelists who, at certain periods, are hailed as men of g*nius, either because of the mediocrity of their compet-tors, among whom there is no artist capable of revealing what is meant by true talent, or because of the mediocrity of the public, which, did there exist an extraordinary individuality, would be incapable of understanding it. in mme. molé‘s case it is preferable, if not absolutely fair, to stop at the former explanation. the social world being the realm of nullity, there exist between the merits of women in society only insignificant degrees, which are at best capable of rousing to madness the rancours or the imagination of m. de charlus. and certainly, if he spoke as he had just been speaking in this language which was a precious alloy of artistic and social elements, it was because his old-womanly anger and his culture as a man of the world furnished the genuine eloquence that he possessed with none but insignificant themes. since the world of differences does not exist on the surface of the earth, among all the countries which our perception renders uniform, all the more reason why it should not exist in the social ‘world.’ does it exist anywhere else? vinteuil’s septet had seemed to tell me that it did. but where? as m. de charlus also enjoyed repeating what one person had said of another, seeking to stir up quarrels, to divide and reign, he added: “you have, by not inviting her, deprived mme. molé of the opportunity of saying: ‘i can’t think why this mme. verdurin should invite me. i can’t imagine who these people are, i don’t know them.’ she was saying a year ago that you were boring her with your advances. she’s a fool, never invite her again. after all, she’s nothing so very wonderful. she can come to your house without making a fuss about it, seeing that i come here. in short,” he concluded, “it seems to me that you have every reason to thank me, for, so far as it went, everything has been perfect. the d-ch-sse de guermantes did not come, but one can’t tell, it was better perhaps that she didn’t. we shan’t bear her any grudge, and we shall remember her all the same another time, not that one can help remembering her, her very eyes say to us ‘forget me not!’, for they are a pair of myosotes” (here i thought to myself how strong the guermantes spirit — the decision to go to one house and not to another — must be, to have outweighed in the d-ch-ss’s mind her fear of palamède). “in the face of so complete a success, one is tempted like bernardin de saint-pierre to see everywhere the hand of providence. the d-ch-sse de duras was enchanted. she even asked me to tell you so,” added m. de charlus, dwelling upon the words as though mme. verdurin must regard this as a sufficient honour. sufficient and indeed barely credible, for he found it necessary, if he was to be believed, to add, completely carried away by the madness of those whom jupiter has decided to ruin: “she has engaged morel to come to her house, where the same programme will be repeated, and i even think of asking her for an invitation for m. verdurin.” this civility to the husband alone was, although no such idea even occurred to m. de charlus, the most wounding outrage to the wife who, believing herself to possess, with regard to the violinist, by virtue of a sort of ukase which prevailed in the little clan, the right to forbid him to perform elsewhere without her express authorisation, was fully determined to forbid his appearance at mme. de duras’s party
the baron’s volubility was in itself an irritation to mme. verdurin who did not like people to form independent groups within their little clan. how often, even at la raspelière, hearing m. de charlus talking incessantly to charlie instead of being content with taking his part in the so harmonious chorus of the clan, she had pointed to him and exclaimed: “what a rattle [mme. verdurin uses here the word tapette, being probably unaware of its popular meaning. c. k. s. m.] he is! what a rattle! oh, if it comes to rattles, he’s a famous rattle!” but this time it was far worse. inebriated with the sound of his own voice, m. de charlus failed to realise that by cutting down the part -ssigned to mme. verdurin and confining it within narrow limits, he was calling forth that feeling of hatred which was in her only a special, social form of jealousy. mme. verdurin was genuinely fond of her regular visitors, the faithful of the little clan, but wished them to be entirely devoted to their mistress. willing to make some sacrifice, like those jealous lovers who will tolerate a betrayal, but only under their own roof and even before their eyes, that is to say when there is no betrayal, she would allow the men to have mistresses, lovers, on condition that the affair had no social consequence outside her own house, that the tie was formed and perpetuated in the shelter of her wednesdays. in the old days, every furtive peal of laughter that came from odette when she conversed with swann had gnawed her heartstrings, and so of late had every aside exchanged by morel and the baron; she found one consolation alone for her griefs which was to destroy the happiness of other people. she had not been able to endure for long that of the baron. and here was this rash person precipitating the catastrophe by appearing to be restricting the mistress’s place in her little clan. already she could see morel going into society, without her, under the baron’s aegis. there was but a single remedy, to make morel choose between the baron and herself, and, relying upon the ascendancy that she had acquired over morel by the display that she made of an extraordinary perspicacity, thanks to reports which she collected, to falsehoods which she invented, all of which served to corroborate what he himself was led to believe, and what would in time be made plain to him, thanks to the pitfalls which she was preparing, into which her unsuspecting victims would fall, relying upon this ascendancy, to make him choose herself in preference to the baron. as for the society ladies who had been present and had not even asked to be introduced to her, as soon as she grasped their hesitations or indifference, she had said: “ah! i see what they are, the sort of old good-for-nothings that are not our style, it’s the last time they shall set foot in this house.” for she would have died rather than admit that anyone had been less friendly to her than she had hoped. “ah! my dear general,” m. de charlus suddenly exclaimed, abandoning mme. verdurin, as he caught sight of general deltour, secretary to the president of the republic, who might be of great value in securing charlie his cross, and who, after asking some question of cottard, was rapidly withdrawing: “good evening, my dear, delightful friend. so this is how you slip away without saying good-bye to me,” said the baron with a genial, self-satisfied smile, for he knew quite well that people were always glad to stay behind for a moment to talk to himself. and as, in his present state of excitement, he would answer his own questions in a shrill tone: “well, did you enjoy it? wasn’t it really fine? the andante, what? it’s the most touching thing that was ever written. i defy anyone to listen to the end without tears in his eyes. charming of you to have come. listen, i had the most perfect telegram this morning from froberville, who tells me that as far as the grand chancery goes the difficulties have been smoothed away, as the saying is.” m. de charlus’s voice continued to soar at this piercing pitch, as different from his normal voice as is that of a barrister making an emphatic plea from his ordinary utterance, a phenomenon of vocal amplification by over-excitement and nervous tension -n-logous to that which, at her own dinner-parties, raised to so high a diapason the voice and gaze alike of mme. de guermantes. “i intended to send you a note to-morrow by a messenger to tell you of my enthusiasm, until i could find an opportunity of speaking to you, but you have been so surrounded! froberville’s support is not to be despised, but for my own part, i have the minister’s promise,” said the general. “ah! excellent. besides, you have seen for yourself that it is only what such talent deserves. hoyos was delighted, i didn’t manage to see the amb-ssadress, was she pleased? who would not have been, except those that have ears and hear not, which does not matter so long as they have tongues and can speak.” taking advantage of the baron’s having withdrawn to speak to the general, mme. verdurin made a signal to brichot. he, not knowing what mme. verdurin was going to say, sought to amuse her, and never suspecting the anguish that he was causing me, said to the mistress: “the baron is delighted that mlle. vinteuil and her friend did not come. they shock him terribly. he declares that their morals are appalling. you can’t imagine how prudish and severe the baron is on moral questions.” contrary to brichot’s expectation, mme. verdurin was not amused: “he is obscene,” was her answer. “take him out of the room to smoke a cigarette with you, so that my husband can get hold of his dulcinea without his noticing it and warn him of the abyss that is yawning at his feet.” brichot seemed to hesitate. “i don’t mind telling you,” mme. verdurin went on, to remove his final scruples, “that i do not feel at all safe with a man like that in the house. i know, there are all sorts of horrible stories about him, and the police have him under supervision.” and, as she possessed a certain talent of improvisation when inspired by malice, mme. verdurin did not stop at this: “it seems, he has been in prison. yes, yes, i have been told by people who knew all about it. i know, too, from a person who lives in his street, that you can’t imagine the ruffians that go to his house.” and as brichot, who often went to the baron’s, began to protest, mme. verdurin, growing animated, exclaimed: “but i can -ssure you! it is i who am telling you,” an expression with which she habitually sought to give weight to an -ssertion flung out more or less at random. “he will be found murdered in his bed one of these days, as those people always are. he may not go quite as far as that perhaps, because he is in the clutches of that jupien whom he had the impudence to send to me, and who is an ex-convict, i know it, you yourself know it, yes, for certain. he has a hold on him because of some letters which are perfectly appalling, it seems. i know it from somebody who has seen them, and told me: ‘you would be sick on the spot if you saw them.’ that is how jupien makes him toe the line and gets all the money he wants out of him. i would sooner die a thousand times over than live in a state of terror like charlus. in any case, if morel’s family decides to bring an action against him, i have no desire to be dragged in as an accomplice. if he goes on, it will be at his own risk, but i shall have done my duty. what is one to do? it’s no joke, i can tell you.” and, agreeably warmed already by the thought of her husband’s impending conversation with the violinist, mme. verdurin said to me: “ask brichot whether i am not a courageous friend, and whether i am not capable of sacrificing myself to save my comrades.” (she was alluding to the circ-mstances in which she had, just in time, made him quarrel, first of all with his laundress, and then with mme. de cambremer, quarrels as a result of which brichot had become almost completely blind, and [people said] had taken to morphia.) “an incomparable friend, far-sighted and valiant,” replied the professor with an innocent emotion. “mme. verdurin prevented me from doing something extremely foolish,” brichot told me when she had left us. “she never hesitates to operate without anaesthetics. she is an interventionist, as our friend cottard says. i admit, however, that the thought that the poor baron is still unconscious of the blow that is going to fall upon him distresses me deeply. he is quite mad about that boy. if mme. verdurin should prove successful, there is a man who is going to be very miserable. however, it is not certain that she will not fail. i am afraid that she may only succeed in creating a misunderstanding between them, which, in the end, without parting them, will only make them quarrel with her.” it was often thus with mme. verdurin and her faithful. but it was evident that in her the need to preserve their friendship was more and more dominated by the requirement that this friendship should never be challenged by that which they might feel for one another. h0m-s-xuality did not disgust her so long as it did not tamper with orthodoxy, but like the church she preferred any sacrifice rather than a concession of orthodoxy. i was beginning to be afraid lest her irritation with myself might be due to her having heard that i had prevented albertine from going to her that afternoon, and that she might presently set to work, if she had not already begun, upon the same task of separating her from me which her husband, in the case of charlus, was now going to attempt with the musician. “come along, get hold of charlus, find some excuse, there’s no time to lose,” said mme. verdurin, “and whatever you do, don’t let him come back here until i send for you. oh! what an evening,” mme. verdurin went on, revealing thus the true cause of her anger. “performing a masterpiece in front of those wooden images. i don’t include the queen of naples, she is intelligent, she is a nice woman” (which meant: “she has been kind to me”). “but the others. oh! it’s enough to drive anyone mad. what can you expect, i’m no longer a girl. when i was young, people told me that one must put up with boredom, i made an effort, but now, oh no, it’s too much for me, i am old enough to please myself, life is too short; bore myself, listen to idiots, smile, pretend to think them intelligent. no, i can’t do it. get along, brichot, there’s no time to lose.” “i am going, madame, i am going,” said brichot, as general deltour moved away. but first of all the professor took me aside for a moment: “moral duty,” he said, “is less clearly imperative than our ethics teach us. whatever the theosophical cafés and the kantian beer-houses may say, we are deplorably ignorant of the nature of good. i myself who, without wishing to boast, have lectured to my pupils, in all innocence, upon the philosophy of the said immanuel kant, i can see no precise ruling for the case of social casuistry with which i am now confronted in that critique of practical reason in which the great renegade of protestantism platonised in the german manner for a germany prehistorically sentimental and aulic, ringing all the changes of a pomeranian mysticism. it is still the symposium, but held this time at kônigsberg, in the local style, indigestible and reeking of sauerkraut, and without any good-looking boys. it is obvious on the one hand that i cannot refuse our excellent hostess the small service that she asks of me, in a fully orthodox conformity with traditional morals. one ought to avoid, above all things, for there are few that involve one in more foolish speeches, letting oneself be lured by words. but after all, let us not hesitate to admit that if the mothers of families were ent-tled to vote, the baron would run the risk of being lamentably blackballed for the chair of virtue. it is unfortunately with the temperament of a rake that he pursues the vocation of a pedagogue; observe that i am not speaking evil of the baron; that good man, who can carve a joint like n0body in the world, combines with a g*nius for anathema treasures of goodness. he can be most amusing as a superior sort of wag, whereas with a certain one of my colleagues, an academician, if you please, i am bored, as xenophon would say, at a hundred drachmae to the hour. but i am afraid that he is expending upon morel rather more than a wholesome morality enjoins, and without knowing to what extent the young penitent shews himself docile or rebellious to the special exercises which his catechist imposes upon him by way of mortification, one need not be a learned clerk to be aware that we should be erring, as the other says, on the side of clemency with regard to this rosicrucian who seems to have come down to us from petronius, by way of saint-simon, if we granted him with our eyes shut, duly signed and sealed, permission to satanise. and yet, in keeping the man occupied while mme. verdurin, for the sinner’s good and indeed rightly tempted by such a cure of souls, proceeds — by speaking to the young fool without any concealment — to remove from him all that he loves, to deal him perhaps a fatal blow, it seems to me that i am leading him into what one might call a man-trap, and i recoil as though from a base action.” this said, he did not hesitate to commit it, but, taking him by the arm, began: “come, baron, let us go and smoke a cigarette, this young man has not yet seen all the marvels of the house.” i made the excuse that i was obliged to go home. “just wait a moment,” said brichot. “you remember, you are giving me a lift, and i have not forgotten your promise.” “wouldn’t you like me, really, to make them bring out their plate, nothing could be simpler,” said m. de charlus. “you promised me, remember, not a word about morel’s decoration. i mean to give him the surprise of announcing it presently when people have begun to leave, although he says that it is of no importance to an artist, but that his uncle would like him to have it” (i blushed, for, i thought to myself, the verdurins would know through my grandfather what morel’s uncle was). “then you wouldn’t like me to make them bring out the best pieces,” said m. de charlus. “of course, you know them already, you have seen them a dozen times at la raspelière.” i dared not tell him that what might have interested me was not the mediocrity of even the most splendid plate in a middle-cl-ss household, but some specimen, were it only reproduced in a fine engraving, of mme. du barry’s. i was far too gravely preoccupied — even if i had not been by this revelation as to mlle. vinteuil’s expected presence — always, in society, far too much distracted and agitated to fasten my attention upon objects that were more or less beautiful. it could have been arrested only by the appeal of some reality that addressed itself to my imagination, as might have been, this evening, a picture of that venice of which i had thought so much during the afternoon, or some general element, common to several forms and more genuine than they, which, of its own accord, never failed to arouse in me an inward appreciation, normally lulled in slumber, the rising of which to the surface of my consciousness filled me with great joy. well, as i emerged from the room known as the concert-room, and crossed the other drawing-rooms with brichot and m. de charlus, on discovering, transposed among others, certain pieces of furniture which i had seen at la raspelière and to which i had paid no attention, i perceived, between the arrangement of the town house and that of the country house, a certain common air of family life, a permanent ident-ty, and i understood what brichot meant when he said to me with a smile: “there, look at this room, it may perhaps give you an idea of what things were like in rue montalivet, twenty-five years ago.” from his smile, a tribute to the defunct drawing-room which he saw with his mind’s eye, i understood that what brichot, perhaps without realising it, preferred in the old room, more than the large windows, more than the g-y youth of his hosts and their faithful, was that unreal part (which i myself could discern from some similarities between la raspelière and quai conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the external, actual part, liable to everyone’s control, is but the prolongation, was that part become purely imaginary, of a colour which no longer existed save for my elderly guide, which he was incapable of making me see, that part which has detached itself from the outer world, to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives a surplus value, in which it is -ssimilated to its normal substance, transforming itself — houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at the suppers which we recall — into that translucent alabaster of our memories, the colour of which we are incapable of displaying, since we alone see it, which enables us to say truthfully to other people, speaking of things past, that they cannot form any idea of them, that they do not resemble anything that they have seen, while we are unable to think of them ourselves without a certain emotion, remembering that it is upon the existence of our thoughts that there depends, for a little time still, their survival, the brilliance of the lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of the arbours that will never bloom again. and possibly, for this reason, the drawing-room in rue montalivet disparaged, for brichot, the verdurins’ present home. but on the other hand it added to this home, in the professor’s eyes, a beauty which it could not have in those of a stranger. those pieces of the original furniture that had been transported here, and sometimes arranged in the same groups, and which i myself remembered from la raspelière, introduced into the new drawing-room fragments of the old which, at certain moments, recalled it so vividly as to create a hallucination and then seemed themselves scarcely real from having evoked in the midst of the surrounding reality fragments of a vanished world which seemed to extend round about them. a sofa that had risen up from dreamland between a pair of new and thoroughly substantial armchairs, smaller chairs upholstered in pink silk, the cloth surface of a card-table raised to the dignity of a person since, like a person, it had a past, a memory, retaining in the chill and gloom of quai conti the tan of its roasting by the sun through the windows of rue montalivet (where it could tell the time of day as accurately as mme. verdurin herself) and through the gl-ss doors at la raspelière, where they had taken it and where it used to gaze out all day long over the flower-beds of the garden at the valley far below, until it was time for cottard and the musician to sit down to their game; a posy of violets and pansies in pastel, the gift of a painter friend, now dead, the sole fragment that survived of a life that had vanished without leaving any trace, summarising a great talent and a long friendship, recalling his keen, gentle eyes, his shapely hand, plump and melancholy, while he was at work on it; the incoherent, charming disorder of the offerings of the faithful, which have followed the lady of the house on all her travels and have come in time to -ssume the fixity of a trait of character, of a line of destiny; a profusion of cut flowers, of chocolate-boxes which here as in the country systematised their growth in an identical mode of blossoming; the curious interpolation of those singular and superfluous objects which still appear to have been just taken from the box in which they were offered and remain for ever what they were at first, new year’s day presents; all those things, in short, which one could not have isolated from the rest, but which for brichot, an old frequenter of the verdurin parties, had that patina, that velvety bloom of things to which, giving them a sort of profundity, an astral body has been added; all these things scattered before him, sounded in his ear like so many resonant keys which awakened cherished likenesses in his heart, confused reminiscences which, here in this drawing-room of the present day that was littered with them, cut out, defined, as on a fine day a shaft of sunlight cuts a section in the atmosphere, the furniture and carpets, and pursuing it from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a footstool to a lingering scent, from the lighting arrangements to the colour scheme, carved, evoked, spiritualised, called to life a form which might be called the ideal aspect, immanent in each of their successive homes, of the verdurin drawing-room. “we must try,” brichot whispered in my ear, “to get the baron upon his favourite topic. he is astounding.” now on the one hand i was glad of an opportunity to try to obtain from m. de charlus information as to the coming of mlle. vinteuil and her friend. on the other hand, i did not wish to leave albertine too long by herself, not that she could (being uncertain of the moment of my return, not to mention that, at so late an hour, she could not have received a visitor or left the house herself without arousing comment) make any evil use of my absence, but simply so that she might not find it too long. and so i told brichot and m. de charlus that i must shortly leave them. “come with us all the same,” said the baron, whose social excitement was beginning to flag, but feeling that need to prolong, to spin out a conversation, which i had already observed in the d-ch-sse de guermantes as well as in himself, and which, while distinctive of their family, extends in a more general fashion to all those people who, offering their minds no other realisation than talk, that is to say an imperfect realisation, remain un-ssuaged even after hours spent in one’s company, and attach themselves more and more hungrily to their exhausted companion, from whom they mistakenly expect a satiety which social pleasures are incapable of giving. “come, won’t you,” he repeated, “this is the pleasant moment at a party, the moment when all the guests have gone, the hour of dona sol; let us hope that it will end less tragically. unfortunately you are in a hurry, in a hurry probably to go and do things which you would much better leave undone. people are always in a hurry and leave at the time when they ought to be arriving. we are here like couture’s philosophers, this is the moment in which to go over the events of the evening, to make what is called in military language a criticism of the operations. we might ask mme. verdurin to send us in a little supper to which we should take care not to invite her, and we might request charlie — still hernani — to play for ourselves alone the sublime adagio. isn’t it fine, that adagio? but where is the young violinist, i would like to congratulate him, this is the moment for tender words and embraces. admit, brichot, that they played like gods, morel especially. did you notice the moment when that lock of hair came loose? ah, then, my dear fellow, you saw nothing at all. there was an f sharp at which enesco, capet and thibaut might have died of jealousy; i may have appeared calm enough, i can tell you that at such a sound my heart was so wrung that i could barely control my tears. the whole room sat breathless; brichot, my dear fellow,” cried the baron, gripping the other’s arm which he shook violently, “it was sublime. only young charlie preserved a stony immobility, you could not even see him breathe, he looked like one of those objects of the inanimate world of which théodore rousseau speaks, which make us think, but do not think themselves. and then, all of a sudden,” cried m. de charlus with enthusiasm, making a pantomime gesture, “then . . . the lock! and all the time, the charming little country-dance of the allegro vivace. you know, that lock was the symbol of the revelation, even to the most obtuse. the princess of taormina, deaf until then, for there are none so deaf as those that have ears and hear not, the princess of taormina, confronted by the message of the miraculous lock, realised that it was music that they were playing and not poker. oh, that was indeed a solemn moment.” “excuse me, sir, for interrupting you,” i said to m. de charlus, hoping to bring him to the subject in which i was interested, “you told me that the composer’s daughter was to be present. i should have been most interested to meet her. are you certain that she was expected?” “oh, that i can’t say.” m. de charlus thus complied, perhaps unconsciously, with that universal rule by which people withhold information from a jealous lover, whether in order to shew an absurd ‘comradeship,’ as a point of honour, and even if they detest her, with the woman who has excited his jealousy, or out of malice towards her, because they guess that jealousy can only intensify love, or from that need to be disagreeable to other people which consists in revealing the truth to the rest of the world but concealing it from the jealous, ignorance increasing their torment, or so at least the tormentors suppose, who, in their desire to hurt other people are guided by what they themselves believe, wrongly perhaps, to be most painful. “you know,” he went on, “in this house they are a trifle pr-ne to exaggerate, they are charming people, still they do like to catch celebrities of one sort or another. but you are not looking well, and you will catch cold in this damp room,” he said, pushing a chair towards me. “since you have not been well, you must take care of yourself, let me go and find you your coat. no, don’t go for it yourself, you will lose your way and catch cold. how careless people are; you might be an infant in arms, you want an old nurse like me to look after you.” “don’t trouble, baron, let me go,” said brichot, and left us immediately; not being precisely aware perhaps of the very warm affection that m. de charlus felt for me and of the charming lapses into simplicity and devotion that alternated with his delirious crises of grandeur and persecution, he was afraid that m. de charlus, whom mme. verdurin had entrusted like a prisoner to his vigilance, might simply be seeking, under the pretext of asking for my greatcoat, to return to morel and might thus upset the mistress’s plan
meanwhile ski had sat down, uninvited, at the piano, and -ssuming — with a playful knitting of his brows, a remote gaze and a slight twist of his lips — what he imagined to be an artistic air, was insisting that morel should play something by bizet. “what, you don’t like it, that boyish music of bizet. why, my dear fellow,” he said, with that rolling of the letter r which was one of his peculiarities, “it’s rravishing.” morel, who did not like bizet, said so in exaggerated terms and (as he had the reputation in the little clan of being, though it seems incredible, a wit) ski, pretending to take the violinist’s diatribes as paradoxes, burst out laughing. his laugh was not, like m. verdurin’s, the stifled gasp of a smoker. ski first of all -ssumed a subtle air, then allowed to escape, as though against his will, a single note of laughter, like the first clang from a belfry, followed by a silence in which the subtle gaze seemed to be making a competent examination of the absurdity of what had been said, then a second peal of laughter shook the air, followed presently by a merry angelus
i expressed to m. de charlus my regret that m. brichot should be taking so much trouble. “not at all, he is delighted, he is very fond of you, everyone is fond of you. somebody was saying only the other day: ‘we never see him now, he is isolating himself!’ besides, he is such a good fellow, is brichot,” m. de charlus went on, never suspecting probably, in view of the affectionate, frank manner in which the professor of moral philosophy conversed with him, that he had no hesitation is slandering him behind his back. “he is a man of great merit, immensely learned, and not a bit spoiled, his learning hasn’t turned him into a bookworm, like so many of them who smell of ink. he has retained a breadth of outlook, a tolerance, rare in his kind. sometimes, when one sees how well he understands life, with what a natural grace he renders everyone his due, one asks oneself where a humble little sorbonne professor, an ex-schoolmaster, can have picked up such breeding. i am astonished at it myself.” i was even more astonished when i saw the conversation of this brichot, which the least refined of mme. de guermantes’s friends would have found so dull, so heavy, please the most critical of them all, m. de charlus. but to achieve this result there had collaborated, among other influences, themselves distinct also, those by virtue of which swann, on the one hand, had so long found favour with the little clan, when he was in love with odette, and on the other hand, after he married, found an attraction in mme. bontemps who, pretending to adore the swann couple, came incessantly to call upon the wife and revelled in all the stories about the husband. just as a writer gives the palm for intelligence, not to the most intelligent man, but to the worldling who utters a bold and tolerant comment upon the p-ssion of a man for a woman, a comment which makes the writer’s bluestocking mistress agree with him in deciding that of all the people who come to her house the least stupid is after all this old beau who shews experience in the things of love, so m. de charlus found more intelligent than the rest of his friends brichot, who was not merely kind to morel, but would cull from the greek philosophers, the latin poets, the authors of oriental tales, appropriate texts which decorated the baron’s propensity with a strange and charming anthology. m. de charlus had reached the age at which a victor hugo chooses to surround himself, above all, with vacqueries and meurices. he preferred to all others those men who tolerated his outlook upon life. “i see a great deal of him,” he went on, in a balanced, sing-song tone, allowing no movement of his lips to stir his grave, powdered mask over which were purposely lowered his prelatical eyelids. “i attend his lectures, that atmosphere of the latin quarter refreshes me, there is a studious, thoughtful adolescence of young bourgeois, more intelligent, better read than were, in a different sphere, my own contemporaries. it is a different world, which you know probably better than i, they are youngbourgeois,” he said, detaching the last word to which he prefixed a string of b_s, and emphasising it from a sort of habit of elocution, corresponding itself to a taste for fine distinctions in past history, which was peculiar to him, but perhaps also from inability to resist the pleasure of giving me a fl!ck of his insolence. this did not in any way diminish the great and affectionate pity that was inspired in me by m. de charlus (after mme. verdurin had revealed her plan in my hearing), it merely amused me, and indeed on any other occasion, when i should not have felt so kindly disposed towards him, would not have offended me. i derived from my grandmother such an absence of any self-importance that i might easily be found wanting in dignity. doubtless, i was scarcely aware of this, and by dint of having seen and heard, from my schooldays onwards, my most esteemed companions take offence if anyone failed to keep an appointment, refuse to overlook any disloyal behaviour, i had come in time to exhibit in my speech and actions a second nature which was stamped with pride. i was indeed considered extremely proud, because, as i had never been timid, i had been easily led into duels, the moral prestige of which, however, i diminished by making little of them, which easily persuaded other people that they were absurd; but the true nature which we trample underfoot continues nevertheless to abide within us. thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of g*nius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have always despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings scorned by us, the value of which the book in which we discover them afresh at once teaches us. i had come in time to learn from my experience of life that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me, instead of feeling annoyed. but this want of self-importance and resentment, if i had so far ceased to express it as to have become almost entirely unaware that it existed in me, was nevertheless the primitive, vital element in which i was steeped. anger and spite came to me only in a wholly different manner, in furious crises. what was more, the sense of justice was so far lacking in me as to amount to an entire want of moral sense. i was in my heart of hearts entirely won over to the side of the weaker party, and of anyone who was in trouble. i had no opinion as to the proportion in which good and evil might be blended in the relations between morel and m. de charlus, but the thought of the sufferings that were being prepared for m. de charlus was intolerable to me. i would have liked to warn him, but did not know how to do it. “the spectacle of all that laborious little world is very pleasant to an old stick like myself. i do not know them,” he went on, raising his hand with an air of reserve — so as not to appear to be boasting of his own conquests, to testify to his own purity and not to allow any suspicion to rest upon that of the students —“but they are most civil, they often go so far as to keep a place for me, since i am a very old gentleman. yes indeed, my dear boy, do not protest, i am past forty,” said the baron, who was past sixty. “it is a trifle stuffy in the hall in which brichot lectures, but it is always interesting.” albeit the baron preferred to mingle with the youth of the schools, in other words to be jostled by them, sometimes, to save him a long wait in the lecture-room, brichot took him in by his own door. brichot might well be at home in the sorbonne, at the moment when the janitor, loaded with chains of office, stepped out before him, and the master admired by his young pupils followed, he could not repress a certain timidity, and much as he desired to profit by that moment in which he felt himself so important to shew consideration for charlus, he was nevertheless slightly embarr-ssed; so that the janitor should allow him to p-ss, he said to him, in an artificial tone and with a preoccupied air: “follow me, baron, they’ll find a place for you,” then, without paying any more attention to him, to make his own entry, he advanced by himself briskly along the corridor. on either side, a double hedge of young lecturers greeted him; brichot, anxious not to appear to be posing in the eyes of these young men to whom he knew that he was a great pontiff, bestowed on them a thousand glances, a thousand little nods of connivance, to which his desire to remain martial, thoroughly french, gave the effect of a sort of cordial encouragement by an old soldier saying: “d-mn it all, we can face the foe.” then the applause of his pupils broke out. brichot sometimes extracted from this attendance by m. de charlus at his lectures an opportunity for giving pleasure, almost for returning hospitality. he would say to some parent, or to one of his middle-cl-ss friends: “if it would interest your wife or daughter, i may tell you that the baron de charlus, prince de carency, a scion of the house of condé, attends my lectures. it is something to remember, having seen one of the last descendants of our aristocracy who preserves the type. if they care to come, they will know him because he will be sitting next to my chair. besides he will be alone there, a stout man, with white hair and black moustaches, wearing the military medal.” “oh, thank you,” said the father. and, albeit his wife had other engagements, so as not to disoblige brichot, he made her attend the lecture, while the daughter, troubled by the heat and the crowd, nevertheless devoured eagerly with her eyes the descendant of condé, marvelling all the same that he was not crowned with strawberry-leaves and looked just like anybody else of the present day. he meanwhile had no eyes for her, but more than one student, who did not know who he was, was amazed at his friendly glances, became self-conscious and stiff, and the baron left the room full of dreams and melancholy. “forgive me if i return to the subject,” i said quickly to m. de charlus, for i could hear brichot returning, “but could you let me know by wire if you should hear that mlle. vinteuil or her friend is expected in paris, letting me know exactly how long they will be staying and without telling anybody that i asked you.” i had almost ceased to believe that she had been expected, but i wished to guard myself thus for the future. “yes, i will do that for you, first of all because i owe you a great debt of grat-tude. by not accepting what, long ago, i had offered you, you rendered me, to your own loss, an immense service, you left me my liberty. it is true that i have abdicated it in another fashion,” he added in a melancholy tone beneath which was visible a desire to take me into his confidence; “that is what i continue to regard as the important fact, a whole combination of circ-mstances which you failed to turn to your own account, possibly because fate warned you at that precise minute not to cross my path. for always man proposes and god disposes. who knows whether if, on the day when we came away together from mme. de villeparisis’s, you had accepted, perhaps many things that have since happened would never have occurred?” in some embarr-ssment, i turned the conversation, seizing hold of the name of mme. de villeparisis, and sought to find out from him, so admirably qualified in every respect, for what reasons mme. de villeparisis seemed to be held aloof by the aristocratic world. not only did he not give me the solution of this little social problem, he did not even appear to me to be aware of its existence. i then realised that the position of mme. de villeparisis, if it was in later years to appear great to posterity, and even in the marquise’s lifetime to the ignorant rich, had appeared no less great at the opposite extremity of society, that which touched mme. de villeparisis, that of the guermantes. she was their aunt; they saw first and foremost birth, connexions by marriage, the opportunity of impressing some sister-in-law with the importance of their own family. they regarded this less from the social than from the family point of view. now this was more brilliant in the case of mme. de villeparisis than i had supposed. i had been impressed when i heard that the t-tle villeparisis was falsely -ssumed. but there are other examples of great ladies who have made degrading marriages and preserved a predominant position. m. de charlus began by informing me that mme. de villeparisis was a niece of the famous d-ch-sse de ——-, the most celebrated member of the great aristocracy during the july monarchy, albeit she had refused to -ssociate with the citizen king and his family. i had so longed to hear stories about this d-ch-ss! and mme. de villeparisis, the kind mme. de villeparisis, with those cheeks that to me had been the cheeks of an ordinary woman, mme. de villeparisis who sent me so many presents and whom i could so easily have seen every day, mme. de villeparisis was her niece brought up by her, in her home, at the hôtel de ——-. “she asked the duc de doudeauville,” m. de charlus told me, “speaking of the three sisters, ‘which of the sisters do you prefer?’ and when doudeauville said: ‘madame de villeparisis,’ the d-ch-sse de ——— replied ‘pig!’ for the d-ch-ss was extremely witty,” said m. de charlus, giving the word the importance and the special pr-nunciation in use among the guermantes. that he should have thought the expression so ‘witty’ did not, however, surprise me, for i had on many other occasions remarked the centrifugal, objective tendency which leads men to abdicate, when they are relishing the wit of others, the severity with which they would criticise their own, and to observe, to record faithfully, what they would have scorned to create. “but what on earth is he doing, that is my greatcoat he is bringing,” he said, on seeing that brichot had made so long a search to no better result. “i would have done better to go for it myself. however, you can put it on now. are you aware that it is highly compromising, my dear boy, it is like drinking out of the same gl-ss, i shall be able to read your thoughts. no, not like that, come, let me do it,” and as he put me into his greatcoat, he pressed it down on my shoulders, fastened it round my throat, and brushed my chin with his hand, making the apology: “at his age, he doesn’t know how to put on a coat, one has to t-tivate him, i have missed my vocation, brichot, i was born to be a nursery-maid.” i wanted to go home, but as m. de charlus had expressed his intention of going in search of morel, brichot detained us both. moreover, the certainty that when i went home i should find albertine there, a certainty as absolute as that which i had felt in the afternoon that albertine would return home from the trocadéro, made me at this moment as little impatient to see her as i had been then when i was sitting at the piano, after françoise had sent me her telephone message. and it was this calm that enabled me, whenever, in the course of this conversation, i attempted to rise, to obey brichot’s injunctions who was afraid that my departure might prevent charlus from remaining with him until the moment when mme. verdurin was to come and fetch us. “come,” he said to the baron, “stay a little here with us, you shall give him the accolade presently,” brichot added, fastening upon myself his almost sightless eyes to which the many operations that he had undergone had restored some degree of life, but which had not all the same the mobility necessary to the sidelong expression of malice. “the accolade, how absurd!” cried the baron, in a shrill and rapturous tone. “my boy, i tell you, he imagines he is at a prize-giving, he is dreaming of his young pupils. i ask myself whether he don’t sleep with them.” “you wish to meet mlle. vinteuil,” said brichot, who had overheard the last words of our conversation. “i promise to let you know if she comes, i shall hear of it from mme. verdurin,” for he doubtless foresaw that the baron was in peril of an immediate exclusion from the little clan. “i see, so you think that i have less claim than yourself upon mme. verdurin,” said m. de charlus, “to be informed of the coming of these terribly disreputable persons. you know that they are quite notorious. mme. verdurin is wrong to allow them to come here, they are all very well for the fast set. they are friends with a terrible band of women. they meet in the most appalling places.” at each of these words, my suffering was increased by the addition of a fresh suffering, changing in form. “certainly not, i don’t suppose that i have any better claim than yourself upon mme. verdurin,” brichot protested, punctuating his words, for he was afraid that he might have aroused the baron’s suspicions. and as he saw that i was determined to go, seeking to detain me with the bait of the promised entertainment: “there is one thing which the baron seems to me not to have taken into account when he speaks of the reputation of these two ladies, namely that a person’s reputation may be at the same time appalling and undeserved. thus for instance, in the more notorious group which i shall call parallel, it is certain that the errors of justice are many and that history has registered convictions for sodomy against ill-strious men who were wholly innocent of the charge. the recent discovery of michelangelo’s p-ssionate love for a woman is a fresh fact which should ent-tle the friend of leo x to the benefit of a posthumous retrial. the michelangelo case seems to me clearly indicated to excite the sn0bs and mobilise the villette, when another case in which anarchism reared its head and became the fashionable sin of our worthy dilettantes, but which must not even be mentioned now for fear of stirring up quarrels, shall have run its course.” from the moment when brichot began to speak of masculine reputations, m. de charlus betrayed on every one of his features that special sort of impatience which one sees on the face of a medical or military expert when society people who know nothing about the subject begin to talk nonsense about points of therapeutics or strategy. “you know absolutely nothing about the matter,” he said at length to brichot. “quote me a single reputation that is undeserved. mention names. oh yes, i know the whole story,” was his brutal retort to a timid interruption by brichot, “the people who tried it once long ago out of curiosity, or out of affection for a dead friend, and the man who, afraid he has gone too far, if you speak to him of the beauty of a man, replies that that is chinese to him, that he can no more distinguish between a beautiful man and an ugly one than between the engines of two motorcars, mechanics not being in his line. that’s all stuff and nonsense. mind you, i don’t mean to say that a bad (or what is conventionally so called) and yet undeserved reputation is absolutely impossible. it is so exceptional, so rare, that for practical purposes it does not exist. at the same time i, who have a certain curiosity in ferreting things out, have known cases which were not mythical. yes, in the course of my life, i have established (scientifically speaking, of course, you mustn’t take me too literally) two unjustified reputations. they generally arise from a similarity of names, or from certain outward signs, a profusion of rings, for instance, which persons who are not qualified to judge imagine to be characteristic of what you were mentioning, just as they think that a peasant never utters a sentence without adding: ‘jarnignié,’ or an englishman: ‘goddam.’ dialogue for the boulevard theatres. what will surprise you is that the unjustified are those most firmly established in the eyes of the public. you yourself, brichot, who would thrust your hand in the flames to answer for the virtue of some man or other who comes to this house and whom the enlightened know to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you feel obliged to believe like every tom, d-ck and harry in what is said about some man in the public eye who is the incarnation of those propensities to the common herd, when as a matter of fact, he doesn’t care twopence for that sort of thing. i say twopence, because if we were to offer five-and-twenty louis, we should see the number of plaster saints dwindle down to nothing. as things are, the average rate of sanct-ty, if you see any sanct-ty in that sort of thing, is somewhere between thirty and forty per cent.” if brichot had transferred to the male s-x the question of evil reputations, with me it was, inversely, to the female s-x that, thinking of albertine, i applied the baron’s words. i was appalled at his statistics, even when i bore in mind that he was probably enlarging his figures to reach the total that he would like to believe true, and had based them moreover upon the reports of persons who were scandalmongers and possibly liars, and had in any case been led astray by their own desire, which, coming in addition to that of m. de charlus, doubtless falsified the baron’s calculations. “thirty per cent!” exclaimed brichot. “why, even if the proportions were reversed i should still have to multiply the guilty a hundredfold. if it is as you say, baron, and you are not mistaken, then we must confess that you are one of those rare visionaries who discern a truth which n0body round them has ever suspected. just as barrés made discoveries as to parliamentary corruption, the truth of which was afterwards established, like the existence of leverrier’s planet. mme. verdurin would prefer to cite men whom i would rather not name who detected in the intelligence bureau, in the general staff, activities inspired, i am sure, by patriotic zeal, which i had never imagined. upon free-masonry, german espionage, morphinomania, léon daudet builds up, day by day, a fantastic fairy-tale which turns out to be the barest truth. thirty per cent!” brichot repeated in stupefaction. it is only fair to say that m. de charlus taxed the great majority of his contemporaries with inversion, always excepting those men with whom he himself had had relations, their case, provided that they had introduced the least trace of romance into those relations, appearing to him more complex. so it is that we see men of the world, who refuse to believe in women’s honour, allow some remnants of honour only to the woman who has been their mistress, as to whom they protest sincerely and with an air of mystery: “no, you are mistaken, she is not that sort of girl.” this unlooked-for tribute is dictated partly by their own self-respect which is flattered by the supposition that such favours have been reserved for them alone, partly by their simplicity which has easily swallowed everything that their mistress has given them to believe, partly from that sense of the complexity of life which brings it about that, as soon as we approach other people, other lives, ready-made labels and cl-ssifications appear unduly crude. “thirty per cent! but have a care; less fortunate than the historians whose conclusions the future will justify, baron, if you were to present to posterity the statistics that you offer us, it might find them erroneous. posterity judges only from doc-mentary evidence, and will insist on being -ssured of your facts. but as no doc-ment would be forthcoming to authenticate this sort of collective phenomena which the few persons who are enlightened are only too ready to leave in obscurity, the best minds would be moved to indignation, and you would be regarded as nothing more than a slanderer or a lunatic. after having, in the social examination, obtained top marks and the primacy upon this earth, you would taste the sorrows of a blackball beyond the grave. that is not worth powder and shot, to quote — may god forgive me — our friend bossuet.” “i am not interested in history,” replied m. de charlus, “this life is sufficient for me, it is quite interesting enough, as poor swann used to say.” “what, you knew swann, baron, i was not aware of that. tell me, was he that way inclined?” brichot inquired with an air of misgiving!“what a mind the man has! so you suppose that i only know men like that. no, i don’t think so,” said charlus, looking to the ground and trying to weigh the pros and cons. and deciding that, since he was dealing with swann whose hostility to that sort of thing had always been notorious, a half-admission could only be harmless to him who was its object and flattering to him who allowed it to escape in an insinuation: “i don’t deny that long ago in our schooldays, once by accident,” said the baron, as though unwillingly and as though he were thinking aloud, then recovering himself: “but that was centuries ago, how do you expect me to remember, you are making a fool of me,” he concluded with a laugh. “in any case, he was never what you’d call a beauty!” said brichot who, himself hideous, thought himself good-looking and was always ready to believe that other men were ugly. “hold your tongue,” said the baron, “you don’t know what you’re talking about, in those days he had a peach-like complexion, and,” he added, finding a fresh note for each syllable, “he was as beautiful as cupid himself. besides he was always charming. the women were madly in love with him.” “but did you ever know his wife?” “why, it was through me that he came to know her. i thought her charming in her disguise one evening when she played miss sacripant; i was with some fellows from the club, each of us took a woman home with him, and, although all that i wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged, for it is terrible how malicious people are, that i went to bed with odette. only she took advantage of the slanders to come and worry me, and i thought i might get rid of her by introducing her to swann. from that moment she never let me go, she couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was i who wrote all her letters for her. and it was i who, afterwards, had to take her out. that, my boy, is what comes of having a good reputation, you see. though i only half deserved it. she forced me to help her to betray him, with five, with six other men.” and the lovers whom odette had had in succession (she had been with this man, then with that, those men not one of whose names had ever been guessed by poor swann, blinded in turn by jealousy and by love, reckoning the chances and believing in oaths more affirmative than a contradiction which escapes from the culprit, a contradiction far more unseizable, and at the same time far more significant, of which the jealous lover might take advantage more logically than of the information which he falsely pretends to have received, in the hope of confusing his mistress), these lovers m. de charlus began to enumerate with as absolute a certainty as if he had been repeating the list of the kings of france. and indeed the jealous lover is, like the contemporaries of an historical event, too close, he knows nothing, and it is in the eyes of strangers that the comic aspect of adultery -ssumes the precision of history, and prolongs itself in lists of names which are, for that matter, unimportant and become painful only to another jealous lover, such as myself, who cannot help comparing his own case with that which he hears mentioned and asks himself whether the woman of whom he is suspicious cannot boast an equally ill-strious list. but he can never know anything more, it is a sort of universal conspiracy, a ‘blindman’s buff’ in which everyone cruelly partic-p-tes, and which consists, while his mistress flits from one to another, in holding over his eyes a bandage which he is perpetually attempting to tear off without success, for everyone keeps him blindfold, poor wretch, the kind out of kindness, the wicked out of malice, the co-rs–minded out of their love of co-rs- jokes, the well-bred out of politeness and good-breeding, and all alike respecting one of those conventions which are called principles. “but did swann never know that you had enjoyed her favours?” “what an idea! if you had suggested such a thing to charles! it’s enough to make one’s hair stand up on end. why, my dear fellow, he would have k!lled me on the spot, he was as jealous as a tiger. any more than i ever confessed to odette, not that she would have minded in the least, that . . . but you must not make my tongue run away with me. and the joke of it is that it was she who fired a revolver at him, and nearly hit me. oh! i used to have a fine time with that couple; and naturally it was i who was obliged to act as his second against d’osmond, who never forgave me. d’osmond had carried off odette and swann, to console himself, had taken as his mistress, or make-believe mistress, odette’s sister. but really you must not begin to make me tell you swann’s story, we should be here for ten years, don’t you know, n0body knows more about him than i do. it was i who used to take odette out when she did not wish to see charles. it was all the more awkward for me as i have a quite near relative who bears the name crécy, without of course having any manner of right to it, but still he was none too well pleased. for she went by the name of odette de crécy, as she very well might, being merely separated from a crécy whose wife she still was, and quite an authentic person, a highly respectable gentleman out of whom she had drained his last farthing. but why should i have to tell you about this crécy, i have seen you with him on the crawler, you used to have him to dinner at balbec. he must have needed those dinners, poor fellow, he lived upon a tiny allowance that swann made him; i am greatly afraid that, since my friend’s death, that income must have stopped altogether. what i do not understand,” m. de charlus said to me, “is that, since you used often to go to charles’s, you did not ask me this evening to present you to the queen of naples. in fact i can see that you are less interested in people than in curiosities, and that continues to surprise me in a person who knew swann, in whom that sort of interest was so far developed that it is impossible to say whether it was i who initiated him in these matters or he myself. it surprises me as much as if i met a person who had known whistler and remained ignorant of what is meant by taste. by jove, it is morel that ought really to have been presented to her, he was p-ssionately keen on it too, for he is the most intelligent fellow you could imagine. it is a nuisance that she has left. however, i shall effect the conjunction one of these days. it is indispensable that he should know her. the only possible obstacle would be if she were to die in the night. well, we may hope that it will not happen.” all of a sudden brichot, who was still suffering from the shock of the proportion ‘thirty per cent’ which m. de charlus had revealed to him, brichot who had continued all this time in the pursuit of his idea, with an abruptness which suggested that of an examining magistrate seeking to make a prisoner confess, but which was in reality the result of the professor’s desire to appear perspicacious and of the misgivings that he felt about launching so grave an accusation, spoke. “isn’t ski like that?” he inquired of m. de charlus with a sombre air. to make us admire his alleged power of intuition, he had chosen ski, telling himself that since there were only three innocent men in every ten, he ran little risk of being mistaken if he named ski who seemed to him a trifle odd, suffered from insomnia, scented himself, in short was not entirely normal. “nothing of the sort!” exclaimed the baron with a bitter, dogmatic, exasperated irony. “what you say is utterly false, absurd, fantastic. ski is like that precisely to the people who know nothing about it; if he was, he would not look so like it, be it said without any intention to criticise, for he has a certain charm, indeed i find something very attractive about him.” “but give us a few names, then,” brichot pursued with insistence. m. de charlus drew himself up with a forbidding air. “ah! my dear sir, i, as you know, live in a world of abstraction, all that sort of thing interests me only from a transcendental point of view,” he replied with the touchy susceptibility peculiar to men of his kind, and the affectation of grandiloquence that characterised his conversation. “to me, you understand, it is only general principles that are of any interest, i speak to you of this as i might of the law of gravitation.” but these moments of irritable reaction in which the baron sought to conceal his true life lasted but a short time compared with the hours of continual progression in which he allowed it to be guessed, displayed it with an irritating complacency, the need to confide being stronger in him than the fear of divulging his secret. “what i was trying to say,” he went on, “is that for one evil reputation that is unjustified there are hundreds of good ones which are no less so. obviously, the number of those who do not merit their reputations varies according to whether you rely upon what is said by men of their sort or by the others. and it is true that if the malevolence of the latter is limited by the extreme difficulty which they would find in believing that a vice as horrible to them as robbery or murder is being practised by men whom they know to be sensitive and sincere, the malevolence of the former is stimulated to excess by the desire to regard as — what shall i say? — accessible, men who appeal to them, upon the strength of information given them by people who have been led astray by a similar desire, in fact by the very aloofness with which they are generally regarded. i have heard a man, viewed with considerable disfavour on account of these tastes, say that he supposed that a certain man in society shared them. and his sole reason for believing it was that this other man had been polite to him! so many reasons for optimism,” said the baron artlessly, “in the computation of the number. but the true reason of the enormous difference that exists between the number calculated by the profane, and that calculated by the initiated, arises from the mystery with which the latter surround their actions, in order to conceal them from the rest, who, lacking any source of information, would be literally stupefied if they were to learn merely a quarter of the truth.” “then in our days, things are as they were among the greeks,” said brichot. “what do you mean, among the greeks? do you suppose that it has not been going on ever since? take the reign of louis xiv, you have young vermandois, molière, prince louis of baden, brunswick, charolais, boufflers, the great condé, the duc de brissac.” “stop a moment, i knew about monsieur, i knew about brissac from saint-simon, vendôme of course, and many, others as well. but that old pest saint-simon often refers to the great condé and prince louis of baden and never mentions it.” “it seems a pity, i must say, that it should fall to me to teach a professor of the sorbonne his history. but, my dear master, you are as ignorant as a carp.” “you are harsh, baron, but just. and, wait a moment, now this will please you, i remember now a song of the period composed in macaronic verse about a certain storm which surprised the great condé as he was going down the rhône in the company of his friend, the marquis de la moussaye. condé says:
carus amicus mussaeus
ah! quod tempus, bonus deus
landerirette
imbre sumus perituri
and la moussaye re-ssures him with:
securae sunt nostrae vitae
sumus enim sodomitae
igne tantum perituri
landeriri.”
“i take back what i said,” said charlus in a shrill and mannered tone, “you are a well of learning, you will write it down for me, won’t you, i must preserve it in my family archives, since my great-great-great-grandmother was a sister of m. le prince.” “yes, but, baron, with regard to prince louis of baden i can think of nothing. however, at that period, i suppose that generally speaking the art of war. . . . ” “what nonsense, vendôme, villars, prince eugène, the prince de conti, and if i were to tell you of all the heroes of tonkin, morocco, and i am thinking of men who are truly sublime, and pious, and ‘new generation,’ i should astonish you greatly. ah! i should have something to teach the people who are making inquiries about the new generation which has rejected the futile complications of its elders, m. bourget tells us! i have a young friend out there, who is highly spoken of, who has done great things, however, i am not going to tell tales out of school, let us return to the seventeenth century, you know that saint-simon says of the maréchal d’huxelles — one among many: ‘voluptuous in grecian debaucheries which he made no attempt to conceal, he used to get hold of young officers whom he trained to his purpose, not to mention stalwart young valets, and this openly, in the army and at strasbourg.’ you have probably read madame’s letters, all his men called him ‘putain.’ she is quite outspoken about it.” “and she was in a good position to know, with her husband.” “such an interesting character, madame,” said m. de charlus. “one might base upon her the lyrical synthesis of ‘wives of aunties.’ first of all, the masculine type; generally the wife of an auntie is a man, that is what makes it so easy for her to bear him children. then madame does not mention monsieur’s vices, but she does mention incessantly the same vice in other men, writing as a well-informed woman, from that tendency which makes us enjoy finding in other people’s families the same defects as afflict us in our own, in order to prove to ourselves that there is nothing exceptional or degrading in them. i was saying that things have been much the same in every age. nevertheless, our own is quite remarkable in that respect. and notwithstanding the instances that i have borrowed from the seventeenth century, if my great ancestor françois c. de la rochefoucauld were alive in these days, he might say of them with even more justification than of his own — come, brichot, help me out: ‘vices are common to every age; but if certain persons whom everyone knows had appeared in the first centuries of our era, would anyone speak to-day of the prost-tutions of heliogabalus?’ ‘whom everyone knows’ appeals to me immensely. i see that my sagacious kinsman understood the tricks of his most ill-strious contemporaries as i understand those of my own. but men of that sort are not only far more frequent to-day. they have also special characteristics.” i could see that m. de charlus was about to tell us in what fashion these habits had evolved. the insistence with which m. de charlus kept on reverting to this topic — into which, moreover, his intellect, constantly trained in the same direction, had acquired a certain penetration — was, in a complicated way, distinctly trying. he was as boring as a specialist who can see nothing outside his own subject, as irritating as a well-informed man whose vanity is flattered by the secrets which he possesses and is burning to divulge, as repellent as those people who, whenever their own defects are mentioned, spread themselves without noticing that they are giving offence, as obsessed as a maniac and as uncontrollably imprudent as a criminal. these characteristics which, at certain moments, became as obvious as those that stamp a madman or a criminal, brought me, as it happened, a certain consolation. for, making them undergo the necessary transposition in order to be able to draw from them deductions with regard to albertine, and remembering her att-tude towards saint-loup, and towards myself, i said to myself, painful as one of these memories and melancholy as the other was to me, i said to myself that they seemed to exclude the kind of deformity so plainly denounced, the kind of specialisation inevitably exclusive, it appeared, which was so vehemently apparent in the conversation as in the person of m. de charlus. but he, as ill luck would have it, made haste to destroy these grounds for hope in the same way as he had furnished me with them, that is to say unconsciously. “yes,” he said, “i am no longer in my teens, and i have already seen many things change round about me, i no longer recognise either society, in which the barriers are broken down, in which a mob, devoid of elegance and decency, dance the tango even in my own family, or fashions, or politics, or the arts, or religion, or anything. but i must admit that the thing which has changed most of all is what the germans call h0m-s-xuality. good god, in my day, apart from the men who loathed women, and those who, caring only for women, did the other thing merely with an eye to profit, the h0m-s-xuals were sound family men and never kept mistresses except to screen themselves. if i had had a daughter to give away, it is among them that i should have looked for my son-in-law if i had wished to be certain that she would not be unhappy. alas! things have changed entirely. nowadays they are recruited also from the men who are the most insatiable with women. i thought i possessed a certain instinct, and that when i said to myself: ‘certainly not,’ i could not have been mistaken. well, i give it up. one of my friends, who is well-known for that sort of thing, bad a coachman whom my sister-in-law oriane found for him, a lad from combray who was something of a jack of all trades, but particularly in trading with women, and who, i would have sworn, was as hostile as possible to anything of that sort. he broke his mistress’s heart by betraying her with two women whom he adored, not to mention the others, an actress and a girl from a bar. my cousin the prince de guermantes, who has that irritating intelligence of people who are too ready to believe anything, said to me one day: ‘but why in the world does not x——-have his coachman? it might be a pleasure to théodore’ (which is the coachman’s name) ‘and he may be annoyed at finding that his master does not make advances to him.’ i could not help telling gilbert to hold his tongue; i was overwrought both by that boasted perspicacity which, when it is exercised indiscriminately, is a want of perspicacity, and also by the sîlver-lined malice of my cousin who would have liked x——-to risk taking the first steps so that, if the going was good, he might follow.” “then the prince de guermantes is like that, too?” asked brichot with a blend of astonishment and dismay. “good god,” replied m. de charlus, highly delighted, “it is so notorious that i don’t think i am guilty of an indiscretion if i tell you that he is. very well, the year after this, i went to balbec, where i heard from a sailor who used to take me out fishing occasionally, that my théodore, whose sister, i may mention, is the maid of a friend of mme. verdurin, baroness putbus, used to come down to the harbour to pick up now one sailor, now another, with the most infernal cheek, to go for a trip on the sea ‘with extras.’” it was now my turn to inquire whether his employer, whom i had identified as the gentleman who at balbec used to play cards all day long with his mistress, and who was the leader of the little group of four boon companions, was like the prince of guermantes. “why, of course, everyone knows about him, he makes no attempt to conceal it.” “but he had his mistress there with him.” “well, and what difference does that make? how innocent these children are,” he said to me in a fatherly tone, little suspecting the grief that i extracted from his words when i thought of albertine. “she is charming, his mistress.” “but then his three friends are like himself.” “not at all,” he cried, stopping his ears as though, in playing some instrument, i had struck a wrong note. “now he has gone to the other extreme. so a man has no longer the right to have friends? ah! youth, youth; it gets everything wrong. we shall have to begin your education over again, my boy. well,” he went on, “i admit that this case, and i know of many others, however open a mind i may try to keep for every form of audacity, does embarr-ss me. i may be very old-fashioned, but i fail to understand,” he said in the tone of an old gallican speaking of some development of ultramontanism, of a liberal royalist speaking of the action française or of a disciple of claude monet speaking of the cubists. “i do not reproach these innovators, i envy them if anything, i try to understand them, but i do not succeed. if they are so p-ssionately fond of woman, why, and especially in this workaday world where that sort of thing is so frowned upon, where they conceal themselves from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? it is because it represents to them something else. what?” “what else can a woman represent to albertine,” i thought, and there indeed lay the cause of my anguish. “decidedly, baron,” said brichot, “should the board of studies ever think of founding a chair of h0m-s-xuality, i shall see that your name is the first to be submitted. or rather, no; an inst-tute of psycho-physiology would suit you better. and i can see you, best of all, provided with a chair in the collège de france, which would enable you to devote yourself to personal researches the results of which you would deliver, like the professor of tamil or sanskrit, to the handful of people who are interested in them. you would have an audience of two, with your -ssistant, not that i mean to cast the slightest suspicion upon our corps of janitors, whom i believe to be above suspicion.” “you know nothing about them,” the baron retorted in a harsh and cutting tone. “besides you are wrong in thinking that so few people are interested in the subject. it is just the opposite.” and without stopping to consider the incompatibility between the invariable trend of his own conversation and the reproach which he was about to heap upon other people: “it is, on the contrary, most alarming,” said the baron, with a scandalised and contrite air, “people are talking about nothing else. it is a scandal, but i am not exaggerating, my dear fellow! it appears that, the day before yesterday, at the d-ch-sse d’agen’s, they talked about nothing else for two hours on end; you can imagine, if women have taken to discussing that sort of thing, it is a positive scandal! what is vilest of all is that they get their information,” he went on with an extraordinary fire and emphasis, “from pests, regular harlots like young châtellerault, who has the worst reputation in the world, who tell them stories about other men. i have been told that he said more than enough to hang me, but i don’t care, i am convinced that the mud and filth flung by an individual who barely escaped being turned out of the jockey for cheating at cards can only fall back upon himself. i am sure that if i were jane d’agen, i should have sufficient respect for my drawing-room not to allow such subjects to be discussed in it, nor to allow my own flesh and blood to be dragged through the mire in my house. but there is no longer any society, any rules, any conventions, in conversation any more than in dress. ah, my dear fellow, it is the end of the world. everyone has become so malicious. the prize goes to the man who can speak most evil of his fellows. it is appalling.”
as cowardly still as i had been long ago in my boyhood at combray when i used to run away in order not to see my grandfather tempted with brandy and the vain efforts of my grandmother imploring him not to drink it, i had but one thought in my mind, which was to leave the verdurins’ house before the execution of m. de charlus occurred. “i simply must go,” i said to brichot. “i am coming with you,” he replied, “but we cannot slip away, english fashion. come and say good-bye to mme. verdurin,” the professor concluded, as he made his way to the drawing-room with the air of a man who, in a guessing game, goes to find out whether he may ‘come back.’
while we conversed, m. verdurin, at a signal from his wife, had taken morel aside. indeed, had mme. verdurin decided, after considering the matter in all its aspects, that it was wiser to postpone morel’s enlightenment, she was powerless now to prevent it. there are certain desires, some of them confined to the mouth, which, as soon as we have allowed them to grow, insist upon being gratified, whatever the consequences may be; we are unable to resist the temptation to kiss a bare shoulder at which we have been gazing for too long and at which our lips strike like a serpent at a bird, to bury our sweet tooth in a cake that has fascinated and famished it, nor can we forego the delight of the amazement, anxiety, grief or mirth to which we can move another person by some unexpected communication. so, in a frenzy of melodrama, mme. verdurin had ordered her husband to take morel out of the room and, at all costs, to explain matters to him. the violinist had begun by deploring the departure of the queen of naples before he had had a chance of being presented to her. m. de charlus had told him so often that she was the sister of the empress elisabeth and of the d-ch-sse d’alençon that her majesty had -ssumed an extraordinary importance in his eyes. but the master explained to him that it was not to talk about the queen of naples that they had withdrawn from the rest, and then went straight to the root of the matter. “listen,” he had concluded after a long explanation; “listen; if you like, we can go and ask my wife what she thinks. i give you my word of honour, i’ve said nothing to her about it. we shall see how she looks at it. my advice is perhaps not the best, but you know how sound her judgment is; besides, she is extremely attached to yourself, let us go and submit the case to her.” and while mme. verdurin, awaiting with impatience the emotions that she would presently be relishing as she talked to the musician, and again, after he had gone, when she made her husband give her a full report of their conversation, continued to repeat: “but what in the world can they be doing? i do hope that my husband, in keeping him all this time, has managed to give him his cue,” m. verdurin reappeared with morel who seemed greatly moved. “he would like to ask your advice,” m. verdurin said to his wife, in the tone of a man who does not know whether his prayer will be heard. instead of replying to m. verdurin, it was to morel that, in the heat of her p-ssion, mme. verdurin addressed herself. “i agree entirely with my husband, i consider that you cannot tolerate this sort of thing for another instant,” she exclaimed with violence, discarding as a useless fiction her agreement with her husband that she was supposed to know nothing of what he had been saying to the violinist. “how do you mean? tolerate what?” stammered m. verdurin, endeavouring to feign astonishment and seeking, with an awkwardness that was explained by his dismay, to defend his falsehood. “i guessed what you were saying to him,” replied mme. verdurin, undisturbed by the improbability of this explanation, and caring little what, when he recalled this scene, the violinist might think of the mistress’s veracity. “no,” mme. verdurin continued, “i feel that you ought not to endure any longer this degrading promiscuity with a tainted person whom n0body will have in her house,” she went on, regardless of the fact that this was untrue and forgetting that she herself entertained him almost daily. “you are the talk of the conservatoire,” she added, feeling that this was the argument that carried most weight; “another month of this life and your artistic future is shattered, whereas, without charlus, you ought to be making at least a hundred thousand francs a year.” “but i have never heard anyone utter a word, i am astounded, i am very grateful to you,” morel murmured, the tears starting to his eyes. but, being obliged at once to feign astonishment and to conceal his shame, he had turned redder and was perspiring more abundantly than if he had played all beethoven’s sonatas in succession, and tears welled from his eyes which the bonn master would certainly not have drawn from him. “if you have never heard anything, you are unique in that respect. he is a gentleman with a vile reputation and the most shocking stories are told about him. i know that the police are watching him and that is perhaps the best thing for him if he is not to end like all those men, murdered by hooligans,” she went on, for as she thought of charlus the memory of mme. de duras recurred to her, and in her frenzy of rage she sought to aggravate still further the wounds that she was inflicting on the unfortunate charlie, and to avenge herself for those that she had received in the course of the evening. “anyhow, even financially, he can be of no use to you, he is completely ruined since he has become the prey of people who are blackmailing him, and who can’t even make him fork out the price of the tune they call, still less can he pay you for your playing, for it is all heavily mortgaged, town house, country house, everything.” morel was all the more ready to believe this lie since m. de charlus liked to confide in him his relations with hooligans, a race for which the son of a valet, however debauched he may be, professes a feeling of horror as strong as his attachment to bonapartist principles
already, in the cunning mind of morel, a plan was beginning to take shape similar to what was called in the eighteenth century the reversal of alliances. determined never to speak to m. de charlus again, he would return on the following evening to jupien’s niece, and see that everything was made straight with her. unfortunately for him this plan was doomed to failure, m. de charlus having made an appointment for that very evening with jupien, which the ex-tailor dared not fail to keep, in spite of recent events. other events, as we shall see, having followed upon morel’s action, when jupien in tears told his tale of woe to the baron, the latter, no less wretched, -ssured him that he would adopt the forsaken girl, that she should -ssume one of the t-tles that were at his disposal, probably that of mlle. d’oloron, that he would see that she received a thorough education, and furnish her with a rich husband. promises which filled jupien with joy and left his niece unmoved, for she was still in love with morel, who, from stupidity or cynicism, used to come into the shop and tease her in jupien’s absence. “what is the matter with you,” he would say with a laugh, “with those black marks under your eyes? a broken heart? gad, the years p-ss and people change. after all, a man is free to try on a shoe, all the more a woman, and if she doesn’t fit him. . . . ” he lost his temper once only, because she cried, which he considered cowardly, unworthy of her. people are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked
but we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the verdurins’ party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off. “i should never have suspected it,” morel groaned, in answer to mme. verdurin. “naturally people do not say it to your face, that does not prevent your being the talk of the conservatoire,” mme. verdurin went on wickedly, seeking to make it plain to morel that it was not only m. de charlus that was being criticised, but himself also. “i can well believe that you know nothing about it; all the same, people are quite outspoken. ask ski what they were saying the other day at chevillard’s within a foot of us when you came into my box. i mean to say, people point you out. as far as i’m concerned, i don’t pay the slightest attention, but what i do feel is that it makes a man supremely ridiculous and that he becomes a public laughing-stock for the rest of his life.” “i don’t know how to thank you,” said charlie in the tone we use to a dentist who has just caused us terrible pain while we tried not to let him see it, or to a too bloodthirsty second who has forced us into a duel on account of some casual remark of which he has said: “you can’t swallow that.” “i believe that you have plenty of character, that you are a man,” replied mme. verdurin, “and that you will be capable of speaking out boldly, although he tells everybody that you would never dare, that he holds you fast.” charlie, seeking a borrowed dignity in which to cloak the tatters of his own, found in his memory something that he had read or, more probably, heard quoted, and at once proclaimed: “i was not brought up to eat that sort of bread. this very evening i will break with m. de charlus. the queen of naples has gone, hasn’t she? otherwise, before breaking with him, i should like to ask him. . . . ” “it is not necessary to break with him altogether,” said mme. verdurin, anxious to avoid a disruption of the little nucleus. “there is no harm in your seeing him here, among our little group, where you are appreciated, where no one speaks any evil of you. but insist upon your freedom, and do not let him drag you about among all those sheep who are friendly to your face; i wish you could have heard what they were saying behind your back. anyhow, you need feel no regret, not only are you wiping off a stain which would have marked you for the rest of your life, from the artistic point of view, even if there had not been this scandalous presentation by charlus, i don’t mind telling you that wasting yourself like this in this sham society will make people suppose that you aren’t serious, give you an amateur reputation, as a little drawing-room performer, which is a terrible thing at your age. i can understand that to all those fine ladies it is highly convenient to be able to return their friends’ hospitality by making you come and play for nothing, but it is your future as an artist that would foot the bill. i don’t say that you shouldn’t go to one or two of them. you were speaking of the queen of naples — who has left, for she had to go on to another party — now she is a splendid woman, and i don’t mind saying that i think she has a poor opinion of charlus and came here chiefly to please me. yes, yes, i know she was longing to meet us, m. verdurin and myself. that is a house in which you might play. and then i may tell you that if i take you — because the artists all know me, you understand, they have always been most obliging to me, and regard me almost as one of themselves, as their mistress — that is a very different matter. but whatever you do, you must never go near mme. de duras! don’t go and make a stupid blunder like that! i know several artists who have come here and told me all about her. they know they can trust me,” she said, in the sweet and simple tone which she knew how to adopt in an instant, imparting an appropriate air of modesty to her features, an appropriate charm to her eyes, “they come here, just like that, to tell me all their little troubles; the ones who are said to be most silent, go on chatting to me sometimes for hours on end and i can’t tell you how interesting they are. poor chabrier used always to say: ‘there’s n0body like mme. verdurin for getting them to talk.’ very well, don’t you know, all of them, without one exception, i have seen them in tears because they had gone to play for mme. de duras. it is not only the way she enjoys making her servants humiliate them, they could never get an engagement anywhere else again. the agents would say: ‘oh yes, the fellow who plays at mme. de duras’s.’ that settled it. there is nothing like that for ruining a man’s future. you know what society people are like, it’s not taken seriously, you may have all the talent in the world, it’s a dreadful thing to have to say, but one mme. de duras is enough to give you the reputation of an amateur. and among artists, don’t you know, well i, you can ask yourself whether i know them, when i have been moving among them for forty years, launching them, taking an interest in them; very well, when they say that somebody is an amateur, that finishes it. and people were beginning to say it of you. indeed, at times i have been obliged to take up the cudgels, to -ssure them that you would not play in some absurd drawing-room! do you know what the answer was: ‘but he will be forced to go, charlus won’t even consult him, he never asks him for his opinion.’ somebody thought he would pay him a compliment and said: ‘we greatly admire your friend morel.’ can you guess what answer he made, with that insolent air which you know? ‘but what do you mean by calling him my friend, we are not of the same cl-ss, say rather that he is my creature, my protégé.’” at this moment there stirred beneath the convex brows of the musical deity the one thing that certain people cannot keep to themselves, a saying which it is not merely abject but imprudent to repeat. but the need to repeat it is stronger than honour, than prudence. it was to this need that, after a few convulsive movements of her spherical and sorrowful brows, the mistress succ-mbed: “some one actually told my husband that he had said ‘my servant,’ but for that i cannot vouch,” she added. it was a similar need that had compelled m. de charlus, shortly after he had sworn to morel that n0body should ever know the story of his birth, to say to mme. verdurin: “his father was a flunkey.” a similar need again, now that the story had been started, would make it circulate from one person to another, each of whom would confide it under the seal of a secrecy which would be promised and not kept by the hearer, as by the informant himself. these stories would end, as in the game called hunt-the-thimble, by being traced back to mme. verdurin, bringing down upon her the wrath of the person concerned, who would at last have learned the truth. she knew this, but could not repress the words that were burning her tongue. anyhow, the word ‘servant’ was bound to annoy morel. she said ‘servant’ nevertheless, and if she added that she could not vouch for the word, this was so as at once to appear certain of the rest, thanks to this hint of uncertainty, and to shew her impartiality. this impartiality that she shewed, she herself found so touching that she began to speak affectionately to charlie: “for, don’t you see,” she went on, “i am not blaming him, he is dragging you down into his abyss, it is true, but it is not his fault, since he wallows in it himself, since he wallows in it,” she repeated in a louder tone, having been struck by the aptness of the image which had taken shape so quickly that her attention only now overtook it and was trying to give it prominence. “no, the fault that i do find with him,” she said in a melting tone — like a woman drunken with her own success —“is a want of delicacy towards yourself. there are certain things which one does not say in public. well, this evening, he was betting that he would make you blush with joy, by telling you (stuff and nonsense, of course, for his recommendation would be enough to prevent your getting it) that you were to have the cross of the legion of honour. even that i could overlook, although i have never quite liked,” she went on with a delicate, dignified air, “hearing a person make a fool of his friends, but, don’t you know, there are certain little things that one does resent. such as when he told us, with screams of laughter, that if you want the cross it’s to please your uncle and that your uncle was a footman.” “he told you that!” cried charlie, believing, on the strength of this adroitly interpolated quotation, in the truth of everything that mme. verdurin had said! mme. verdurin was overwhelmed with the joy of an old mistress who, just as her young lover was on the point of deserting her, has succeeded in breaking off his marriage, and it is possible that she had not calculated her lie, that she was not even consciously lying. a sort of sentimental logic, something perhaps more elementary still, a sort of nervous reflex urging her, in order to brighten her life and preserve her happiness, to stir up trouble in the little clan, may have brought impulsively to her lips, without giving her time to check their veracity, these -ssertions diabolically effective if not rigorously exact. “if he had only repeated it to us, it wouldn’t matter,” the mistress went on, “we know better than to listen to what he says, besides, what does a man’s origin matter, you have your own value, you are what you make yourself, but that he should use it to make mme. de portefin laugh” (mme. verdurin named this lady on purpose because she knew that charlie admired her) “that is what vexes us: my husband said to me when he heard him: ‘i would sooner he had struck me in the face.’ for he is as fond of you as i am, don’t you know, is gustave” (from this we learn that m. verdurin’s name was gustave). “he is really very sensitive.” “but i never told you i was fond of him,” muttered m. verdurin, acting the kind-hearted curmudgeon. “it is charlus that is fond of him.” “oh, no! now i realise the difference, i was betrayed by a scoundrel and you, you are good,” charlie exclaimed in all sincerity. “no, no,” murmured mme. verdurin, seeking to retain her victory, for she felt that her wednesdays were safe, but not to abuse it: “scoundrel is too strong; he does harm, a great deal of harm, unconsciously; you know that tale about the legion of honour was the affair of a moment. and it would be painful to me to repeat all that he said about your family,” said mme. verdurin, who would have been greatly embarr-ssed had she been asked to do so. “oh, even if it only took a moment, it proves that he is a traitor,” cried morel. it was at this moment that we returned to the drawing-room. “ah!” exclaimed m. de charlus when he saw that morel was in the room, advancing upon him with the alacrity of the man who has sk!llfully organised a whole evening’s entertainment with a view to an -ssignation with a woman, and in his excitement never imagines that he has with his own hands set the snare in which he will presently be caught and publicly thrashed by bravoes stationed in readiness by her husband. “well, after all it is none too soon; are you satisfied, young glory, and presently young knight of the legion of honour? for very soon you will be able to sport your cross,” m. de charlus said to morel with a tender and triumphant air, but by the very mention of the decoration endorsed mme. verdurin’s lies, which appeared to morel to be indisputable truth. “leave me alone, i forbid you to come near me,” morel shouted at the baron. “you know what i mean, all right, i’m not the first young man you’ve tried to corrupt!” my sole consolation lay in the thought that i was about to see morel and the verdurins pulverised by m. de charlus. for a thousand times less an offence i had been visited with his furious rage, no one was safe from it, a king would not have intimidated him. instead of which, an extraordinary thing happened. one saw m. de charlus dumb, stupefied, measuring the depths of his misery without understanding its cause, finding not a word to utter, raising his eyes to stare at each of the company in turn, with a questioning, outraged, suppliant air, which seemed to be asking them not so much what had happened as what answer he ought to make. and yet m. de charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity, when, seized by a rage which had long been simmering against some one, he reduced him to desperation, with the most outrageous speeches, in front of a scandalised society which had never imagined that anyone could go so far. m. de charlus, on these occasions, burned, convulsed with a sort of epilepsy, which left everyone trembling. but in these instances he had the initiative, he launched the attack, he said whatever came into his mind (just as bloch was able to make fun of jews and blushed if the word jew was uttered in his hearing). perhaps what struck him speechless was — when he saw that m. and mme. verdurin turned their eyes from him and that no one was coming to his rescue — his anguish at the moment and, still more, his dread of greater anguish to come; or else that, not having lost his temper in advance, in imagination, and forged his thunderbolt, not having his rage ready as a weapon in his hand, he had been seized and dealt a mortal blow at the moment when he was unarmed (for, sensitive, neurotic, hysterical, his impulses were genuine, but his courage was a sham; indeed, as i had always thought, and this was what made me like him, his malice was a sham also: the people whom he hated, he hated because he thought that they looked down upon him; had they been civil to him, instead of flying into a furious rage with them, he would have taken them to his bosom, and he did not shew the normal reactions of a man of honour who has been insulted); or else that, in a sphere which was not his own, he felt himself less at his ease and less courageous than he would have been in the faubourg. the fact remains that, in this drawing-room which he despised, this great n0bleman (in whom his sense of superiority to the middle cl-sses was no less essentially inherent than it had been in any of his ancestors who had stood in the dock before the revolutionary tribunal) could do nothing, in a paralysis of all his members, including his tongue, but cast in every direction glances of terror, outraged by the violence that had been done to him, no less suppliant than questioning. in a situation so cruelly unforeseen, this great talker could do no more than stammer: “what does it all mean, what has happened?” his question was not even heard. and the eternal pantomime of panic terror has so little altered, that this elderly gentleman, to whom a disagreeable incident had just occurred in a parisian drawing-room, unconsciously repeated the various formal att-tudes in which the greek sculptors of the earliest times symbolised the terror of nymphs pursued by the great pan
the amb-ssador who has been recalled, the undersecretary placed suddenly on the retired list, the man about town whom people began to cut, the lover who has been shewn the door examine sometimes for months on end the event that has shattered their hopes; they turn it over and over like a projectile fired at them they know not whence or by whom, almost as though it were a meteorite. they would fain know the elements that compose this strange engine which has burst upon them, learn what hostilities may be detected in them. chemists have at least the power of -n-lysis; sick men suffering from a malady the origin of which they do not know can send for the doctor; criminal mysteries are more or less solved by the examining magistrate. but when it comes to the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men, we rarely discover their motives. thus m. de charlus, to antic-p-te the days that followed this party to which we shall presently return, could see in charlie’s att-tude one thing alone that was self-evident. charlie, who had often threatened the baron that he would tell people of the p-ssion that he inspired in him, must have seized the opportunity to do so when he considered that he had now sufficiently ‘arrived’ to be able to fly unaided. and he must, out of sheer ingrat-tude, have told mme. verdurin everything. but how had she allowed herself to be taken in (for the baron, having made up his mind to deny the story, had already persuaded himself that the sentiments for which he was blamed were imaginary)? some friends of mme. verdurin, who themselves perhaps felt a p-ssion for charlie, must have prepared the ground. accordingly, m. de charlus during the next few days wrote terrible letters to a number of the faithful, who were entirely innocent and concluded that he must be mad; then he went to mme. verdurin with a long and moving tale, which had not at all the effect that he desired. for in the first place mme. verdurin repeated to the baron: “all you need do is not to bother about him, treat him with scorn, he is a mere boy.” now the baron longed only for a reconciliation. in the second place, to bring this about, by depriving charlie of everything of which he had felt himself -ssured, he asked mme. verdurin not to invite him again; a request which she met with a refusal that brought upon her angry and sarcastic letters from m. de charlus. flitting from one supposition to another, the baron never arrived at the truth, which was that the blow had not come from morel. it is true that he might have learned this by asking him for a few minutes’ conversation. but he felt that this would injure his dignity and would be against the interests of his love. he had been insulted, he awaited an explanation. there is, for that matter, almost invariably, attached to the idea of a conversation which might clear up a misunderstanding, another idea which, whatever the reason, prevents us from agreeing to that conversation. the man who is abased and has shewn his weakness on a score of occasions, will furnish proofs of pride on the twenty-first, the only occasion on which it would serve him not to adopt a headstrong and arrogant att-tude but to dispel an error which will take root in his adversary failing a contradiction. as for the social side of the incident, the rumour spread abroad that m. de charlus had been turned out of the verdurins’ house at the moment when he was attempting to rape a young musician. the effect of this rumour was that n0body was surprised when m. de charlus did not appear again at the verdurins’, and whenever he happened by chance to meet, anywhere else, one of the faithful whom he had suspected and insulted, as this person had a grudge against the baron who himself abstained from greeting him, people were not surprised, realising that no member of the little clan would ever wish to speak to the baron again
while m. de charlus, rendered speechless by morel’s words and by the att-tude of the mistress, stood there in the pose of the nymph a prey to panic terror, m. and mme. verdurin had retired to the outer drawing-room, as a sign of diplomatic rupture, leaving m. de charlus by himself, while on the platform morel was putting his violin in its case. “now you must tell us exactly what happened,” mme. verdurin appealed avidly to her husband. “i don’t know what you can have said to him, he looked quite upset,” said ski, “there are tears in his eyes.” pretending not to have understood: “i’m sure, nothing that i said could make any difference to him,” said mme. verdurin, employing one of those stratagems which do not deceive everybody, so as to force the sculptor to repeat that charlie was in tears, tears which filled the mistress with too much pride for her to be willing to run the risk that one or other of the faithful, who might not have heard what was said, remained in ignorance of them. “no, it has made a difference, for i saw big tears glistening in his eyes,” said the sculptor in a low tone with a smile of malicious connivance, and a sidelong glance to make sure that morel was still on the platform and could not overhear the conversation. but there was somebody who did overhear, and whose presence, as soon as it was observed, was to restore to morel one of the hopes that he had forfeited. this was the queen of naples, who, having left her fan behind, had thought it more polite, on coming away from another party to which she had gone on, to call for it in person. she had entered the room quite quietly, as though she were ashamed of herself, prepared to make apologies for her presence, and to pay a little call upon her hostess now that all the other guests had gone. but no one had heard her come in, in the heat of the incident the meaning of which she had at once gathered, and which set her ablaze with indignation. “ski says that he had tears in his eyes, did you notice that? i did not see any tears. ah, yes, i remember now,” she corrected herself, in the fear that her denial might not be believed. “as for charlus, he’s not far off them, he ought to take a chair, he’s tottering on his feet, he’ll be on the floor in another minute,” she said with a pitiless laugh. at that moment morel hastened towards her: “isn’t that lady the queen of naples?” he asked (albeit he knew quite well that she was), pointing to her majesty who was making her way towards charlus. “after what has just happened, i can no longer, i’m afraid, ask the baron to present me.” “wait, i shall take you to her myself,” said mme. verdurin, and, followed by a few of the faithful, but not by myself and brichot who made haste to go and call for our hats and coats, she advanced upon the queen who was talking to m. de charlus. he had imagined that the realisation of his great desire that morel should be presented to the queen of naples could be prevented only by the improbable demise of that lady. but we picture the future as a reflexion of the present projected into empty sp-ce, whereas it is the result, often almost immediate, of causes which for the most part escape our notice. not an hour had p-ssed, and now m. de charlus would have given everything he possessed in order that morel should not be presented to the queen. mme. verdurin made the queen a curtsey. seeing that the other appeared not to recognise her: “i am mme. verdurin. your majesty does not remember me.” “quite well,” said the queen as she continued so naturally to converse with m. de charlus and with an air of such complete indifference that mme. verdurin doubted whether it was to herself that this ‘quite well’ had been addressed, uttered with a marvellously detached intonation, which wrung from m. de charlus, despite his broken heart, a smile of expert and delighted appreciation of the art of impertinence. morel, who had watched from the distance the preparations for his presentation, now approached. the queen offered her arm to m. de charlus. with him, too, she was vexed, but only because he did not make a more energetic stand against vile detractors. she was crimson with shame for him whom the verdurins dared to treat in this fashion. the entirely simple civility which she had shewn them a few hours earlier, and the arrogant pride with which she now stood up to face them, had their source in the same region of her heart. the queen, as a woman full of good nature, regarded good nature first and foremost in the form of an unshakable attachment to the people whom she liked, to her own family, to all the princes of her race, among whom was m. de charlus, and, after them, to all the people of the middle cl-sses or of the humblest populace who knew how to respect those whom she liked and felt well-disposed towards them. it was as to a woman endowed with these sound instincts that she had shewn kindness to mme. verdurin. and, no doubt, this is a narrow conception, somewhat tory, and increasingly obsolete, of good nature. but this does not mean that her good nature was any less genuine or ardent. the ancients were no less strongly attached to the group of humanity to which they devoted themselves because it did not exceed the limits of their city, nor are the men of to-day to their country than will be those who in the future love the united states of the world. in my own immediate surroundings, i have had an example of this in my mother whom mme. de cambremer and mme. de guermantes could never persuade to take part in any philanthropic undertaking, to join any patriotic workroom, to sell or to be a patroness at any bazaar. i do not go so far as to say that she was right in doing good only when her heart had first spoken, and in reserving for her own family, for her servants, for the unfortunate whom chance brought in her way, her treasures of love and generosity, but i do know that these, like those of my grandmother, were unbounded and exceeded by far anything that mme. de guermantes or mme. de cambremer ever could have done or did. the case of the queen of naples was altogether different, but even here it must be admitted that her conception of deserving people was not at all that set forth in those novels of dostoievski which albertine had taken from my shelves and devoured, that is to say in the guise of wheedling parasites, thieves, drunkards, at one moment stupid, at another insolent, debauchees, at a pinch murderers. extremes, however, meet, since the n0ble man, the brother, the outraged kinsman whom the queen sought to defend, was m. de charlus, that is to say, notwithstanding his birth and all the family ties that bound him to the queen, a man whose virtue was hedged round by many vices. “you do not look at all well, my dear cousin,” she said to m. de charlus. “léan upon my arm. be sure that it will still support you. it is firm enough for that.” then, raising her eyes proudly to face her adversaries (at that moment, ski told me, there were in front of her mme. verdurin and morel), “you know that, in the past, at gaeta, it held the mob in defiance. it will be able to serve you as a rampart.” and it was thus, taking the baron on her arm and without having allowed morel to be presented to her, that the splendid sister of the empress elisabeth left the house. it might be supposed, in view of m. de charlus’s terrible nature, the persecutions with which he terrorised even his own family, that he would, after the events of this evening, let loose his fury and practise reprisals upon the verdurins. we have seen why nothing of this sort occurred at first. then the baron, having caught cold shortly afterwards, and contracted the septic pneumonia which was very rife that winter, was for long regarded by his doctors, and regarded himself, as being at the point of death, and lay for many months suspended between it and life. was there simply a physical change, and the subst-tution of a different malady for the neurosis that had previously made him lose all control of himself in his outbursts of rage? for it is too obvious to suppose that, having never taken the verdurins seriously, from the social point of view, but having come at last to understand the part that they had played, he was unable to feel the resentment that he would have felt for any of his equals; too obvious also to remember that neurotics, irritated on the slightest provocation by imaginary and inoffensive enemies, become on the contrary inoffensive as soon as anyone takes the offensive against them, and that we can calm them more easily by flinging cold water in their faces than by attempting to prove to them the inanity of their grievances. it is probably not in a physical change that we ought to seek the explanation of this absence of rancour, but far more in the malady itself. it exhausted the baron so completely that he had little leisure left in which to think about the verdurins. he was almost dead. we mentioned offensives; even those which have only a posthumous effect require, if we are to ‘stage’ them properly, the sacrifice of a part of our strength. m. de charlus had too little strength left for the activity of a preparation. we hear often of mortal enemies who open their eyes to gaze upon one another in the hour of death and close them again, made happy. this must be a rare occurrence, except when death surprises us in the midst of life. it is, on the contrary, at the moment when we have nothing left to lose, that we are not bothered by the risks which, when full of life, we would lightly have undertaken. the spirit of vengeance forms part of life, it abandons us as a rule — notwithstanding certain exceptions which, occurring in the heart of the same person, are, as we shall see, human contradictions — on the threshold of death. after having thought for a moment about the verdurins, m. de charlus felt that he was too weak, turned his face to the wall, and ceased to think about anything. if he often lay silent like this, it was not that he had lost his eloquence. it still flowed from its source, but it had changed. detached from the violence which it had so often adorned, it was no more now than an almost mystic eloquence decorated with words of meekness, words from the gospel, an apparent resignation to death. he talked especially on the days when he thought that he would live. a relapse made him silent. this christian meekness into which his splendid violence was transposed (as is in esther the so different g*nius of andromaque) provoked the admiration of those who came to his bedside. it would have provoked that of the verdurins themselves, who could not have helped adoring a man whom his weakness had made them hate. it is true that thoughts which were christian only in appearance rose to the surface. he implored the archangel gabriel to appear and announce to him, as to the prophet, at what time the messiah would come to him. and, breaking off with a sweet and sorrowful smile, he would add: “but the archangel must not ask me, as he asked daniel, to have patience for ‘seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks,’ for i should be dead before then.” the person whom he awaited thus was morel. and so he asked the archangel raphael to bring him to him, as he had brought the young tobias. and, introducing more human methods (like sick popes who, while ordering m-sses to be said, do not neglect to send for their doctors), he insinuated to his visitors that if brichot were to bring him without delay his young tobias, perhaps the archangel raphael would consent to restore brichot’s sight, as he had done to the father of tobias, or as had happened in the sheep-pool of bethesda. but, notwithstanding these human lapses, the moral purity of m. de charlus’s conversation had none the less become alarming. vanity, slander, the insanity of malice and pride, had alike disappeared. morally m. de charlus had been raised far above the level at which he had lived in the past. but this moral perfection, as to the reality of which his oratorical art was for that matter capable of deceiving more than one of his comp-ssionate audience, this perfection vanished with the malady which had laboured on its behalf. m. de charlus returned along the downward slope with a rapidity which, as we shall see, continued steadily to increase. but the verdurins’ att-tude towards him was by that time no more than a somewhat distant memory which more immediate outbursts prevented from reviving
to turn back to the verdurins’ party, when the host and hostess were by themselves, m. verdurin said to his wife: “you know where cottard has gone? he is with saniette: he has been speculating to put himself straight and has gone smash. when he got home just now after leaving us, and learned that he hadn’t a penny in the world and nearly a million francs of debts, saniette had a stroke.” “but then, why did he gamble, it’s idiotic, he was the last person in the world to succeed at that game. cleverer men than he get plucked at it, and he was born to let himself be swindled by every tom, d-ck and harry.” “why, of course, we have always known that he was an idiot,” said m. verdurin. “anyhow, this is the result. here you have a man who will be turned out of house and home to-morrow by his landlord, who is going to find himself utterly penniless; his family don’t like him, forcheville is the last man in the world to do anything for him. and so it occurred to me, i don’t wish to do anything that doesn’t meet with your approval, but we might perhaps be able to scr-pe up a small income for him so that he shan’t be too conscious of his ruin, so that he can keep a roof over his head.” “i entirely agree with you, it is very good of you to have thought of it. but you say ‘a roof; the imbecile has kept on an apartment beyond his means, he can’t remain in it, we shall have to find him a couple of rooms somewhere. i understand that at the present moment he is still paying six or seven thousand francs for his apartment.” “six thousand, five hundred. but he is greatly attached to his home. in short, he has had his first stroke, he can scarcely live more than two or three years. suppose we were to allow him ten thousand francs for three years. it seems to me that we should be able to afford that. we might for instance this year, instead of taking la raspelière again, get hold of something on a simpler scale. with our income, it seems to me that to sacrifice ten thousand francs a year for three years is not out of the question.” “very well, there’s only the nuisance that people will get to know about it, we shall be expected to do it again for others.” “believe me, i have thought about that. i shall do it only upon the express condition that n0body knows anything about it. thank you, i have no desire that we should become the benefactors of the human race. no philanthropy! what we might do is to tell him that the money has been left to him by princess sherbatoff.” “but will he believe it? she consulted cottard about her will.” “if the worse comes to the worst, we might take cottard into our confidence, he is used to professional secrecy, he makes an enormous amount of money, he won’t be like one of those busybodies one is obliged to hush up. he may even be willing to say, perhaps, that it was himself that the princess appointed as her agent. in that way we shouldn’t even appear. that would avoid all the nuisance of scenes, and grat-tude, and speeches.” m. verdurin added an expression which made quite plain the kind of touching scenes and speeches which they were anxious to avoid. but it cannot have been reported to me correctly, for it was not a french expression, but one of those terms that are to be found in certain families to denote certain things, annoying things especially, probably because people wish to indicate them in the hearing of the persons concerned without being understood! an expression of this sort is generally a survival from an earlier condition of the family. in a jewish family, for instance, it will be a ritual term diverted from its true meaning, and perhaps the only hebrew word with which the family, now thoroughly french, is still acquainted. in a family that is strongly provincial, it will be a term in the local dialect, albeit the family no longer speaks or even understands that dialect. in a family that has come from south america and no longer speaks anything but french, it will be a spanish word. and, in the next generation, the word will no longer exist save as a childish memory. they may remember quite well that their parents at table used to allude to the servants who were waiting, without being understood by them, by employing some such word, but the children cannot tell exactly what the word meant, whether it was spanish, hebrew, german, dialect, if indeed it ever belonged to any language and was not a proper name or a word entirely forged. the uncertainty can be cleared up only if they have a great-uncle, a cousin still surviving who must have used the same expression. as i never knew any relative of the verdurins, i have never been able to reconstruct the word. all i know is that it certainly drew a smile from mme. verdurin, for the use of this language less general, more personal, more secret, than their everyday speech inspires in those who use it among themselves a sense of self-importance which is always accompanied by a certain satisfaction. after this moment of mirth: “but if cottard talks,” mme. verdurin objected. “he will not talk.” he did mention it, to myself at least, for it was from him that i learned of this incident a few years later, actually at the funeral of saniette. i was sorry that i had not known of it earlier. for one thing the knowledge would have brought me more rapidly to the idea that we ought never to feel resentment towards other people, ought never to judge them by some memory of an unkind action, for we do not know all the good that, at other moments, their hearts may have sincerely desired and realised; no doubt the evil form which we have established once and for all will recur, but the heart is far more rich than that, has many other forms that will recur, also, to these people, whose kindness we refuse to admit because of the occasion on which they behaved badly. furthermore, this revelation by cottard must inevitably have had an effect upon me, because by altering my opinion of the verdurins, this revelation, had it been made to me earlier, would have dispelled the suspicions that i had formed as to the part that the verdurins might be playing between albertine and myself, would have dispelled them, wrongly perhaps as it happened, for if m. verdurin — whom i supposed, with increasing certainty, to be the most malicious man alive — had certain virtues, he was nevertheless tormenting to the point of the most savage persecution, and so jealous of his domination over the little clan as not to shrink from the basest falsehoods, from the fomentation of the most unjustified hatreds, in order to sever any ties between the faithful which had not as their sole object the strengthening of the little group. he was a man capable of disinterested action, of unostentatious generosity, that does not necessarily mean a man of feeling, nor a pleasant man, nor a scrupulous, nor a truthful, nor always a good man. a partial goodness, in which there persisted, perhaps, a trace of the family whom my great-aunt had known, existed probably in him in view of this action before i discovered it, as america or the north pole existed before columbus or peary. nevertheless, at the moment of my discovery, m. verdurin’s nature offered me a new and unimagined aspect; and so i am brought up against the difficulty of presenting a permanent image as well of a character as of societies and p-ssions. for it changes no less than they, and if we seek to portray what is relatively unchanging in it, we see it present in succession different aspects (implying that it cannot remain still but keeps moving) to the disconcerted artist
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