And more from the Prisoner
M. de Charlus’s lady guests melted away quite rapidly. Many of them said, ‘I'd rather not go to the vestry (the small drawing-room where the Baron, with Charlie at his side, was receiving congratulations), but I must make sure Palamede sees me and knows I stayed right to the end.” None took the least notice of Mme Verdurin. Some pretended not to recognize her and to say a mistaken good-bye to Mme Cottard, saying to me of the doctor’s wife, “That's Mme Verdurin, isn’t it?” Mme d’Arpajon asked me, within earshot of the real hostess, “Was there ever really a M. Verdurin?” The duchesses who were last to leave, not finding any of the expected strangenesses in this place which they had hoped would be different from everything they knew, consoled themselves by stifling wild giggles in front of Elstir’s paintings; everything else, which they found much more similar than they had expected to what they were used to, they put to the credit of M. de Charlus, saying, “Isn't Palaméde clever! He could stage a fairy-play in a broom-closet, it would still be breathtaking.” The highest-ranking among them were those who congratulated M. de Charlus most fervently on the success of an evening whose secret motive was known at least to some of them and did not embarrass them at all, for this society—in memory, perhaps, of certain earlier historical periods when their family was already fully conscious of its destiny—carried its contempt for scruples almost as far as its reverence for etiquette. Several booked Charlie on the spot to come and play Vinteul septet for them, but none of them dreamed of inviting Mme Verdurin to hear him. She was consumed with rage, when M. de Charlus, floating on cloud and unable to register her fury, magnanimously chose to invite the Patronne to share his joy. And this expert in artistic parties was perhaps, rather giving way to his literary tastes chan to an outrush of pride when he said to Mme Verdurin, “Well, are you pleased? I think you have cause to be, you can see that when I take the trouble to organize a party, I do the thing properly. I do not know if your grasp of heraldry would allow you to measure exactly the importance of this occasion, to understand the impact | have made, the job I have done for you. The Queen of Naples came, the brother of the King of Bavaria, the holders of the three oldest peerages. Ifwe think of Vinteuil as Mahomet, we can say that we moved the least movable of mountains on his account. Just think that for your party the Queen of Naples came from Neuilly, which she finds much more difficult than leaving the Two Sicilies,” he said with unkind humor, despite his admiration for the Queen. “It’s a historic occasion. Think of it, she had probably never been out since the fall of Gaeta. I expect that in the biographical dictionaries her key dates will be the fall of Gaeta and Mme Verdurin’s party. The fan that she put down to applaud Vinteuil will take its place alongside the one that Mme de Metternich broke when she heard them hiss Wagner—Look, she left the fan behind,” said Mme Verdurin, momentarily pacified by the memory of the Queen’s kind manner to her, and she showed M. de Charlus where it was lying on a chair. “Oh, how moving! cried M. de Charlus, approaching the relic with veneration. All the more moving as it’s so ugly; the little violet is beyond belief.” Emotion and irony ran through him in alternating spasms. “I don’t know if these things touch you as they do me. Swann would simply have died in convulsions if he had seen that. Now I know that, howevef high the price goes, I shall have to buy that fan when the Queen’s things ar¢ sold up. And they will be, he added, for she’s as poor as a church mouse, cruel detraction being always mixed in the Baron's speech with the most Genuine veneration each springing from one of the 2 opposing natures that were brought together in him.
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That is why, he concluded, for he loved to lecture, why I was so against your inviting those human divisors I mentioned, who would have acted upon the sub. stantial figures I brought like decimal points in a sum, reducing the others to a tenth part of their value. I have a natural feeling for these things. You understand, we must avoid blunders when we are giving a party that must be worthy of Vinceuil, of his brilliant interpreter, of you and, dare I say it, of myself. Invite La Molé and everything would have been ruined. She is the little contrary, neutralizing drop that makes a potion powerless. The lights would have gone out, the petits fours would have been late, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomach-ache. At the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-story, the brass would have fallen silent; the lute and the oboe would suddenly have lost their voices. Morel himself, even if he could have scraped out a few sounds, would not have been up to his task, and instead of Vinteuil’s septet, you would have heard Beckmesser’s parody* of it, finishing in a chorus of boos. I really believe in the influences of certain people, I could feel in one particular allargando as it opened right out like a flower, in the overwhelming satisfaction of the finale which was not just allegro but genuinely full of matchless allegria, that the absence of la Molé was inspiring the musicians and dilating the very instruments themselves with joy. Anyway, the day one plays host to one’s sovereigns is not the day to invite the concierge.” In calling her 4a Molé (he also said /a Duras though he was very fond of her) he was doing her justice. For all these women were actresses on the social stage, and it is true that even considered in that light Mme Molé was not equal to the extraordinary reputation for intelligence that she had acquired, and which reminded one of those mediocre actors of novelists who at a certain period come to be thought of as geniuses, either because of the mediocrity of their contemporaries, who do not include any outstanding artist who could show what real talent is, or the poor taste of the public, who, if a really individual genius did come to light, would be incapable of understanding him. The world being the kingdom of vanity; there is so little to choose among the various society hostesses that only the spite or wild imagination of M. de Charlus could make much of a distinction. And certainly, when he talked as he had just been doing, in this language which was a recherché amalgam of artistic and fashionable concerns, it was because his old woman’s rages and his drawing-room culture provided his real eloquence with only cut-rate themes. ‘The world of real differences does not exist on the surface of the earth, among all the countries leveled by our perception; how much less, therefore, does it exist among the “worldly.” Does it in fact exist anywhere? The Vinteuil septet had seemed to tell me that it did. But where?
As M. de Charlus also loved tale-bearing and setting people at odds, following a policy of divide and rule, he added, “And by not inviting her, you did not give Mme Mole the chance to say, ‘I can’t think why that Mme Verdurin asked me. Who are those people, I don’t know them.’ She was already saying last year that you were trying so hard to attract her it was becoming a bore. She’s a fool, don’t ask her again. What is she, anyway? Nothing out of the ordinary. She could perfectly well come to your house without making such a fuss; after all, I do. All in all, he concluded, I think you can be grateful to me, for, as it turned out, the evening was perfect. The Duchesse de Guermantes didn’t come, but I don’t know, perhaps that was for the best. We shan’t be angry with her and we shall think of her again for another time, anyway, how could we not remember her, with those blue eyes of hers always saying ‘forget me not.” (And I thought to myself how powerful the Guermantes spirit—the decision to go here and not there—must be in the Duchesse to have overcome her fear of Palaméde.) “In the face of such a complete success, one is tempted to be like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and see the hand of Providence everywhere. The Duchesse de Duras was delighted with everything. She even asked me to tell you so,” M. de Charlus added, emphasizing each word, as if Mme Verdurin should consider the message honor enough. So great an honor, indeed, as to be hardly believable, for he felt it necessary to convince her by adding, with the folly the gods send to those they wish to destroy, “Truly.” “She has engaged Morel to play at her house, the program will be the same, and I think I can even get an invitation for M. Verdurin.” This courtesy extended to the husband alone was, though M. de Charlus did not realize it, the blackest insult to the wife, who, believing herself to enjoy, in relation to the performer and thanks to a kind of Moscow decree operating within the little set, the right to forbid him to play anywhere else without her express permission, was already determined to cancel his appearance at Mme de Duras’s party.
By this mere fluency of speech, M. de Charlus was already irritating Mme Verdurin, who did not appreciate private relationships within the litle set. How often, and even at La Raspeliére, when she heard che Baron talking uninterruptedly to Charlie rather than taking part in the concertante ensemble of the set, she had cried, pointing to the Baron, “What a gossip! What a gossip! Talk about a gossip, he’s a gossip all right!” But this time it was much worse. Drunk on his own words, the Baron did not understand that by recognizing Mme Verdurin’s role but fixing strict limits to it, he was unleashing that feeling of hatred which in her was a particular form, a social form, of jealousy. Mme Verdurin truly loved her regulars, the faithful members of the little set, she wanted them to belong wholly to their Patronne. She had to settle for less, like those jealous men who let themselves be deceived, but only under their own roof and even under their eyes, that is, where they are not deceived; she would allow the men to have a mistress, or a lover, provided the relationship had no social ramifications outside her house; it must have begun and had all its existence under the umbrella of her Wednesdays. Every suppressed laugh from Odette as she sat next to Swann had formerly gnawed at her heart, as had, recently, every private conversation between Morel and the Baron; she could find only one consolation for her pain, which was to destroy the happiness of others. She could never have tolerated the Baron’s for much longer. But now his own rashness was bringing on the catastrophe by seeming to restrict the power of the Patronne within her own little clan. Already she could see Morel going into society without her, under the protection of the Baron. There was only one solution—to force Morel to choose between the Baron and herself and, using the ascendancy she had established over Morel by displaying, as he thought, an extraordinary insight which was due to reports she commissioned, lies that she invented and served up to him as corroboration of things he already wanted to believe, and, something he was about to experience for himself, traps that she set for the unwary to fall into: using this ascendancy, to make him choose herself in preference to the Baron. As for the society ladies who were there and who had not even asked to be introduced to her, as soon as she had understood their reluctance or simple indifferent rudeness, she had said, “All right, I’ve got it, this is a bunch of old slappers that we can do without, they won't see the inside of this house again.” For she would sooner have died than admit they had been less friendly to her than she had hoped.
provided they have tongues and speak?”
Seeing the Baron taken up with the General, Mme Verdurin called over Brichot. He, not knowing what Mme Verdurin was going to say, decided to make her laugh and, without realizing the suffering he was causing me, said to the Patronne, “The Baron is delighted that Mlle Vinteuil and her friend aren’t here. He is thoroughly scandalized by them. He said that their way of life was appalling. You can’t imagine how prudish and stern the Baron is on the subject of morals.” Contrary to Brichot's expectation, Mme Verdurin was not amused. “He is disgusting,” she replied. “Take him out to smoke a cigarette with you, so that my husband can take his inamorata on one side without old Charlus seeing, and show him the danger he is falling into.” Brichot seemed to be hesitating. “Let me tell you,” said Mme Verdurin, to remove his last scruples, “I don’t feel safe with that man in my house. I know he’s been mixed up in some very dirty business, and the police are watching him.” And, since she had a certain gift of improvisation when inspired by malice, Mme Verdurin did not stop there: “Apparently he’s been in prison. Oh yes, I heard it from some people who ought to know. And someone I know who lives in his street says you can’t imagine the characters that go up to his house.” And as Brichot, who often went to the Baron's himself, protested, Mme Verdurin replied even more emphatically, “It’s true, I tell you! You have my word for it,” an expression she generally used to support allegations made more or less at random. “He’ll be murdered one of these days, that’s the way they all go. Perhaps he won’t get that far because he’s in the clutches of that Jupien. He had the nerve to send him here to me, a jailbird, he is, you know, I know it for certain. He’s got a hold on Charlus through some letters, the most dreadful things apparently. Someone I know has seen them, and he told me. “They'd make you sick if you read them, he said. That’s how Jupien keeps him under his thumb and makes him cough up all the money he wants. I'd rather a thousand times be dead than living in terror as Charlus does. Anyway, if Morel’s family decides to take him to jaw, I don’t want to be charged as an accomplice. Let him go on, but at his own risk: I'll have done my duty. I’m sorry, but doing the right thing isn’t always fun.” And already in a pleasant fever of anticipation at the thought of che conversation her husband was going to have with the violinist, Mme Verdurin said to me, “Ask Brichot what kind of friend J am, and if I can do what it takes to save my friends.” (She was alluding to the way in which she had made him break just in time, first with his laundress and then with Mme de Cambremer; following upon these quarrels Brichot had become first almost completely blind and then, it was said, a morphine addict.) “A pearl among friends, far-sighted and brave,” replied the old don with genuine if naive feeling. “Mme Verdurin kept me from doing something extremely foolish, Brichot continued, when she had moved away. She doesn’t hesitate to cut deep, to do heroic surgery, as Cottard would say. I must admit, however, to great sadness at the thought that the poor Baron does not yet know of the blow that is going to fall upon him. He is quite mad about that boy. If Mme Verdurin succeeds, he is going to be a very unhappy man. But in any case it is by no means certain that she will not fail. I fear that she may be able to create certain misunderstandings between them which, in the end, will not separate them but only estrange them from her.” This had often happened between Mme Verdurin and her flock. But one could see that the need to keep their friendship was increasingly dominated in her by the need to ensure that that friendship was never imperiled by any feeling they might have for each other. Homosexuality did not offend her, so long as it did not threaten the faith, but, like the Church, she would have accepted any sacrifice rather than any compromise on orthodoxy. I began to fear that she might be annoyed with me because she had learned that I had Prevented Albertine from being there that afternoon, and that she might begin, if she had not already done so, the process of separating her from me, the same work that her husband was about to undertake, in relation to Charlus, with the violinist. “Come on, go and find Charlus, think of something, now’s the time, said Mme Verdurin, and above all, don’t let him come back until I send someone to fetch you. What an evening! Mme Verdurin added, revealing the real cause of her rage. Playing those masterpieces in front of those dimwits! I don’t mean the Queen of Naples, she is intelligent (meaning: she was friendly to me). But the others! It’s enough to drive you mad. I’m sorry, but I’m nota girl any more. When I was young we were told you had to be able to stand boredom, and I tried, but now it’s too much, | can’t take any more, I’m old enough to do as I please, life is too short, and being bored, spending time with imbeciles and trying to look as if I find them intelligent, no, no, that’s all over. Come on, Brichor, there's no time to lose—I’m going, Madame, I’m going,” said Brichot as General Deltour moved away. But first the professor took me on one side. “Moral duty, he said, is not so categorically imperative as our ethics courses teach. Theosophical] cafés and Kantian brasseries can say what they like, we are deplorably ignorant of the nature of the Good. I myself, in all modesty, have expounded for my pupils, to the best of my ability, the teachings of the aforesaid Immanuel Kant, yet I can find no precise guidance on the problem in social casuistry that faces me in that Critique of Practical Reason in which the great unfrocked pastor of Protestantism rewrote Plato in Teutonic style for a prehistorically sentimental Germany of princedoms, all for the greater good of a certain Pomeranian mysticism. It is the Symposium all over again, but this time in K6nigsberg, in the local style, healthy and indigestible, with sauerkraut and no rent-boys. It is evident, on the one hand, that I cannot refuse our excellent hostess a small favor chat she asks of me, one which conforms fully with traditional Morality. We must above all avoid letting ourselves be deceived by words, for there are few things that lead to greater foolishness. But we must, in the end, admit that if mothers of families could vote, the Baron would run the risk of being deplorably blackballed for the post of professor of morals. Unfortunately it is with the constitution of a roué that he pursues his pedagogical vocation; note that I am not saying anything against the Baron; that charming man, who can carve a roast better than anyone, combines a genius for anathema with a heart of gold. He can be as amusing as the best of clowns, while with a certain colleague, a member of the Academy if you please, I yawn away sixteen drachmas to the dozen, as Xenophon might have said. But I fear he compromises his constitution with Morel a little more than sound morals would prescribe, and without knowing how docilely or otherwise the young penitent submits to the special exercises with which his catechist teaches him to mortify the flesh, one need not be an expert casuist to be certain that we should commit a sin of excessive indulgence, as you might say, toward that occult practitioner who seems to have come from the pages of Petronius via Saint-Simon, if we closed our eyes and gave him an open license to flirt with Satan. Yet on the other hand, if 1 keep the man occupied while Mme Verdurin, for the sinner’s own good and justly tempted by the thought of such a conversion, speaks plainly to the foolish young man and takes away from him all that he loves, perhaps strikes a facal blow at him, I cannot say that the thing is indifferent to me, it seems to me that I am luring him into an ambush, as you might say, and I shrink from it as from an act of cowardice.” Having said this, he did not hesitate to commit the act, and taking me by the arm, said, “Come, Baron, let us go and smoke a cigarette, this young man has not yet seen all the treasures of the house.” I tried to excuse myself, saying that I had to go home.
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“Indeed not, I do not think I am closer to Mme Verdurin than you are,” Brichot declared, enunciating each word clearly, for he feared he had awakened the Baron’s suspicions. And seeing that I wanted to leave and trying to keep me by the promise of amusement, he continued, “It seems to me that the Baron fails to consider one thing when he speaks of those ladies’ reputation, and that is that a reputation can be both dreadful and undeserved. Thus for example, in what I may call parallel history, it is certain that judicial errors have been frequent, and that history has recorded convictions for sodomy against famous men who were quite innocent of it. The recent discovery of Michelangelo's love for a woman is a piece of new evidence which should give Leo X’s Friend the benefit of a posthumous judicial review. The Michelangelo affair seems, to me to have all the prerequisites to stir up high society and set the East End on the march, when that other Affair, which made anarchy the fashionable vice among our smartest dilettantes, but whose name one dare not mention for fear of quarrels, is finally forgotten.” From the moment Brichot had begun talking about men’s reputations, M. de Charlus’s whole face had betrayed the particular kind of impatience that we see in an expert on medical or military matters, when lay people who know nothing about them begin to say foolish things about therapeutics or strategy. “You haven't the first idea what you're talking about, he finally said to Brichot. Just tell me one undeserved reputation. Give me the names. Yes, I know, he burst our when Brichot timidly attempted a reply, the people who tried it once out of curiosity, or a particular feeling for a dear friend who's dead now, and the one who's afraid he once gave himself away and now, when you say that a man is good-looking, replies that that’s all Greek to him, that he can no more tell a handsome man from an ugly one than one motor engine from another, since he hasn’t the bump for mechanical things. That’s all hogwash. Good Lord, I don’t mean to say that a bad reputation (or what people call a bad reputation) can never possibly be unjustified. But it’s so rare, so out of the ordinary that for practical purposes it doesn’t exist. I’m an expert on the subject, I hunt out examples, and I’ve found one or two that weren’t mythical. Yes, in my whole life I’ve established the existence (I mean established scientifically, I don’t go by what I hear) of two undeserved reputations. They usually occur because of the similarity of two names, or certain outwatd signs, like wearing too many rings, which people who know nothing about it think are absolutely unfailing signs of what you are talking about, just as they believe a peasant never opens his mouth without saying Aay, of an {rishman Begorrah. These are just clichés from the middlebrow theater.’
I was very surprised to hear M. de Charlus mention as an invert the “actress’s friend” whom I had seen at Balbec and who was the leader of thé Club of four friends. “But what about the actress?—She’s a blind, and anyway he sleeps with her, more perhaps than he does with men: he’s not very active with them.—Does he sleep with the other three?—Never! Absolutely not. They’re friends, that’s all, they don’t do anything like that. Two of them are women-only, the third is one, but isn’t sure about his friend, and in any case they hide their affairs from each other. What is really surprising is the way undeserved reputations are the ones that people believe in most strongly. You, Brichot, for example, you'd go to the stake for the virtue of this or that man who comes here, and to those in the know he stands out like a sore chumb. Ac the same time, you're like everyone else, you believe the stories about such-and-such a famous man who, in the eyes of the public, is the personification of the vice we’re speaking of, while he wouldn't practice it for worlds. I say for worlds because that’s vague: if we tied it down to a few hundred in cash, then the number of the strictly pure would soon fall to zero. Without any inducement, the proportion of the virtuous, if you call that virtue, would fall somewhere between thirty and forty percent.” Brichot had transferred our consideration of bad reputations on to the male sex: I, on the other hand, preoccupied with Albertine, had begun once more to apply M. de Charlus’s words to women. I was appalled by his statistics, even though I realized that his figures must be inflated by wishful thinking and the reports of gossips, perhaps untruthful and in any case led astray by their own desires which, added to those of M. de Charlus himself, must have thrown out the Baron’s calculations. “Three out of ten virtuous! cried Brichot. Even if the proportions were reversed, I should still have had to multiply the numbers of the wicked by a hundred. If there are as many as you say, Baron, if you are not mistaken, then we must confess that you are one of the few clear-sighted observers of a truth chat few can recognize around them. You are like Bartés,°° who made discoveries about parliamentary corruption that were confirmed later, like the existence of Leverrier’s planet.”” Mme Verdurin could probably mention some men whom I would rather not name, who suspected the existence in the Secret Service, in Army Headquarters, of behavior prompted, no doubt, by patriotism but of which I could never have dreamed,
Think of freemasonry, German spies, drug-addiction: Lucien Daudet writes about them every day, stories that seem the height of fantasy and then turn out to be true. Three out of ten!” he repeated in astonishment. And it is true that M. de Charlus ascribed inversion to the great majority of his contemporaries, excepting only those with whom he had himself had relations; their case—provided the relations had been in the smallest degree romantic—he regarded as more complex. In the same way confirmed seducers, usually cyn. ical about women’s honor, will give a little credit only to the woman who hag been their mistress, protesting, with apparent sincerity and an air of mys. tery, “No, no, youre wrong, she’s not like that.” This unlikely respect is dic. tated partly by their self-esteem, for it is naturally more flattering to suppose that such favors have been reserved for them alone, partly by their naiveté, which readily swallows everything their mistress tells them, and partly by the way in which, the closer one becomes to human beings and their existences, the more one is convinced that ready-made labels and classifications are too simple. “Three out of ten! But be careful, Baron: unlike those historians whom the future will vindicate, if you were to present to posterity the picture you have just been describing, it might be rejected. Posterity demands evidence, and will want to see your documents. Now, as there will be no documentary evidence to support the existence of such collective phenomena, which the small number of those involved will be only too anxious to leave in obscurity, there would be outrage in the circles of the high-minded, and you would be regarded as a slanderer or, dare I say it, a madman. Having achieved full marks and first place as arbiter elegantiarum,” you would suffer the misfortune of a posthumous blackballing. That would be a slap in the face, as—God forgive me—our dear Bossuet says somewhere or other.—I am not working for posterity, M. de Charlus replied, I am content with life, it is quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.—What! Did you know Swann, Baron, I didn’t know that. Was he one of them? Brichot asked uneasily.—Really! Do you think I only know people like that? No, I don't think so,” said Charlus with lowered eyelids, weighing the pros and cons.
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Suddenly, having been ruminating on the “thirty percent rule” revealed to him by M. de Charlus, Brichot, determined to pursue the subject, broke in with what seemed like the brusque manner of an examining magistrate trying to make a prisoner confess, but was in fact the result of the professor’s desire to seem perspicacious and his uneasiness at uttering such a grave accusation. “Isn’t Ski one of them?” he asked M. de Charlus with a somber look. To show off his imagined powers of intuition he had chosen Ski, saying to himself that since only three men out of ten were innocent, he would not run much risk by choosing someone who appeared to him somewhat bizarre, who slept badly, wore scent, and in a word was out of the ordinary. “No, zot at all, cried the Baron, giving his expert decision in a sarcastic, exasperated tone. Youre absolutely wrong, quite on the wrong track, it’s absurd! Ski is just people’s idea of that sort of man, people who don’t know anything about it. If he were, he wouldn’t look it so much; I don’t say that to criticize him, for he is an attractive man, there’s something really likable about him.—Tell us some of their names, then,” Brichot persisted. M. de Charlus drew himself up haughtily: “My dear man, you know I live in a world of abstraction, these things only interest me from a transcendental point of view,” he replied with the touchiness of his kind and the assumed grandiloquence which marked his conversation. “I am only interested in general principles, I’m talking to you of these things as I might discuss the law of gravity.” But these moments of annoyed reaction in which the Baron tried to hide his real life were few and fleeting as compared with the hours during which he constantly let it show through or displayed it with an irritating self-satisfaction, the need to confide being much stronger in him than che fear of self-revelation. “What I meant to say he went on, is chat for every bad reputation that is undeserved, there are hundreds of good ones that are equally groundless. Obviously the numbe of those who do not deserve their reputation for virtue varies according to whether you listen to people like them or to the others. And while it is true that the readiness of the latter to believe ill of the virtuous is limited by the excessive difficulty they would have in ascribing a vice as horrible in their eyes as theft or murder to people they know to be sensitive and scrupulous, the first group is over-excited by the wish to believe that people they find attractive are, how shall I put it, attainable, and by information derived from others led astray by a similar desire, and finally by the very distance at which they are generally held by the rest of society. I have heard a man, generally avoided for this reason, say that he thought a certain gentleman had the same tastes. And his only reason for thinking so was that the man had spoken pleasantly to him! These are some of the reasons for optimism, said the Baron naively, in guessing the number. But the real reason for the enormous gap between the number as calculated by outsiders and by the initiates, is the mystery with which the insiders surround their doings in order to hide them from the others, who, cut off from any source of information, would be literally astounded if they learned even a quarter of the truth.—So our times are just like those of the Greeks, said Brichot.—What do you mean, like the Greeks? Do you think nothing went on between the Greeks and us? Look at Louis XIV’s time, with Monsieur,” little Vermandois, Moliére, Prince Louis of Baden, Brunswick, Charolais, Boufflers, the great Condé, the Duc de Brissac.—Stop there, I knew about Monsieur, Brissac is in Saint-Simon, Vendome naturally and lots of others too, but Saint-Simon, that old slanderer, often talks about the great Condé and Prince Louis of Baden and he never says anything about that.—Dear me, to think | have to give history lessons to a teacher at the Sorbonne.
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Ah, I could tell some tales to those people who are examining how the new generation has rejected the needless complications of its elders, as M. Bourget says.”* I have a young friend in the army who is making quite aname for himself, who has done great things; but let me not gossip, let's go back to the seventeenth century, you know what Saint-Simon says about the Maréchal d’Huxelles—among so many others: ‘pleasure-loving, given to Greek debauchery which he did not trouble to conceal, he drew in young officers and made them his companions, along with handsome young serving-men, all quite openly, when on service and at Strasbourg.’ You have probably read Madame'’s letters, the men never called him anything but ‘Putana.’ She speaks of it quite openly.And she knew whereof she spoke, with that husband.—Such an interesting character, Madame, said M. de Charlus. She could serve as the complete model of the ‘Queen's Woman.’ Mannish, for a start; the Queen’s wife is usually a man, that’s why it’s so easy for him to get children on her. Then Madame never speaks of her husband's vices, but talks endlessly of the same vice in other people, and obviously knew what she was talking about; it’s the same quirk that makes us love to find in other people’s families the same weaknesses that we suffer from in our Own, so as to prove to ourselves that there is nothing exceptional or shameful about them. As I was saying, it’s always been like that. However, our own age stands out particularly from this point of view. And in spite of the examples I took from the seventeenth century, if my great ancestor Frangois de la Rochefoucauld were alive today, he could say with even more truth than when speaking of his own time, come along, Brichot, help me out: ‘Vices belong to every age; but if certain people whom everyone knows had appeared in the first centuries, should we still speak today of the excesses of Heliogabalus?* Whom everyone knows, like that. I can see that my wise relative could tell when his most famous contemporaries were ‘spinning a line,’ just as I can with mine. But it’s not just that there are even more people like that today. There’s also something particular about them.” I saw that M. de Charlus was going to tell us in what way that mode of life had changed. But not for a moment as he talked, as Brichot talked, was the more or less conscious image of my apartment where Albertine was waiting for me, an image ass0ciated with the homely, caressing motif of Vinteuil’s music, dispelled from my mind. I kept coming back to Albertine, just as I would soon have in reality to go back to her, as if to a kind of ball and chain which prevented me from leaving Paris and which at this moment, as from the Verdurin salon J thought of my own home, made me see it, not as an empty space, exciting to the personality and rather sad, but as filled—just as the hotel at Balbec had been filled on a certain evening—by that unmoving presence, which continued to inhabit it for my sake, and which I could be sure of finding there again whenever I wanted to. The insistence with which M. de Charlus kept returning to his theme—in relation to which his intelligence, always exercised in the same direction, did possess a certain penetration—was distressing in quite a complex way. He was as boring as a scholar who can see nothing beyond his own subject, irritating as an insider who prides himself on the secrets he knows and cannot wait to give away, disagreeable as those who, in the matter of their own faults, let themselves go without realizing what offense they are giving, obsessive as a maniac and fatally rash as one who knows himself guilty. These characteristics, which at some moments became as striking as those which distinguish a madman or a criminal, did however offer me some comfort. For, transposing them into a firm which allowed me to draw conclusions from them about Albertine, and remembering her attitude to Saint-Loup and to me, I said to myself that, however painful one of those memories was for me, and however melancholy the other, they seemed to rule out the kind of severe mental warping, the in rensely one-sided specialization, which was so strongly evident in the conversation and in the person of M. de Charlus. But the man himself, sadly, now began to destroy these reasons for hope in the same way in which he had provided me with them, that is, unintentionally. “Yes, he said, I'm nota boy any more and I have already seen many things changing around me, I can no longer understand a society where all barriers are broken down, where a noisy crowd with no elegance or even decency dances the tango even in the houses of my family, nor fashion, nor politics, nor the arts, nor religion, nothing, But I will admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality. Good heavens, in my day, if one set aside the men who simply hated women, and those who, while actually preferring them, did other things for money or their careers, homosexuals were good family men and really only kept mistresses as a blind. If had had a daughter to settle I should have gone to them to find her a husband, if I had wished to make sure she would not be unhappy. But now everything is changed, alas. Now they recruit even among men who are the maddest about women. I used to be able to spot them, and when I said to myself ‘no, not that one’ I would never be wrong. But now I give up. Onc of my friend, who is famous for it had a coachman that my sister-in-law Orianc had found for him, a boy from Combray who had been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades but was chiefly known as a ladies’ man: I would have sworn no one could have been more averse to that kind of thing. He had a regular girl-friend but tor. mented her by seeing two other women he was mad about, not to mention all the others—an actress and a barmaid. My cousin the Prince de Guermantes, who is intelligent in the irritating way of people who are too ready to believe everything, said to me one day, “Why doesn’t X sleep with his coachman, do you suppose? Théodore (that’s the coachman’s name) might like it, you never know; perhaps he’s even offended that his master hasn’t made any advances to him.’ I couldn’t stop myself telling Gilbert to be quiet; I was annoyed by two things: his pretense at understanding, which when it is too general shows a lack of understanding, and the transparent scheming of my cousin, who wanted to see our friend X test the water and then, if he was successful, follow in his footsteps.—Is the Prince de Guermantes that way inclined as well, then? Brichot asked with a mixture of astonishment and unease.Goodness, replied M. de Charlus delightedly, it’s so well known that I dont think I'm being indiscreet in saying yes. Anyway, the next year I went to Balbec and there I learned from a sailor who sometimes took me fishing that the same Théodore, whose sister, by the way, is maid to one of Mme Verdurin’s friends, the Baronne Putbus, was now in the habit of coming down co the harbor as bold as brass to pick up one sailor or another and go out with them for a sail ‘and that’s not all, and that’s not all.’ It was now my turn to ask whether the proprietor, in whom I had recognized the gentleman who played cards all day with his mistress, was like the Prince de Guermances. ‘Of course he is, everyone knows that, he doesn’t even trouble to hidé jt.—Bur his mistress was with him.—And so? How naive these children are, he said in a paternal tone, not guessing the suffering I extracted from his words when I applied them to Albertine. ‘His mistress is delightful. —So his three friends are like him?—No, no, no, he cried, stopping his ears as if I had just plaved a wrong note on a musical instrument. Now he’s gone off to the other extreme. Can't a man have friends any more? Youth, youth, they get everything wrong. We shall have to take your education in hand, young man. Now I admit, he continued, that this case, and I know of many others of the same kind, puts me in difficulty, however hard I try to keep an open mind. I may be old-fashioned, but I can’t understand, he said, like an old Gallican speaking of certain forms of Ultramontane religion, a liberal Royalist of Action frangaise or a disciple of Claude Monet of the cubists. If they like women so much, why, especially in the working-class world where it’s so disapproved of, do they feel they must have what they call a gay boy as well? It must represent something different for them. But what?” “What is the ‘something different’ that a woman represents for Albertine?” I wondered, and that, indeed, was the painful question for me. “Really, Baron, said Brichot, if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once. No, perhaps a special Institute of Psychopathology would suit you better. Best of all, I could see you with a chair at the College de France, able to pursue your own researches and report on them, as the professors of Tamil or Sanskrit do, to the very small number of people who take an interest. You would have an audience of two and the porter, if I may say so without casting aspersions on our caretaking staff, a splendid body of men.—You don’t know what you're talking about, said the Baron harshly. Anyway, you are mistaken if you think the subject interests only so very few people. Quite the opposite, in fact,” and, seemingly unaware of the contradiction between the unfailing tendency of his own conversation and the reproaches he was about to address to other people: “It’s dreadful, he said to Brichot with a scandalized, thamefaced look, no one talks of anything else. Shameful, I know, but that’s the way it is, my dear fellow. Imagine, if women start talking about it now, what a scandal! The worst of it is, he added with extraordinary force, they get their information from real horrors, shockers like little Chatellerault, against whom there'd be more to say than anyone else, and who tell them stories about other people. I hear he says the most dreadful things about me bur I don’t care, I think that any mud thrown by someone who was thrown out of the Jockey Club for cheating at cards can only fall back ay himself. But I do know that if I were Jane d’Ayen I should have enough respect for my guests not to allow these subjects to be discussed in their hearing, nor to let my family be dragged through the mud in my own house. Bre
there is no society any more, no rules, no propriety, whether in conversation or dress. Ah, my dear friend, it’s the end of the world. Everyone has become So wicked. They compete to see who can say the worst things about each other. Horrible!” Still cowardly as I had been as a child at Combray, when I fled so as nox to see them offering my grandfather brandy and my grandmother vainly trying to persuade him not to drink it, I now had only one wish, to escape from the Verdurins’ before the execution of Charlus was carried out. “I really must go, I said to Brichot.—I’ll come with you, he replied, but we can’t just walk out like that. Let’s go and say good-bye to Mme Verdurin,” the professor concluded, walking toward the drawing-room with the look of someone playing a parlor game, going into the room to ask “May we come in?”
While we were talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife, had taken Morel off to another room. Even if Mme Verdurin had decided, after reflection, that it would be wiser to postpone the revelations to be made to Morel, it was now too late to turn back. We can allow certain desires, sometimes purely oral in nature, to become so strong that they must be satisfied, whatever the consequences: we simply must plant a kiss on a bare shoulder that we have been looking at for too long, and our lips fall on it like a bird of prey ona snake; we cannot resist the impulse, stronger than hunger, to sink our teeth in a cake, or forgo the astonishment, the alarm, the sorrow or the gaiety which we can unleash in a human soul by saying something unex pected. In this frame of mind, drunk on melodrama, Mme Verdurin had impressed on her husband that he must take the violinist on one side and, a all costs, speak to him. The young man had begun by complaining that the Queen of Naples had left before he could be introduced to her. M. de Charlus had repeated to him so often that she was the sister of the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchesse d’Alencon that the royal lady had taken on extraordinary importance in Morel’s eyes. But the Patron had explained to him that they were not there to discuss the Queen of Naples, and had gone straight to the heart of the matter. “That's how it is, he had said after some time had passed, but look, if you like, we'll ask my wife’s advice. I haven't said anything to her about this, I swear. Let’s see what she thinks about it. Maybe my idea isn’t the right one, but you know how clever she is, and then she’s immensely fond of you: let’s consult her.” And while Mme Verdurin waited impatiently for the delicious excitement she would feel in talking to the virtuoso, and then, after he was gone, in making her husband go over every word of the scene that had passed between them, and as she waited kept repeating, “What on earth can they be doing? Auguste is taking so long, I hope at least he'll have got him properly sorted out,” M. Verdurin had come downstairs again with Morel, who seemed to be experiencing strong emotion. “He would like to ask your advice,” said M. Verdurin to his wife, with the air of someone who does not know if his request will be granted. In the grip of passion, Mme Verdurin spoke not to her husband but directly to Morel: “I think my husband’s absolutely right, you can't put up with this any longer!” she cried violently, forgetting the futile fiction agreed with her husband beforehand, that she was not supposed to know anything of what he had said to the violinist. “What? Put up with what?” M. Verdurin stammered, trying to feign astonishment and, with understandable clumsiness, to cover up his lie. “I guessed it, I guessed what you told him,” Mme Verdurin replied, without the least concern for the probability or otherwise of the explanation, and regardless of what, when he thought over this scene again, the violinist might think of the veracity of his Patronne. “No, Mme Verdurin repeated, I believe that you should no longer accept this shameful familiarity with a disgraced character who is not received anywhere, she added, quite unconterned that this was a lie and forgetting that she herself received him in her house almost daily. Everyone at the Conservatoire is talking about you, she added, feeling that this would be the most telling argument; one more month of this life and your musical career is finished, whereas without Charlus you should be earning a hundred thousand a year.—But I’ve never heard a word of this, I’m dumbstruck, I can’t thank you enough,” murmured Morel with tears in his eves. But, obliged to feign astonishment and hide his shame at the same time, he was redder in the face and sweating more freely than if he had played all Beethoven's sonatas in quick succession, and his eyes were filling with tears that the master of Bonn could never have drawn from them. The sculptor, interested by the tears, smiled and pointed out Charlie to me with a sidelong glance. “If you haven’t heard about him you're the only one who hasn’t. He’s a gentleman with a very nasty reputation who's been mixed up in all sorts of scandals. I know the police are watching him and it's a good thing for him that they are, otherwise he would end up like all the rest of them, murdered by street riff-raff,” she added, for the thought of Charlus had brought back the memory of Mme de Duras and, intoxicated with rage, she was trying to wound the wretched Charlie ever more deeply, in revenge for the insults she had suffered in the course of the evening. “Anyway, even in practical terms he can’t be of any use to you, he is completely ruined since he fell into the clutches of blackmailers; he can’t even pay them, so how could he help you, everything is mortgaged to the hilt, his town house, his country estate, etc.” Morel was all the more convinced by this lie as M. de Charlus liked to confide in him about his dealings with apaches, a race which a manservant’s son, however squalid his own life, must regard with a horror equal to his attachment to Bonapartist ideas.
Already his crafty mind had formed the idea of a reversal analogous to what was called in the eighteenth century the Diplomatic Revolution. Determined never to speak to M. de Charlus again, he had decided to go back the next evening to see Jupien’s niece and patch everything up again. Unfortunately for him, this plan was a failure, M. de Charlus having already made an appointment for the evening of the party with Jupien, an appointment which the former waistcoat-maker, despite the day’s events, did not dare break. Other people, as we shall see, having made rash decisions in relation to Morel, when a tearful Jupien recounted his misfortunes to the Baron, that nobleman, no less unhappy, announced that he would adopt the unfortunate girl, that she could take one of the titles in his gift, probably that of Mile d’Oloron; he would give her an appropriate education and find her a rich husband. These promises caused deep joy to Jupien and did not impress his niece at all, for she still loved Morel, who was foolish or shameless enough to come into the shop when Jupien was out. “What's the matter, he asked, laughing, you've got rings under your eyes. Unhappy in love? Come along, tomorrow is another day. A fter all, surely a man has the right to try ona pair of shoes, or a woman, and if they don’t fit...” He got angry only once, when she cried; he thought that cowardly, an unworthy maneuver. It is not always easy to bear the tears that are shed for us.
But we are running on too fast, for all these things happened after the Verdurin soirée; we must pick up our account of it where we left off. “I'd never have dreamed ..., Morel sighed in response to Mme Verdurin.—Of course no one says it to your face, but still everyone in the Conservatoire is talking about you, she repeated spitefully, wishing to show Morel that not only the Baron but he himself was the subject of gossip. I believe you when you say you weren't aware of it, but people do say the most dreadful things. Ask Ski what they were saying the other day at Chevillard’s just a few yards away from us, when you came into my box. Everyone’s eyes were on you. I must say that for myself I don’t care in the least, but I do think it makes a man a complete laughing-stock, and that’s something that can last a lifetime.—I don’t know how to thank you,” said Charlie in the tone one uses to a dentist who has just been causing one excruciating pain to which one does hot want to admit, or to an over-bloodthirsty second who is dragging one into a duel over some harmless remark of which he says, “You can’t swallow thar.” “I think you’ve got backbone, that you're a man, Mme Verdurin replied, and you'll speak up for yourself even though he tells everyone that you daren’t, that he has a hold on you.” Charlie, trying to find a borrowed dignity to cover the tatters of his own, found in his memory a phrase which he had read somewhere or heard someone say, and promptly proclaimed, “I wasn't brought up to take that sort of thing. I'll break with M. de Charlus this very evening. The Queen of Naples has left, hasn’t she? Otherwise, before breaking with him, I’d have asked him. ..—You don’t have to break of with him completely, said Mme Verdurin, not wishing to disrupt the inner circle. You can safely meet him here, in our little group, where people appreciate you, where no one will say anything unkind. But insist on your independence, and don’t let him drag you to all those two-faced old trouts houses; I wish you could have heard what they said behind your back. Don't feel any regret about it, not only will you be getting rid of a cloud that would have hung over you all your life, but from the professional point of view, ir, not just the shame of being introduced by Charlus, I should tell you tha getting mixed up in that phoney society would make you look completely unserious, like an amateur, a little drawing-room musician, and that’s terrible at your age. I can see that it’s a great idea for all those fine ladies to retum favors to their friends by getting you to play for them for nothing, but it’ your future as a musician you should be thinking of. I don’t say you can't go to one or two houses. I think I heard you mention the Queen of Naples, she has left by the way, now she was planning a party and she’s a good sort, who doesn’t think much of Charlus or so I hear. I really do think she came chiefly to see me. In fact I know it’s true, she wanted to meet M. Verdurin and myself. Now there is somewhere you could play. And then let me say that if you were introduced by me, someone all the musicians know, you know, some one they’re always really decent with, for they see me as one of themselves, their own Patronne, that would be quite different. But don’t even think of going to Mme de Duras’s. Don’t make a blunder like that! Artistes I know have come to tell me about the problems they have had with her. You know, they know they can crust me, she said in the sweet, simple tone she knew how to assume at a moment's notice, giving her features an air of modesty and her eyes the appropriate charm. They come and tell me their little trou’ bles; the ones who are supposed to have the least to say sometimes talk to me for hours, and I can’t tell you how interesting they are. Poor Chabrier always said, ‘Mme Verdurin’s the only one who can get them talking’ Well, you know, I’ve seen all of them, every last one, in tears after they had been to play at Mme de Duras’s. It’s not just the way she encourages her servants to humiliate them, but they found no onc else would hire them afterward. The concert bookers said, ‘Oh yes, he’s the one who plays at Mme de Duras’s.’ And that was that. It’s the kind of thing that will really cut short a career. You know, working for socicty people just doesn’t look serious, you can have all the talent in the world, but sadly one Mme de Duras is enough to make you look like an amateur, And the artistes themselves, well, you know I’ve known them for forty years, taking an interest in them, getting them started, well, you know how it is, once they call somebody an amateur that’s that. And they were just starting to say it about you. How many times I’ve had to stand up for you, to swear that you wouldn’ play in this or that ridiculous salon! Do you know what they answered? ‘But he’ll have to, Charlus will fix it without consulting him, he never asks him what he wants to do.’ Someone tried to please him by saying “We all so admire your friend Morel.’ Do you know what he answered, with that insolent look of his? “What do you mean, my friend? We come from different classes: he is my protégé, my creature if you will.” ” At this moment something was fermenting behind the domed forehead of the music-lover, the only thing that certain persons cannot keep to themselves, a remark to repeat which would be not only contemptible but dangerous. But the need to repeat it is stronger than honor or prudence. It was to this need that, after a few convulsive movements of the spherical, angry forehead, the Patronne gave way. “Someone even told my husband that he said ‘my servant, but I can’t be sure of that,” she added. Ic was a similar need that had driven M. de Charlus, shortly after swearing to Morel that he would never reveal his background to anyone, to tell Mme Verdurin, “His father was a manservant.” It would again be this kind of need that, once the word was out, would make it pass from one person to another, each tevealing it under the promise of a strict secrecy which would not be kepr, any more than the first person had kept it. As in the ring game, these remarks eventually found their way back to Mme Verdurin, losing her the friendship of the subject, who had finally become aware of them. She knew this, but could not hold on to the word which was burning her tongue, “Servant” was bound to hurt Morel. However she said it: “servant,” and if she added that she could not be sure of it, it was both in order to suggest that she was sure about the other insults, and to show her own impartiality. The thought of this impartiality gave her such a warm feeling that she began to speak to Charlie in tender tones: “Of course I don’t hold it against him that he tried to pull you into the mud beside him, since he is wallowing in it himself, wallowing in it, she repeated a little louder, pleased by the vividness of the image which had escaped her faster than her attention could follow it, and now struck her as deserving more prominence. “No, what I blame him for, she continued tenderly, with a note of feminine triumph in her voice, is his lack of consideration for you. There are some things we don’t repeat to everyone. Just a moment ago he was betting people that he would make you blush with pleasure by getting you (he must have been joking, for his recommendation would be enough to make sure you didn’t get it) the cross of the Légion d’honneur. There was no harm in that, though I’ve never thought it was very nice, she added primly, to make a fool of one’s friends, but you know, there are some things he says that do hurt. Like the way he laughed aloud when he said that you really wanted the decoration to please your uncle, and your uncle was a flunky.—He said that!’ cried Charlie, convinced by these carefully remembered last words that everything Mme Verdurin had said was true. Mme Verdurin felt flooding over her the joy of an old mistress who, about to be dropped by her young lover, has found a way to stop his marriage. And perhaps her lies were not deliberately planned, nor even conscious. It was perhaps a logic of feeling, or even something more elementary, a kind of nervous reflex that moved her, when it was a question of enlivening her existence or preserving her happiness, to ‘make mischief’ inside the little set, that brought to her lips chese assertions, devilishly useful if not entirely exact. ‘It wouldn't matter if he’d only said it to us, the Parronne continued, we know we have to take what he says with a pinch of salt, and then there is no shame in honest work, each man has his own worth; but to go and make Mme de Portefin giggle over it (Mme Verdurin mentioned Mme de Portefin on purpose, knowing that Charlie liked her), that’s the kind of thing we hate.
My husband said, when he heard him say it, “I’d rather have had a slap in the face.”’ For Gustave likes you just as much as I do (it was thus that we learned M. Verdurin’s name was Gustave). He’s quite cender-hearted really.—I never cold you I liked him, muttered M. Verdurin in the role of kindly curmudgeon. It’s Charlus who likes him.—Oh, no, now I can tell che difference; f was being used by someone despicable, but you are kind, Charlie cried with sincere fecling.—-No, no, said Mme Verdurin, magnanimous in victory (for she now felt her Wednesdays safe), despicable is too strong: he does damage, lots of damage, without meaning to; you know, that Légion d'honneur business didn’t go on for very long. And Id rather not tell you all the other things he said about your family (she would have been hard put to it to think of any).—I don’t care if it only lasted a second, that’s enough to show he’s a wretch,” cried Morel.
It was at this moment that we came back into the drawing-room. “Ah!” M. de Charlus cried, seeing Morel there, and, walking toward the musician with the spring in his step of a man who has organized his whole evening perfectly to lead up to a rendezvous with a woman and who, intoxicated with his cleverness, does not realize that he has himself set the trap in which he will be caught and soundly thrashed in front of everyone by the husband’s spies. “Well, there you are at last. Are you happy, young maestro and soon to be young Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur? For soon you'll be able to show off your cross,” said M. de Charlus to Morel with a look of render triumph, but this very mention of the decoration seemed to confirm Mme Verdurin’s lies, which now seemed indisputably true to Morel. “Leave me alone, don’t you dare come near me, cried Morel to the Baron, I bet this isn’t your first time, you must have tried to corrupt other people before me.” My only comfort was the belief thac I would soon see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus. I had had to face his insane rages for a thousand times less than this, no one was safe from them, a king would not have intimidated him. Now the most extraordinary thing happened. We saw M. de Charlus dumbstruck, aghast, realizing the scale of his misfortune but not its cause, not finding a word to say, turning his eyes upon everyone present, one by one, puzzled, indignant, helpless, as if to ask them not so much what had happened as what he should now do. Perhaps what had struck him dumb was (seeing M. and Mme Verdurin turning away from him and no one else coming to his aid) his present suffering and above all the fear of further sufferings to come; or perhaps it was thar, not having used the power of hiy imagination to work himself up and develop a rage in advance, and having no ready-made fury to draw on (for with his sensitive, nervous, hysterical temperament he was genuinely impulsive but not a natural fighter, nor for that matter, and this made me like him better, truly aggressive, and he lacked the normal reactions of the man wounded in his honor), he had been taken by surprise, attacked when he was unarmed; or perhaps it was that in a milieu not his own he felt less confident and consequently less brave than he would have been if at home in the Faubourg. For whatever reason, in this salon that he despised, this great noble (whose superiority over commoners was no more self-evident chan had been that of certain of his tormented ancestors appearing before the Revolutionary courts) found his whole body and tongue seemingly paralyzed, and could do nothing but cast frightened glances in all directions, expressing incomprehension, indignation at the attack on him and mute calls for help. And yet M. de Charlus could call on all the resources not only of eloquence but of boldness when, possessed by a rage which had been bubbling up inside him against someone, he would transhx him, reduce him to utter despair by the cruelest words in the hearing of polite people who stood aghast, never having imagined that anyone could go so far, In those situations M. de Charlus was on fire, in the grip of genuine nervous attacks which left everyone trembling. But in those cases he had the initiative, he could go on the artack, say whatever he pleased (just as Bloch could make jokes against Jews, but blushed if anyone mentioned their name to him). When he hated people, ir was because he thought those people despised him. If they had been pleasant to him, then instead of be coming intuxicated with rage against them, he would have put his arms Around them. In a situation so cruelly unforeseen as this one the great talker could only stammer what's the meaning of this what's going on he could hardly even be heard. And the gestures expressive of panic terror have changed so little that the old gentleman to whom something unpleasant was happening in a Paris drawing room struck again without knowing it the small number of stylized attitudes which in archaic Greek sculpture indicated the alarm of nymphs being pursued by the God Pan.
The disgraced ambassador, the civil service chief forced into retirement, the man about town given a chilly reception, the lover shown the door sometimes spend months examining the event which destroyed their hopes; they turn it over and over like a bullet fired they do not know from where nor by whom, almost like a meteorite. They want to know what the strange device is made of that struck them down so suddenly, whose ill-will it embodies. At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men rarely reveal their motives. Thus M. de Charlus, to move forward for a moment to the days which followed Mme Verdurin’s party, to which we shall return, could see only one clear reason for Charlie’s attitude. Charlie, who had often threatened to reveal the nature of the Baron’s passion for him, must have decided to do it now that he felt “established” enough to stand on his own feet. And out of sheer ingratitude he must have told Mme Verdurin everything. But how could she have allowed herself to be so deceived (for the Baron, having made up his mind to deny the charge, had already persuaded himself that the feelings he would be accused of were imaginary)? Friends of Mme Verdurin’s, perhaps attracted to Charlie themSelves, must have prepared the ground. So over the next few days M. de Charlus wrote dreadful letters to several entirely innocent members of the “faithful,” who simply thought he had gone mad; then he went to pour out to Mme Verdurin a long, pitiful tale which did not have at all the effect he intended. For on the one hand Mme Verdurin kept repeating to the Baron: ‘Just ignore him, don’t have anything more to do with him, he’s a baby,” when the Baron desired nothing more than a reconciliation. On the other hand, trying to bring one about by denying Charlie everything he had thought he could rely on, he asked Mme Verdurin to stop inviting him to her house, her refusal earned her some furiously sarcastic letters from M. de Charlus Alternating between one theory and another, M. de Charlus never hit op the right one, namely that the coup had not originated with Morel at all} is true that he could have found that out by asking Morel to talk to him fo, a few minutes. But he thought that would be beneath his dignity and dam. aging to the interests of his love. He was the offended party, he was owed an explanation. In fact there is almost always, attached to the idea of a conversa. tion which might clear up a misunderstanding, some other idea which for one reason or another makes us reluctant to have that conversation. The man who has backed down and shown weakness in twenty different circumstances, will stand on his pride the twenty-first time, the only time when it would have been useful not to dig his heels in and to dispel a misapprehension that can only grow stronger in his adversary for want of an explanation. As for the “society” side of the incident, the word went around that M. de Charlus had been thrown out of the Verdurins’ when he was discovered trying to rape a young musician. So no one was surprised when he did not reappear at the Verdurins’, and when he bumped into one of the “faithful” whom he had suspected and insulted, as the other man still felt resentment toward the Baron, who himself did not greet him, it was easy for others to assume that no one in the little set was now willing to speak to the Baron.
While M. de Charlus, felled on the spot by Morel’s words and the Patronne’s attitude, was adopting the pose of the nymph seized by panic terror, M. and Mme Verdurin had retired into the first drawing-room, as if to signal a break in diplomatic relations, leaving M. de Charlus alone, while Morel stood on the dais putting his violin back in its case. “Tell us how it went, said Mme Verdurin greedily to her husband.—I don’t know what you said to him, but he really looked upset, said Ski, he was crying.” Pretending not to understand, “I don’t think what I said made any impression on him,” said Mme Verdurin, making one of those feints which do nor, in fact, deceive everyone, in order to make the sculptor repeat that Charlie had been in tears: tears which filled the Patronne with such swelling pride that she wanted to be sure no member of the faithful could possibly have failed to hear about them. “No, it must have, I saw big tears glistening in his eyes,” said the sculptor in a low voice, smiling conspiratorially and looking out of che corner of his eye to make sure that Morel was still on the dais and could not hear what he was saying. But there was one person who did hear it and whose presence, as soon as it was noticed, restored to Morel one of his lost hopes. It was the Queen of Naples who, having left her fan behind, had chought it would be kinder, on her way back from another party, to call for it herself. She had slipped in as quietly as possible, as if coming to apologize and to make a short visit now that everyone had gone home. But her entrance had passed unnoticed in the excitement of the incident, which she had instantly understood and which filled her with burning indignation. “Ski says that he was crying, did you see that? I didn’t see any tears. Oh yes, I did, now I remember, she added for fear that her denial might be believed. As for old Charlus, he doesn’t look so good, he ought to sit down, he’s tottering on his feet, he'll fall over if he’s not careful,” she said with a pitiless snigger. At that moment Morel ran toward her: “Isn’t that the Queen of Naples, he asked (though he knew it was she), pointing to the royal lady, who was now walking toward Charlus. After what’s happened I can’t very well ask the Baron to introduce me.—Wait a minute, I'll do it,” said Mme Verdurin, and followed by several faithful, bur not by Brichot or myself, for we were hurrying to collect our coats and leave, she advanced toward the Queen, who was talking to M. de Charlus. He had thought that his great wish to see Morel presented to the Queen of Naples could be denied only by the improbable death of the sovereign. But we think of the future as a reflection of the present projected into an empty space, while it is often the immediate result of causes which for the most part escape us. Less than an hour had passed, and M. de Charlus would now have given anything to ensure that Morel was not presented to the Queen. Mme Verdurin curtsied to the Queen. Seeing that she did not seem to recognize her: “I am Mme Verdurin, she said. Your Majesty does not recognize me.
Quite so,” said the Queen, continuing her conversation with M. de Charlus so naturally and with such an absentminded manner that Mme Verdurin could not be sure whether the “quite so,” pronounced so distantly, and which drew from M. de Charlus, in the midst of his suffering, as a lover, the grateful, appreciative smile of a connoisseur of insolence, was really meant for her. Morel, seeing from a distance that the preliminaries to his presentation were under way, had come nearer. The Queen held out her arm to M. de Charlus. She was angry with him too, but only because he was not standing up more energetically to those who had dared to insult him, She blushed with shame on his behalf that the Verdurins should feel able to treat him in such a way. The unaffected friendliness she had shown them a few hours before and the insolent pride with which she now held herself erect before them had their source in the same place in her heart. The Queen was a woman of great goodness, but her idea of goodness was, first of all, an unshakable attachment to people whom she loved, to her relations, to all the princes of her family, one of whom was M. de Charlus, then to all the middle-class or humbler people who showed respect to those she loved, who had the proper feelings toward them. It was as a woman endowed with these good instincts that she had shown friendliness to Mme Verdurin. And no doubt hers was a narrow, rather reactionary and increasingly outdated conception of goodness. But that does not mean that her goodness was any less sincere or less ardent. In ancient times men did not love the human group to which they devoted themselves with any less fervor because it was restricted to the city, nor do the men of today love their country less than those who will one day love the United States of the Earth. I have an example closer at hand in my mother, whom Mme de Cambremer and Mme de Guermantes were never able to interest in any philanthropic “good works,” in any patriotic sewing-circle or charity bazaar. I do not say that she was right in acting only when her own heart moved her, and in reserving to her own family, her servants, any unfortunates that chance put in her way, the treasures of her love and generosity, but I do know that those treasures, like my grandmother’s, were inexhaustible and left far behind anything that Mmes de Cambremer and de Guermantes were ever able to achieve. The case of the Queen of Naples was quite different, but we must admit that she did not choose the objects of her sympathy, as Dostoevsky did in the novels Albertine borrowed from my bookshelves and made her own, among flattering parasites, thieves, drunkards, some of them dull and others insolent, debauchees and even murderers. But the two extremes arc closer than we think, since the nobleman, the close friend, the offended relative chat the Queen wished to defend was M. de Charlus, chat is to say, despite his birth and his various family ties to the Queen, someone whose virtue was set off by numerous vices. “You don’t look well, my dear cousin, she said to M. de Charlus. Lean on my arm. It will always be there to support you. It is strong enough for that. You know how once, at Gaeta, it held the mob at bay. It will be a rampart to you.” Such was the departure, lending her arm to the Baron and without having let Morel be presented to her, of the glorious sister of the Empress Elizabeth.
One might imagine, given the appalling character of M. de Charlus, the way in which he persecuted and terrified even members of his own family, that in the aftermath of this evening he would have unleashed his rage and carried out violent reprisals against the Verdurins. But nothing of the kind took place, and the main reason was certainly that the Baron, having caught a chill a few days later and contracted one of those infectious pneumonias that were so common at the time, was judged by his doctors and judged himself to be at death’s door, and then spent several months suspended between death and life. Was there simply a physical metastasis, and did another illness replace the neurosis which up to that point had made him forget himself and give way to veritable orgies of anger? For it would be too simple to chink that, never having taken the Verdurins seriously from the social point of view, he could not feel resentment toward them as he would toward his equals; too simple, also, to recall that the highly strung, forever stirred up against imaginary and harmless enemies, become harmless themselves when anyone stands up to them, and that one can calm them down better by throwing cold water over them than by trying to show them the emptiness of their grievances. But the explanation of the Baron’s lack of resentment is probably not to be found in a metastasis, but in the malady itself. It exhausted the Baron so completely that it left him little chance to think about the Verdurins. He was half-dead. We were speaking of counterattacks; even those which can have only posthumous effects require, in order to be “set up” effectively, the sacrifice of some part of one’s forces. M. de Charlus had too little strength left to embark on such a preparation. We often hear about mortal enemies who open their eyes only to see each other on the point of death and die happy. That must be a rare occurrence, except where death has caught us in the midst of life. On the contrary, it is when we have nothing more to lose that we lose the will to face risks which we should have taken quite happily when in health. The desire for revenge is part of life; more often than not—in spite of exceptions which, within a single character, are mere human contradictions—it fades at the approach of death. When he had thought about the Verdurins for a moment. M. de Charlus felt too tired, turned toward the wall and stopped thinking altogether. It was not that he had lost his eloquence, but it now cost him less effort. It still flowed from him spontaneously, but had lost its previous character. Freed from its subjection to the violent feelings it had so often dignified, it was now an almost mystical eloquence adorned with words of gentleness, Gospel parables, seeming resignation to death. He spoke chiefly on the days when he felt he would survive. A relapse reduced him to silence. This Christian sweetness, into which his splendid violence had been transformed (as Esther represents a transformation of the very different genius of Andromaque), caused wonderment in all who saw it. Even the Verdurins would have been equally admiring; they could not have forborne to adore a man whose faults had made them hate him.
