The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (186 page)

M. de Charlus was soon seated by the side of Mme Swann. At every social gathering at which he appeared, contemptuous towards the men, courted by the women, he promptly attached himself to the most elegantly dressed of the latter, by whose garments he felt himself to be embellished. The Baron’s frock-coat or tails were reminiscent of a portrait by some great colourist of a man dressed in black but having by his side, thrown over a chair, the brilliant cloak which he is about to wear at some fancy-dress ball. These tête-à-têtes, generally with some royal lady, secured for M. de Charlus various privileges which he cherished. For instance, one consequence of them was that his hostesses, at theatricals or recitals, allowed the Baron alone to have a front seat in a row of ladies, while the rest of the men jostled one another at the back of the room. Furthermore, completely absorbed, it seemed, in telling amusing stories to the enraptured lady at the top of his voice, M. de Charlus was dispensed from the necessity of going to shake hands with any of the others, was set free from all social duties. Behind the scented barrier which the chosen beauty provided for him, he was isolated in the middle of a crowded drawing-room, as, in a crowded theatre, behind the rampart of a box; and when anyone came up to greet him, through, as it were, the beauty of his companion, it was permissible for him to reply quite curtly and without interrupting his conversation with a lady. True, Mme Swann was scarcely of the rank of the persons with whom he liked thus to flaunt himself. But he professed admiration for her and friendship for Swann, knew that she would be flattered by his attentions, and was himself flattered at being compromised by the prettiest woman in the room.

Mme de Villeparisis meanwhile was not too well pleased to receive a visit from M. de Charlus. The latter, while admitting serious defects in his aunt’s character, was genuinely fond of her. But every now and then in a fit of anger or imaginary grievance, he would sit down and write to her, without making the slightest attempt to resist his impulse, letters full of the most violent abuse, in which he made the most of trifling incidents which until then he seemed not even to have noticed. Among other examples I may instance the following, which my stay at Balbec brought to my knowledge: Mme de Villeparisis, fearing that she had not brought enough money with her to Balbec to enable her to prolong her holiday there, and not caring, since she was of a thrifty disposition and shrank from superfluous expenditure, to have money sent to her from Paris, had borrowed three thousand francs from M. de Charlus. A month later, annoyed with his aunt for some trivial reason, he asked her to repay him this sum by telegraphic money order. He received two thousand nine hundred and ninety-odd francs. Meeting his aunt a few days later in Paris, in the course of a friendly conversation he drew her attention, very mildly, to the mistake that her bank had made when sending the money. “But there was no mistake,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, “the money order cost six francs seventy-five.” “Ah, well, if it was intentional, that’s fine,” said M. de Charlus. “I mentioned it only in case you didn’t know, because in that case, if the bank had done the same thing with anyone who didn’t know you as well as I do, it might have led to unpleasantness.” “No, no, there was no mistake.” “Actually you were quite right,” M. de Charlus concluded gaily, stooping to kiss his aunt’s hand. And in fact he bore her no ill will and was only amused at this little instance of her stinginess. But some time afterwards, imagining that, in a family matter, his aunt had been trying to cheat him and had “worked up a regular conspiracy” against him, as she rather foolishly took shelter behind the lawyers with whom he suspected her of having plotted to do him down, he had written her a letter boiling over with insolence and rage. “I shall not be satisfied with having my revenge,” he added as a postscript, “I shall make you a laughing-stock. Tomorrow I shall tell everyone the story of the money order and the six francs seventy-five you kept back from me out of the three thousand I lent you. I shall disgrace you publicly.” Instead of so doing, he had gone to his aunt the next day to apologise, having already regretted a letter in which he had used some really appalling language. In any case, to whom could he have told the story of the money order? Since he no longer sought vengeance but a sincere reconciliation, now would have been the time for him to keep silence. But he had already told the story everywhere, while still on the best of terms with his aunt, had told it without malice, as a joke, and because he was the soul of indiscretion. He had told the story, but without Mme de Villeparisis’s knowledge. With the result that, having learned from his letter that he intended to disgrace her by divulging a transaction in which he had assured her personally that she had acted rightly, she concluded that he had deceived her then and had lied when he pretended to be fond of her. All this had now died down, but neither of them knew precisely what the other thought of him or her. This sort of intermittent quarrel is of course somewhat exceptional. Of a different order again were those of M. de Charlus, as we shall presently see, with people wholly unlike Mme de Villeparisis. In spite of this we must bear in mind that the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and family, far from being static, save in appearance, are as eternally fluid as the sea itself. Whence all the rumours of divorce between couples who have always seemed so perfectly united and will soon afterwards speak of one another with affection; all the terrible things said by one friend of another from whom we supposed him to be inseparable and with whom we shall find him once more reconciled before we have had time to recover from our surprise; all the reversals of alliances between nations after the briefest of spells.

“I say, things are hotting up between my uncle and Mme Swann,” remarked Saint-Loup. “And look at Mamma in the innocence of her heart going across to disturb them. To the pure all things are pure!”

I studied M. de Charlus. The tuft of his grey hair, his twinkling eye, the brow of which was raised by his monocle, the red flowers in his buttonhole, formed as it were the three mobile apexes of a convulsive and striking triangle. I had not ventured to greet him, for he had given me no sign of recognition. And yet, though he was not facing in my direction, I was convinced that he had seen me; while he sat spinning some yarn to Mme Swann, whose sumptuous, pansy-coloured cloak floated over his knee, the Baron’s roving eye, like that of a street hawker who is watching all the time for the “law” to appear, had certainly explored every corner of the room and taken note of all the people who were in it. M. de Châtellerault came up to say good evening to him without there being the slightest hint on M. de Charlus’s face that he had seen the young Duke until he was actually standing in front of him. In this way, in fairly numerous gatherings such as this, M. de Charlus kept almost continuously on show a smile without determinate direction or particular object, which, thereby pre-existing the greetings of new arrivals, remained, when the latter entered its zone, devoid of any amiable implication towards them. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to go across and speak to Mme Swann. But as she was not certain whether I knew Mme de Marsantes and M. de Charlus, she was distinctly cold, fearing no doubt that I might ask her to introduce me to them. I then turned to M. de Charlus, and at once regretted it, for though he could not have helped seeing me he showed no sign of having done so. As I stood before him and bowed I found, at some distance from his body which it prevented me from approaching by the full length of his outstretched arm, a finger bereft, one would have said, of an episcopal ring, of which he appeared to be offering the consecrated site for the kiss of the faithful, and I was made to appear to have penetrated, without leave from the Baron and by an act of trespass for which he left me the entire responsibility, the unalterable, anonymous and vacant dispersion of his smile. This coldness was hardly of a kind to encourage Mme Swann to depart from hers.

“How tired and worried you look,” said Mme de Marsantes to her son who had come up to greet M. de Charlus.

And indeed the expression in Robert’s eyes seemed now and then to reach a depth from which it rose at once like a diver who has touched bottom. This bottom which hurt Robert so much when he touched it that he left it at once, to return to it a moment later, was the thought that he had broken with his mistress.

“Never mind,” his mother went on, stroking his cheek, “never mind; it’s good to see my little boy again.”

This show of affection seeming to irritate Robert, Mme de Marsantes led her son away to the other end of the room where in an alcove hung with yellow silk a group of Beauvais armchairs massed their violet-hued tapestries like purple irises in a field of buttercups. Mme Swann, finding herself alone and having realised that I was a friend of Saint-Loup, beckoned me to come and sit beside her. Not having seen her for so long, I did not know what to talk to her about. I was keeping an eye on my hat among all those that littered the carpet, and I wondered with a vague curiosity to whom could belong one that was not the Duc de Guermantes’s and yet in the lining of which a capital “G” was surmounted by a ducal coronet. I knew who everyone in the room was, and could not think of anyone whose hat this could possibly be.

“What a pleasant man M. de Norpois is,” I said to Mme Swann, pointing him out to her. “It’s true that Robert de Saint-Loup says he’s a pest, but …”

“He’s quite right,” she replied.

Seeing from her face that she was thinking of something which she was keeping from me, I plied her with questions. Pleased, perhaps, to appear to be very taken up with someone in this room where she hardly knew anyone, she took me into a corner.

“I’m sure this is what M. de Saint-Loup meant,” she began, “but you must never tell him I said so, for he would think me indiscreet, and I value his esteem very highly—I’m an ‘honest Injun,’ you know. The other day, Charlus was dining at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, and for some reason or other your name was mentioned. It appears that M. de Norpois told them—it’s all too silly for words, don’t go and worry yourself to death over it, nobody paid any attention, they all knew only too well the mischievous tongue that said it—that you were a hysterical little flatterer.”

I have recorded a long way back my stupefaction at the discovery that a friend of my father such as M. de Norpois was could have expressed himself thus in speaking of me. I was even more astonished to learn that my emotion on that evening long ago when I had spoken about Mme Swann and Gilberte was known to the Princesse de Guermantes, whom I imagined never to have heard of my existence. Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the “world,” from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is infinitely variable and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned from experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated (such as those so enthusiastic speeches which I used at one time to make to everyone and at every opportunity on the subject of Mme Swann, thinking that among so many scattered seeds one at least would germinate) has at once, often because of our very anxiety, been hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word which we ourselves have forgotten, which may not even have been uttered by us but formed along its way by the imperfect refraction of a different word, could be transported, without ever being halted in its progress, infinite distances—in the present instance to the Princesse de Guermantes—and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods! What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbour; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and demeanour no more resembles our own than an inaccurate tracing, on which for the black line we find an empty space and for a blank area an inexplicable contour, resembles the original drawing. It may happen however that what has not been transcribed is a non-existent feature which only our purblind self-esteem reveals to us, and what seems to us to have been added does indeed belong to us, but so quintessentially that it escapes us. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to us bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, unflattering, certainly, but profound and useful, as an X-ray photograph. Not that that is any reason why we should recognise ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure will, if he is shown an X-ray of them, have the same suspicion of error at the sight of this rosary of bones labelled as being a picture of himself as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy in the picture of ourselves according to whether it is drawn by one’s own hand or another’s was something I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they had taken of themselves while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but stunning them with amazement if some chance revealed them to them, saying: “It’s you.”

A few years earlier I should have been only too glad to tell Mme Swann in what connexion I had behaved so tenderly towards M. de Norpois, since the connexion had been my desire to get to know her. But I no longer felt this desire, since I was no longer in love with Gilberte. At the same time I found it difficult to identify Mme Swann with the lady in pink of my childhood. Accordingly I spoke of the woman who was on my mind at the moment.

“Did you see the Duchesse de Guermantes just now?” I asked Mme Swann.

But since the Duchess did not greet Mme Swann when they met, the latter chose to appear to regard her as a person of no interest, whose presence in a room one did not even notice.

“I don’t know; I didn’t
realise
she was here,” she replied sourly, using an expression borrowed from English.