The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (278 page)

Although other reasons may have dictated this transformation of M. de Charlus, and purely physical ferments may have set his chemistry “working” and made his body gradually change into the category of women’s bodies, nevertheless the change that we record here was of spiritual origin. By dint of imagining oneself to be ill one becomes ill, one grows thin, one is too weak to rise from one’s bed, one suffers from nervous enteritis. By dint of thinking tenderly of men one becomes a woman, and an imaginary skirt hampers one’s movements. The obsession, as in the other instance it can affect one’s health, may in this instance alter one’s sex.

Morel, who accompanied him, came up to greet me. From that first moment, owing to a twofold change that occurred in him, he made (and alas, I was not quick enough to take account of it!) a bad impression on me. And this is why. I have said that Morel, having risen above his father’s menial status, was generally pleased to indulge in a contemptuous familiarity. He had spoken to me, on the day when he brought me the photographs, without once addressing me as Monsieur, treating me superciliously. What was my surprise at Mme Verdurin’s to see him bow very low before me, and before me alone, and to hear, before he had even uttered a syllable to anyone else, words of infinite respect—words such as I thought could not possibly flow from his pen or fall from his lips—addressed to myself. I at once suspected that he had some favour to ask of me. Taking me aside a minute later: “Monsieur would be doing me a very great service,” he said to me, going so far this time as to address me in the third person, “by keeping from Mme Verdurin and her guests the nature of the profession that my father practised in his uncle’s household. It would be best to say that, in your family, he was the steward of estates so vast as to put him almost on a level with your parents.” Morel’s request annoyed me intensely, not because it obliged me to magnify his father’s position, which was a matter of complete indifference to me, but by requiring me to exaggerate the apparent wealth of my own, which I felt to be absurd. But he appeared so wretched so pressing, that I could not refuse him. “No, before dinner,” he said in an imploring tone, “Monsieur can easily find some excuse for taking Mme Verdurin aside.” This was what I in fact did, trying to enhance to the best of my ability the glamour of Morel’s father without unduly exaggerating the “style,” the “worldly goods” of my own family. It went off very smoothly, despite the astonishment of Mme Verdurin, who had had a nodding acquaintance with my grandfather. And as she had no tact and hated family life (that dissolvent of the little nucleus), after telling me that she remembered seeing my great-grandfather long ago, and speaking to me of him as of somebody who was more or less an idiot who would have been incapable of understanding the little group and who, to use her expression, “was not one of us,” she said to me: “Families are such a bore, one longs to get away from them”; and at once proceeded to tell me of a trait in my great-grandfather’s character of which I was unaware, although I had suspected it at home (I had never known him, but he was much spoken of), his remarkable stinginess (in contrast to the somewhat lavish generosity of my great-uncle, the friend of the lady in pink and Morel’s father’s employer): “The fact that your grandparents had such a smart steward only goes to show that there are people of all complexions in a family. Your grandfather’s father was so stingy that at the end of his life when he was almost gaga—between you and me, he was never anything very special, you make up for the lot of them—he could not bring himself to pay a penny for his ride on the omnibus. So that they were obliged to have him followed by somebody who paid his fare for him, and to let the old miser think that his friend M. de Persigny, the Cabinet Minister, had given him a permit to travel free on the omnibuses. But I’m delighted to hear that
our
Morel’s father was so distinguished. I was under the impression that he had been a schoolmaster, but it doesn’t matter, I must have misunderstood. In any case, it makes not the slightest difference, for I must tell you that here we appreciate only true worth, the personal contribution, what I call participation. Provided that a person is artistic, provided in a word that he is one of the confraternity, nothing else matters.” The way in which Morel was one of the confraternity was—so far as I was able to discover—that he was sufficiently fond of both women and men to satisfy either sex with the fruits of his experience of the other—as we shall see later on. But what it is essential to note here is that as soon as I had given him my word that I would speak on his behalf to Mme Verdurin, as soon, especially, as I had actually done so without any possibility of subsequent retractation, Morel’s “respect” for myself vanished as though by magic, the formal language of respect melted away, and indeed for some time he avoided me, contriving to appear to despise me, so that if Mme Verdurin wanted me to give him a message, to ask him to play something, he would continue to talk to one of the faithful, then move on to another, changing his seat if I approached him. The others were obliged to tell him three or four times that I had spoken to him, after which he would reply, with an air of constraint, briefly—unless we were by ourselves. Then he was expansive and friendly, for there was a charming side to him. I concluded all the same from this first evening that his must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind. But inasmuch as I had inherited a strain of my grandmother’s nature, and enjoyed the diversity of other people without expecting anything of them or resenting anything that they did, I overlooked his baseness, rejoiced in his gaiety when it was in evidence, and indeed in what I believe to have been a genuine affection on his part when, having run through the whole gamut of his false ideas of human nature, he realised (in fits and starts, for he had strange reversions to blind and primitive savagery) that my gentleness with him was disinterested, that my indulgence arose not from a want of perception but from what he called kindness; and above all I was enraptured by his art, through which, although it was little more than an admirable virtuosity, and although he was not, in the intellectual sense of the word, a real musician, I heard again or for the first time so much beautiful music. Moreover a manager (M. de Charlus, in whom I had not suspected these talents, although Mme de Guermantes, who had known him as a very different person in their younger days, asserted that he had composed a sonata for her, painted a fan, and so forth), a manager modest in regard to his true merits, extremely gifted, contrived to place this virtuosity at the service of a versatile artistic sense which increased it tenfold. Imagine a purely skilful performer in the Russian ballet, trained, taught, developed in all directions by M. Diaghilev.

I had just given Mme Verdurin the message with which Morel had entrusted me and was talking to M. de Charlus about Saint-Loup, when Cottard burst into the room announcing, as though the house were on fire, that the Cambremers had arrived. Mme Verdurin, not wishing to appear, in front of newcomers such as M. de Charlus (whom Cottard had not seen) and myself, to attach any great importance to the arrival of the Cambremers, did not move, made no response to the announcement of these tidings, and merely said to the Doctor, fanning herself gracefully and adopting the tone of a marquise in the Théâtre-Français: “The Baron has just been telling us …” This was too much for Cottard. Less brightly than he would have done in the old days, for learning and high positions had slowed down his delivery, but nevertheless with the excitement which he recaptured at the Verdurins’, he exclaimed: “A Baron! What Baron? Where’s the Baron?” staring round the room with an astonishment that bordered on incredulity. With the affected indifference of a hostess when a servant has broken a valuable glass in front of her guests, and with the artificial, high-pitched tone of a Conservatoire prize-winner acting in a play by the younger Dumas, Mme Verdurin replied, pointing with her fan to Morel’s patron: “Why, the Baron de Charlus, to whom let me introduce you … M. le Professeur Cottard.” Mme Verdurin was for that matter by no means sorry to have an opportunity of playing the leading lady. M. de Charlus proffered two fingers which the Professor clasped with the kindly smile of a “prince of science.” But he stopped short upon seeing the Cambremers enter the room, while M. de Charlus led me into a corner to have a word with me, not without feeling my muscles, which is a German habit.

M. de Cambremer bore little resemblance to the old Marquise. As she was wont to remark tenderly, he took entirely “after his papa.” To anyone who had only heard of him, or of letters written by him, brisk and suitably expressed, his personal appearance was startling. No doubt one grew accustomed to it. But his nose had chosen, in placing itself askew above his mouth, perhaps the only oblique line, among so many possible ones, that one would never have thought of tracing upon this face, and one that indicated a vulgar stupidity, aggravated still further by the proximity of a Norman complexion on cheeks that were like two red apples. It is possible that M. de Cambremer’s eyes retained between their eyelids a trace of the sky of the Cotentin, so soft upon sunny days when the wayfarer amuses himself counting in their hundreds the shadows of the poplars drawn up by the roadside, but those eyelids, heavy, bleared and drooping, would have prevented the least flash of intelligence from escaping. And so, discouraged by the meagreness of that azure gaze, one returned to the big crooked nose. By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose. This nose of his was not ugly; it was if anything too handsome, too bold, too proud of its own importance. Arched, polished, gleaming, brand-new, it was amply disposed to make up for the spiritual inadequacy of the eyes. Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature on another), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Although the propriety of the dark clothes which M. de Cambremer invariably wore, even in the morning, might well reassure those who were dazzled and exasperated by the insolent brightness of the seaside attire of people whom they did not know, it was none the less impossible to understand why the wife of the judge should have declared with an air of discernment and authority, as a person who knows far more than you about the high society of Alençon, that on seeing M. de Cambremer one immediately felt oneself, even before one knew who he was, in the presence of a man of supreme distinction, of a man of perfect breeding, a change from the sort of person one saw at Balbec, a man in short in whose company one could breathe freely. He was to her, asphyxiated by all those Balbec tourists who did not know her world, like a bottle of smelling salts. It seemed to me on the contrary that he was one of those people whom my grandmother would at once have set down as “very common,” and since she had no conception of snobbishness, she would no doubt have been stupefied that he could have succeeded in winning the hand of Mlle Legrandin, who must surely be difficult to please, having a brother who was “so well-bred.” At best one might have said of M. de Cambremer’s plebeian ugliness that it was to some extent redolent of the soil and had a hint of something very anciently local; one was reminded, on examining his faulty features, which one would have liked to correct, of those names of little Norman towns as to the etymology of which my friend the curé was mistaken because the peasants, mispronouncing or having misunderstood the Latin or Norman words that underlay them, have finally perpetuated in a barbarism to be found already in the cartularies, as Brichot would have said, a misinterpretation and a faulty pronunciation. Life in these little old towns may, for all that, be pleasant enough, and M. de Cambremer must have had his good points, for if it was in a mother’s nature that the old Marquise should prefer her son to her daughter-in-law, on the other hand she who had other children, of whom two at least were not devoid of merit, was often heard to declare that the Marquis was, in her opinion, the best of the family. During the short time he had spent in the Army, his messmates, finding Cambremer too long a name to pronounce, had given him the nickname Cancan, implying a flow of gossip, which he had done nothing to deserve. He knew how to brighten a dinner-party to which he was invited by saying when the fish (even if it were putrescent) or the entrée came in: “I say, that looks a fine beast.” And his wife, who had adopted on entering the family everything that she supposed to form part of their ethos, put herself on the level of her husband’s friends and perhaps sought to please him like a mistress and as though she had been involved in his bachelor existence, by saying in a casual tone when she spoke of him to officers: “You shall see Cancan presently. Cancan has gone to Balbec, but he will be back this evening.” She was furious at having compromised herself this evening by coming to the Verdurins’ and had done so only in response to the entreaties of her mother-in-law and her husband, in the interests of a renewal of the lease. But, being less well-brought-up than they, she made no secret of the ulterior motive and for the last fortnight had been making fun of this dinner-party to her women friends. “You know we’re going to dine with our tenants. That will be well worth an increased rent. As a matter of fact, I’m rather curious to see what they’ve done to our poor old Raspelière” (as though she had been born in the house, and would find there all her old family associations). “Our old keeper told me only yesterday that you wouldn’t know the place. I can’t bear to think of all that must be going on there. I’m sure we shall have to have the whole place disinfected before we move in again.” She arrived haughty and morose, with the air of a great lady whose castle, owing to a state of war, is occupied by the enemy, but who nevertheless feels herself at home and makes a point of showing the conquerors that they are intruders. Mme de Cambremer could not see me at first for I was in a bay at the side of the room with M. de Charlus, who was telling me that he had heard from Morel that his father had been a “steward” in my family, and that he, Charlus, credited me with sufficient intelligence and magnanimity (a term common to himself and Swann) to forgo the shabby and ignoble pleasure which vulgar little idiots (I was warned) would not have failed, in my place, to give themselves by revealing to our hosts details which they might regard as demeaning. “The mere fact that I take an interest in him and extend my protection over him, gives him a pre-eminence and wipes out the past,” the Baron concluded. As I listened to him and promised the silence which I would have kept even without the hope of being considered in return intelligent and magnanimous, I looked at Mme de Cambremer. And I had difficulty in recognising the melting, savoury morsel I had had beside me the other day at tea-time on the terrace at Balbec in the piece of Norman shortbread I now saw, hard as rock, in which the faithful would in vain have tried to insert their teeth. Irritated in advance by the good nature which her husband had inherited from his mother, and which would make him assume a flattered expression when the faithful were presented to him, but nevertheless anxious to perform her duty as a society woman, when Brichot was introduced to her she wanted to introduce him to her husband, as she had seen her more fashionable friends do, but, rage or pride prevailing over the desire to show her knowledge of the world, instead of saying, as she ought to have done, “Allow me to present my husband,” she said: “I present you to my husband,” holding aloft thus the banner of the Cambremers, but to no avail, for her husband bowed as low before Brichot as she had expected. But all Mme de Cambremer’s ill humour vanished in an instant when her eye fell on M. de Charlus, whom she knew by sight. Never had she succeeded in obtaining an introduction, even at the time of her liaison with Swann. For as M. de Charlus always sided with the woman—with his sister-in-law against M. de Guermantes’s mistresses, with Odette, at that time still unmarried, but an old flame of Swann’s, against the new—he had, as a stern defender of morals and faithful protector of homes, given Odette—and kept—the promise that he would never allow himself to be introduced to Mme de Cambremer. She had certainly never imagined that it was at the Verdurins’ that she was at length to meet this unapproachable person. M. de Cambremer knew that this was a great joy to her, so great that he himself was moved by it and gave his wife a look that implied: “You’re glad you decided to come, aren’t you?” He spoke in fact very little, knowing that he had married a superior woman. “Unworthy as I am,” he would say at every moment, and readily quoted a fable of La Fontaine and one of Florian which seemed to him to apply to his ignorance and at the same time to enable him, beneath the outward form of a disdainful flattery, to show the men of science who were not members of the Jockey that one might be a sportsman and yet have read fables. The unfortunate thing was that he knew only two. And so they kept cropping up. Mme de Cambremer was no fool, but she had a number of extremely irritating habits. With her, the corruption of names had absolutely nothing to do with aristocratic disdain. She was not the person to say, like the Duchesse de Guermantes (whom the mere fact of her birth ought to have preserved even more than Mme de Cambremer from such an absurdity), with a pretence of not remembering the unfashionable name (although it is now that of one of the women whom it is most difficult to approach) of Julien de Monchâteau: “a little Madame … Pico della Mirandola.” No, when Mme de Cambremer said a name wrong it was out of kindness of heart, so as not to appear to know some damaging fact, and when, out of truthfulness, she admitted it, she tried to conceal it by distorting it. If, for instance, she was defending a woman, she would try to conceal, while determined not to lie to the person who had asked her to tell the truth, the fact that Madame So-and-so was at the moment the mistress of M. Sylvain Lévy, and would say: “No … I know absolutely nothing about her, I believe that people used to accuse her of having inspired a passion in a gentleman whose name I don’t know, something like Cahn, Kohn, Kuhn; anyhow, I believe the gentleman has been dead for years and that there was never anything between them.” This is an analogous—but inverse—process to that adopted by liars who, in falsifying what they have done when giving an account of it to a mistress or merely to a friend, imagine that their listener will not immediately see that the crucial phrase (as with Cahn, Kohn, Kuhn) is interpolated, is of a different texture from the rest of the conversation, is false-bottomed.