The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (286 page)

“You’re making fun of me,” said Mme Cottard, herself laughing, and raising her hand to her forehead with the light touch of a hypnotist and the deftness of a woman putting her hair straight, to erase the last traces of sleep, “I must offer my humble apologies to dear Mme Verdurin and get the truth from her.” But her smile at once grew mournful, for the Professor, who knew that his wife sought to please him and trembled lest she fail to do so, had shouted at her: “Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re as red as if you had an eruption of acne. You look just like an old peasant.”

“You know, he’s charming,” said Mme Verdurin, “he has such a delightfully sardonic good nature. And then, he snatched my husband from the jaws of death when the whole medical profession had given him up. He spent three nights by his bedside, without ever lying down. And so for me, you know,” she went on in a grave and almost menacing tone, raising her hand to the twin spheres, shrouded in white tresses, of her musical temples, and as though we had threatened to assault the Doctor, “Cottard is sacred! He could ask me for anything in the world! As it is, I don’t call him Doctor Cottard, I call him Doctor God! And even in saying that I’m slandering him, for this God does everything in his power to remedy some of the disasters for which the other is responsible.”

“Play a trump,” M. de Charlus said to Morel with a delighted air.

“A trump, here goes,” said the violinist.

“You ought to have declared your king first,” said M. de Charlus, “you’re not paying attention to the game, but how well you play!”

“I have the king,” said Morel.

“He’s a fine man,” replied the Professor.

“What’s that thing up there with the sticks?” asked Mme Verdurin, drawing M. de Cambremer’s attention to a superb escutcheon carved over the mantelpiece. “Are they your
arms
?” she added with sarcastic scorn.

“No, they’re not ours,” replied M. de Cambremer. “We bear
barry of five, embattled counterembattled or and gules, as many trefoils countercharged
. No, those are the arms of the Arrachepels, who were not of our stock, but from whom we inherited the house, and nobody of our line has ever made any changes here.” (“That’s one in the eye for her,” muttered Mme de Cambremer.) “The Arrachepels (formerly Pelvilains, we are told) bore
or five piles couped in base gules
. When they allied themselves with the Féterne family, their blazon changed, but remained
cantoned within twenty cross crosslets fitchee in base or, a dexter canton ermine
. My great-grandmother was a d’Arrachepel or de Rachepel, whichever you like, for both forms are found in the old charters,” continued M. de Cambremer, blushing deeply, for only then did the idea for which his wife had given him credit occur to him, and he was afraid that Mme Verdurin might have applied to herself words which had in no way been aimed at her. “History relates that in the eleventh century the first Arrachepel, Macé, known as Pelvilain, showed a special aptitude, in siege warfare, in tearing up piles. Whence the nickname Arrachepel under which he was ennobled, and the piles which you see persisting through the centuries in their arms. These are the piles which, to render fortifications more impregnable, used to be driven, bedded, if you will pardon the expression, into the ground in front of them, and fastened together laterally. They are what you quite rightly called sticks, though they had nothing to do with the floating sticks of our good La Fontaine. For they were supposed to render a stronghold impregnable. Of course, with our modern artillery, they make one smile. But you must bear in mind that I’m speaking of the eleventh century.”

“Yes, it’s not exactly up-to-date,” said Mme Verdurin, “but the little campanile has character.”

“You have,” said Cottard, “the luck of a fiddlededee,” a word which he regularly repeated to avoid using Molière’s.
¹⁷
“Do you know why the king of diamonds was invalided out of the army?”

“I shouldn’t mind being in his shoes,” said Morel, who was bored with military service.

“Oh! how unpatriotic!” exclaimed M. de Charlus, who could not refrain from pinching the violinist’s ear.

“You don’t know why the king of diamonds was invalided out of the army?” Cottard pursued, determined to make his joke, “it’s because he has only one eye.”

“You’re up against it, Doctor,” said M. de Cambremer, to show Cottard that he knew who he was.

“This young man is astonishing,” M. de Charlus interrupted naïvely, pointing to Morel. “He plays like a god.”

This observation did not find favour with the Doctor, who replied: “Wait and see. He who laughs last laughs longest.”

“Queen, ace,” Morel announced triumphantly, for fortune was favouring him.

The Doctor bowed his head as though powerless to deny this good fortune, and admitted, spellbound: “That’s beautiful.”

“We’re so pleased to have met M. de Charlus,” said Mme de Cambremer to Mme Verdurin.

“Had you never met him before? He’s rather nice, most unusual, very much
of a period
” (she would have found it difficult to say which), replied Mme Verdurin with the complacent smile of a connoisseur, a judge and a hostess.

Mme de Cambremer asked me if I was coming to Féterne with Saint-Loup. I could not suppress a cry of admiration when I saw the moon hanging like an orange lantern beneath the vault of oaks that led away from the house. “That’s nothing,” said Mme Verdurin. “Presently, when the moon has risen higher and the valley is lit up, it will be a thousand times more beautiful. That’s something you haven’t got at Féterne!” she added scornfully to Mme de Cambremer, who did not know how to answer, not wishing to disparage her property, especially in front of the tenants.

“Are you staying much longer in the neighbourhood, Madame?” M. de Cambremer asked Mme Cottard, an inquiry that might be interpreted as a vague intention to invite her, but which dispensed him for the moment from making any more precise commitment. “Oh, certainly, Monsieur, I regard this annual exodus as most important for the children. Say what you like, they need fresh air. I may be rather primitive on this point but I believe that no cure is as good for children as healthy air—even if someone should give me a mathematical proof to the contrary. Their little faces are already completely changed. The doctors wanted to send me to Vichy; but it’s too stuffy there, and I can look after my stomach when those big boys of mine have grown a little bigger. Besides, the Professor, with all the examining he has to do, has always got his shoulder to the wheel, and the heat tires him dreadfully. I feel that a man needs a thorough rest after he has been on the go all the year like that. Whatever happens we shall stay another month at least.”

“Ah! in that case we shall meet again.”

“In any case I shall be obliged to stay here as my husband has to go on a visit to Savoy, and won’t be finally settled here for another fortnight.”

“I like the view of the valley even more than the sea view,” Mme Verdurin went on. “You’re going to have a splendid night for your journey.”

“We ought really to find out whether the carriages are ready, if you are absolutely determined to go back to Balbec tonight,” M. Verdurin said to me, “for I see no necessity for it myself. We could drive you over tomorrow morning. It’s certain to be fine. The roads are excellent.”

I said that it was impossible. “But in any case it isn’t time to go yet,” the Mistress protested. “Leave them alone, they have heaps of time. A lot of good it will do them to arrive at the station with an hour to wait. They’re far better off here. And you, my young Mozart,” she said to Morel, not venturing to address M. de Charlus directly, “won’t you stay the night? We have some nice rooms overlooking the sea.”

“No, he can’t,” M. de Charlus replied on behalf of the absorbed card-player who had not heard. “He has a pass until midnight only. He must go back to bed like a good little boy, obedient and well-behaved,” he added in a smug, affected, insistent voice, as though he found a sadistic pleasure in employing this chaste comparison and also in letting his voice dwell, in passing, upon something that concerned Morel, in touching him, if not with his hand, with words that seemed to be tactile.

From the sermon that Brichot had addressed to me, M. de Cambremer had concluded that I was a Dreyfusard. As he himself was as anti-Dreyfusard as possible, out of courtesy to a foe he began to sing me the praises of a Jewish colonel who had always been very decent to a cousin of the Chevregnys and had secured for him the promotion he deserved. “And my cousin’s opinions were the exact opposite,” said M. de Cambremer. He omitted to mention what those opinions were, but I sensed that they were as antiquated and misshapen as his own face, opinions which a few families in certain small towns must long have entertained. “Well, you know, I call that really fine!” was M. de Cambremer’s conclusion. It is true that he was hardly employing the word “fine” in the aesthetic sense in which his wife or his mother would have applied it to different works of art. M. de Cambremer often made use of this term, when for instance he was congratulating a delicate person who had put on a little weight. “What, you’ve gained half a stone in two months? I say, that’s really fine!”

Refreshments were set out on a table. Mme Verdurin invited the gentlemen to go and choose whatever drink they preferred. M. de Charlus went and drank his glass and at once returned to a seat by the card-table from which he did not stir. Mme Verdurin asked him: “Did you have some of my orangeade?” Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: “No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It’s delicious.” It is curious that a certain category of secret impulses has as an external consequence a way of speaking or gesticulating which reveals them. If a man believes or disbelieves in the Virgin Birth, or in the innocence of Dreyfus, or in a plurality of worlds, and wishes to keep his opinion to himself, you will find nothing in his voice or in his gait that will betray his thoughts. But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, “No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice,” one could say: “Ah, he likes the stronger sex,” with the same certainty as enables a judge to sentence a criminal who has not confessed, or a doctor a patient suffering from general paralysis who himself is perhaps unaware of his malady but has made some mistake in pronunciation from which it can be deduced that he will be dead in three years. Perhaps the people who deduce, from a man’s way of saying: “No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice,” a love of the kind called unnatural, have no need of any such scientific knowledge. But that is because here there is a more direct relation between the revealing sign and the secret. Without saying so to oneself in so many words, one feels that it is a gentle, smiling lady who is answering and who appears affected because she is pretending to be a man and one is not accustomed to seeing men put on such airs. And it is perhaps more gracious to think that a certain number of angelic women have long been included by mistake in the masculine sex where, feeling exiled, ineffectually flapping their wings towards men in whom they inspire a physical repulsion, they know how to arrange a drawing-room, to compose “interiors.” M. de Charlus was not in the least perturbed that Mme Verdurin should be standing, and remained ensconced in his armchair so as to be nearer to Morel. “Don’t you think it criminal,” said Mme Verdurin to the Baron, “that that creature who might be enchanting us with his violin should be sitting there at a card-table. When one can play the violin like that!” “He plays cards well, he does everything well, he’s so intelligent,” said M. de Charlus, keeping his eye on the game, so as to be able to advise Morel. This was not his only reason, however, for not rising from his chair for Mme Verdurin. With the singular amalgam that he had made of his social conceptions at once as a great nobleman and as an artlover, instead of being courteous in the same way as a man of his world would have been, he invented as it were tableaux-vivants for himself after Saint-Simon; and at that moment he was amusing himself by impersonating the Maréchal d’Huxelles, who interested him from other aspects also, and of whom it is said that he was so arrogant as to remain seated, with an air of indolence, before all the most distinguished persons at Court.

“By the way, Charlus,” said Mme Verdurin, who was beginning to grow familiar, “you don’t know of any penniless old nobleman in your Faubourg who would come to me as porter?” “Why, yes … why, yes,” replied M. de Charlus with a genial smile, “but I don’t advise it.” “Why not?” “I should be afraid for your sake that the more elegant visitors would go no further than the lodge.” This was the first skirmish between them. Mme Verdurin barely noticed it. There were to be others, alas, in Paris. M. de Charlus remained glued to his chair. He could not, moreover, restrain a faint smile on seeing how his favourite maxims as to aristocratic prestige and bourgeois cowardice were confirmed by the so easily won submission of Mme Verdurin. The Mistress appeared not at all surprised by the Baron’s posture, and if she left him it was only because she had been perturbed by seeing me taken up by M. de Cambremer. But first of all, she wished to clear up the mystery of M. de Charlus’s relations with Comtesse Molé. “You told me that you knew Mme de Molé. Does that mean you go there?” she asked, giving to the words “go there” the sense of being received there, of having received permission from the lady to go and call on her. M. de Charlus replied with an inflexion of disdain, an affectation of precision and in a sing-song tone: “Yes, sometimes.” This “sometimes” inspired doubts in Mme Verdurin, who asked: “Have you ever met the Duc de Guermantes there?” “Ah! that I don’t remember.” “Oh!” said Mme Verdurin, “you don’t know the Duc de Guermantes?” “And how could I not know him?” replied M. de Charlus, his lips curving in a smile. This smile was ironical; but as the Baron was afraid of letting a gold tooth be seen, he checked it with a reverse movement of his lips, so that the resulting sinuosity was that of a smile of benevolence. “Why do you say: ‘How could I not know him?’ ” “Because he is my brother,” said M. de Charlus carelessly, leaving Mme Verdurin plunged in stupefaction and uncertain whether her guest was making fun of her, was a natural son, or a son by another marriage. The idea that the brother of the Duc de Guermantes might be called Baron de Charlus never entered her head. She bore down upon me. “I heard M. de Cambremer invite you to dinner just now. It has nothing to do with me, you understand. But for your own sake, I very much hope you won’t go. For one thing, the place is infested with bores. Oh, if you like dining with provincial counts and marquises whom nobody knows, you’ll have all you could wish.” “I think I shall be obliged to go there once or twice. I’m not altogether free, however, for I have a young cousin whom I can’t leave by herself” (I felt that this fictitious kinship made it easier for me to take Albertine about), “but in the case of the Cambremers, as I’ve already introduced her to them …” “You shall do just as you please. One thing I can tell you: it’s extremely unhealthy; when you’ve caught pneumonia, or a nice little chronic rheumatism, what good will that do you?” “But isn’t the place itself very pretty?” “Mmmmyesss … If you like. Frankly, I must confess that I’d far sooner have the view from here over this valley. In any case, I wouldn’t have taken the other house if they’d paid us because the sea air is fatal to M. Verdurin. If your cousin is at all delicate … But you yourself are delicate, I believe … you have fits of breathlessness. Very well! You shall see. Go there once, and you won’t sleep for a week after it; but it’s not my business.” And regardless of the inconsistency with what had gone before, she went on: “If it would amuse you to see the house, which is not bad, pretty is too strong a word, still it’s amusing with its old moat and its old drawbridge, as I shall have to sacrifice myself and dine there once, very well, come that day, I shall try to bring all my little circle, then it will be quite nice. The day after tomorrow we’re going to Harambouville in the carriage. It’s a magnificent drive, and the cider is delicious. Come with us. You, Brichot, you shall come too. And you too, Ski. It will make a party which, as a matter of fact, my husband must have arranged already. I don’t know whom all he has invited. Monsieur de Charlus, are you one of them?”