The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (340 page)

After dinner, I told Albertine that I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was up to go and see some of my friends, Mme de Villeparisis, Mme de Guermantes, the Cambremers, anyone, in short, whom I might find at home. I omitted to mention only the people whom I did intend to visit, the Verdurins. I asked her if she would like to come with me. She pleaded that she had no suitable clothes. “Besides, my hair is so awful. Do you really want me to go on doing it like this?” And by way of farewell she held out her hand to me in that brusque fashion, the arm outstretched, the shoulders thrust back, which she used to adopt on the beach at Balbec and had since entirely abandoned. This forgotten gesture transformed the body which it animated into that of the Albertine who as yet scarcely knew me. It restored to Albertine, ceremonious beneath an air of brusqueness, her initial
novelty, her mystery, even her setting. I saw the sea behind this girl whom I had never seen shake hands with me in this way since I was at the seaside. “My aunt thinks it ages me,” she added glumly. “Would that her aunt were right!” thought I. “That Albertine by looking like a child should make Mme Bontemps appear younger than she is, is all that her aunt would ask, and also that Albertine should cost her nothing between now and the day when, by marrying me, she will bring her in money.” But that Albertine should appear less young, less pretty, should turn fewer heads in the street, that is what I, on the contrary, hoped. For the agedness of a duenna is less reassuring to a jealous lover than that of the face of the woman he loves. I regretted only that the style in which I had asked her to do her hair should appear to Albertine an additional bolt on the door of her prison. And it was again this new domestic feeling that never ceased, even when I was away from Albertine, to bind me to her.

I said to Albertine, who was disinclined, as she had told me, to accompany me to the Guermantes’ or the Cambremers’, that I was not quite sure where I might go, and set off for the Verdurins’. At the moment when, on leaving the house, the thought of the concert that I was going to hear brought back to my mind the scene that afternoon: “
grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue
”—a scene of disappointed love, of jealous love perhaps, but if so as bestial as the scene to which (minus the words) a woman might be subjected by an orang-outang that was, if one may so say, enamoured of her—at the moment when, having reached the street, I was about to hail a cab, I heard the sound of sobs which a man who was sitting upon a curbstone was endeavouring to stifle. I came
nearer; the man, whose face was buried in his hands, appeared to be quite young, and I was surprised to see, from the gleam of white in the opening of his cloak, that he was wearing evening clothes and a white tie. On hearing me he uncovered a face bathed in tears, but at once, having recognised me, turned away. It was Morel. He saw that I had recognised him and, checking his tears with an effort, told me that he had stopped for a moment because he was in such anguish.

“I have grossly insulted, this very day,” he said, “a person for whom I had the strongest feelings. It was a vile thing to do, for she loves me.”

“She will forget perhaps, in time,” I replied, without realising that by speaking thus I made it apparent that I had overheard the scene that afternoon. But he was so absorbed in his grief that it never even occurred to him that I might know something about the affair.

“She may forget, perhaps,” he said. “But I myself can never forget. I feel such a sense of shame, I’m so disgusted with myself! However, what I have said I have said, and nothing can unsay it. When people make me lose my temper, I don’t know what I’m doing. And it’s so bad for me, my nerves are all tied up in knots”—for, like all neurotics, he was keenly interested in his own health. If, during the afternoon, I had witnessed the amorous rage of an infuriated animal, this evening, within a few hours, centuries had elapsed and a new sentiment, a sentiment of shame, regret, grief, showed that an important stage had been reached in the evolution of the beast destined to be transformed into a human being. Nevertheless, I still heard ringing in my ears his
“grand pied de grue”
and feared an imminent return to the savage state. I had only
a very vague idea, however, of what had happened, and this was all the more natural in that M. de Charlus himself was totally unaware that for some days past, and especially that day, even before the shameful episode which had no direct connexion with the violinist’s condition, Morel had been suffering from a recurrence of his neurasthenia. He had, in the previous month, proceeded as rapidly as he had been able, which was a great deal less rapidly than he would have liked, towards the seduction of Jupien’s niece, with whom he was at liberty, now that they were engaged, to go out whenever he chose. But as soon as he had gone a little too far in his attempts at rape, and especially when he suggested to his betrothed that she might make friends with other girls whom she would then procure for him, he had met with a resistance that had enraged him. All at once (either because she had proved too chaste, or on the contrary had finally given herself) his desire had subsided. He had decided to break with her, but feeling that the Baron, depraved though he might be, was far more moral than himself, he was afraid lest, in the event of a rupture, M. de Charlus might throw him out. And so he had decided, a fortnight ago, that he would not see the girl again, would leave M. de Charlus and Jupien to clean up the mess (he employed a more scatological term) by themselves, and, before announcing the rupture, to “bugger off” to an unknown destination.

This outcome had left him a little sad, and it is therefore probable that although his conduct towards Jupien’s niece coincided exactly, down to the minutest details, with the plan of conduct which he had outlined to the Baron as they were dining together at Saint-Mars-le-Vétu, in reality it had been somewhat different, and that sentiments of a
less heinous nature, which he had not foreseen in his theoretical conduct, had embellished and softened it in practice. The sole point in which the reality was worse than the theory was this, that in the original plan it had not appeared to him possible that he could remain in Paris after such an act of betrayal. Now, on the contrary, actually to “bugger off” for so small a matter seemed to him excessive. It meant leaving the Baron, who would probably be furious, and forfeiting his position. He would lose all the money that the Baron was now giving him. The thought that this was inevitable made him hysterical; he whimpered for hours on end, and to take his mind off the subject dosed himself cautiously with morphine. Then suddenly he hit upon an idea which no doubt had gradually been taking shape in his mind and gaining strength there for some time, and this was that a rupture with the girl would not inevitably mean a complete break with M. de Charlus. To lose all the Baron’s money was a serious thing. Morel in his uncertainty remained for some days a prey to black thoughts, such as came to him at the sight of Bloch. Then he decided that Jupien and his niece had been trying to set a trap for him, that they might consider themselves lucky to be rid of him so cheaply. He found in short that the girl had been in the wrong in having been so maladroit in failing to keep him attached to her through the senses. Not only did the sacrifice of his position with M. de Charlus seem to him absurd, but he even regretted the expensive dinners he had given the girl since they had become engaged, the exact cost of which he knew by heart, being a true son of the valet who used to bring his “book” every month for my uncle’s inspection. For the word book, in the singular, which means a
printed volume to humanity in general, loses that meaning among royalty and servants. To the latter it means their account-book, to the former the register in which we inscribe our names. (At Balbec one day when the Princesse de Luxembourg told me that she had not brought a book with her, I was about to offer her
Le Pêcheur d’Islande
and
Tartarin de Tarascon
, when I realised that she had meant not that she would pass the time less agreeably, but that it would be more difficult for me to get on to her list.)

Notwithstanding the change in Morel’s point of view with regard to the consequences of his behaviour, although that behaviour would have seemed to him abominable two months earlier when he was passionately in love with Jupien’s niece, whereas during the last fortnight he had never ceased to assure himself that the same behaviour was natural and praiseworthy, it could not fail to intensify the state of nervous tension in which, finally, he had served notice of the rupture that afternoon. And he was quite prepared to vent his rage, if not (except in a momentary outburst) upon the girl, for whom he still felt that lingering fear which is the last trace of love, at any rate upon the Baron. He took care, however, not to say anything to him before dinner, for, valuing his own professional virtuosity above everything, whenever he had any difficult music to play (as this evening at the Verdurins’) he avoided (as far as possible, and the scene that afternoon was already more than ample) anything that might make his movements at all jerky. Similarly, a surgeon who is an enthusiastic motorist does not drive when he has an operation to perform. This explained to me why, as he was speaking to me, he kept bending his fingers gently one after another to see whether they had regained
their suppleness. A slight frown seemed to indicate that there was still a trace of nervous stiffness. But in order not to aggravate it, he relaxed his features, as we try to prevent ourselves from getting agitated about not being able to sleep or to persuade a woman to give herself, for fear lest our phobia itself may retard the moment of sleep or of pleasure. And so, anxious to regain his serenity in order to be able to concentrate, as usual, on what he was going to play at the Verdurins’, and anxious, so long as I was watching him, to let me see how unhappy he was, he decided that the simplest course was to entreat me to leave him immediately. The entreaty was superfluous, for it was a relief to me to get away from him. I had trembled lest, as we were due at the same house within a few minutes of one another, he might ask me to take him with me, my memory of the scene that afternoon being too vivid not to give me a certain distaste for the idea of having Morel by my side during the drive. It is quite possible that the love, and afterwards the indifference or hatred, felt by Morel for Jupien’s niece had been sincere. Unfortunately, it was not the first time (nor would it be the last) that he had behaved thus, that he had suddenly “ditched” a girl to whom he had sworn undying love, going so far as to produce a loaded revolver and telling her that he would blow out his brains if ever he was vile enough to desert her. He would nevertheless desert her in time, and feel, instead of remorse, a sort of rancour against her. It was not the first time that he had behaved thus, and it was not to be the last, with the result that many young girls—girls less forgetful of him than he was of them—suffered—as Jupien’s niece, continuing to love
Morel while despising him, was to suffer for a long time—their heads ready to burst with the stabbing of an inner pain, because in each of them, like a fragment of a Greek sculpture, an aspect of Morel’s face, hard as marble and beautiful as the art of antiquity, was embedded in the brain, with his blossoming hair, his fine eyes, his straight nose—forming a protuberance in a cranium not shaped to receive it, and on which no one could operate. But in the fullness of time these stony fragments end by slipping into a place where they cause no undue laceration, from which they never stir again; their presence is no longer felt: the pain has been forgotten, or is remembered with indifference.

Meanwhile I had gained two things in the course of the day. On the one hand, thanks to the calm induced by Albertine’s docility, there was the possibility, and in consequence the resolve, to break with her; on the other—the fruit of my reflexions during the interval that I had spent waiting for her, seated at the piano—the idea that Art, to which I would try to devote my reconquered liberty, was not something that was worth a sacrifice, something above and beyond life, that did not share in its fatuity and futility; the appearance of genuine individuality achieved in works of art being due merely to the illusion produced by technical skill. If my afternoon had left behind it other deposits, possibly more profound, they were not to impinge upon my consciousness until much later. As for the two which I was able thus to ponder, they were not to be long-lived; for, from that very evening, my ideas about art were to recover from the diminution that they had suffered in the afternoon, while on the other hand my calm,
and consequently the freedom that would enable me to devote myself to it, was once again to be withdrawn from me.

As my cab, driving along the riverside, was approaching the Verdurins’ house, I made the driver pull up. I had just seen Brichot alighting from a tram at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte, after which he dusted his shoes with an old newspaper and put on a pair of pearl-grey gloves. I went up to him on foot. For some time past, his sight having grown steadily worse, he had been equipped—as richly as an observatory—with new spectacles of a powerful and complicated kind, which, like astronomical instruments, seemed to be screwed into his eyes; he focused their exaggerated beams upon myself and recognised me. They—the spectacles—were in marvellous condition. But behind them I could see, minute, pallid convulsive, expiring, a remote gaze placed under this powerful apparatus, as, in a laboratory too richly endowed for the work that is done in it, you may watch the last throes of some tiny insignificant beast under the latest and most advanced type of microscope. I offered the purblind man my arm to steady his steps. “This time it is not by great Cherbourg that we meet,” he said to me, “but by little Dunkirk,” a remark which I found extremely tiresome, as I did not understand what it meant; and yet I dared not ask Brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his explanations. I replied that I was longing to see the drawing-room in which Swann used to meet Odette every evening. “What, so you know that old story, do you?” he said.