The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (357 page)

I could see that M. de Charlus was about to tell us in what fashion these habits had evolved. And not for a moment while he was speaking, or while Brichot was speaking, was the semi-conscious image of my home, where Albertine awaited me—an image associated with the intimate and caressing motif of Vinteuil—absent from my mind. I kept coming back to Albertine, just as I would be obliged in fact to go back to her presently as to a sort of ball and chain to which I was somehow attached, which prevented me from leaving Paris and which at this moment, while from the Verdurin salon I pictured my home, made me think of it not as an empty space, exalting to the personality if a little melancholy, but as being filled—alike in this to the hotel in Balbec on a certain evening—with that immutable presence, which lingered there for me and which I was sure to find there whenever I chose. The insistence with which M. de Charlus kept reverting to this topic—into which his mind, constantly exercised in the same direction, had indeed acquired a certain penetration—was in a rather complex way distinctly trying. He was as boring as a specialist who can see nothing outside his own subject, as irritating as an initiate who prides himself on the secrets which he possesses and is burning to divulge, as repellent as those people who, whenever their own weaknesses are in question, blossom and expatiate
without noticing that they are giving offence, as obsessed as a maniac and as uncontrollably imprudent as a criminal. These characteristics, which at certain moments became as striking as those that stamp a madman or a felon, brought me, as it happened, a certain consolation. For, subjecting them to the necessary transposition in order to be able to draw from them deductions with regard to Albertine, and remembering her attitude towards Saint-Loup and towards me, I said to myself, painful as one of these memories and melancholy as the other was to me, I said to myself that they seemed to preclude the kind of deformation, so distinctive and pronounced, the kind of specialisation, inevitably exclusive it seemed, that emanated so powerfully from the conversation as from the person of M. de Charlus. But the latter, unfortunately, made haste to destroy these grounds for hope in the same way as he had furnished me with them, that is to say unwittingly.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m no longer a stripling, and I’ve already seen many things change round about me. I no longer recognise either society, in which all the barriers have been broken down, in which a mob devoid of elegance or decency dance the tango even in my own family, or fashion, or politics, or the arts, or religion, or anything. But I must admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality. Good heavens, in my day, leaving aside the men who loathed women, and those who, caring only for women, did the other thing merely with an eye to profit, homosexuals were sound family men and never kept mistresses except as a cover. Had I had a daughter to give away, it’s among them that I should have looked for my son-in-law if I’d
wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be unhappy. Alas! things have changed. Nowadays they’re also recruited from among the most rabid womanisers. I thought I had a certain flair, and that when I said to myself: ‘Certainly not,’ I couldn’t have been mistaken. Well, now I give up. One of my friends who is well-known for it had a coachman whom my sister-in-law Oriane found for him, a lad from Combray who had dabbled in all sorts of trades but particularly that of chasing skirts, and who, I would have sworn, was as hostile as possible to that sort of thing. He broke his mistress’s heart by deceiving her with two women whom he adored, not to mention the others, an actress and a barmaid. My cousin the Prince de Guermantes, who has the irritating mind of people who are too ready to believe anything, said to me one day: ‘But why in the world doesn’t X—sleep with his coachman? It might give pleasure to Théodore’ (which is the coachman’s name) ‘and he may even be rather hurt that his master doesn’t make advances to him.’ I couldn’t help telling Gilbert to hold his tongue; I was irritated by that would-be perspicacity which, when exercised indiscriminately, is a want of perspicacity, and also by the blatant guile of my cousin who would have liked X—to test the ground so that he himself could follow if the going was good.”

“Then the Prince de Guermantes has those tastes too?” asked Brichot with a mixture of astonishment and dismay.

“Good lord,” replied M. de Charlus, highly delighted, “it’s so notorious that I don’t think I’m being guilty of an indiscretion if I tell you that he does. Well, the following year I went to Balbec, where I heard from a sailor who
used to take me out fishing occasionally that my Theodore, whose sister, I may mention, is the maid of a friend of Mme Verdurin, Baroness Putbus, used to come down to the harbour to pick up this or that sailor, with the most infernal cheek, to go for a boat-trip ‘with extras.’ ”

It was now my turn to inquire whether the coachman’s employer, whom I had identified as the gentleman who at Balbec used to play cards all day long with his mistress, was like the Prince de Guermantes.

“Why, of course, everyone knows. He doesn’t even make any attempt to conceal it.”

“But he had his mistress there with him.”

“Well, and what difference does that make? How innocent these children are,” he said to me in a fatherly tone, little suspecting the grief that I extracted from his words when I thought of Albertine. “She’s charming, his mistress.”

“So then his three friends are like himself?”

“Not at all,” he cried, stopping his ears as though, in playing some instrument, I had struck a wrong note.

“Now he’s gone to the other extreme. So a man no longer has the right to have friends? Ah! youth; it gets everything wrong. We shall have to begin your education over again, my boy. Now,” he went on, “I admit that this case—and I know of many others—however open a mind I may try to keep for every form of effrontery, does embarrass me. I may be very old-fashioned, but I fail to understand,” he said in the tone of an old Gallican speaking of certain forms of Ultramontanism, of a liberal royalist speaking of the
Action Française
or of a disciple of Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists. “I don’t condemn these
innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t. If they’re so passionately fond of women, why, and especially in this working-class world where it’s frowned upon, where they conceal it from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? It’s because it represents something else to them. What?”

“What else can a woman represent to Albertine,” I thought, and there indeed lay the cause of my anguish.

“Decidedly, Baron,” said Brichot, “should the University Council ever think of founding a Chair of Homosexuality, I shall see that your name is the first to be submitted. Or rather, no; an Institute of Special Psychophysiology would suit you better. And I can see you, best of all, provided with a Chair in the College de France, which would enable you to devote yourself to personal researches the results of which you would deliver, like the Professor of Tamil or Sanskrit, to the handful of people who are interested in them. You would have an audience of two, with your beadle, not that I mean to cast the slightest aspersion upon our corps of ushers, whom I believe to be above suspicion.”

“You know nothing about it,” the Baron retorted in a harsh and cutting tone. “Besides you’re wrong in thinking that so few people are interested in the subject. It’s just the opposite.” And without stopping to consider the incompatibility between the invariable trend of his own conversation and the reproaches he was about to level at others, “It is, on the contrary, most alarming,” said the Baron with a shocked and contrite air, “people talk about nothing else. It’s a disgrace, but I’m not exaggerating, my
dear fellow! It appears that the day before yesterday, at the Duchesse d’Ayen’s, they talked about nothing else for two hours on end. Just imagine, if women have taken to discussing that sort of thing, it’s a positive scandal! The most revolting thing about it,” he went on with extraordinary fire and vigour, “is that they get their information from pests, real scoundrels like young Châtellerault, about whom there’s more to be told than anyone, who tell them stories about other men. I gather he’s been vilifying me, but I don’t care; I’m convinced that the mud and filth flung by an individual who barely escaped being turned out of the Jockey for cheating at cards can only rebound on him. I know that if I were Jane d’Ayen, I should have sufficient respect for my salon not to allow such subjects to be discussed there, nor to allow my own flesh and blood to be dragged through the mire in my house. But society’s finished, there are no longer any rules, any proprieties, in conversation any more than in dress. Ah, my dear fellow, it’s the end of the world. Everyone has become so malicious. People vie with one another in speaking ill of their fellows. It’s appalling!”

As cowardly still as I had been long ago in my boyhood at Combray when I used to run away in order not to see my grandfather tempted with brandy and the vain efforts of my grandmother imploring him not to drink it, I had but one thought, which was to leave the Verdurins’ house before the execution of M. de Charlus occurred.

“I simply must go,” I said to Brichot.

“I’m coming with you,” he replied, “but we can’t just slip away, English fashion. Come and say good-bye to Mme Verdurin,” the Professor concluded, as he made his
way to the drawing-room with the air of a man who, in a parlour game, goes to find out whether he may “come back.”

While we had been talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife, had taken Morel aside. Even if Mme Verdurin had decided on reflexion that it was wiser to postpone Morel’s enlightenment, she was powerless now to prevent it. There are certain desires, sometimes confined to the mouth, which, as soon as we have allowed them to grow, insist upon being gratified, whatever the consequences may be; one can no longer resist the temptation to kiss a bare shoulder at which one has been gazing for too long and on which one’s lips pounce like a snake upon a bird, or to bury one’s sweet tooth in a tempting cake; nor can one deny oneself the satisfaction of seeing the amazement, anxiety, grief or mirth to which one can move another person by some unexpected communication. So, drunk with melodrama, Mme Verdurin had ordered her husband to take Morel out of the room and at all costs to explain matters to him. The violinist had begun by deploring the departure of the Queen of Naples before he had had a chance of being presented to her. M. de Charlus had told him so often that she was the sister of the Empress Elizabeth and of the Duchesse d’Alençon that the sovereign had assumed an extraordinary importance in his eyes. But the Master explained to him that they were not there to talk about the Queen of Naples, and then went straight to the point. “Listen,” he had concluded after a long explanation, “if you like, we can go and ask my wife what she thinks. I give you my word of honour, I’ve said nothing to her about it. We’ll see what she thinks of it all. My advice may not be right, but you know how
sound her judgment is, and besides, she has an immense affection for you; let’s go and submit the case to her.” And as Mme Verdurin, impatiently looking forward to the excitement that she would presently be relishing when she talked to the musician, and then, after he had gone, when she made her husband give her a full report of their conversation, went on repeating to herself: “But what in the world can they be doing? I do hope that Gustave, in keeping him all this time, has managed to give him his cue,” M. Verdurin reappeared with Morel, who seemed extremely agitated.

“He’d like to ask your advice,” M. Verdurin said to his wife, in the tone of a man who does not know whether his request will be granted. Instead of replying to M. Verdurin, it was to Morel that, in the heat of her passion, Mme Verdurin addressed herself.

“I agree entirely with my husband. I consider that you cannot put up with it any longer,” she exclaimed vehemently, discarding as a useless fiction her agreement with her husband that she was supposed to know nothing of what he had been saying to the violinist.

“How do you mean? Put up with what?” stammered M. Verdurin, endeavouring to feign astonishment and seeking, with an awkwardness that was explained by his dismay, to defend his falsehood.

“I guessed what you’d been saying to him,” replied Mme Verdurin, undisturbed by the improbability of this explanation, and caring little what the violinist might think of her veracity when he recalled this scene. “No,” Mme Verdurin continued, “I feel that you cannot possibly persist in this degrading promiscuity with a tainted person whom nobody will have in their house,” she went on, regardless
of the fact that this was untrue and forgetting that she herself entertained him almost daily. “You’re the talk of the Conservatoire,” she added, feeling that this was the argument that would carry most weight. “Another month of this life and your artistic future will be shattered, whereas without Charlus you ought to be making at least a hundred thousand francs a year.”

“But I’d never heard a thing, I’m astounded, I’m very grateful to you,” Morel murmured, the tears starting to his eyes. But, being obliged at once to feign astonishment and to conceal his shame, he had turned redder and was sweating more abundantly than if he had played all Beethoven’s sonatas in succession, and tears welled from his eyes which the Bonn Master would certainly not have drawn from him.

“If you’ve never heard anything, you’re unique in that respect. He is a gentleman with a vile reputation and has been mixed up in some very nasty doings. I know that the police have their eye on him and that is perhaps the best thing for him if he’s not to end up like all such men, murdered by ruffians,” she went on, for as she thought of Charlus the memory of Mme de Duras recurred to her, and in the intoxication of her rage she sought to aggravate still further the wounds that she was inflicting on the unfortunate Charlie, and to avenge those that she herself had received in the course of the evening. “Anyhow, even financially he can be of no use to you; he’s completely ruined since he has become the prey of people who are blackmailing him, and who can’t even extract from him the price of the tune they call, any more than you can extract the price for yours, because everything’s
mortgaged up to the hilt, town house, country house, everything.”