Time Regained & a Guide to Proust

by Marcel Proust

  In the case of M. de Charlus, which on the whole, with slight discrepancies due to the identity of sex, accords very well with the general laws of love, for all that he belonged to a family more ancient than the Capets, that he was rich and vainly sought after by fashionable society while Morel was nobody, he would have got nowhere by saying to Morel, as he had once said to me: “I am a prince, I want to help you”—it was still Morel who had the upper hand so long as he refused to surrender. And for him to persist in this refusal, it was perhaps enough that he should feel himself to be loved. The horror that grand people have for the snobs who move heaven and earth to make their acquaintance is felt also by the virile man for the invert, by a woman for every man who is too much in love with her. M. de Charlus possessed, and would have offered Morel a share in, immense advantages. But it is possible that all this might have hurled itself in vain against a determined will. And in that case, M. de Charlus would have suffered the same fate as the Germans—in whose ranks in fact his ancestry placed him—who in the war at that moment taking its course were indeed, as the Baron was a little too fond of repeating, victorious on every front. But of what use were their victories, since after every one they found the Allies yet more firmly resolved to refuse them the one thing that they, the Germans, wanted: peace and reconciliation? Napoleon too, as he advanced into Russia, had again and again magnanimously invited the authorities to meet him. But nobody came.

  I made my way downstairs and went back into the little ante-room where Maurice, uncertain whether he would be sent for again (he had been told by Jupien to wait just in case), was engaged in a game of cards with one of his friends. There was a lot of excitement about a croix de guerre which had been found lying on the ground—nobody knew who had lost it and to whom it ought to be returned so that the owner should not be punished. Then there was talk of the generosity of an officer who had been killed trying to save his batman. “All the same, there are some good blokes among the rich. I’d gladly get myself killed for a chap like that,” said Maurice, who evidently performed his terrible fustigations of the Baron simply from mechanical habit, as a result of a neglected education, from need of money and from a certain preference for making it in a manner which was supposed to be less trouble, and was perhaps really more trouble, than ordinary work. But as M. de Charlus had feared, he was perhaps really very kind-hearted and certainly, so it seemed, a young man of exemplary courage. He almost had tears in his eyes as he spoke of the death of this officer, and the young man of twenty-two was no less moved. “Yes, indeed, they’re fine blokes. For poor chaps like us there’s not much to lose, but when it’s a toff who has a whole troop of flunkeys and can go to posh bars every night of his life, it’s really terrific! You can scoff as much as you like, but when you see blokes like that dying, it really does something to you. Rich people like that, God shouldn’t let them die—for one thing they’re too useful to the working man. A death like that makes you want to kill every Boche to the last man. And then look what they did at Louvain, and cutting off the hands of little children! No, I don’t know, I’m no better than the next man, but I’d rather face the music and be shot to bits than give in to barbarians like that; they’re not men, they’re real barbarians, don’t you try and tell me anything else.” All these young men were patriots at heart. One only, who had been slightly wounded in the arm but was soon going to have to return to the front, did not rise to the level of the others. “Darn it,” he said, “it wasn’t the right sort of wound” (the kind that gets you invalided out), very much as in the past Mme Swann would have said: “Somehow or other I’ve caught this most tiresome influenza.”

  The door opened to re-admit the chauffeur, who had been taking the air for a moment. “What, finished already? You weren’t long,” he said, catching sight of Maurice, whom he supposed to be still engaged in beating the individual whom, in allusion to a newspaper which was appearing at that time, they had nicknamed “the Man in Chains.” “It may not have seemed long to you out in the fresh air,” replied Maurice, vexed that the others should see that he had failed to give satisfaction upstairs. “But if you’d been obliged to wallop away with all your might in this heat, like me! If it wasn’t for the fifty francs he gives …” “And then, he’s a man who talks well; you can see he’s educated. Does he say it will soon be over?” “He says we’ll never beat them, it will end without either side really winning.” “Bloody hell, if he says that he must be a Boche …” “I’ve already told you you’re talking too loud,” said the oldest of the group to the others, seeing that I had returned, and then to me: “Have you finished with your room?” “Shut your trap, you’re not the boss here.” “Yes, I’ve finished, and I’ve come to pay.” “It would be better if you paid the patron. Maurice, go and fetch him.” “But I don’t want to bother you.” “It’s no trouble.” Maurice went upstairs, and came back saying: “The patron will be down in a second.” I gave him two francs for his pains. He blushed with pleasure. “Oh! thank you very much. I’ll send it to my brother who’s a prisoner. No, he doesn’t have a bad time. It depends a lot on the camp you’re in.”

  Meanwhile, two very smart clients, in white tie and tails and wearing overcoats—two Russians, as I guessed from the very slight accent with which they spoke—were standing in the doorway and deliberating whether they should enter. It was visibly the first time that they had been to the place, to which no doubt they had come on somebody’s recommendation, and they appeared torn between desire, temptation and extreme fright. One of the two—a good-looking young man—kept repeating every ten seconds to the other, with a smile that was half a question and half an attempt at persuasion: “Well! After all, what do we care?” But though no doubt he meant by this that after all they did not care about the consequences, it is probable that he cared rather more than he implied, for the remark was not followed by any movement to cross the threshold but by a further glance at his companion, followed by the same smile and the same “After all, what do we care?” And in this “After all, what do we care?” I saw a perfect example of that portentous language, so unlike the language we habitually speak, in which emotion deflects what we had intended to say and causes to emerge in its place an entirely different phrase, issued from an unknown lake wherein dwell these expressions alien to our thoughts which by virtue of that very fact reveal them. I remember an occasion when Françoise, whose approach we had not heard, was about to come into the room while Albertine was completely naked in my arms, and Albertine, wanting to warn me, blurted out: “Good heavens, here’s the beautiful Françoise!” Françoise, whose sight was no longer very good and who was merely going to cross the room at some distance from us, would no doubt have noticed nothing. But the unprecedented phrase “the beautiful Françoise,” which Albertine had never uttered before in her life, was in itself enough to betray its origin; Françoise sensed that the words had been plucked at random by emotion and had no need to look to understand what was happening; she went out muttering in her dialect the word poutana. On another occasion, many years later, after Bloch had become the father of a family and had married off one of his daughters to a Catholic, an ill-mannered gentleman said to the young woman that he thought he had heard that her father was a Jew and asked what his name was. Whereupon she, who had been Mile Bloch with a k sound from the day she was born, replied “Bloch” with the Teutonic ch which the Duc de Guermantes would have used.

  The patron, to return to the scene in the hotel (into which the two Russians had decided to penetrate—“After all, what do we care?”), had still not arrived when Jupien came in to say that they were talking too loud and that the neighbours would complain. But seeing me he was rooted to the spot in amazement. “Go out on to the landing, all of you.” They were all rising to their feet when I said to him: “It would be simpler if these young men stayed where they are and you and I went outside for a moment.” He followed me, very agitated. I explained to him why I had come. Clients could be heard inquiring of the patron whether he could in
troduce them to a footman, a choir-boy, a negro chauffeur. Every profession interested these old lunatics, every branch of the armed forces, every one of the allied nations. Some asked particularly for Canadians, influenced perhaps unconsciously by the charm of an accent so slight that one does not know whether it comes from the France of the past or from England. The Scots too, because of their kilts and because dreams of a landscape with lakes are often associated with these desires, were at a premium. And as every form of madness is, if not in every case aggravated by circumstances, at least imprinted by them with particular characteristics, an old man in whom curiosity of every kind had no doubt been satisfied was asking insistently to be introduced to a disabled soldier. Slow footsteps were heard on the stairs. With the indiscretion that was natural to him, Jupien could not refrain from telling me that it was the Baron who was coming down, and at all costs he must not see me, but that if I liked to go into the bedroom adjoining the ante-room where the young men were, he would open the ventilator, a device which he had fixed up so that the Baron could see and hear without being seen, and which he said he would use in my favour against him. “Only don’t move.” And pushing me into the dark, he left me. In any case he had no other room to give me, his hotel, in spite of the war, being full. The one which I had just left had been taken by the Vicomte de Courvoisier who, having got away from the Red Cross at X—for two days, had come to Paris for an hour’s entertainment before going on to the Château de Courvoisier to be reunited with his wife, to whom he would explain that he had not been able to catch the fast train. He had no suspicion that M. de Charlus was a few yards away from him, and the latter would have been equally surprised to know that his cousin was there, never having met him in the establishment of Jupien, who was himself ignorant of the Vicomte’s carefully concealed identity.

  The Baron soon entered the ante-room, walking with difficulty on account of his injuries, though doubtless he must have been used to them. Although his pleasure was at an end and he had only come in to give Maurice the money which he owed him, he directed at the young men a tender and curious glance which travelled round the whole circle, promising himself with each of them the pleasure of a moment’s chat, platonic but amorously prolonged. And in the sprightly frivolity which he exhibited before this harem which appeared almost to intimidate him, I recognised those jerky movements of the body and the head, those languishing glances which had struck me on the evening of his first visit to La Raspelière, graces inherited from some grandmother whom I had not known, which in ordinary life were disguised by more virile expressions on his face but which from time to time were made to blossom there coquettishly, when circumstances made him anxious to please an inferior audience, by the desire to appear a great lady.

  Jupien had recommended the young men to the Baron’s favour by swearing that they were all pimps from Belleville and would sell you their own sisters for a few francs. And in this he was at the same time lying and telling the truth. Better, more soft-hearted than he made them out to be, they did not belong to a race of savages. But the clients who believed them to be thugs spoke to them nevertheless with complete truthfulness, a truthfulness which they imagined these terrible beings to share. For a man given to sadistic pleasures may believe that he is talking to a murderer but this will not alter his own purity of heart, he will still be astounded by the mendacity of his companion, who is not a murderer at all but wants to earn a little easy money and whose father or mother or sister alternately die, come to life, and die again as he contradicts himself in his conversation with the client whom he is attempting to please. The client, in his naivety, is astounded, for with his arbitrary conception of the gigolo, while he gets a thrill of delight from the numerous murders of which he believes him to be guilty, he is horrified by any simple contradiction or lie which he detects in his words.

  Everybody in the room seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus stopped for a long time before each one, talking to them in what he thought was their language, both from a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he got a sadistic pleasure from contact with a life of depravity. “You’re disgusting, you are, I saw you outside the Olympia with two tarts. After a bit of brass, no doubt. Just shows how faithful you are to me.” Luckily for the man to whom these remarks were addressed, he did not have time to declare that he would never have accepted “brass” from a woman, a claim which would have damped the Baron’s ardour, but reserved his protest for the final phrase, which he answered by saying: “But of course I’m faithful to you.” This remark gave M. de Charlus a lively pleasure, and as, in spite of himself, the kind of intelligence that was natural to him showed through the character which he affected, he turned to Jupien: “How nice of him to say that! And how well he says it! One would really think it was true. And after all, what does it matter whether it is true or not since he manages to make me believe it? What charming little eyes he has! There, I’m going to give you two big kisses for your trouble, my dear boy. You will think of me in the trenches. Things are not too bad there?” “Whew, there are some days, when a grenade just misses you …” And the young man proceeded to imitate the noise of the grenade, the aeroplanes, etc. “But one’s got to do what the others do, and you can be absolutely sure that we will go on to the end.” “To the end! If one only knew to what end!” said the Baron in a melancholy manner, giving rein to his “pessimism.” “You haven’t seen what Sarah Bernhardt said in the papers: ‘France will go on to the end. If necessary, the French will let themselves be killed to the last man.’” “I do not doubt for a single moment that the French would bravely let themselves be killed to the last man,” said M. de Charlus, as if this were the simplest thing in the world and although he himself had no intention of doing anything whatsoever, hoping by this remark to correct the impression of pacifism which he gave when he forgot himself. “That I do not doubt, but I ask myself to what extent Madame Sarah Bernhardt is qualified to speak in the name of France … But I don’t think I have made the acquaintance of this charming, this delightful young man,” he added, spying another whom he did not recognise or perhaps had not seen before. He greeted him as he would have greeted a prince at Versailles, and making the most of this opportunity to have a supplementary pleasure for nothing—just as, when I was little and my mother had finished giving an order at Boissier’s or Gouache’s, I would accept the offer of a sweet which one of the ladies behind the counter would invite me to select from those glass bowls over which she and her colleagues held sway—he took the hand of the charming young man and gave it a long squeeze, in the Prussian manner, smilingly fixing him with his eyes for the interminable time which photographers used to take to pose you when the light was bad. “Sir, I am charmed, I am enchanted to make your acquaintance. What pretty hair he has!” he said, turning to Jupien. Next he went up to Maurice to give him his fifty francs, but first, putting his arm round his waist: “You never told me that you had knifed an old hag of a concierge in Belleville.” And M. de Charlus shrieked with ecstatic laughter and brought his face close to that of Maurice. “Oh! Monsieur le Baron,” said the gigolo, who had not been warned, “how can you believe such a thing?” Whether the report was in fact false, or whether it was true and the perpetrator of the deed nevertheless thought it abominable and one of those things that it is better to deny, he went on: “Me touch a fellow-creature? A Boche, yes, because that’s war, but a woman, and an old woman at that!” This declaration of virtuous principles had the effect of a douche of cold water upon the Baron, who brusquely moved away from Maurice, having first handed him his money, but with the disgusted air of someone who has been cheated, who pays because he does not want to make a fuss but is far from pleased. The bad impression made upon the Baron was accentuated by the manner in which the recipient thanked him, with the words: “I shall send this to the old folks and keep a bit for my brother at the front as well.” By these touching sentiments M. de Charlus was almost as gravely disappointed as he was irritated by the rather conventional peasa
nt’s language in which they were expressed. Occasionally Jupien warned the young men that they ought to be more perverse. Then one of them, as if he were confessing to something diabolical, would hazard: “I say, Baron, you won’t believe me, but when I was a kid I used to watch my parents making love through the key-hole. Pretty vicious, wasn’t it? You look as if you think that’s a cock and bull story, but I swear it’s the truth.” And M. de Charlus was driven at once to despair and to exasperation by this factitious attempt at perversity, the result of which was only to reveal such depths both of stupidity and of innocence. Yet even the most determined thief or murderer would not have satisfied him, for that sort of man does not talk about his crimes; and besides there exists in the sadist—however kind he may be, in fact all the more the kinder he is—a thirst for evil which wicked men, doing what they do not because it is wicked but from other motives, are unable to assuage.