“Haven’t they got the busts of all the old lords of Guermantes down there?”
“Yes, and a lovely sight they are!” Saint-Loup was ironical. “Between you and me, I look on all that sort of thing as rather a joke. But what they have got at Guermantes, which is a little more interesting, is quite a touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière. It’s as fine as Whistler or Velasquez,” went on Saint-Loup, who in his neophyte zeal was not always very exact about degrees of greatness. “There are also some stunning pictures by Gustave Moreau. My aunt is the niece of your friend Mme de Villeparisis; she was brought up by her, and married her cousin, who was a nephew, too, of my aunt Villeparisis, the present Duc de Guermantes.”
“Then what is your uncle?”
“He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Strictly, when my great-uncle died, my uncle Palamède ought to have taken the title of Prince des Laumes, which was that of his brother before he became Duc de Guermantes—in that family they change their names as often as their shirts. But my uncle has peculiar ideas about all that sort of thing. And as he feels that people are rather apt to overdo the Italian Prince and Grandee of Spain business nowadays, and although he had half-a-dozen princely titles to choose from, he has remained Baron de Charlus, as a protest, and with an apparent simplicity which really covers a good deal of pride. ‘In these days,’ he says, ‘everybody is a prince; one really must have something to distinguish one; I shall call myself Prince when I wish to travel incognito.’ According to him there is no older title than the Charlus barony; to prove to you that it’s earlier than the Montmorency title, though they used to claim, quite wrongly, to be the premier barons of France when they were only premier in the Ile-de-France, where their fief was, my uncle will hold forth to you for hours on end and enjoy doing so because, although he’s a most intelligent man, really gifted, he regards that sort of thing as quite a live topic of conversation.” Saint-Loup smiled again. “But as I’m not like him, you mustn’t ask me to talk pedigrees. I know nothing more deadly, more outdated; really, life’s too short.”
I now recognised in the hard look which had made me turn round outside the Casino the same that I had seen fixed on me at Tansonville at the moment when Mme Swann had called Gilberte away.
“Wasn’t Mme Swann one of the numerous mistresses you told me your uncle M. de Charlus had had?”
“Good lord, no! That is to say, my uncle’s a great friend of Swann, and has always stood up for him. But no one has ever suggested that he was his wife’s lover. You would cause the utmost astonishment in Parisian society if people thought you believed that.”
I dared not reply that it would have caused even greater astonishment in Combray society if people had thought that I did not believe it.
My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus. No doubt he attached an extreme importance to all questions of birth and social position, and my grandmother had remarked this, but without any trace of that severity which as a rule embodies a secret envy and irritation, at seeing another person enjoy advantages which one would like but cannot oneself possess. Since, on the contrary, my grandmother, content with her lot and not for a moment regretting that she did not move in a more brilliant sphere, employed only her intellect in observing the eccentricities of M. de Charlus, she spoke of Saint-Loup’s uncle with that detached, smiling, almost affectionate benevolence with which we reward the object of our disinterested observation for the pleasure that it has given us, all the more so because this time the object was a person whose pretensions, if not legitimate at any rate picturesque, made him stand out in fairly vivid contrast to the people whom she generally had occasion to see. But it was above all in consideration of his intelligence and sensibility, qualities which it was easy to see that M. de Charlus, unlike so many of the society people whom Saint-Loup derided, possessed in a marked degree, that my grandmother had so readily forgiven him his aristocratic prejudice. And yet this prejudice had not been sacrificed by the uncle, as it had been by the nephew, to higher qualities. Rather, M. de Charlus had reconciled it with them. Possessing, by virtue of his descent from the Ducs de Nemours and the Princes de Lamballe, documents, furniture, tapestries, portraits painted for his ancestors by Raphael, Velasquez, Boucher, justified in saying that he was “visiting” a museum and a matchless library when he was merely going over his family mementoes, he still placed the whole heritage of the aristocracy in the high position from which Saint-Loup had toppled it. Perhaps also, being less ideological than Saint-Loup, less satisfied with words, a more realistic observer of men, he did not care to neglect an essential element of prestige in their eyes which, if it gave certain disinterested pleasures to his imagination, could often be a powerfully effective aid to his utilitarian activities. No agreement can ever be reached between men of his sort and those who obey an inner ideal which drives them to rid themselves of such advantages so that they may seek only to realise that ideal, resembling in that respect the painters and writers who renounce their virtuosity, the artistic people who modernise themselves, the warrior people who initiate universal disarmament, the absolute governments which turn democratic and repeal their harsh laws, though as often as not the sequel fails to reward their noble efforts; for the artists lose their talent, the nations their age-old predominance; pacifism often breeds wars and tolerance criminality. If Saint-Loup’s strivings towards sincerity and emancipation could not but be regarded as extremely noble, to judge by their visible result, one could still be thankful that they had failed to bear fruit in M. de Charlus, who had transferred to his own home much of the admirable furniture from the Hôtel Guermantes instead of replacing it, like his nephew, with Art Nouveau furniture, pieces by Lebourg or Guillaumin. It was none the less true that M. de Charlus’s ideal was highly artificial, and, if the epithet can be applied to the word ideal, as much social as artistic. In certain women of great beauty and rare culture whose ancestresses, two centuries earlier, had shared in all the glory and grace of the old order, he found a distinction which made him capable of taking pleasure in their society alone, and doubtless his admiration for them was sincere, but countless reminiscences, historical and artistic, evoked by their names played a considerable part in it, just as memories of classical antiquity are one of the reasons for the pleasure which a literary man finds in reading an ode by Horace that is perhaps inferior to poems of our own day which would leave him cold. Any of these women by the side of a pretty commoner was for him what an old picture is to a contemporary canvas representing a procession or a wedding—one of those old pictures the history of which we know, from the Pope or King who ordered them, through the hands of the eminent persons whose acquisition of them, by gift, purchase, conquest or inheritance, recalls to us some event or at least some alliance of historic interest, and consequently some knowledge that we ourselves have acquired, gives it new meaning, increases our sense of the richness of the possessions of our memory or of our erudition. M. de Charlus was thankful that a prejudice similar to his own, by preventing these few great ladies from mixing with women whose blood was less pure, presented them for his veneration intact, in their unadulterated nobility, like some eighteenth-century façade supported on its flat columns of pink marble, in which the passage of time has wrought no change.
M. de Charlus extolled the true “nobility” of mind and heart which characterised these women, playing upon the word in a double sense by which he himself was taken in, and in which lay the falsehood of this bastard conception, of this medley of aristocracy, generosity and art, but also its seductiveness, dangerous to people like my grandmother, to whom the less refined but more innocent prejudice of a nobleman who cared only about quarterings and took no thought for anything besides would have appeared too silly for words, whereas she was defenceless as soon as a thing presented itself under the externals of an intellectual superiority, so much so, indeed, that she regarded princes as enviable above all other men because they were able to have a La Bruyère or a Fénelon as their tutors.
O
utside the Grand Hotel the three Guermantes left us; they were going to luncheon with the Princesse de Luxembourg. While my grandmother was saying good-bye to Mme de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup to my grandmother, M. de Charlus, who up till then had not addressed a single word to me, drew back from the group and arriving at my side, said to me: “I shall be taking tea this evening after dinner in my aunt Villeparisis’s room. I hope that you will give me the pleasure of seeing you there with your grandmother.” With which he rejoined the Marquise.
Although it was Sunday, there were no more carriages waiting outside the hotel now than at the beginning of the season. The notary’s wife, in particular, had decided that it was not worth the expense of hiring one every time simply because she was not going to the Cambremers’, and simply stayed in her room.
“Is Mme Blandais not well?” her husband was asked. “We haven’t seen her all morning.”
“She has a slight headache—the heat, you know, this thundery weather. The least thing upsets her. But I expect you’ll see her this evening. I’ve told her she ought to come down. It can do her nothing but good.”
I had supposed that in thus inviting us to take tea with his aunt, whom I never doubted that he would have warned of our coming, M. de Charlus wished to make amends for the impoliteness which he had shown me during our walk that morning. But when, on our entering Mme de Villeparisis’s room, I attempted to greet her nephew, for all that I walked right round him while in shrill accents he was telling a somewhat spiteful story about one of his relatives, I could not succeed in catching his eye. I decided to say “Good evening” to him, and fairly loud, to warn him of my presence; but I realised that he had observed it, for before ever a word had passed my lips, just as I was beginning to bow to him, I saw his two fingers held out for me to shake without his having turned to look at me or paused in his story. He had evidently seen me, without letting it appear that he had, and I noticed then that his eyes, which were never fixed on the person to whom he was speaking, strayed perpetually in all directions, like those of certain frightened animals, or those of street hawkers who, while delivering their patter and displaying their illicit merchandise, keep a sharp look-out, though without turning their heads, on the different points of the horizon from which the police may appear at any moment. At the same time I was a little surprised to find that Mme de Villeparisis, while glad to see us, did not seem to have been expecting us, and I was still more surprised to hear M. de Charlus say to my grandmother: “Ah! what a capital idea of yours to come and pay us a visit! Charming of them, is it not, my dear aunt?” No doubt he had noticed his aunt’s surprise at our entry and thought, as a man accustomed to set the tone, that it would be enough to transform that surprise into joy were he to show that he himself felt it, that it was indeed the feeling which our arrival there ought to prompt. In which he calculated wisely; for Mme de Villeparisis, who had a high opinion of her nephew and knew how difficult it was to please him, appeared suddenly to have found new attractions in my grandmother and welcomed her with open arms. But I failed to understand how M. de Charlus could, in the space of a few hours, have forgotten the invitation—so curt but apparently so intentional, so premeditated—which he addressed to me that same morning, or why he called a “capital idea” on my grandmother’s part an idea that had been entirely his own. With a regard for accuracy which I retained until I had reached the age at which I realised that it is not by questioning him that one learns the truth of what another man has had in his mind, and that the risk of a misunderstanding which will probably pass unobserved is less than that which may come from a purblind insistence: “But, Monsieur,” I reminded him, “you remember, surely, that it was you who asked me if we would come round this evening?” Not a sound, not a movement betrayed that M. de Charles had so much as heard my question. Seeing which, I repeated it, like diplomats or like young men after a misunderstanding who endeavour, with untiring and unrewarded zeal, to obtain an explanation which their adversary is determined not to give them. Still M. de Charlus answered me not a word. I seemed to see hovering upon his lips the smile of those who from a great height pass judgment on the character and breeding of their inferiors.
Since he refused all explanation, I tried to provide one for myself, but succeeded only in hesitating between several, none of which might have been the right one. Perhaps he did not remember, or perhaps it was I who had failed to understand what he had said to me that morning . . . More probably, in his pride, he did not wish to appear to have sought the company of people he despised, and preferred to cast upon them the responsibility for their intrusion. But then, if he despised us, why had he been so anxious that we should come, or rather that my grandmother should come, for of the two of us it was to her alone that he spoke that evening, and never once to me? Talking with the utmost animation to her, as also to Mme de Villeparisis, hiding, so to speak, behind them as though he were seated at the back of a theatre-box, he merely turned from them every now and then the searching gaze of his penetrating eyes and fastened it on my face, with the same gravity, the same air of preoccupation, as if it had been a manuscript difficult to decipher.
No doubt, had it not been for those eyes, M. de Charlus’s face would have been similar to the faces of many good-looking men. And when Saint-Loup, speaking to me of various other Guermantes, said on a later occasion: “Admittedly, they don’t have that thoroughbred air, that look of being noblemen to their finger-tips, that uncle Palamède has,” confirming my suspicion that a thoroughbred air and aristocratic distinction were not something mysterious and new but consisted in elements which I had recognised without difficulty and without receiving any particular impression from them, I was to feel that another of my illusions had been shattered. But however much M. de Charlus tried to seal hermetically the expression on that face, to which a light coating of powder lent a faintly theatrical aspect, the eyes were like two crevices, two loop-holes which alone he had failed to block, and through which, according to one’s position in relation to him, one suddenly felt oneself in the path of some hidden weapon which seemed to bode no good, even to him who, without being altogether master of it, carried it within himself in a state of precarious equilibrium and always on the verge of explosion; and the circumspect and unceasingly restless expression of those eyes, with all the signs of exhaustion which the heavy pouches beneath them stamped upon his face, however carefully he might compose and regulate it, made one think of some incognito, some disguise assumed by a powerful man in danger, or merely by a dangerous—but tragic—individual. I should have liked to divine what was this secret which other men did not carry in their breasts and which had already made M. de Charlus’s stare seem to me so enigmatic when I had seen him that morning outside the Casino. But with what I now knew of his family I could no longer believe that it was that of a thief, nor, after what I had heard of his conversation, of a madman. If he was so cold towards me, while making himself so agreeable to my grandmother, this did not perhaps arise from any personal antipathy, for in general, to the extent that he was kindly disposed towards women, of whose faults he spoke without, as a rule, departing from the utmost tolerance, he displayed towards men, and especially young men, a hatred so violent as to suggest that of certain misogynists for women. Of two or three “gigolos,” relatives or intimate friends of Saint-Loup, who happened to mention their names, M. de Charlus remarked with an almost ferocious expression in sharp contrast to his usual coldness: “Young scum!” I gathered that the particular fault which he found in the young men of the day was their effeminacy. “They’re nothing but women,” he said with scorn. But what life would not have appeared effeminate beside that which he expected a man to lead, and never found energetic or virile enough? (He himself, when he walked across country, after long hours on the road would plunge his heated body into frozen streams.) He would not even concede that a man should wear a single ring.
But this obsession with virility did not prevent his having also the most delicate sensibilities. When Mme
de Villeparisis asked him to describe to my grandmother some country house in which Mme de Sévigné had stayed, adding that she could not help feeling that there was something rather “literary” about that lady’s distress at being parted from “that tiresome Mme de Grignan”:
“On the contrary,” he retorted, “I can think of nothing more genuine. Besides, it was a time in which feelings of that sort were thoroughly understood. The inhabitant of La Fontaine’s Monomotapa, running round to see his friend who had appeared to him in a dream looking rather sad, the pigeon finding that the greatest of evils is the absence of the other pigeon, seem to you perhaps, my dear aunt, as exaggerated as Mme de Sévigné’s impatience for the moment when she will be alone with her daughter. It’s so beautiful, what she says when she leaves her: ‘This parting gives a pain to my soul which I feel like an ache in my body. In absence one is liberal with the hours. One anticipates a time for which one is longing.’ ”
My grandmother was delighted to hear the Letters thus spoken of, exactly as she would have spoken of them herself. She was astonished that a man could understand them so well. She found in M. de Charlus a delicacy, a sensibility that were quite feminine. We said to each other afterwards, when we were by ourselves and discussed him together, that he must have come under the strong influence of a woman—his mother, or in later life his daughter if he had any children. “A mistress,” I thought to myself, remembering the influence which Saint-Loup’s seemed to have had over him and which enabled me to realise the degree to which men can be refined by the women with whom they live.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 42