The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  So far, I had never dreamed that M. de Charlus’s rage could have been caused by an unflattering remark which had been repeated to him; I searched my memory; I had not spoken about him to anyone. Some ill-wisher had invented the whole thing. I protested to M. de Charlus that I had said absolutely nothing about him. “I don’t think I can have annoyed you by saying to Mme de Guermantes that I was a friend of yours.” He gave a disdainful smile, raised his voice to the supreme pitch of its highest register, and there, softly attacking the shrillest and most contumelious note, “Oh! Sir,” he said, returning by the most gradual stages to a natural intonation, and seeming to revel as he went in the oddities of this descending scale, “I think you do yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were friends. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in one who could all too easily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo chair, but really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more and more sardonically winning until a charming smile actually began to play about his lips, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were friends! As for your having boasted that you had been presented to me, had talked to me, knew me slightly, had obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of becoming my protégé, I find it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done so. The extreme difference in age that there is between us enables me to recognise without absurdity that that presentation, those talks, that vague prospect of future relations were for you, it is not for me to say an honour, but still, when all is said and done, an advantage as to which I consider that your folly lay not in divulging it but in not having had the sense to keep it. I will even go so far as to say,” he went on, switching suddenly and momentarily from haughty anger to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I thought he was going to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered the proposal I made to you here in Paris, it seemed to me so unbelievable on your part, you who had struck me as well brought up and of a good bourgeois family” (on this adjective alone his voice gave a little hiss of impertinence), “that I was ingenuous enough to imagine all the tall stories that never happen, letters miscarrying, addresses misread. I recognise that it was extremely naïve of me, but St Bonaventure preferred to believe that an ox could fly rather than that his brother was capable of lying. However, all that is over: the idea did not appeal to you, there is no more to be said. It seems to me only that you might have brought yourself” (and there were genuine tears in his voice), “were it only out of consideration for my age, to write to me. I had conceived and planned for you infinitely seductive things, which I had taken good care not to divulge to you. You preferred to refuse without knowing what they were; that is your affair. But, as I say, one can always write. In your position, and indeed in my own, I should have done so. For that reason I prefer mine to yours—I say ‘for that reason,’ because I believe that all our positions are equal, and I have more fellow-feeling for an intelligent labourer than for many a duke. But I can say that I prefer my position, because in the whole course of my life, which is beginning now to be a pretty long one, I am conscious that I have never done what you did.” (His head was turned away from the light, and I could not see if tears were falling from his eyes, as his voice led one to suppose.) “I said that I had advanced a long way towards you; the effect that had was to make you withdraw twice as far. Now it is for me to withdraw, and we shall know one another no longer. I shall retain not your name but your case, so that at moments when I might be tempted to believe that men have good manners, or simply the intelligence not to let slip an unparalleled opportunity, I may remember that that is ranking them too highly. No, that you should have said that you knew me when it was true—for henceforward it will cease to be true—I regard that as only natural, and I take it as an act of homage, that is to say something agreeable. Unfortunately, elsewhere and in other circumstances, you have uttered remarks of a very different nature.”

  “Monsieur, I swear to you that I have said nothing that could offend you.”

  “And who says that I am offended?” he screamed in fury, raising himself into an erect posture on the sofa on which hitherto he had been reclining motionless, while, as the pallid, frothing snakes twisted and stiffened in his face, his voice became alternately shrill and solemn like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The force with which he habitually spoke, which made strangers turn round in the street, was multiplied a hundredfold, as is a musical forte if, instead of being played on the piano, it is played by an orchestra, and changed into a fortissimo as well. M. de Charlus roared.) “Do you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You are evidently not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?”

  While he was speaking, my desire to persuade M. de Charlus that I had never spoken or heard anyone else speak ill of him had given place to a wild rage, provoked by the words which, to my mind, were dictated to him solely by his colossal pride. Perhaps they were indeed the effect, in part at any rate, of this pride. Almost all the rest sprang from a feeling of which I was then still ignorant, and for which I could not therefore be blamed for not making due allowance. Failing this unknown element, I might, had I remembered the words of Mme de Guermantes, have been tempted to assume a trace of madness in his pride. But at that moment the idea of madness never even entered my head. There was in him, in my view, only pride, while in me there was only fury. This fury (at the moment when M. de Charlus ceased to shout, in order to refer to his august toes, with a majesty that was accompanied by a grimace, a vomit of disgust at his obscure blasphemers), this fury could contain itself no longer. I felt a compulsive desire to strike something, and, a lingering trace of discernment making me respect the person of a man so much older than myself, and even, in view of their dignity as works of art, the pieces of German porcelain that were grouped around him, I seized the Baron’s new silk hat, flung it to the ground, trampled it, picked it up again, began blindly pulling it to pieces, wrenched off the brim, tore the crown in two, heedless of the continuing vociferations of M. de Charlus, and, crossing the room in order to leave, opened the door. To my intense astonishment, two footmen were standing one on either side of it, who moved slowly away, so as to appear only to have been casually passing in the course of their duty. (I afterwards learned their names; one was called Burnier, the other Charmel.) I was not taken in for a moment by the explanation which their leisurely gait seemed to offer me. It was highly improbable; three others appeared to me to be less so: one was that the Baron sometimes entertained guests against whom, in case he happened to need assistance (but why?), he deemed it necessary to keep reinforcements posted close at hand; the second was that, drawn by curiosity, they had stopped to listen at the keyhole, not thinking that I should come out so quickly; the third, that, the whole of the scene which M. de Charlus had made having been a piece of play-acting rehearsed in advance, he had himself told them to listen, from a love of spectacle combined, perhaps, with a nunc erudimini, “Be wise now,” by which everyone would profit.

  My anger had not calmed that of M. de Charlus, and my departure from the room seemed to cause him acute distress; he called me back, shouted to his servants to stop me, and finally, forgetting that a moment earlier, when he spoke of his “august toes,” he had thought to make me a witness of his own deification, came running after me at full speed, overtook me in the hall, and stood barring the door. “Come, now,” he said, “don’t be childish; come back for a minute; he that loveth well chasteneth well, and if I have chastened you well it is because I love you well.” My anger had subsided; I let the word “chasten” pass and followed the Baron who, summoning a footman, ordered him without a trace of self-consciousness to clear away the remains of the shattered hat, which was replaced by another.

  “If you will tell me, Monsieur, who it is that has treacherously m
aligned me,” I said to M. de Charlus, “I will stay here to learn his name and to confute the impostor.”

  “Who? Do you not know? Do you retain no memory of the things you say? Do you think that the people who are so good as to inform me of such things do not begin by demanding secrecy? And do you imagine that I’m going to betray a person to whom I have given my promise?”

  “So it’s impossible for you to tell me?” I asked, racking my brains in a last fruitless effort to discover to whom I could have spoken about M. de Charlus.

  “Did you not hear me say that I had given a promise of secrecy to my informant?” he said in a snarling voice. “I see that with your fondness for abject utterances you combine one for futile persistence. You ought at least to have the intelligence to profit from a final interview with me, and not go on talking for the sake of talking drivel.”

  “Monsieur,” I replied, moving away from him, “you insult me. I am disarmed, because you are several times my age, we are not equally matched. Moreover, I cannot convince you. I have already sworn to you that I have said nothing.”

  “So I’m lying!” he screamed in a terrifying tone, and with a bound forward that brought him within a yard of me.

  “Someone has misinformed you.”

  Then in a gentle, affectionate, melancholy voice, as in those symphonies which are played without a break between the different movements, in which a graceful scherzo, amiable and idyllic, follows the thunder-peals of the opening part, “It is quite possible,” he said. “Generally speaking, a remark repeated at second hand is rarely true. It is your fault if, not having profited by the opportunities of seeing me which I had held out to you, you have not furnished me, by those frank and open words of daily intercourse which create confidence, with the unique and sovereign remedy against a remark which made you out a traitor. Either way, true or false, the allegation has done its work. I can never rid myself of the impression it made on me. I cannot even say that he who chasteneth well loveth well, for I have chastened you well enough but I no longer love you.”

  While saying this he had forced me to sit down and had rung the bell. A different footman appeared. “Bring something to drink and order the brougham.” I said that I was not thirsty, that it was very late, and that in any case I had a carriage waiting. “They have probably paid him and sent him away,” he told me, “you needn’t worry about that. I’m ordering a carriage to take you home . . . If you’re anxious about the time . . . I could have given you a room here . . .” I said that my mother would be worried. “Ah! of course, yes. Well, true or false, the remark has done its work. My affection, a trifle premature, had flowered too soon, and, like those apple-trees of which you spoke so poetically at Balbec, it has been unable to withstand the first frost.”

  If M. de Charlus’s affection for me had not been destroyed, he could hardly have acted differently, since, while assuring me that we had fallen out, he made me sit down and drink, asked me to stay the night, and was now going to send me home. He had indeed an air of dreading the moment at which he must part from me and find himself alone, that sort of slightly anxious fear which his sister-in-law and cousin Guermantes had appeared to me to be feeling when she had tried to force me to stay a little longer, with something of the same momentary fondness for me, of the same effort to prolong the passing minute.

  “Unfortunately,” he went on, “I have not the gift to cause what has once been destroyed to blossom again. My affection for you is quite dead. Nothing can revive it. I believe that it is not unworthy of me to confess that I regret it. I always feel myself to be a little like Victor Hugo’s Boaz: ‘I am widowed and alone, and darkness gathers over me.’ ”

  I walked back through the big green drawing-room with him. I told him, speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. “Isn’t it?” he replied. “It’s a good thing to be fond of something. The panelling is by Bagard. What is rather charming, d’you see, is that it was made to match the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. You observe, it repeats the same decorative design. There used to be only two places where you could see this, the Louvre and M. d’Hinnisdal’s house. But naturally, as soon as I had decided to come and live in this street, there cropped up an old family house of the Chimays which nobody had ever seen before because it came here expressly for me. On the whole it’s quite good. It might perhaps be better, but after all it’s not bad. Some pretty things, are there not? These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland and the King of England, by Mignard. But why am I telling you all this? You must know it as well as I do, since you were waiting in this room. No? Ah, then they must have put you in the blue drawing-room,” he said with an air that might have been either rudeness, on the score of my lack of curiosity, or personal superiority, in not having taken the trouble to ask where I had been kept waiting. “Look, in this cabinet I have all the hats worn by Madame Elisabeth, by the Princesse de Lamballe, and by Marie-Antoinette. They don’t interest you; it’s as though you couldn’t see. Perhaps you are suffering from an affection of the optic nerve. If you like this kind of beauty better, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear: Beethoven has come to join him.” And indeed one could hear the first chords of the last movement of the Pastoral Symphony, “Joy after the Storm,” performed somewhere not far away, on the first floor no doubt, by a band of musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be playing that, and who the musicians were. “Ah, well, one doesn’t know. One never does know. It’s invisible music. Pretty, isn’t it?” he said to me in a slightly insolent tone, which nevertheless suggested somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “But you don’t care two hoots about it. You want to go home, even if it means showing disrespect for Beethoven and for me. You are pronouncing judgment on yourself,” he added, with an affectionate and mournful air, when the moment had come for me to go. “You will excuse my not accompanying you home, as good manners ordain that I should. Since I have decided not to see you again, spending five minutes more in your company would make very little difference to me. But I am tired, and I have a great deal to do.” However, seeing that it was a fine night: “Ah, well, perhaps I will come in the carriage after all,” he said. “There’s a superb moon which I shall go on to admire from the Bois after I have taken you home. What, you don’t know how to shave!—even on a night when you’ve been dining out, you have still a few hairs here,” he said, taking my chin between two fingers which seemed as it were magnetised, and after a moment’s resistance ran up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. “Ah! how pleasant it would be to look at the ‘blue light of the moon’ in the Bois with someone like yourself,” he said to me with a sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, and then, sadly: “For you’re nice, really; you could be nicer than anyone,” he went on, laying his hand in a fatherly way on my shoulder. “Originally, I must confess that I found you quite insignificant.” I ought to have reflected that he must find me so still. I had only to recall the rage with which he had spoken to me, barely half an hour before. In spite of this I had the impression that he was, for the moment, sincere, that his kindness of heart was prevailing over what I regarded as an almost frenzied condition of susceptibility and pride. The carriage was waiting beside us, and still he prolonged the conversation. “Come along,” he said abruptly, “jump in, in five minutes we shall be at your door. And I shall bid you a good-night which will cut short our relations, for all time. It is better, since we must part for ever, that we should do so, as in music, on a common chord.” Despite these solemn affirmations that we should never see one another again, I could have sworn that M. de Charlus, annoyed at having forgotten himself earlier in the evening and afraid of having hurt my feelings, would not have been displeased to see me once again. Nor was I mistaken, for, a moment later: “There, now,” he said, “if I hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all. In memory of your grandmother, I have had a rare edition of Mme de Sévigné bound for you. I fear that that will pr
event this from being our last meeting. One must console oneself with the reflexion that complicated affairs are rarely settled in a day. Just look how long they took over the Congress of Vienna.”

  “But I could send round for it without disturbing you,” I said obligingly.

  “Will you hold your tongue, you little fool,” he replied angrily, “and not assume the grotesque air of regarding as a small matter the honour of being probably (I do not say certainly, for it will perhaps be one of my servants who hands you the volumes) received by me.”

  Then, regaining possession of himself: “I do not wish to part from you on these words. No dissonance; before the eternal silence, the dominant chord!” It was for his own nerves that he seemed to dread an immediate return home after harsh words of dissension. “You would not care to come to the Bois,” he said to me in a tone that was not so much interrogative as affirmative, not, it seemed to me, because he did not wish to make me the offer, but because he was afraid that his self-esteem might meet with a refusal. “Ah, well,” he went on, still postponing our separation, “it is the moment when, as Whistler says, the bourgeois go to bed” (perhaps he wished now to appeal to my self-esteem) “and it is meet to begin to look at things. But you don’t even know who Whistler is!” I changed the subject and asked him whether the Princesse d’Iéna was an intelligent person. M. de Charlus stopped me, and, adopting the most contemptuous tone that I had yet heard him use, “Ah! there, sir,” he said, “you are alluding to an order of nomenclature with which I do not hold. There is perhaps an aristocracy among the Tahitians, but I must confess that I know nothing about it. The name which you have just pronounced did sound in my ears, strangely enough, only a few days ago. Someone asked me whether I would condescend to allow the young Duc de Guastalla to be presented to me. The request astonished me, for the Duc de Guastalla has no need of an introduction to me, for the simple reason that he is my cousin, and has known me all his life; he is the son of the Princesse de Parme, and, as a well brought-up young kinsman, he never fails to come and pay his respects to me on New Year’s Day. But, on making inquiries, I discovered that the young man in question was not my kinsman but the son of the person in whom you are interested. As there exists no princess of that title, I supposed that my friend was referring to some poor wanton sleeping under the Pont d’Iéna, who had picturesquely assumed the title of Princesse d’Iéna, as one talks about the Panther of the Batignolles, or the Steel King. But no, the reference was to a rich person who possesses some remarkable furniture which I had seen and admired at an exhibition, and which enjoys the superiority over the name of its owner of being genuine. As for this self-styled Duc de Guastalla, I supposed him to be my secretary’s stockbroker; one can procure so many things with money. But no; it was the Emperor, it appears, who amused himself by conferring on these people a title which simply was not his to bestow. It was perhaps a sign of power, or of ignorance, or of malice, but in any case, I consider that it was an exceedingly scurvy trick to play on these unwitting usurpers. However, I cannot enlighten you on the subject; my knowledge begins and ends with the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where, among all the Courvoisiers and Gallardons, you will find, if you can manage to secure an introduction, plenty of old harridans taken straight out of Balzac who will amuse you. Naturally, all that has nothing to do with the prestige of the Princesse de Guermantes, but without me and my ‘Open Sesame’ her portals are inaccessible.”