“At last we’re alone,” he said. “I quite forget where I was. Oh yes, I had just told you, hadn’t I, that the Prince asked the abbé Poiré if he could say his mass next day for Dreyfus. ‘No, the abbé informed me’ (“I say me,” Swann explained to me, “because it’s the Prince who is speaking, you understand?”), ‘for I have another mass that I’ve been asked to say for him tomorrow as well.—What, I said to him, is there another Catholic as well as myself who is convinced of his innocence?—It appears so.—But this other supporter’s conviction must be more recent than mine.—Maybe, but this other was asking me to say masses when you still believed Dreyfus guilty.—Ah, I can see that it’s no one in our world.—On the contrary!—Really, there are Dreyfusists among us, are there? You intrigue me; I should like to unbosom myself to this rare bird, if it is someone I know.—It is.—What is his name?—The Princesse de Guermantes. While I was afraid of offending my dear wife’s nationalistic opinions, her faith in France, she had been afraid of alarming my religious opinions, my patriotic sentiments. But privately she had been thinking as I did, though for longer than I had. And what her maid had been hiding as she went into her room, what she went out to buy for her every morning, was the Aurore. My dear Swann, from that moment I thought of the pleasure that I should give you if I told you how closely akin my views upon this matter were to yours; forgive me for not having done so sooner. If you bear in mind that I had never said a word to the Princess, it will not surprise you to be told that thinking the same as yourself must at that time have kept me further apart from you than thinking differently. For it was an extremely painful topic for me to broach. The more I believe that an error, that crimes even, have been committed, the more my heart bleeds for the Army. It had never occurred to me that opinions like mine could possibly cause you similar pain, until I was told the other day that you emphatically condemned the insults to the Army and the fact that the Dreyfusists agreed to ally themselves with those who insulted it. That settled it. I admit that it has been most painful for me to confess to you what I think of certain officers, few in number fortunately, but it is a relief to me not to have to keep away from you any longer, and above all a relief to make it clear to you that if I had other feelings it was because I hadn’t a shadow of doubt as to the soundness of the verdict. As soon as my doubts began, I could wish for only one thing, that the mistake should be rectified.’ I confess that I was deeply moved by the Prince de Guermantes’s words. If you knew him as I do, if you could realise the distance he has had to travel in order to reach his present position, you would admire him as he deserves. Not that his opinion surprises me, his is such an upright nature!”
Swann was forgetting that during the afternoon he had on the contrary told me that people’s opinions as to the Dreyfus case were dictated by atavism. At the most he had made an exception on behalf of intelligence, because in Saint-Loup it had managed to overcome atavism and had made a Dreyfusard of him. Now he had just seen that this victory had been of short duration and that Saint-Loup had passed into the opposite camp. And so it was to moral uprightness that he now assigned the role which had previously devolved upon intelligence. In reality we always discover afterwards that our adversaries had a reason for being on the side they espoused, which has nothing to do with any element of right that there may be on that side, and that those who think as we do do so because their intelligence, if their moral nature is too base to be invoked, or their uprightness, if their perception is weak, has compelled them to.
Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes as well as my schoolfellow Bloch, whom previously he had avoided and whom he now invited to lunch. Swann interested Bloch greatly by telling him that the Prince de Guermantes was a Dreyfusard. “We must ask him to sign our appeal on behalf of Picquart; a name like his would have a tremendous effect.” But Swann, blending with his ardent conviction as a Jew the diplomatic moderation of a man of the world, whose habits he had too thoroughly acquired to be able to shed them at this late hour, refused to allow Bloch to send the Prince a petition to sign, even on his own initiative. “He cannot do such a thing, we mustn’t expect the impossible,” Swann repeated. “There you have a charming man who has travelled thousands of miles to come over to our side. He can be very useful to us. If he were to sign your petition, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on our account, might even repent of his confidences and do nothing more.” Furthermore, Swann withheld his own name. He considered it too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides, even if he approved of everything that concerned reconsideration, he did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the anti-militarist campaign. He wore, a thing he had never done previously, the decoration he had won as a young militiaman in ’70, and added a codicil to his will asking that, contrary to its previous provisions, he might be buried with the military honours due to his rank as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a whole squadron of those troopers over whose fate Françoise used to weep in days gone by, when she envisaged the prospect of war. In short, Swann refused to sign Bloch’s petition, with the result that, if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my friend found him lukewarm, infected with nationalism, and jingoistic.
Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking in this room where he had too many friends, but said to me: “You ought to come and see your friend Gilberte. She has really grown up now and altered, you wouldn’t know her. She would be so pleased!” I no longer loved Gilberte. She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated would no longer fit into a life which has ceased to be fashioned for her. I no longer had any desire to see her, not even that desire to show her that I did not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before her when I loved her no longer.
Hence, seeking now only to give myself in Gilberte’s eyes the air of having longed with all my heart to meet her again and of having been prevented by circumstances of the kind called “beyond our control,” which indeed only occur, with any consistency at least, when we do nothing to thwart them, so far from accepting Swann’s invitation with reserve, I did not leave him until he had promised to explain in detail to his daughter the mischances that had prevented and would continue to prevent me from going to see her. “In any case I shall write to her as soon as I get home,” I added. “But be sure to tell her it will be a threatening letter, for in a month or two I shall be quite free, and then let her tremble, for I shall be coming to your house as regularly as in the old days.”
Before parting from Swann, I had a word with him about his health. “No, it’s not as bad as all that,” he told me. “Still, as I was saying, I’m pretty worn out, and I accept with resignation whatever may be in store for me. Only, I must say that it would be very irritating to die before the end of the Dreyfus case. Those scoundrels have more than one card up their sleeves. I have no doubt of their being defeated in the end, but still they’re very powerful, they have supporters everywhere. Just as everything is going on splendidly, it all collapses. I should like to live long enough to see Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel.”
When Swann had left, I returned to the big drawing-room to find the Princesse de Guermantes, with whom I did not then know that I was one day to be so intimate. Her passion for M. de Charlus did not reveal itself to me at first. I noticed only that the Baron, after a certain date, and without having taken to the Princesse de Guermantes one of those sudden dislikes so familiar with him, while continuing to feel for her just as strong if not a stronger affection perhaps than ever, appeared irritated and displeased whenever one mentioned her name to him. He never included it now in his list of people with whom he wished to dine.
It is true that before this time I had heard an extremely malicious ma
n about town say that the Princess had completely changed, that she was in love with M. de Charlus, but this slander had appeared to me absurd and had made me angry. I had indeed remarked with astonishment that, when I was telling her something that concerned myself, if M. de Charlus’s name cropped up in the middle, the Princess’s attention at once became screwed up to a higher pitch, like that of a sick man who, hearing us talk about ourselves and listening, in consequence, in a listless and absent-minded fashion, suddenly realises that a name we have mentioned is that of the disease from which he is suffering, which at once interests and delights him. Thus, if I said to her: “Actually, M. de Charlus was telling me …” the Princess at once gathered up the slackened reins of her attention. And having on one occasion said in her hearing that M. de Charlus had at that time a warm regard for a certain person, I was astonished to see in the Princess’s eyes that momentary glint, like the trace of a fissure in the pupils, which is due to a thought that our words have unwittingly aroused in the mind of the person to whom we are talking, a secret thought that will not find expression in words but will rise from the depths which we have stirred to the momentarily altered surface of his gaze. But if my remark had moved the Princess, I did not then suspect in what way.
At all events, shortly after this she began to talk to me about M. de Charlus, and almost without circumlocution. If she made any allusion to the rumours which a few people here and there were spreading about the Baron, it was merely to reject them as absurd and infamous inventions. But on the other hand she said: “I feel that any woman who fell in love with a man of such immense worth as Palamède ought to be magnanimous enough and devoted enough to accept him and understand him as a whole, for what he is, to respect his freedom, humour his whims, seek only to smooth out his difficulties and console him in his griefs.” Now, by such words, vague as they were, the Princesse de Guermantes gave away what she was seeking to idealise, just as M. de Charlus himself did at times. Have I not heard him, again and again, say to people who until then had been uncertain whether or not he was being slandered: “I, who have had so many ups and downs in my life, who have known all manner of people, thieves as well as kings, and indeed, I must confess, with a slight preference for the thieves, I who have pursued beauty in all its forms,” and so forth; and by these words which he thought adroit, and by contradicting rumours which no one knew of (or, from inclination, restraint or concern for verisimilitude, to make a concession to the truth that he was alone in regarding as minimal), he removed the last doubts from the minds of some of his hearers, and inspired others, who had not yet begun to doubt him, with their first. For the most dangerous of all concealments is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His constant awareness of it prevents him from imagining how generally unknown it is, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will begin to detect an admission in words which he believes to be innocent. In any case there was no real need to try to hush it up, for there is no vice that does not find ready tolerance in the best society, and one has seen a country house turned upside down in order that two sisters might sleep in adjoining rooms as soon as their hostess learned that theirs was a more than sisterly affection. But what revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess’s love was a particular incident on which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of a bus conductor whom he found prodigiously intimidating. However, to finish with the Princess’s love, I shall say briefly what the trifle was that opened my eyes. I was, on the day in question, alone with her in her carriage. As we were passing a post office she stopped the coachman. She had come out without a footman. She half drew a letter from her muff and was preparing to step down from the carriage to put it into the box. I tried to stop her, she made a show of resistance, and we both realised that our instinctive movements had been, hers compromising, in appearing to be protecting a secret, mine indiscreet, in thwarting that protection. She was the first to recover. Suddenly turning very red, she gave me the letter. I no longer dared not to take it, but, as I slipped it into the box, I could not help seeing that it was addressed to M. de Charlus.
To return to this first evening at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, I went to bid her good night, for her cousins, who had promised to take me home, were in a hurry to be gone. M. de Guermantes wished, however, to say good-bye to his brother, Mme de Surgis having found time to mention to the Duke as she left that M. de Charlus had been charming to her and to her sons. This great kindness on his brother’s part, the first moreover that he had ever shown in that line, touched Basin deeply and aroused in him old family feelings which were never dormant for long. As we were saying good-bye to the Princess he insisted, without actually thanking M. de Charlus, on expressing his fondness for him, either because he genuinely had difficulty in containing it or in order that the Baron might remember that actions of the sort he had performed that evening did not escape the eyes of a brother, just as, with the object of creating salutary associations of memory for the future, we give a lump of sugar to a dog that has done its trick. “Well, little brother!” said the Duke, stopping M. de Charlus and taking him tenderly by the arm, “so we walk past our elders without so much as a word? I never see you now, Mémé, and you can’t think how I miss you. I was turning over some old letters the other day and came upon some from poor Mamma, which are all so full of tenderness for you.”
“Thank you, Basin,” M. de Charlus replied in a broken voice, for he could never speak of their mother without emotion.
“You must let me fix up a cottage for you at Guermantes,” the Duke went on.
“It’s nice to see the two brothers so affectionate towards each other,” the Princess said to Oriane.
“Yes, indeed! I don’t suppose you could find many brothers like them. I shall invite you with him,” the Duchess promised me. “You’ve not quarrelled with him? … But what can they be talking about?” she added in an anxious tone, for she could catch only an occasional word of what they were saying. She had always felt a certain jealousy of the pleasure that M. de Guermantes found in talking to his brother of a past from which he was inclined to keep his wife shut out. She felt that, when they were happily together like this and she, unable to restrain her impatient curiosity, came and joined them, her arrival was not well received. But this evening, this habitual jealousy was reinforced by another. For if Mme de Surgis had told M. de Guermantes how kind his brother had been to her so that the Duke might thank his brother, at the same time devoted female friends of the Guermantes couple had felt it their duty to warn the Duchess that her husband’s mistress had been seen in close conversation with his brother. And Mme de Guermantes was tormented by this.
“Think of the fun we used to have at Guermantes long ago,” the Duke went on. “If you came down sometimes in summer we could take up our old life again. Do you remember old Father Courveau: ‘Why is Pascal disturbing? Because he is dis … dis …’ ” “Turbed,” put in M. de Charlus as though he were still responding to his tutor. “‘And why is Pascal disturbed?; because he is dis … because he is dis …’ ” “Turbing.” “‘Very good, you’ll pass, you’re certain to get a distinction, and Madame la Duchesse will give you a Chinese dictionary.’ How it all comes back to me, Mémé, and the old Chinese vase Hervey de Saint-Denis6 brought back for you, I can see it now. You used to threaten us that you would go and spend your life in China, you were so enamoured of the country; even then you used to love going for long rambles. Ah, you were always an odd one, for I can honestly say that you never had the same tastes as other people in anything …” But no sooner had he uttered these words than the Duke turned scarlet, for he was aware of his brother’s reputation, if not of his actual habits. As he never spoke to him about it, he was all the more embarrassed at having said something which might be taken to refer t
o it, and still more at having shown his embarrassment. After a moment’s silence: “Who knows,” he said, to cancel the effect of his previous words, “you were perhaps in love with a Chinese girl before loving so many white ones, and finding favour with them, if I am to judge by a certain lady to whom you have given great pleasure this evening by talking to her. She was delighted with you.” The Duke had vowed to himself that he would not mention Mme de Surgis, but, in the confusion that the gaffe he had just made had wrought in his ideas, he had pounced on the one that was uppermost in his mind, which happened to be precisely the one that ought not to have appeared in the conversation, although it had started it. But M. de Charlus had observed his brother’s blush. And, like guilty persons who do not wish to appear embarrassed that you should talk in their presence of the crime which they are supposed not to have committed, and feel obliged to prolong a dangerous conversation: “I am charmed to hear it,” he replied, “but I should like to go back to what you were saying before, which struck me as being profoundly true. You were saying that I never had the same ideas as other people—how right you are!—and you said that I had unorthodox tastes.” “No I didn’t,” protested M. de Guermantes, who, as a matter of fact, had not used those words, and may not have believed that their meaning was applicable to his brother. Besides, what right had he to bully him about idiosyncrasies which in any case were vague enough or secret enough to have in no way impaired the Baron’s tremendous position in society? What was more, feeling that the resources of his brother’s position were about to be placed at the service of his mistresses, the Duke told himself that this was well worth a little tolerance in exchange; had he at that moment known of some “unorthodox” relationship of his brother’s, then in the hope of the support that the other might give him, a hope linked with pious remembrance of the old days, M. de Guermantes would have passed it over, shutting his eyes to it, and if need be lending a hand. “Come along, Basin; good night, Palamède,” said the Duchess, who, devoured by rage and curiosity, could endure no more, “if you have made up your minds to spend the night here, we might just as well stay to supper. You’ve been keeping Marie and me standing for the last half-hour.” The Duke parted from his brother after a meaningful hug, and the three of us began to descend the immense staircase of the Princess’s house.
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