As for other young men, M. de Charlus found that the existence of Morel was no obstacle to his taste for them, and that indeed his brilliant reputation as a violinist or his growing fame as a composer and journalist might in certain instances provide a bait. If a young composer of pleasing appearance was introduced to the Baron, it was in Morel’s talents that he sought an opportunity of doing the newcomer a favour. “You must,” he would tell him, “bring me some of your work so that Morel can play it at a concert or on tour. There’s so little decent music written for the violin. It’s a godsend to find something new. And abroad they appreciate that sort of thing enormously. Even in the provinces there are little musical societies where they love music with a fervour and intelligence that are quite admirable.” Without any greater sincerity (for all this served only as bait and it was seldom that Morel condescended to fulfil these promises), Bloch having confessed that he was something of a poet (“in my idle momerits,” he had added with the sarcastic laugh with which he would accompany a trite remark when he could think of nothing original), M. de Charlus said to me: “You must tell your young Hebrew, since he writes verse, that he really must bring me some for Morel. For a composer that’s always the stumbling-block, finding something decent to set to music. One might even consider a libretto. It mightn’t be uninteresting, and would acquire a certain value from the distinction of the poet, from my patronage, from a whole concatenation of auxiliary circumstances, among which Morel’s talent would take the chief place. For he’s composing a lot just now, and writing too, and very nicely—I must talk to you about it. As for his talent as an executant (there, as you know, he’s already a real master), you shall see this evening how well the lad plays Vinteuil’s music. He staggers me; at his age, to have such understanding while remaining such a schoolboy, such an urchin! Oh, this evening is only to be a little rehearsal. The big affair is to come off in two or three days. But it will be much more distinguished this evening. And so we’re delighted that you’ve come,” he went on, using the royal plural. “The programme is so magnificent that I’ve advised Mme Verdurin to give two parties: one in a few days’ time, at which she will have all her own acquaintances, the other tonight at which the hostess is, as they say in legal parlance, ‘disseized.’ It is I who have issued the invitations, and I have collected a few people from another sphere, who may be useful to Charlie and whom it will be nice for the Verdurins to meet. It’s all very well, don’t you agree, to have the finest music played by the greatest artists, but the effect of the performance remains muffled, as though in cotton-wool, if the audience is composed of the milliner from across the way and the grocer from round the corner. You know what I think of the intellectual level of society people, but there are certain quite important roles which they can perform, among others the role which in public events devolves upon the press, and which is that of being an organ of dissemination. You understand what I mean: I have for instance invited my sister-in-law Oriane; it is not certain that she will come, but it is on the other hand certain that, if she does come, she will understand absolutely nothing. But one doesn’t ask her to understand, which is beyond her capacity, but to talk, a task for which she is admirably suited, and which she never fails to perform. The result? Tomorrow as ever is, instead of the silence of the milliner and the grocer, an animated conversation at the Mortemarts’ with Oriane telling everyone that she has heard the most marvellous music, that a certain Morel, and so forth, and indescribable rage among the people not invited, who will say: Palamède obviously thought we were not worth asking; but in any case, who are these people in whose house it happened?’—a counterblast quite as useful as Oriane’s praises, because Morel’s name keeps cropping up all the time and is finally engraved in the memory like a lesson one has read over a dozen times. All this forms a concatenation of circumstances which may be of value to the artist, and to the hostess, may serve as a sort of megaphone for an event which will thus be made audible to a wide public. It really is worth the trouble; you shall see what progress Charlie has made. And what is more, we’ve discovered a new talent in him, my dear fellow: he writes like an angel. Like an angel, I tell you.”
M. de Charlus omitted to say that for some time past he had been employing Morel, like those great noblemen of the seventeenth century who scorned to sign and even to write their own lampoons, to compose certain vilely calumnious little paragraphs at the expense of Comtesse Mole. Their effrontery being apparent even to those who merely glanced at them, how much more cruel were they to the young woman herself, who found in them, so slyly introduced that nobody but herself saw the point, certain passages from her own letters, quoted verbatim but twisted in a way that made them as deadly as the cruellest revenge. They killed the young woman. But there is published every day in Paris, Balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper, more terrible than its printed rivals. We shall see later on that this oral press reduced to nothing the power of a Charlus who had fallen out of fashion, and exalted far above him a Morel who was not worth the millionth part of his former patron. But at least this intellectual fashion is naive and genuinely believes in the nullity of a gifted Charlus and in the incontestable authority of a crass Morel. The Baron was not so innocent in his implacable vindictiveness. Whence, no doubt, that bitter venom on his tongue the irruption of which seemed to dye his cheeks with jaundice when he was in a rage.
“Since you know Bergotte,”10 M. de Charlus went on, “I thought that you might perhaps, by refreshing his memory with regard to the stripling’s writings, as it were collaborate with me, help me to create a concatenation of circumstances capable of fostering a twofold talent, that of a musician and a writer, which might one day acquire the prestige of that of Berlioz. As you know, the illustrious have often other things to think about, they are smothered in flattery, they take little interest except in themselves. But Bergotte, who is genuinely unpretentious and obliging, promised me that he would arrange for the Gaulois, or some such paper, to publish these little articles, a blend of the humorist and the musician, which are really very nicely done, and I should be so pleased if Charlie could combine with his violin this extra little hobby. I know I’m prone to exaggeration where he is concerned, like all the old sugar-mammies of the Conservatoire. What, my dear fellow, didn’t you know that? You’ve clearly never noticed my gullible side. I pace up and down for hours on end outside the examination hall. I’m as happy as a queen. As for Charlie’s prose, Bergotte assured me that it was really very good indeed.”
M. de Charlus, who had long been acquainted with Bergotte through Swann, had indeed gone to see him to ask him to find an opening on some newspaper for a sort of half-humorous column by Morel about music. In doing so, M. de Charlus had felt some remorse, for, a great admirer of Bergotte, he was conscious that he never went to see him for his own sake, but in order—thanks to the respect, partly intellectual, partly social, that Bergotte had for him—to be able to do Morel or Mme Mole or others of his friends a good turn. That he no longer made use of the social world except for such purposes did not shock him, but to treat Bergotte thus seemed to him more reprehensible, because he felt that Bergotte was not at all calculating like society people, and deserved better. But his life was fully occupied and he could never find the time to spare unless he wanted something very badly, for instance when it affected Morel. Moreover, though he was himself extremely intelligent, the conversation of an intelligent man left him comparatively cold, especially that of Bergotte who was too much the man of letters for his liking, belonged to another clan and did not see things from his point of view. Bergotte for his part was well aware of the utilitarian motive for M. de Charlus’s visits, but bore him no grudge; for though he was incapable of sustained kindness, he was anxious to give pleasure, tolerant, and impervious to the pleasure of administering a snub. As for M. de Charlus’s vice, he had never to the smallest degree shared it, but found in it rather an element of colour in the person affected, fas et nefas, for an artist, consisting not in moral exam
ples but in memories of Plato or of Il Sodoma.
“I should have very much liked him to come this evening, for he would have heard Charlie in the things he plays best. But I gather he doesn’t go out, that he doesn’t want to be bothered, and he’s quite right. But you, fair youth, we never see you at the Quai Conti. You don’t abuse their hospitality!”
I explained that I went out as a rule with my cousin.
“Do you hear that! He goes out with his cousin! What a most particularly pure young man!” said M. de Charlus to Brichot. Then, turning again to me: “But we are not asking you to give an account of your life, my boy. You are free to do anything that amuses you. We merely regret that we have no share in it. You have very good taste, by the way: your cousin is charming. Ask Brichot, she quite turned his head at Douville. Shall we be seeing her this evening? She really is extremely pretty. And she would be even prettier if she cultivated a little more the rare art, which she possesses naturally, of dressing well.”
Here I must remark that M. de Charlus “possessed”—and this made him the exact opposite, the antithesis of me—the gift of observing minutely and distinguishing the details of a woman’s clothes as much as of a painting. As regards dresses and hats, certain scandalmongers or certain over-dogmatic theorists will aver that, in a man, a fondness for male attractions is balanced by an innate taste, a knowledge and feeling for female dress. And this is indeed sometimes the case, as though, men having monopolised all the physical desire, all the deep tenderness of a Charlus, the other sex were to be favoured with what comes under the heading of “platonic” (a highly inappropriate adjective) taste, or quite simply everything that comes under the heading of taste, with the most subtle and assured discrimination. In this respect M. de Charlus merited the nickname which was given to him later on, “the dressmaker.” But his taste and his gift for observation extended to many other things. The reader will have seen how, on the evening I went to see him after a dinner-party at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, I had not noticed the masterpieces he had in his house until he pointed them out to me one by one. He recognised immediately things to which no one would ever have paid any attention, and this not only in works of art but in the dishes at a dinner-party (and everything else between painting and cooking). I always regretted that M. de Charlus, instead of restricting his artistic talents to the painting of a fan as a present for his sister-in-law (we have seen the Duchesse de Guermantes holding it in her hand and spreading it out not so much to fan herself with it as to show it off and parade Palamède’s friendship for her) and to the improvement of his pianistic technique in order to accompany Morel’s violin flourishes without playing wrong notes—I always regretted, as I say, and I still regret, that M. de Charlus never wrote anything. Of course one cannot draw from the eloquence of his conversation or even of his correspondence the conclusion that he would have been a talented writer. Those merits are not on the same plane. One has come across purveyors of conversational banality who have written masterpieces, and supreme talkers who have proved inferior to the most mediocre hack as soon as they turned to writing. Nevertheless I believe that if M. de Charlus had tried his hand at prose, to begin with on those artistic subjects about which he knew so much, the fire would have blazed, the lightning would have flashed, and the society dilettante would have become a master of the pen. I often told him so, but he never wished to try his hand, perhaps simply from laziness, or because his time was taken up with dazzling entertainments and sordid diversions, or from a Guermantes need to go on gossiping indefinitely. I regret it all the more because in his most brilliant conversation the wit was never divorced from the character, the inspired invention of the one from the arrogance of the other. If he had written books, instead of being admired and hated as he was in drawing-rooms where, in his most remarkable moments of inventive intelligence, he at the same time trampled down the weak, took revenge on people who had not insulted him, basely sought to sow discord between friends—if he had written books, one would have had his spiritual qualities in isolation, drained of evil, the admiration would have been unalloyed, and friendship kindled by many a trait.
In any case, even if I am mistaken about what he might have achieved with the merest page of prose, he would have performed a rare service by writing, for, while he observed and distinguished everything, he also knew the name of everything he distinguished. Certain it is that by talking to him, if I did not learn to see (the natural tendency of my mind and sensibility lying elsewhere), at least I glimpsed things that without him would have remained invisible to me, though their names, which would have helped me to recall their design or their colour, I always forgot fairly quickly. If he had written books, even bad ones (though I do not believe they would have been bad), what a delightful dictionary, what an inexhaustible inventory they would have been! But after all, who knows? Instead of bringing to the task his knowledge and his taste, perhaps, through that daemon that so often thwarts our destinies, he would have written insipid romances or pointless books of travel and adventure.
“Yes, she knows how to dress, or more precisely how to wear clothes,” M. de Charlus went on apropos of Albertine. “My only doubt is whether she dresses in conformity with her particular style of beauty, and I am in fact to some extent responsible for this, as a result of some rather ill-considered advice I gave her. What I often used to tell her on the way to La Raspelière, which was perhaps dictated—I regret to say—by the nature of the countryside, the proximity of the beaches, rather than by your cousin’s distinctive type of looks, has made her err slightly on the side of flimsiness. I have seen her, I admit, in some very pretty muslins, some charming gauze scarves, and a certain pink toque by no means disfigured by a little pink feather. But I feel that her beauty, which is real and solid, demands more than dainty chiffons. Does a toque really suit that enormous head of hair which a kakochnyk would set off to full advantage? Very few women are suited by old-fashioned dresses which give an impression of theatre or fancy dress. But the beauty of this young girl who is already a woman is an exception, worthy of some old dress in Genoese velvet” (I thought at once of Elstir and of Fortuny’s dresses) “which I would not be afraid of weighing down even more with incrustations or pendants of stones, marvellous and outmoded—I can think of no higher praise—such as the peridot, the marcasite and the incomparable labradorite. Moreover she herself seems to have an instinct for the counter-balance that a somewhat heavy beauty calls for. Remember, on the way to dinner at La Raspelière, all that accompaniment of pretty cases and weighty bags, into which, when she is married, she will be able to put more than the whiteness of face-powder or the crimson of cosmetics but—in a casket of lapis lazuli not too tinged with indigo—those of pearls and rubies, not imitation ones, I suspect, for she may well marry into money.”
“Well, well, Baron,” interrupted Brichot, fearing that I might be distressed by these last words, for he had some doubts as to the purity of my relations and the authenticity of my cousinage with Albertine, “you do take an interest in young ladies!”
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 290