What she had enabled us, thanks to her labour, to know of Vinteuil was to all intents and purposes the whole of Vinteuil’s work. Compared with this septet, certain phrases from the sonata which were all that the public knew appeared so commonplace that it was difficult to understand how they could have aroused so much admiration. Similarly we are surprised that, for years past, pieces as trivial as the Song to the Evening Star or Elisabeth’s Prayer can have aroused in the concert-hall fanatical worshippers who wore themselves out applauding and shouting encore at the end of what after all seems poor and trite to us who know Tristan, the Rhinegold and the Mastersingers. One must assume that those featureless melodies nevertheless already contained, in infinitesimal and for that reason perhaps more easily assimilable quantities, something of the originality of the masterpieces which alone matter to us in retrospect, but whose very perfection might perhaps have prevented them from being understood; those earlier melodies may have prepared the way for them in people’s hearts. But the fact remains that, if they gave a vague presentiment of the beauties to come, they left these in complete obscurity. The same was true of Vinteuil; if at his death he had left behind him—excepting certain parts of the sonata—only what he had been able to complete, what we should have known of him would have been, in relation to his true greatness, as inconsiderable as in the case of, say, Victor Hugo if he had died after the Pas d’Armes du Roi Jean, the Fiancée du Timbalier and Sarah la Baigneuse, without having written a line of the Légende des Siècles or the Contemplations: what is to us his real achievement would have remained purely potential, as unknown as those universes to which our perception does not reach, of which we shall never have any idea.
Moreover this apparent contrast and profound union between genius (talent too and even virtue) and the sheath of vices in which, as had happened in the case of Vinteuil, it is so frequently contained and preserved, was detectable, as in a popular allegory, in the very assembly of the guests among whom I found myself once again when the music had come to an end. This assembly, albeit limited this time to Mme Verdurin’s salon, resembled many others, the ingredients of which are unknown to the general public, and which journalist-philosophers, if they are at all well-informed, call Parisian, or Panamist, or Dreyfusard, never suspecting that they may equally well be found in Petersburg, Berlin, Madrid, and in every epoch; if as a matter of fact the Under Secretary of State for Fine Arts, an artist to his fingertips, wellborn and snobby, several duchesses and three ambassadors with their wives were present this evening at Mme Verdurin’s, the proximate, immediate cause of their presence lay in the relations that existed between M. de Charlus and Morel, relations which made the Baron anxious to give as wide a celebrity as possible to the artistic triumphs of his young idol, and to obtain for him the cross of the Legion of Honour; the remoter cause which had made this assembly possible was that a girl who enjoyed a relationship with Mlle Vinteuil analogous to that of Charlie and the Baron had brought to light a whole series of works of genius which had been such a revelation that before long a subscription was to be opened under the patronage of the Minister of Education, with the object of erecting a statue to Vinteuil. Moreover, these works had been assisted, no less than by Mlle Vinteuil’s relations with her friend, by the Baron’s relations with Charlie, a sort of short cut, as it were, thanks to which the world was enabled to catch up with these works without the detour, if not of an incomprehension which would long persist, at least of a complete ignorance which might have lasted for years. Whenever an event occurs which is within the range of the vulgar mind of the journalist-philosopher, a political event as a rule, the journalist-philosophers are convinced that there has been some great change in France, that we shall never see such evenings again, that no one will ever again admire Ibsen, Renan, Dostoievsky, D’Annunzio, Tolstoy, Wagner, Strauss. For the journalist-philosophers take their cue from the equivocal undercurrents of these official manifestations, in order to find something decadent in the art which is there celebrated and which as often as not is more austere than any other. There is not a name, among those most revered by these journalist-philosophers, which has not quite naturally given rise to some such strange gathering, although its strangeness may have been less flagrant and better concealed. In the case of this gathering, the impure elements that came together therein struck me from another aspect; true, I was as well able as anyone to dissociate them, having learned to know them separately; but those which concerned Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, speaking to me of Combray, spoke to me also of Albertine, that is to say of Balbec, since it was because I had long ago seen Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain and had learned of her friend’s intimacy with Albertine that I was presently, when I returned home, to find, instead of solitude, Albertine awaiting me; and those which concerned Morel and M. de Charlus, speaking to me of Balbec, where I had seen, on the platform at Doncières, their intimacy begin, spoke to me of Combray and of its two “ways,” for M. de Charlus was one of those Guermantes, Counts of Combray, inhabiting Combray without having any dwelling there, suspended in mid-air, like Gilbert the Bad in his window, while Morel was the son of that old valet who had introduced me to the lady in pink and enabled me, years after, to identify her as Mme Swann.*
At the moment when, the music having come to an end, his guests came to take leave of him, M. de Charlus committed the same error as on their arrival. He did not ask them to shake hands with their hostess, to include her and her husband in the gratitude that was being showered on himself. There was a long procession, a procession which led to the Baron alone, and of which he was clearly aware, for as he said to me a little later: “The form of the artistic celebration ended in a ‘few-words-in-the-vestry’ touch that was quite amusing.” The guests even prolonged their expressions of gratitude with various remarks which enabled them to remain for a moment longer in the Baron’s presence, while those who had not yet congratulated him on the success of his party hung around impatiently in the rear. (Several husbands wanted to go; but their wives, snobs even though duchesses, protested: “No, no, even if we have to wait for an hour, we can’t go away without thanking Palamède, who has gone to so much trouble. There’s nobody else these days who can give entertainments like this.” Nobody would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme Verdurin any more than to the attendant in a theatre to which some great lady has for one evening brought the entire aristocracy.)
“Were you at Eliane de Montmorency’s yesterday, cousin?” asked Mme de Mortemart, seeking an excuse to prolong their conversation.
“As a matter of fact, no; I’m fond of Eliane, but I never can understand her invitations. I must be very dense, I’m afraid,” he went on with a beaming smile, while Mme de Mortemart realised that she was to be made the first recipient of “one of Palamède’s” as she had often been of “one of Oriane’s.” “I did indeed receive a card a fortnight ago from the charming Eliane. Above the questionably authentic name of ‘Montmorency’ was the following kind invitation: ‘My dear cousin, will you do me the honour of thinking of me next Friday at halfpast nine.’ Underneath were written the two less gracious words: ‘Czech Quartet.’ These seemed to me to be unintelligible, and in any case to have no more connexion with the sentence above than in those letters on the back of which one sees that the writer had begun another with the words ‘My dear—’ and nothing else, and failed to take a fresh sheet, either from absentmindedness or in order to save paper. I’m fond of Eliane, and so I bore her no ill-will; I merely ignored the strange and inappropriate allusion to a Czech Quartet, and, as I am a methodical man, I placed on my chimney-piece the invitation to think of Madame de Montmorency on Friday at half past nine. Although renowned for my obedient, punctual and meek nature, as Buffon says of the camel”—at this, laughter seemed to radiate from M. de Charlus, who knew that on the contrary he was regarded as the most impossibly difficult man—“I was a few minutes late (the time that it took me to change my clothes), though without feeling undue remorse, thinking that half past n
ine meant ten. At the stroke of ten, in a comfortable dressing-gown, with warm slippers on my feet, I sat down in my chimney corner to think of Eliane as she had requested me, and with an intensity which did not begin to falter until half past ten. Do tell her, if you will, that I complied strictly with her audacious request. I am sure she will be gratified.”
Mme de Mortemart swooned with laughter, in which M. de Charlus joined. “And tomorrow,” she went on, oblivious of the fact that she had already long exceeded the time that could reasonably be allotted to her, “are you going to our La Rochefoucauld cousins?”
“Oh, that, now, is quite impossible. They have invited me, and you too, I see, to a thing it is utterly impossible to imagine, which is called, if I am to believe the invitation card, a ‘the dansant.’ I used to be considered pretty nimble when I was young, but I doubt whether I could ever decently have drunk a cup of tea while dancing. And I have never cared to eat or drink in an unseemly fashion. You will remind me that my dancing days are done. But even sitting down comfortably drinking my tea—of the quality of which I am in any case suspicious since it is called ‘dancing’—I should be afraid lest other guests younger than myself, and less nimble possibly than I was at their age, might spill their cups over my tails and thus interfere with my pleasure in draining my own.”
Nor was M. de Charlus content with leaving Mme Verdurin out of the conversation while he spoke of all manner of subjects (which he seemed to take a delight in developing and varying, for the cruel pleasure which he had always enjoyed of keeping indefinitely “queuing up” on their feet the friends who were waiting with excruciating patience for their turn to come); he even criticised all that part of the entertainment for which Mme Verdurin was responsible. “But, talking of cups, what in the world are those strange little bowls which remind me of the vessels in which, when I was a young man, people used to get sorbets from Poiré Blanche? Somebody said to me just now that they were for ‘iced coffee.’ But I have seen neither coffee nor ice. What curious little objects, with so ill-defined a purpose!”
While saying this M. de Charlus had placed his white-gloved hands vertically over his lips and cautiously swivelled his eyes with a meaning look as though he were afraid of being heard and even seen by his host and hostess. But this was only a pretence, for in a few minutes he would be offering the same criticisms to the Mistress herself, and a little later would be insolently enjoining her: “No more iced-coffee cups, remember! Give them to one of your friends whose house you wish to disfigure. But warn her not to have them in the drawing-room, or people might think that they had come into the wrong room, the things are so exactly like chamberpots.”
“But, cousin,” said the guest, lowering her voice too and casting a questioning glance at M. de Charlus, for fear of offending not Mme Verdurin but the Baron himself, “perhaps she doesn’t yet quite know these things …”
“She shall be taught.”
“Oh!” laughed the guest, “she couldn’t have a better teacher! She is lucky! If you’re in charge one can be sure there won’t be a false note.”
“There wasn’t one, if it comes to that, in the music.”
“Oh! it was sublime. One of those pleasures which can never be forgotten. Talking of that marvellous violinist,” she went on, imagining in her innocence that M. de Charlus was interested in the violin for its own sake, “do you happen to know one whom I heard the other day playing a Fauré sonata wonderfully well. He’s called Frank …”
“Oh, he’s ghastly,” replied M. de Charlus, oblivious of the rudeness of a contradiction which implied that his cousin was lacking in taste. “As far as violinists are concerned, I advise you to confine yourself to mine.”
This led to a fresh exchange of glances, at once furtive and watchful, between M. de Charlus and his cousin, for, blushing and seeking by her zeal to repair her blunder, Mme de Mortemart was about to suggest to M. de Charlus that she might organise an evening to hear Morel play. Now, for her the object of the evening was not to bring an unknown talent into prominence, though this was the object which she would pretend to have in mind and which was indeed that of M. de Charlus. She regarded it simply as an opportunity for giving a particularly elegant reception and was calculating already whom she would invite and whom she would leave out. This process of selection, the chief preoccupation of people who give parties (the people whom “society” journalists have the nerve or the stupidity to call “the elite”), alters at once the expression—and the handwriting—of a hostess more profoundly than any hypnotic suggestion. Before she had even thought of what Morel was to play (which she rightly regarded as a secondary consideration, for even if everybody observed a polite silence during the music, from fear of M. de Charlus, nobody would even think of listening to it), Mme de Mortemart, having decided that Mme de Valcourt was not to be one of the “chosen,” had automatically assumed that secretive, conspiratorial air which so degrades even those society women who can most easily afford to ignore what “people will say.”
“Might it be possible for me to give a party for people to hear your friend play?” murmured Mme de Mortemart, who, while addressing herself exclusively to M. de Charlus, could not refrain, as though mesmerised, from casting a glance at Mme de Valcourt (the excluded one) in order to make certain that she was sufficiently far away not to hear her. “No, she can’t possibly hear what I’m saying,” Mme de Mortemart concluded inwardly, reassured by her own glance which in fact had had a totally different effect upon Mme de Valcourt from that intended: “Why,” Mme de Valcourt had said to herself when she caught this glance, “Marie-Therese is arranging something with Palamède to which I’m not to be invited.”
“You mean my protégé,” M. de Charlus corrected, as merciless to his cousin’s choice of words as he was to her musical endowments. Then, without paying the slightest attention to her mute entreaties, for which she herself apologised with a smile, “Why, yes …” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room, “although there is always a risk in that sort of exportation of a fascinating personality into surroundings that must inevitably diminish his transcendent gifts and would in any case have to be adapted to them.”
Mme de Mortemart told herself that the mezza voce, the pianissimo of her question had been a waste of effort, after the megaphone through which the answer had issued. She was mistaken: Mme de Valcourt heard nothing, for the simple reason that she did not understand a single word. Her anxiety subsided, and would quickly have evaporated entirely, had not Mme de Mortemart, afraid that she might have been given away and might have to invite Mme de Valcourt, with whom she was on too intimate terms to be able to leave her out if the other knew about her party beforehand, raised her eyelids once again in Edith’s direction, as though not to lose sight of a threatening peril, lowering them again briskly so as not to commit herself too far. She intended, on the morning after the party, to write her one of those letters, the complement of the revealing glance, letters which are meant to be subtle but are tantamount to a full and signed confession. For instance: “Dear Edith, I’ve been missing you. I did not really expect you last night” (“How could she have expected me,” Edith would say to herself, “since she never invited me?”) “as I know that you’re not very fond of gatherings of that sort which rather bore you. We should have been greatly honoured, all the same, by your company” (Mme de Mortemart never used the word “honoured,” except in letters in which she attempted to cloak a lie in the semblance of truth). “You know that you are always welcome in our house. In any case you were quite right, as it was a complete failure, like everything that is got up at a moment’s notice.” But already the second furtive glance darted at her had enabled Edith to grasp everything that was concealed by the complicated language of M. de Charlus. This glance was indeed so potent that, after it had struck Mme de Valcourt, the obvious secrecy and intention to conceal that it betrayed rebounded upon a young Peruvian whom Mme de Mortemart intended, on the contrary, to invite. But being of a suspici
ous nature, seeing all too plainly the mystery that was being made without realising that it was not intended to mystify him, he at once conceived a violent hatred for Mme de Mortemart and vowed to play all sorts of disagreeable hoaxes on her, such as ordering fifty iced coffees to be sent to her house on a day when she was not entertaining, or, on a day when she was, inserting a notice in the papers to the effect that the party was postponed, and publishing mendacious accounts of subsequent parties in which would appear the notorious names of all the people whom for various reasons a hostess does not invite or even allow to be introduced to her.
Mme de Mortemart need not have bothered herself about Mme de Valcourt. M. de Charlus was about to take it upon himself to denature the projected entertainment far more than that lady’s presence would have done. “But, my dear cousin,” she said in response to the remark about “adapting the surroundings,” the meaning of which her momentary state of hyperaesthesia had enabled her to discern, “we shall spare you the least trouble. I undertake to ask Gilbert to arrange everything.”
“Not on any account, and moreover he will not be invited. Nothing will be done except through me. The first thing is to exclude all those who have ears and hear not.”
M. de Charlus’s cousin, who had been reckoning on Morel as an attraction in order to give a party at which she could say that, unlike so many of her kinswomen, she had “had Palamède,” abruptly switched her thoughts from this prestige of M. de Charlus’s to all the people with whom he would get her into trouble if he took it upon himself to do the inviting and excluding. The thought that the Prince de Guermantes (on whose account, partly, she was anxious to exclude Mme de Valcourt, whom he declined to meet) was not to be invited alarmed her. Her eyes assumed an uneasy expression.
“Is this rather bright light bothering you?” inquired M. de Charlus with an apparent seriousness the underlying irony of which she failed to perceive.
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