“No, not at all. I was thinking of the difficulty, not because of me of course, but because of my family, if Gilbert were to hear that I had given a party without inviting him, when he never has half a dozen people in without …”
“But precisely, we must begin by eliminating the half-dozen people, who would only jabber. I’m afraid that the din of talk has prevented you from realising that it was a question not of doing the honours as a hostess but of conducting the rites appropriate to every true celebration.”
Then, having decided, not that the next person had been kept waiting too long, but that it did not do to exaggerate the favours shown to one who had in mind not so much Morel as her own visiting-list, M. de Charlus, like a doctor cutting short a consultation when he considers that it has lasted long enough, served notice on his cousin to withdraw, not by bidding her good-night but by turning to the person immediately behind her.
“Good evening, Madame de Montesquiou. It was marvellous, wasn’t it? I didn’t see Helene. Tell her that any policy of general abstention, even the most noble, that is to say hers, must allow exceptions, if they are dazzling enough, as has been the case tonight. To show that one is rare is good, but to subordinate one’s rarity, which is only negative, to what is precious is better still. In your sister’s case—and I value more than anyone her systematic absence from places where what is in store for her is not worthy of her—here tonight, on the contrary, her presence at so memorable an occasion as this would have been a precedence, and would have given your sister, already so prestigious, an additional prestige.”
Then he turned to a third lady.
I was greatly astonished to see there, as friendly and flattering towards M. de Charlus as he had been curt with him in the past, insisting on being introduced to Charlie and telling him that he hoped he would come and see him, M. d’Argencourt, that terrible scourge of the species of men to which M. de Charlus belonged. At the moment he was living in the thick of them. It was certainly not because he had become one of them himself. But for some time past he had more or less deserted his wife for a young society woman whom he adored. Being intelligent herself, she made him share her taste for intelligent people, and was most anxious to have M. de Charlus to her house. But above all M. d’Argencourt, extremely jealous and somewhat impotent, feeling that he was failing to satisfy his conquest and anxious to keep her amused, could do so without risk to himself only by surrounding her with innocuous men, whom he thus cast in the role of guardians of his seraglio. The latter found that he had become quite pleasant and declared that he was a great deal more intelligent than they had supposed, a discovery that delighted him and his mistress.
The remainder of M. de Charlus’s guests drifted away fairly rapidly. Several of them said: “I don’t want to go to the sacristy” (the little room in which the Baron, with Charlie by his side, was receiving congratulations), “but I must let Palamède see me so that he knows that I stayed to the end.” Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mme Verdurin. Some pretended not to recognise her and deliberately said good-night to Mme Cottard, appealing to me for confirmation with a “That is Mme Verdurin, isn’t it?” Mme d’Arpajon asked me in our hostess’s hearing: “Tell me, has there ever been a Monsieur Verdurin?” The duchesses who still lingered, finding none of the oddities they had expected in this place which they had hoped to find more different from what they were used to, made the best of a bad job by going into fits of laughter in front of Elstir’s paintings; for everything else, which they found more in keeping than they had expected with what they were already familiar with, they gave the credit to M. de Charlus, saying: “How clever Palamède is at arranging things! If he were to stage a pantomime in a shed or a bathroom, it would still be perfectly ravishing.” The most noble ladies were those who showed most fervour in congratulating M. de Charlus upon the success of a party of the secret motive for which some of them were not unaware, without however being embarrassed by the knowledge, this class of society—remembering perhaps certain epochs in history when their own families had already arrived in full consciousness at a similar effrontery—carrying their contempt for scruples almost as far as their respect for etiquette. Several of them engaged Charlie on the spot for different evenings on which he was to come and play them Vinteuil’s septet, but it never occurred to any of them to invite Mme Verdurin.
The latter was already blind with fury when M. de Charlus who, his head in the clouds, was incapable of noticing her state, decided that it was only seemly to invite the Mistress to share his joy. And it was perhaps to indulge his taste for literature rather than from an overflow of pride that this specialist in artistic entertainments said to Mme Verdurin: “Well, are you satisfied? I think you have reason to be. You see that when I take it upon myself to organise a festivity there are no half-measures. I don’t know whether your heraldic notions enable you to gauge the precise importance of the event, the weight that I have lifted, the volume of air that I have displaced for you. You have had the Queen of Naples, the brother of the King of Bavaria, the three premier peers. If Vinteuil is Muhammad, we may say that we have brought to him some of the least movable of mountains. Bear in mind that to attend your party the Queen of Naples came up from Neuilly, which is a great deal more difficult for her than it was to leave the Two Sicilies,” he added with malicious intent, notwithstanding his admiration for the Queen. “It’s a historic event. Just think that it’s perhaps the first time she has gone anywhere since the fall of Gaeta. It may well be that the history books will record as climactic dates the day of the fall of Gaeta and that of the Verdurin reception. The fan that she laid down the better to applaud Vinteuil deserves to become more famous than the fan that Mme de Metternich broke because the audience hissed Wagner.”
“In fact she left it here,” said Mme Verdurin, momentarily appeased by the memory of the Queen’s kindness to her, and she showed M. de Charlus the fan which was lying on a chair.
“Oh, how moving!” exclaimed M. de Charlus, approaching the relic with veneration. “It is all the more touching for being so hideous; the little violet is incredible!” And spasms of emotion and irony ran through him by turns. “Oh dear, I don’t know whether you feel these things as I do. Swann would positively have died of convulsions if he had seen it. I know that whatever price it fetches, I shall buy that fan at the sale of the Queen’s belongings, for she’s bound to be sold up, she hasn’t a penny,” he went on, for he never ceased to intersperse the cruellest gossip with the most sincere veneration, although they sprang from two opposing natures, which, however, were combined in him. (They might even be brought to bear alternately on the same fact. For the M. de Charlus who from his comfortable position as a rich man jeered at the poverty of the Queen was the same who was often to be heard extolling that poverty and who, when anyone spoke of Princess Murat, Queen of the Two Sicilies, would reply: “I don’t know who you mean. There is only one Queen of Naples, a sublime person who does not keep a carriage. But from her omnibus she annihilates every carriage in the street and one could kneel down in the dust on seeing her drive past.”) “I shall bequeath it to a museum. In the meantime, it must be sent back to her, so that she need not hire a cab to come and fetch it. The wisest thing, in view of the historical interest of such an object, would be to steal the fan. But that would be awkward for her—since it is probable that she does not possess another!” he added with a shout of laughter. “Anyhow, you see that for my sake she came. And that is not the only miracle I have performed. I don’t believe that anyone at the present day has the power to shift the people whom I persuaded to come. However, everyone must be given his due. Charlie and the rest of the musicians played divinely. And, my dear hostess,” he added condescendingly, “you yourself have played your part on this occasion. Your name will not go unrecorded. History has preserved that of the page who armed Joan of Arc when she set out for battle. In sum, you served as a connecting link, you made possible the fusion between Vinteuil’s music and its inspired interpreter,
you had the intelligence to appreciate the cardinal importance of the whole concatenation of circumstances which would enable the interpreter to benefit from the whole weight of a considerable—if I were not referring to myself I might almost say providential—personage, whom you had the good sense to ask to ensure the success of the gathering, to bring before Morel’s violin the ears directly attached to the tongues that have the widest hearing; no, no, it’s by no means negligible. Nothing is negligible in so complete a realisation. Everything has its part. The Duras was marvellous. In fact, everything; that is why,” he concluded, for he could not resist admonishing people, “I set my face against your inviting those human divisors who, among the superior people whom I brought you, would have played the part of the decimal points in a sum, reducing the others to a merely fractional value. I have a very exact appreciation of that sort of thing. You realise that we must avoid social blunders when we are giving a party which is to be worthy of Vinteuil, of his inspired interpreter, of yourself, and, I venture to say, of me. If you had invited the Mole woman, everything would have been spoiled. It would have been the tiny counteracting, neutralising drop which deprives a potion of its virtue. The electric lights would have fused, the pastries would not have arrived in time, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomach-ache. She was the one person not to have here. At the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-tale, not a note would have issued from the brass; the flute and the oboe would have suddenly lost their voices. Morel himself, even if he had succeeded in playing a few bars, would not have been in tune, and instead of Vinteuil’s septet you would have had a parody of it by Beckmesser, ending amid catcalls. I who believe strongly in the influence of personalities could feel quite plainly in the blossoming of a certain largo, which opened out like a flower, and in the supreme fulfilment of the finale, which was not merely allegro but incomparably lively,14 that the absence of the Mole was inspiring the musicians and causing the very instruments to swell with joy. In any case, when one is at home to queens one does not invite one’s concierge.”
In calling her “the Mole” (as for that matter he said quite affectionately “the Duras”) M. de Charlus was doing the lady justice. For all these women were the actresses of society, and it is true that, even regarding her from this point of view, the Comtesse Mole did not live up to the extraordinary reputation for intelligence that she had acquired, which reminded one of those mediocre actors or novelists who at certain periods are hailed as men of genius, either because of the mediocrity of their competitors, among whom there is no supreme artist capable of showing what is meant by true talent, or because of the mediocrity of the public, which, if any extraordinary individuality existed, would be incapable of understanding it. In Mme Molé’s case it is preferable, if not entirely accurate, to settle for the former explanation. The social world being the realm of nullity, there exist between the merits of different society women only the most insignificant degrees, which can however be crazily exaggerated by the rancours or the imagination of a M. de Charlus. And certainly, if he spoke as he had just been speaking in this language which was an affected mixture of artistic and social elements, it was because his old-womanly rages and his culture as a man of society provided the genuine eloquence that he possessed with only the most trivial themes. Since the world of differentials does not exist on the surface of the earth among all the countries which our perception renders uniform, all the more reason why it should not exist in the social “world.” But does it exist anywhere? Vinteuil’s septet had seemed to tell me that it did. But where?
Since M. de Charlus also enjoyed repeating what one person had said of another, seeking to stir up trouble, to divide and rule, he added: “You have, by not inviting her, deprived Mme Mole of the opportunity of saying: ‘I can’t think why this Mme Verdurin should have invited me. I can’t imagine who these people are, I don’t know them.’ She was already saying a year ago that you were wearying her with your advances. She’s a fool; never invite her again. After all, she’s nothing so very wonderful. She can perfectly well come to your house without making a fuss about it, seeing that I come here. In short,” he concluded, “it seems to me that you have every reason to thank me, for, as far as it went, the whole thing was perfect. The Duchesse de Guermantes didn’t come, but one never knows, perhaps it was better that she didn’t. We shan’t hold it against her, we’ll think of her all the same another time, not that one can help remembering her, her very eyes say to us ‘Forget me not!’, for they remind one of those flowers” (here I thought to myself how strong the Guermantes spirit—the decision to go to one house and not to another—must be, to have outweighed in the Duchess’s mind her fear of Palamède). “Faced with so complete a success, one is tempted like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to see everywhere the hand of Providence. The Duchesse de Duras was enchanted. She even asked me to tell you so,” added M. de Charlus, dwelling upon the words as though Mme Verdurin must regard this as a sufficient honour. Sufficient and indeed scarcely credible, for he thought it necessary, in order to be believed, to add “Yes, indeed,” completely carried away by the madness of those whom Jupiter has decided to destroy. “She has engaged Morel to come to her house, where the same programme will be repeated, and I’m even thinking of asking her for an invitation for M. Verdurin.” This civility to the husband alone was, although no such idea even occurred to M. de Charlus, the most cruel insult to the wife, who, believing herself to possess with regard to the violinist, by virtue of a sort of ukase which prevailed in the little clan, the right to forbid him to perform elsewhere without her express authorisation, was absolutely determined to forbid his appearance at Mme de Duras’s party.
The Baron’s volubility was in itself an irritation to Mme Verdurin, who did not like people to form separate conversational groups within the little clan. How often, even at La Raspelière, hearing M. de Charlus talking incessantly to Charlie instead of being content with taking his part in the concerted ensemble of the clan, had she not pointed to him and exclaimed: “What a windbag he is! What a windbag! He really is the most colossal windbag?”?15 But this time it was far worse. Intoxicated by the sound of his own voice, M. de Charlus failed to realise that by acknowledging Mme Verdurin’s role and confining it within narrow limits, he was unleashing that feeling of hatred which was in her only a special, social form of jealousy. Mme Verdurin was genuinely fond of her regular visitors, the faithful of the little clan, but wished them to be entirely devoted to their Mistress. Cutting her losses, like those jealous lovers who will tolerate unfaithfulness, but only under their own roof and even in front of their eyes, that is to say when it scarcely counts as unfaithfulness, she would allow the men to have mistresses or male lovers, on condition that the affair had no social consequence outside her own house, that the tie was formed and perpetuated in the shelter of her Wednesdays. In the old days, every furtive giggle that came from Odette when she was with Swann had gnawed at Mme Verdurin, and so of late had every aside exchanged by Morel and the Baron; she found one consolation alone for her vexations, which was to destroy the happiness of others. She would have been unable to endure the Baron’s for long. And here was that rash individual precipitating the catastrophe by appearing to restrict the Mistress’s position in her little clan. Already she could see Morel going into society, without her, under the Baron’s aegis. There was only one remedy, to make Morel choose between the Baron and herself, and, taking advantage of the ascendancy that she had acquired over Morel by giving him proof of her extraordinary perspicacity thanks to reports which she commissioned and lies which she herself concocted, all of which served to corroborate what he himself was inclined to believe, and what would in time be made plain to him thanks to the booby-traps which she was preparing and into which her unsuspecting victims would fall—taking advantage of this ascendancy, to make him choose herself in preference to the Baron. As for the society ladies who had been present and had not even asked to be introduced to her, as soon as she grasped their hesitations or ind
ifference, she had said: “Ah! I see what they are, the sort of old frumps that don’t fit in with us. It’s the last time they’ll set foot in this house.” For she would have died rather than admit that anyone had been less civil to her than she had hoped.
“Ah! my dear General,” M. de Charlus suddenly exclaimed, abandoning Mme Verdurin on catching sight of General Deltour, Secretary to the Presidency of the Republic, who might be of great value in securing Charlie his medal, and who, after asking Cottard for a piece of advice, was slipping away. “Good evening, my dear, delightful friend. Trying to get away without saying good-bye to me, eh?” said the Baron with a genial, self-satisfied smile, for he knew quite well that people were always glad to stay a little longer to talk to him. And as, in his present state of exhilaration, he would answer his own questions in a shrill tone: “Well, did you enjoy it? Wasn’t it really beautiful? The andante, what? It’s the most touching thing that was ever written. I defy anyone to listen to the end without tears in his eyes. Charming of you to have come. By the way, I had the most excellent telegram this morning from Froberville, who tells me that as far as the Chancellery of the Legion goes the difficulties have been smoothed over, as they say.” M. de Charlus’s voice continued to rise, as piercing, as different from his normal voice, as that of a barrister grandiloquently addressing the court: a phenomenon of vocal amplification through over-excitement and nervous euphoria analogous to that which, at her own dinner-parties, raised to so high a pitch the voice and gaze alike of Mme de Guermantes.
“I intended to send you a note tomorrow by messenger to tell you of my enthusiasm, until I could find an opportunity to speak to you, but you were so popular! Froberville’s support is not to be despised, but for my own part, I have the Minister’s promise,” said the General.
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