The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  “Why, of course, Monsieur,” he said to me, “it’s common knowledge, I’ve known it for ever so long. The first year Monsieur came to Balbec, M. le Marquis shut himself up with my lift-boy, on the pretext of developing some photographs of Monsieur’s grandmother. The boy made a complaint, and we had the greatest difficulty in hushing the matter up. And besides, Monsieur, Monsieur remembers the day, no doubt, when he came to lunch at the restaurant with M. le Marquis de Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom M. le Marquis was using as a screen. Monsieur doubtless remembers that M. le Marquis left the room, pretending that he had lost his temper. Of course I don’t suggest for a moment that Madame was in the right. She was leading him a regular dance. But as to that day, no one will ever make me believe that M. le Marquis’s anger wasn’t put on, and that he hadn’t a good reason to get away from Monsieur and Madame.”

  So far as that day was concerned, I am convinced that, if Aimé was not deliberately lying, he was entirely mistaken. I remembered too well the state Robert was in, the blow he had struck the journalist. And, for that matter, it was the same with the Balbec incident; either the lift-boy had lied, or it was Aimé who was lying. At least so I believed; I could not be absolutely certain, for we never see more than one aspect of things, and had it not been that the thought distressed me, I should have found a certain beauty in the fact that, whereas for me sending the lift-boy to Saint-Loup had been the most convenient way of conveying a letter to him and receiving his answer, for him it had meant making the acquaintance of a person who had taken his fancy. For everything is at least dual. On to the most insignificant action that we perform, another man will graft a series of entirely different actions. Certain it is that Saint-Loup’s adventure with the lift-boy, if it occurred, no more seemed to me to be inherent in the commonplace dispatch of my letter than that a man who knew nothing of Wagner save the duet in Lohengrin would be able to foresee the prelude to Tristan. True, things offer men only a limited number of their innumerable attributes, because of the paucity of our senses. They are coloured because we have eyes; how many other epithets would they not merit if we had hundreds of senses? But this different aspect which they might present is made more comprehensible to us by the occurrence in life of even the most trivial event of which we know a part which we suppose to be the whole, and at which another person looks as through a window opened up on the other side of the house and offering a different view. Supposing that Aimé had not been mistaken, Saint-Loup’s blush when Bloch spoke to him of the lift-boy had not perhaps been due after all to my friend’s pronouncing the word as “lighft.” But I was convinced that Saint-Loup’s physiological evolution had not begun at that period and that he had then been still exclusively a lover of women. More than by any other sign, I could tell this retrospectively by the friendship that Saint-Loup had shown me at Balbec. It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, for some time at least, to the men who did not attract him physically he displayed an indifference which was to some extent, I believe, sincere—for he had become very curt—but which he exaggerated as well in order to make people think that he was interested only in women. But I remember all the same that one day at Doncières, when I was on my way to dine with the Verdurins and he had just been staring rather hard at Morel, he had said to me: “Curious, that fellow reminds me in some ways of Rachel. Doesn’t it strike you? They seem to me identical in some ways. Not that it can be of the slightest interest to me.” And yet his eyes had afterwards remained for a long time gazing abstractedly at the horizon, as when we think, before returning to the card-table or going out to dinner, of one of those long journeys which we think we shall never make, but for which we have felt a momentary longing. But if Robert found something of Rachel in Charlie, Gilberte, for her part, sought to give herself some resemblance to Rachel in order to appear more attractive to her husband, wearing, like her, bows of scarlet or pink or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a similar style, for she believed that her husband was still in love with Rachel, and so was jealous of her. That Robert’s love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible. In any case, the memory of Rachel now played only an aesthetic role in this context. It is indeed improbable that it could have played any other. One day Robert had gone to her to ask her to dress up as a man, to leave a lock of hair hanging down, and nevertheless had contented himself with gazing at her, unsatisfied. He remained none the less attached to her and paid her scrupulously, though without pleasure, the enormous income which he had promised her and which did not prevent her from treating him in the most abominable fashion later on. This generosity towards Rachel would not have distressed Gilberte if she had known that it was merely the resigned fulfilment of a promise which no longer bore any trace of love. But love was, on the contrary, precisely what he pretended to feel for Rachel. Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women. Not that Gilberte made any complaint. It was the belief that Robert had been loved, and loved for so long, by Rachel that had made her desire him, had made her reject more glittering matches; it seemed that he was making a sort of concession to her in marrying her. And indeed, at first, any comparison between the two women (incommensurable though they were in charm and beauty) did not favour the delightful Gilberte. But the latter subsequently grew in her husband’s esteem while Rachel visibly diminished.

  There was another person, who changed her tune, namely Mme Swann. If, in Gilberte’s eyes, Robert before their marriage was already crowned with the double halo conferred on him on the one hand by his life with Rachel, perpetually advertised by Mme de Marsantes’s lamentations, and on the other hand by the prestige which the Guermantes family had always had in her father’s eyes and which she had inherited from him, Mme de Forcheville for her part would have preferred a more brilliant, perhaps a princely marriage (there were impoverished royal families who would not have refused the money—which incidentally proved to be considerably less than the promised eighty million—laundered as it was by the name Forcheville) and a son-in-law less depreciated in value by a life spent outside the world of society. She had been unable to overcome Gilberte’s determination, and had complained bitterly to all and sundry, denouncing her son-in-law. One fine day her attitude changed completely; her son-in-law had become an angel, and she no longer said anything against him except surreptitiously. The fact was that age had left Mme Swann (now Mme de Forcheville) with the taste she had always had for being kept, but, by the desertion of her admirers, had deprived her of the means. She longed every day for another necklace, a new dress studded with brilliants, a more sumptuous motor-car, but she had only a small income, Forcheville having squandered most of it, and—what Jewish strain influenced Gilberte in this?—she had an adorable but fearfully avaricious daughter, who counted every sou that she gave her husband, and naturally even more so her mother. Then suddenly she had sniffed out and found her natural protector in Robert. That she was no longer in her first youth mattered little to a son-in-law who was not a lover of women. All that he asked of his mother-in-law was to smooth down any little difficulty that might arise between Gilberte and himself, to obtain his wife’s consent to his going on a trip with Morel. Odette, having applied herself thereto, was at once rewarded with a magnificent ruby. To pay for this, it was necessary for Gilberte to be more generous to her husband. Odette urged her in this direction with all the more fervour in that it was she herself who would benefit by her daughter’s generosity. Thus, thanks to Robert, she was enabled, on the threshold of her fifties (some said her sixties), to dazzle every table at which she dined, every party at which she appeared, with an unparalleled splendour without needing to have, as in the past, a “friend” who now would no longer have coughed up, or even fallen for her. And so she had entered, permanently it seemed, into the period of final chastity, and yet she had never been so elegant.

&nb
sp; It was not merely the malice, the rancour of the once poor boy against the master who has enriched him and has moreover (this was in keeping with the character and still more with the vocabulary of M. de Charlus) made him feel the difference of their positions, that had made Charlie turn to Saint-Loup in order to aggravate the Baron’s sufferings. He may also have had an eye to his own profit. I had the impression that Robert must be giving him a great deal of money. After an evening party at which I had met Robert before I went down to Combray—and where the manner in which he flaunted himself by the side of a lady of fashion who was reputed to be his mistress, glued to her, never leaving her for a moment, enveloped publicly in the folds of her skirt, reminded me, but with something more hectic and jumpy about it, of a sort of involuntary repetition of an ancestral gesture which I had had an opportunity of observing in M. de Charlus, when he appeared to be wrapped in the finery of Mme Mole or some other lady, the banner of a gynophile cause which was not his own but which, without having any right to do so, he loved to sport thus, whether because he found it useful as a protection or aesthetically charming—I had been struck, as we came away, by the discovery that this young man, so generous when he was far less rich, had become so careful. That a man clings only to what he possesses, and that he who used to scatter money when he so rarely had any now hoards that with which he is amply supplied, is no doubt a common enough phenomenon, and yet in this instance it seemed to me to have assumed a more particular form. Saint-Loup refused to take a cab, and I saw that he had kept a tramway transfer-ticket. No doubt in so doing Saint-Loup was exercising, for different ends, talents which he had acquired in the course of his liaison with Rachel. A young man who has lived for years with a woman is not as inexperienced as the novice for whom the woman he marries is the first. One had only to see, on the rare occasions when Robert took his wife out to a restaurant, the adroit and considerate way he looked after her, his skill and poise in ordering dinner and giving instructions to waiters, the care with which he smoothed Gilberte’s sleeves before she put on her jacket, to realise that he had been a woman’s lover for a long time before being this one’s husband. Similarly, having had to enter into the minutest details of Rachel’s domestic economy, partly because she herself was useless as a housekeeper, and later because his jealousy made him determined to keep a firm control over her domestic staff, he was able, in the administration of his wife’s property and the management of their household, to go on playing this skilful and competent role which Gilberte, perhaps, might have been unable to fulfil and which she gladly relinquished to him. But no doubt he did so principally in order to be able to give Charlie the benefit of his candle-end economies, maintaining him in affluence without Gilberte’s either noticing it or suffering from it—and perhaps even assuming the violinist to be a spendthrift “like all artists” (Charlie styled himself thus without conviction and without conceit, in order to excuse himself for not answering letters and for a mass of other defects which he believed to form part of the undisputed psychology of the artist). Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it. If, therefore, Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me pain. And yet I realised that the pain I felt would have been as acute if Robert had been a bachelor. In anyone else, his conduct would have left me indifferent. But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could these tastes have come to birth in a young man who had loved women so passionately that I had seen him brought to a state of almost suicidal despair because “Rachel when from the Lord” had threatened to leave him? Had the resemblance between Charlie and Rachel—invisible to me—been the plank which had enabled Robert to pass from his father’s tastes to those of his uncle, in order to complete the physiological evolution which even in the latter had occurred fairly late? At times, however, Aimé’s words came back to my mind to make me uneasy; I remembered Robert that year at Balbec; he had had a trick, when he spoke to the lift-boy, of not paying any attention to him which strongly resembled M. de Charlus’s manner when he addressed certain men. But Robert might easily have derived this from M. de Charlus, from a certain hauteur and a certain physical posture peculiar to the Guermantes family, without for a moment sharing the Baron’s heterodox tastes. For instance, the Duc de Guermantes, who was wholly innocent of such tastes, had the same nervous trick as M. de Charlus of turning his wrist, as though he were straightening a lace cuff round it, and also in his voice certain shrill and affected intonations, mannerisms to all of which, in the case of M. de Charlus, one might have been tempted to ascribe another meaning, to which he had given another meaning himself, the individual expressing his distinctive characteristics by means of impersonal and atavistic traits which are perhaps simply age-old characteristics ingrained in his gestures and voice. On this latter assumption, which borders upon natural history, it would not be M. de Charlus whom one described as a Guermantes affected with a blemish and expressing it to a certain extent by means of traits peculiar to the Guermantes stock, but the Duc de Guermantes who, in a perverted family, would be the exception whom the hereditary disease has so effectively spared that the external stigmata it has left upon him have lost all meaning. I remembered that on the day when I had seen Saint-Loup for the first time at Balbec, so fair-complexioned, fashioned of so rare and precious a substance, his monocle fluttering in front of him, I had found in him an effeminate air which was certainly not the effect of what I had now learned about him, but sprang rather from the grace peculiar to the Guermantes, from the fineness of that Dresden china in which the Duchess too was moulded. I recalled his affection for myself, his tender, sentimental way of expressing it, and told myself that this too, which might have deceived anyone else, meant at the time something quite different, indeed the direct opposite of what I had just learned about him. But when did the change date from? If from the year of my return to Balbec, how was it that he had never once come to see the lift-boy, had never once mentioned him to me? And as for the first year, how could he have paid any attention to the boy, passionately enamoured as he then was of Rachel? That first year, I had found Saint-Loup unusual, as was every true Guermantes. Now he was even odder than I had supposed. But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, are such that we no longer have the means, we have missed the chance, of conveying them to our inmost soul; its communications with the real are blocked and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late. Besides, upon any consideration, this discovery distressed me too deeply for me to be able to appreciate it intellectually. Of course, after what M. de Charlus had told me in Mme Verdurin’s house in Paris, I no longer doubted that Robert’s case was that of any number of respectable people, to be found even among the best and most intelligent of men. To learn this of anyone else would not have affected me, of anyone in the world except Robert. The doubt that Aimé’s words had left in my mind tarnished all our friendship at Balbec and Doncières, and although I did not believe in friendship, or that I had ever felt any real friendship for Robert, when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears.

  NOTES · ADDENDA · SYNOPSIS

  Notes

  1 From Racine’s Esther, Act I, Scene 3.

  2 Famous Siamese twins who appeared in music halls and had a succès de curiosité at the 1900 World’s Fair.

  3 These words appear neither in the libretto of Pelleas et Mélisande nor in any of Rameau’s operas, but in Gluck’s Armide in this form: “Ah, si la liberié me doit être ra
vie, est-ce à toi d’être mon vainqueur!” Similarly, one or two of the phrases attributed to Arkel and Golaud in the next paragraph are a little fanciful: Proust invariably quoted from memory.