The Baron soon entered the ante-room, walking with difficulty on account of his injuries, though doubtless he must have been used to them. Although his pleasure was at an end and he had only come in to give Maurice the money which he owed him, he directed at the young men a tender and curious glance which travelled round the whole circle, promising himself with each of them the pleasure of a moment’s chat, platonic but amorously prolonged. And in the sprightly frivolity which he exhibited before this harem which appeared almost to intimidate him, I recognised those jerky movements of the body and the head, those languishing glances which had struck me on the evening of his first visit to La Raspelière, graces inherited from some grandmother whom I had not known, which in ordinary life were disguised by more virile expressions on his face but which from time to time were made to blossom there coquettishly, when circumstances made him anxious to please an inferior audience, by the desire to appear a great lady.
Jupien had recommended the young men to the Baron’s favour by swearing that they were all pimps from Belleville and would sell you their own sisters for a few francs. And in this he was at the same time lying and telling the truth. Better, more soft-hearted than he made them out to be, they did not belong to a race of savages. But the clients who believed them to be thugs spoke to them nevertheless with complete truthfulness, a truthfulness which they imagined these terrible beings to share. For a man given to sadistic pleasures may believe that he is talking to a murderer but this will not alter his own purity of heart, he will still be astounded by the mendacity of his companion, who is not a murderer at all but wants to earn a little easy money and whose father or mother or sister alternately die, come to life, and die again as he contradicts himself in his conversation with the client whom he is attempting to please. The client, in his naïvety, is astounded, for with his arbitrary conception of the gigolo, while he gets a thrill of delight from the numerous murders of which he believes him to be guilty, he is horrified by any simple contradiction or lie which he detects in his words.
Everybody in the room seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus stopped for a long time before each one, talking to them in what he thought was their language, both from a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he got a sadistic pleasure from contact with a life of depravity. “You’re disgusting, you are, I saw you outside the Olympia with two tarts. After a bit of brass, no doubt. Just shows how faithful you are to me.” Luckily for the man to whom these remarks were addressed, he did not have time to declare that he would never have accepted “brass” from a woman, a claim which would have damped the Baron’s ardour, but reserved his protest for the final phrase, which he answered by saying: “But of course I’m faithful to you.” This remark gave M. de Charlus a lively pleasure, and as, in spite of himself, the kind of intelligence that was natural to him showed through the character which he affected, he turned to Jupien: “How nice of him to say that! And how well he says it! One would really think it was true. And after all, what does it matter whether it is true or not since he manages to make me believe it? What charming little eyes he has! There, I’m going to give you two big kisses for your trouble, my dear boy. You will think of me in the trenches. Things are not too bad there?” “Whew, there are some days, when a grenade just misses you …” And the young man proceeded to imitate the noise of the grenade, the aeroplanes, etc. “But one’s got to do what the others do, and you can be absolutely sure that we will go on to the end.” “To the end! If one only knew to what end!” said the Baron in a melancholy manner, giving rein to his “pessimism.” “You haven’t seen what Sarah Bernhardt said in the papers: ‘France will go on to the end. If necessary, the French will let themselves be killed to the last man.’ ” “I do not doubt for a single moment that the French would bravely let themselves be killed to the last man,” said M. de Charlus, as if this were the simplest thing in the world and although he himself had no intention of doing anything whatsoever, hoping by this remark to correct the impression of pacifism which he gave when he forgot himself. “That I do not doubt, but I ask myself to what extent Madame Sarah Bernhardt is qualified to speak in the name of France … But I don’t think I have made the acquaintance of this charming, this delightful young man,” he added, spying another whom he did not recognise or perhaps had not seen before. He greeted him as he would have greeted a prince at Versailles, and making the most of this opportunity to have a supplementary pleasure for nothing—just as, when I was little and my mother had finished giving an order at Boissier’s or Gouache’s, I would accept the offer of a sweet which one of the ladies behind the counter would invite me to select from those glass bowls over which she and her colleagues held sway—he took the hand of the charming young man and gave it a long squeeze, in the Prussian manner, smilingly fixing him with his eyes for the interminable time which photographers used to take to pose you when the light was bad. “Sir, I am charmed, I am enchanted to make your acquaintance. What pretty hair he has!” he said, turning to Jupien. Next he went up to Maurice to give him his fifty francs, but first, putting his arm round his waist: “You never told me that you had knifed an old hag of a concierge in Belleville.” And M. de Charlus shrieked with ecstatic laughter and brought his face close to that of Maurice. “Oh! Monsieur le Baron,” said the gigolo, who had not been warned, “how can you believe such a thing?” Whether the report was in fact false, or whether it was true and the perpetrator of the deed nevertheless thought it abominable and one of those things that it is better to deny, he went on: “Me touch a fellow-creature? A Boche, yes, because that’s war, but a woman, and an old woman at that!” This declaration of virtuous principles had the effect of a douche of cold water upon the Baron, who brusquely moved away from Maurice, having first handed him his money, but with the disgusted air of someone who has been cheated, who pays because he does not want to make a fuss but is far from pleased. The bad impression made upon the Baron was accentuated by the manner in which the recipient thanked him, with the words: “I shall send this to the old folks and keep a bit for my brother at the front as well.” By these touching sentiments M. de Charlus was almost as gravely disappointed as he was irritated by the rather conventional peasant’s language in which they were expressed. Occasionally Jupien warned the young men that they ought to be more perverse. Then one of them, as if he were confessing to something diabolical, would hazard: “I say, Baron, you won’t believe me, but when I was a kid I used to watch my parents making love through the key-hole. Pretty vicious, wasn’t it? You look as if you think that’s a cock and bull story, but I swear it’s the truth.” And M. de Charlus was driven at once to despair and to exasperation by this factitious attempt at perversity, the result of which was only to reveal such depths both of stupidity and of innocence. Yet even the most determined thief or murderer would not have satisfied him, for that sort of man does not talk about his crimes; and besides there exists in the sadist—however kind he may be, in fact all the more the kinder he is—a thirst for evil which wicked men, doing what they do not because it is wicked but from other motives, are unable to assuage.
The young man realised his mistake and tried to repair it by saying that he loathed the sight of a copper and by daringly inquiring of the Baron: “How about a date?”—but it was too late, the charm was dispelled. One had a distinct feeling of sham, as with the books of authors who force themselves to write slang. It was in vain that the young man described in detail all the “filthy things” that he did with his wife; M. de Charlus merely reflected that these “filthy things” amounted to very little. And in this he was not simply being insincere. Nothing is more limited than pleasure and vice. In that sense one may say truly, altering slightly the meaning of the phrase, that we revolve always in the same vicious circle.
If M. de Charlus was believed to be not a baron but a prince, there was, conversely, general regret in the establishment for the death of someone of whom the gigolos said: “I don’t know his name, but it seems that he is a baron,” and who was no
ne other than the Prince de Foix (the father of Saint-Loup’s friend). Supposed by his wife to spend a lot of time at his club, in reality he would sit for hours at Jupien’s, retailing fashionable gossip to an audience from the underworld. Like his son, he was tall and good-looking. M. de Charlus, no doubt because he had always known him in society, remained strangely ignorant that the Prince shared his own tastes, to such a degree that he was even said to have had designs at one time upon his own son, Saint-Loup’s friend, then still at school. This was probably untrue: on the contrary, excellently informed about activities whose existence many do not suspect, he watched with care over the company kept by his son. One day a man—and a man not of exalted origin—followed the young Prince de Foix as far as his father’s house, where he threw a note in at the window, which the father picked up. But the follower, though genealogically this was not the case, from another point of view belonged to the same world as M. de Foix the father. He therefore had no difficulty in finding among those who shared their common secrets an intermediary who silenced M. de Foix by proving to him that it was his son who had himself provoked this rash act of an elderly man. And this was quite possible. For the Prince de Foix had succeeded in preserving his son from the external influence of bad company but not from heredity. The young Prince de Foix, however, remained, like his father, in this respect unknown to his social equals, although in a different world his behaviour was wild in the extreme.
“How simple he is! You would never say he was a baron,” said some of the frequenters of the establishment when M. de Charlus had left, after being escorted to the street door by Jupien, to whom he did not fail to complain of the young man’s virtuousness. From the air of annoyance of Jupien, whose duty it was to have trained the young man in advance, it was clear that the fictitious murderer would presently get a terrific dressing-down. “The truth is exactly the opposite of what you told me,” added the Baron, so that Jupien might profit by the lesson for another time. “He seems most good-natured, he expresses sentiments of respect for his family.” “Still, he’s on bad terms with his father,” Jupien objected. “It’s true they live together, but they work in different bars.” Obviously this was not much of a crime compared with murder, but Jupien had been caught unprepared with an answer. The Baron said no more, for, if he wanted others to prepare his pleasures for him, he wanted to give himself the illusion that they were unprepared. “He is a real crook, he said all that to mislead you, you are too gullible,” Jupien went on, in an attempt to exculpate himself which succeeded only in wounding the vanity of M. de Charlus.
“It seems that he has a million francs a day to spend,” said the young man of twenty-two, who saw no improbability in this statement. The car which had come to fetch M. de Charlus was now heard to drive away. At the same moment there entered the room with a slow step, by the side of a soldier who had evidently emerged with her from a neighbouring bedroom, what appeared to me to be an elderly lady in a black skirt. I soon realised my mistake: it was a priest—that thing so rare, and in France altogether exceptional, a bad priest. Evidently the soldier was teasing his companion about the discrepancy between his conduct and his habit, for the other with a serious air, raising a finger towards his hideous face with the gesture of a doctor of theology, said sententiously: “What do you expect? I am not” (I expected him to say “a saint”) “a good girl.” He was, however, ready to depart and he said good-bye to Jupien, who had just come upstairs again after seeing the Baron to the door. But absent-mindedly the bad priest had forgotten to pay for his room. Jupien, who had always a ready wit, shook the collecting box in which he placed the contribution of each client and said, as he made it clink: “For the expenses of the church, Monsieur l’Abbé!” The horrid creature apologised, put in his coin and disappeared.
Jupien came to fetch me from the cave of darkness in which I had been standing without daring to move. “Come into the hall for a moment where my young men are sitting, while I go upstairs and lock up the bedroom; since you have taken a room, it’s quite natural.” The patron was there, so I paid him. At that moment a young man in a dinner-jacket came in and asked the patron with an air of authority: “Will I be able to have Léon at a quarter to eleven instead of eleven tomorrow morning, as I have a luncheon engagement?” “That will depend,” replied the patron, “on how long the Abbé keeps him.” This reply appeared not to satisfy the young man in a dinner-jacket, who seemed to be on the point of launching into abuse of the Abbé, but his fury was diverted when he caught sight of me. Going straight up to the patron: “Who is this? What does this mean?” he muttered in a quiet but angry voice. The patron, very put out, explained that my presence was quite harmless, that I had taken a room. The young man in a dinner-jacket appeared to be not in the slightest degree pacified by this explanation. He kept repeating: “This is extremely unpleasant, things of this sort ought not to happen, you know I detest them, if you are not careful I will never set foot here again.” The execution of this threat did not, however, appear to be imminent, for he went off in a rage, but not without asking that Léon should try to be free at a quarter to eleven, or better still half past ten. Jupien came back to fetch me and we went downstairs together and out into the street.
“I do not want you to misjudge me,” he said to me. “This house does not bring me in as much profit as you might think. I am obliged to let rooms to respectable people, though of course if they were my only customers I should simply be throwing money down the drain. Here, contrary to the doctrine of the Carmelites, it is thanks to vice that virtue is able to live. No, if I took this house, or rather if I got the manager whom you have seen to take it, it was purely and simply in order to render a service to the Baron and amuse his old age.” Jupien was here referring not merely to scenes of sadism like those which I had witnessed and to the actual vicious practices of the Baron. The latter, even for conversation, for company, for a game of cards, now only enjoyed the society of lower-class people who exploited him. No doubt the snobbery of the gutter may be understood as easily as snobbery of the other kind. The two had in fact long been united, alternating one with the other, in M. de Charlus, who thought no one was smart enough to be numbered among his social acquaintances, no one sufficiently a ruffian to be worth knowing in other ways. “I detest the intermediate style,” he would say. “Bourgeois comedy is stiff and affected. Let me have either the princesses of classical tragedy or broad farce. No half-way houses—either Phèdre or Les Saltimbanques.” But in the end the balance between the two forms of snobbery had been broken. Perhaps because he was an old man and tired, perhaps because sensuality had come to enter into even his trivial relationships, the Baron now lived only among his “inferiors,” thus unintentionally taking his place as the successor of more than one among his great ancestors, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the Prince d’Harcourt, the Duc de Berry, whom we see in the pages of Saint-Simon passing their lives in the midst of their lackeys, who extracted enormous sums from them, and sharing their amusements, to such an extent that people who had to visit them were embarrassed, for their sakes, to find these great noblemen familiarly engaged in a game of cards or a drinking-bout with their domestic servants. “And above all,” Jupien went on, “it is to keep him out of trouble, because the Baron, you know, is a big baby. Even now that he has here everything that he can desire, he still wanders about in search of sordid adventures. And with his generosity, that sort of thing could have disagreeable consequences in these days. Only the other day there was a page-boy from a hotel who was absolutely terrified because of all the money the Baron offered him if he would go to his house! (To his house, what imprudence!) The boy, who in fact only cares about women, was reassured when he understood what was wanted of him. Hearing all these promises of money, he had taken the Baron for a spy. And he was greatly relieved when he realised that he was being asked to sell not his country but his body, which is possibly not a more moral thing to do, but less dangerous and in any case easier.” And listening to Jupien, I said to m
yself: “How unfortunate it is that M. de Charlus is not a novelist or a poet! Not merely so that he could describe what he sees, but because the position in which a Charlus finds himself with respect to desire causes scandals to spring up around him, and compels him to take life seriously, to load pleasure with a weight of emotion. He cannot get stuck in an ironical and superficial view of things because a current of pain is perpetually reawakened within him. Almost every time he makes a declaration of love he is violently snubbed, if he does not run the risk of being sent to prison.” A slap in the face or a box on the ear helps to educate not only children but poets. If M. de Charlus had been a novelist, the house which Jupien had set up for him, by reducing so greatly the risks—at least (for a raid by the police was always a possibility) the risk emanating from an individual casually encountered in the street, of whose inclinations the Baron could not have felt certain—would have been a misfortune for him. But in the sphere of art M. de Charlus was no more than a dilettante, who never dreamt of writing and had no gift for it.
“Besides, I may as well admit to you,” Jupien continued, “that I have very few scruples about making money in this way. The actual thing that is done here is—I can no longer conceal the fact from you—something that I like, it is what I have a taste for myself. Well, is it forbidden to receive payment for things that one does not regard as wickedness? You are better educated than I am, and you will tell me no doubt that Socrates was of the opinion that he could not accept money for his lessons. But in our age professors of philosophy do not hold that view, nor do doctors or painters or playwrights or theatrical producers. Do not imagine that this trade of mine brings me into contact only with the dregs of society. No doubt the director of an establishment of this kind, like a great courtesan, receives only men, but he receives men who are conspicuous in every walk of life and who are generally, on their own level, among the most intelligent, the most sensitive, the most agreeable of their profession. In no time at all, I assure you, this house could be transformed into an information bureau or a school of wit.” Nevertheless, I was still under the impression of the blows which I had seen inflicted upon M. de Charlus.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 368