Just as we were coming to Mme Verdurin’s doorstep, I caught sight of M. de Charlus, steering towards us the bulk of his huge body, drawing unwillingly in his wake one of those ruffians or beggars who nowadays when he passed sprang out without fail from even the most apparently deserted corners, and by whom this powerful monster was, despite himself, invariably escorted, although at a certain distance, as a shark is by its pilot—in short, contrasting so markedly with the haughty stranger of my first visit to Balbec, with his stern aspect, his affectation of virility, that I seemed to be discovering, accompanied by its satellite, a planet at a wholly different period of its revolution, when one begins to see it full, or a sick man devoured by the malady that a few years ago was but a tiny spot which was easily concealed and the gravity of which was never suspected. Although an operation that Brichot had undergone had restored to some small extent the sight which he had thought to be lost for ever, I do not know whether he had observed the ruffian following in the Baron’s footsteps. Not that this mattered much, for since La Raspelière, and notwithstanding the professor’s friendly regard for M. de Charlus, the sight of the latter always made him feel somehow uneasy. No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths of which he has no inkling. Lying, though it is so often deceptive and is the basis of all conversation, conceals less thoroughly a feeling of hostility, or of self-interest, or a visit which one wants to appear not to have paid, or a short-lived escapade with a mistress which one is anxious to keep from one’s wife, than a good reputation covers up—to the extent of not letting its existence be guessed—sexual depravity. It may remain unsuspected for a lifetime; an accidental encounter on a pier, at night, discloses it; even then this accidental discovery is frequently misunderstood and a third person who is in the know must supply the elusive clue of which everyone is unaware. But, once known, it scares one by making one feel that that way madness lies, far more than by its immorality. Mme de Surgis le Duc could not be said to have a highly developed moral sense, and would have tolerated in her sons anything, however base, that could be explained by material interest, which is comprehensible to all mankind. But she forbade them to go on visiting M. de Charlus when she learned that, by a sort of internal clockwork, he was inevitably drawn upon each of their visits to pinch their chins and to make each of them pinch his brother’s. She felt that uneasy sense of a physical mystery which makes us wonder whether the neighbour with whom we have been on friendly terms is not tainted with cannibalism, and to the Baron’s repeated inquiry: “When am I going to see the young men?” she would reply, conscious of the wrath she was bringing down on herself, that they were very busy working for examinations, preparing to go abroad, and so forth. Irresponsibility aggravates faults, and even crimes, whatever may be said. Landru (assuming that he really did kill his women) may be pardoned if he did so from financial motives, which it is possible to resist, but not if it was from irresistible sadism.
The coarse pleasantries in which Brichot had indulged in the early days of his friendship with the Baron had given place, as soon as it was a question not of uttering commonplaces but of trying to understand, to an awkward feeling which was cloaked by gaiety. He reassured himself by recalling pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in their day to love a young man was the equivalent (Socrates’s jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories) of keeping a dancing girl before getting engaged to be married in ours. M. de Charlus himself would not have understood, he who confused his ruling passion with friendship, which does not resemble it in the least, and the athletes of Praxiteles with obliging boxers. He refused to see that for nineteen hundred years (“a pious courtier under a pious prince would have been an atheist under an atheist prince,” as La Bruyère reminds us) all conventional homosexuality—that of Plato’s young friends as well as that of Virgil’s shepherds—has disappeared, that what survives and increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which one conceals from other people and misrepresents to oneself. And M. de Charlus would have been wrong in not disowning frankly the pagan genealogy. In exchange for a little plastic beauty, how vast the moral superiority! The shepherd in Theocritus who sighs for love of a boy will have no reason later on to be less hard of heart, less dull of wit than the other shepherd whose flute sounds for Amaryllis. For the former is not suffering from a disease; he is conforming to the customs of his time. It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form, the only form that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities. One is dismayed at the relationship that can exist between these and a person’s bodily attributes when one thinks of the tiny dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of the senses, that explains why the world of poets and musicians, so firmly barred against the Duc de Guermantes, opens its portals to M. de Charlus. That the latter should show taste in the furnishing of his home, which is that of a housewife with a taste for curios, need not surprise us; but the narrow loophole that opens upon Beethoven and Veronese! But this does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake through his wife’s machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon him, concludes as follows: “You see that man in the courtyard, who I’m obliged to put up with; he thinks he’s Jesus Christ. That should give you an idea of the sort of lunatics I’ve been shut up with; he can’t be Jesus Christ, because I’m Jesus Christ!” A moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the psychiatrist that a mistake had been made. On hearing these words, even if you bear in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every day, you shrink from him, as Mme de Surgis’s sons shrank from M. de Charlus, not because he had done them any harm, but because of the ceaseless invitations which ended up with his pinching their chins. The poet is to be pitied who must, with no Virgil to guide him, pass through the circles of an inferno of sulphur and brimstone, who must cast himself into the fire that falls from heaven in order to rescue a few of the inhabitants of Sodom! No charm in his work; the same severity in his life as in those of the unfrocked priests who follow the strictest rule of celibacy so that no one may be able to ascribe to anything but loss of faith their discarding of the cassock. Even then, it is not always so with these writers. What asylum doctor has not had his own attack of madness by dint of continual association with madmen? He is lucky if he is able to affirm that it is not a previous latent madness that had predestined him to look after them. The subject of a psychiatrist’s study often rebounds on him. But before that, what obscure inclination, what dreadful fascination had made him choose that subject?
Pretending not to see the shady individual who was gliding in his wake (whenever the Baron ventured on to the boulevards or crossed the main hall of the Gare Saint-Lazare, these hangers-on who dogged his heels in the hope of touching him for a few francs could be counted by the dozen), and fearful lest the man might be bold enough to accost him, the Baron had devoutly lowered his mascara’ed eyelids which, contrasting with his powdered cheeks, gave him the appearance of a Grand Inquisitor painted by El Greco. But this priest was frightening and looked like an excommunicate, the various compromises to which he had been driven by the need to indulge his taste and to keep it secret having had the effect of bringing to the surface of his face precisely what the Baron sought to conceal, a debauched life betrayed by moral degeneration. This last, indeed, whatever be its cause, is easily detected, for it is never slow to materialise and proliferates upon a face, especially on the cheeks and round the eyes, as physically as the ochreous yellows of jaundice or the repulsive reds of a skin disease. Nor was it merely in the cheeks, or rather the chaps, of this painted face, in the mammiferous chest, the fleshy rump of this body abandon
ed to self-indulgence and invaded by obesity, that there now lingered, spreading like a film of oil, the vice at one time so jealously confined by M. de Charlus in the most secret recesses of his being. Now it overflowed into his speech.
“So this is how you prowl the streets at night, Brichot, with a good-looking young man,” he said on joining us, while the disappointed ruffian made off. “A fine example. We must tell your young pupils at the Sorbonne that this is how you behave. But I must say the society of youth seems to agree with you, Monsieur le Professeur, you’re as fresh as a rosebud. I’ve interrupted you though: you looked as though you were enjoying yourselves like a pair of giddy girls, and had no need of an old Granny Killjoy like me. But I shan’t go to confession for it, since you were almost at your destination.” The Baron’s mood was all the more blithe since he was totally ignorant of the scene that afternoon, Jupien having decided that he would be better advised to protect his niece against a renewed onslaught than to go and inform M. de Charlus. And so the Baron still looked forward to the marriage and was delighted at the thought of it. One may suppose that it is a consolation to these great solitaries to alleviate their tragic celibacy with a fictitious fatherhood.
“But, upon my word, Brichot,” he went on, turning towards us with a laugh, “I feel quite embarrassed to see you in such gallant company. You looked like a pair of lovers, going along arm in arm. I say, Brichot, you do go the pace!” Ought these remarks to have been ascribed to the ageing of a mind less master of its reflexes than in the past, which in moments of automatism lets out a secret that has been so carefully hidden for forty years? Or rather to that contempt for the opinion of commoners which all the Guermantes felt in their hearts, and which M. de Charlus’s brother, the Duke, displayed in a different form when, heedless of the fact that my mother could see him, he used to shave by his bedroom window in his unbuttoned nightshirt? Had M. de Charlus contracted, during those stimulating journeys between Doncières and Douville, the dangerous habit of putting himself at his ease and, just as he would push back his straw hat in order to cool his huge forehead, of loosening—for a few moments only at first—the mask that for too long had been rigorously imposed upon his true face? His conjugal attitude towards Morel might well have astonished anyone who was aware that he no longer loved him. But M. de Charlus had reached the stage when the monotony of the pleasures that his vice has to offer had become wearying. He had instinctively sought after new exploits, and tiring of the strangers whom he picked up, had gone to the opposite extreme, to what he used to imagine that he would always loathe, the imitation of “a household” or of “fatherhood.” Sometimes even this did not suffice him; he required novelty, and would go and spend the night with a woman, just as a normal man may once in his life have wished to go to bed with a boy, from a similar though inverse curiosity, in either case equally unhealthy. The Baron’s existence as one of the “faithful,” living, for Charlie’s sake, exclusively among the little clan, by undermining the efforts he had made for years to keep up lying appearances, had had the same influence as a voyage of exploration or residence in the colonies has upon certain Europeans who discard the ruling principles by which they were guided at home. And yet, the internal revolution of a mind ignorant at first of the anomaly it carried within it, then—having recognised it—horrified by it, and finally becoming so accustomed to it as to fail to perceive that one cannot with impunity confess to other people what one has come round to confessing without shame to oneself, had been even more effective in liberating M. de Charlus from the last vestiges of social constraint than the time that he spent at the Verdurins’. No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged sojourn in the bosom of an inner vice, that is to say of a way of thinking different from theirs. A vice (so M. de Charlus used at one time to style it) to which the Baron now gave the genial aspect of a mere failing, extremely common, attractive on the whole and almost amusing, like laziness, absent-mindedness or greed. Conscious of the curiosity that his peculiar characteristics aroused, M. de Charlus derived a certain pleasure from satisfying, whetting, sustaining it. Just as a Jewish journalist will come forward day after day as the champion of Catholicism, probably not with any hope of being taken seriously, but simply in order not to thwart the expectation of a good-natured laugh, M. de Charlus would jokingly denounce sexual depravity in the company of the little clan, as he might have mimicked an English accent or imitated Mounet-Sully,9 without waiting to be asked, simply to do his bit with good grace, by displaying an amateur talent in society; so that when he now threatened Brichot that he would report to the Sorbonne that he was in the habit of walking about with young men, it was in exactly the same way as the circumcised scribe keeps referring in and out of season to the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” and the “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” that is to say without the least trace of hypocrisy, but with more than a hint of play-acting. It was not only the change in the words themselves, so different from those that he allowed himself to use in the past, that seemed to require some explanation, there was also the change that had occurred in his intonation and his gestures, which now singularly resembled what M. de Charlus used most fiercely to castigate; he would now utter involuntarily almost the same little squeaks (involuntary in his case and all the more deep-rooted) as are uttered voluntarily by those inverts who hail one another as “my dear!”—as though this deliberate “camping,” against which M. de Charlus had for so long set his face, were after all merely a brilliant and faithful imitation of the manner that men of the Charlus type, whatever they may say, are compelled to adopt when they have reached a certain stage in their malady, just as sufferers from general paralysis or locomotor ataxia inevitably end by displaying certain symptoms. As a matter of fact—and this is what this purely unconscious “camping” revealed—the difference between the stern, black-clad Charlus with his hair en brosse whom I had known, and the painted and bejewelled young men, was no more than the purely apparent difference that exists between an excited person who talks fast and keeps fidgeting all the time, and a neurotic who talks slowly, preserves a perpetual phlegm, but is tainted with the same neurasthenia in the eyes of the physician who knows that each of the two is devoured by the same anxieties and marred by the same defects. At the same time one could tell that M. de Charlus had aged from wholly different signs, such as the extraordinary frequency in his conversation of certain expressions that had taken root in it and used now to crop up at every moment (for instance: “the concatenation of circumstances”) and upon which the Baron’s speech leaned in sentence after sentence as upon a necessary prop.
“Is Charlie already here?” Brichot asked M. de Charlus as we were about to ring the door-bell.
“Ah! I really don’t know,” said the Baron, raising his arms and half-shutting his eyes with the air of a person who does not wish to be accused of indiscretion, all the more so as he had probably been reproached by Morel for things which he had said and which the other, as cowardly as he was vain, and as ready to disown M. de Charlus as he was to boast of his friendship, had considered serious although they were quite trivial. “You know, I’ve no idea what he does.”
If the conversations of two people bound by a tie of intimacy are full of lies, these crop up no less spontaneously in the conversations that a third person holds with a lover about the person with whom the latter is in love, whatever the sex of that person.
“Have you seem him lately?” I asked M. de Charlus, in order to appear at the same time not to be afraid of mentioning Morel to him and not to believe that they were actually living together.
“He came in, as it happened, for five minutes this morning while I was still half asleep, and sat down on the side of my bed, as though he wanted to ravish me.”
I guessed at once that M. de Charlus had seen Charlie within the last hour, for if one asks a woman when she last saw the man whom one knows to be—and whom she may perhaps suppose that on
e suspects of being—her lover, if she has just had tea with him she replies: “I saw him for a minute before lunch.” Between these two facts the only difference is that one is false and the other true. But both are equally innocent, or, if you prefer it, equally guilty. Hence one would be unable to understand why the mistress (and in this case, M. de Charlus) always chooses the false version, were one not aware that such replies are determined, unbeknown to the person who makes them, by a number of factors which appear so out of proportion to the triviality of the incident that one does not bother to raise them. But to a physicist the space occupied by the tiniest ball of pith is explained by the clash or the equilibrium of laws of attraction or repulsion which govern far bigger worlds. Here we need merely record, as a matter of interest, the desire to appear natural and fearless, the instinctive impulse to conceal a secret assignation, a blend of modesty and ostentation, the need to confess what one finds so delightful and to show that one is loved, a divination of what one’s interlocutor knows or guesses—but does not say—a divination which, exceeding or falling short of his, makes one now exaggerate, now underestimate it, the unwitting desire to play with fire and the determination to rescue something from the blaze. Just as many different laws acting in opposite directions dictate the more general responses with regard to the innocence, the “platonic” nature, or on the contrary the carnal reality, of one’s relations with the person whom one says one saw in the morning when one has seen him or her in the evening. However, on the whole it must be said that M. de Charlus, notwithstanding the aggravation of his malady which perpetually urged him to reveal, to insinuate, sometimes quite simply to invent compromising details, sought, during this period in his life, to maintain that Charlie was not a man of the same kind as himself and that they were friends and nothing more. This (though it may quite possibly have been true) did not prevent him from contradicting himself at times (as with regard to the hour at which they had last met), either because he forgot himself at such moments and told the truth, or proffered a lie out of boastfulness or a sentimental affectation or because he thought it amusing to mislead his interlocutor.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 25