In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  M. de Charlus, who had long been acquainted with Bergotte through Swann, had indeed gone to see him to ask him to find an opening on some newspaper for a sort of half-humorous column by Morel about music. In doing so, M. de Charlus had felt some remorse, for, a great admirer of Bergotte, he was conscious that he never went to see him for his own sake, but in order—thanks to the respect, partly intellectual, partly social, that Bergotte had for him—to be able to do Morel or Mme Mole or others of his friends a good turn. That he no longer made use of the social world except for such purposes did not shock him, but to treat Bergotte thus seemed to him more reprehensible, because he felt that Bergotte was not at all calculating like society people, and deserved better. But his life was fully occupied and he could never find the time to spare unless he wanted something very badly, for instance when it affected Morel. Moreover, though he was himself extremely intelligent, the conversation of an intelligent man left him comparatively cold, especially that of Bergotte who was too much the man of letters for his liking, belonged to another clan and did not see things from his point of view. Bergotte for his part was well aware of the utilitarian motive for M. de Charlus’s visits, but bore him no grudge; for though he was incapable of sustained kindness, he was anxious to give pleasure, tolerant, and impervious to the pleasure of administering a snub. As for M. de Charlus’s vice, he had never to the smallest degree shared it, but found in it rather an element of colour in the person affected, fas et nefas, for an artist, consisting not in moral examples but in memories of Plato or of Il Sodoma.

  “I should have very much liked him to come this evening, for he would have heard Charlie in the things he plays best. But I gather he doesn’t go out, that he doesn’t want to be bothered, and he’s quite right. But you, fair youth, we never see you at the Quai Conti. You don’t abuse their hospitality!”

  I explained that I went out as a rule with my cousin.

  “Do you hear that! He goes out with his cousin! What a most particularly pure young man!” said M. de Charlus to Brichot. Then, turning again to me: “But we are not asking you to give an account of your life, my boy. You are free to do anything that amuses you. We merely regret that we have no share in it. You have very good taste, by the way: your cousin is charming. Ask Brichot, she quite turned his head at Douville. Shall we be seeing her this evening? She really is extremely pretty. And she would be even prettier if she cultivated a little more the rare art, which she possesses naturally, of dressing well.”

  Here I must remark that M. de Charlus “possessed”—and this made him the exact opposite, the antithesis of me—the gift of observing minutely and distinguishing the details of a woman’s clothes as much as of a painting. As regards dresses and hats, certain scandalmongers or certain over-dogmatic theorists will aver that, in a man, a fondness for male attractions is balanced by an innate taste, a knowledge and feeling for female dress. And this is indeed sometimes the case, as though, men having monopolised all the physical desire, all the deep tenderness of a Charlus, the other sex were to be favoured with what comes under the heading of “platonic” (a highly inappropriate adjective) taste, or quite simply everything that comes under the heading of taste, with the most subtle and assured discrimination. In this respect M. de Charlus merited the nickname which was given to him later on, “the dressmaker.” But his taste and his gift for observation extended to many other things. The reader will have seen how, on the evening I went to see him after a dinner-party at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, I had not noticed the masterpieces he had in his house until he pointed them out to me one by one. He recognised immediately things to which no one would ever have paid any attention, and this not only in works of art but in the dishes at a dinner-party (and everything else between painting and cooking). I always regretted that M. de Charlus, instead of restricting his artistic talents to the painting of a fan as a present for his sister-in-law (we have seen the Duchesse de Guermantes holding it in her hand and spreading it out not so much to fan herself with it as to show it off and parade Palamède’s friendship for her) and to the improvement of his pianistic technique in order to accompany Morel’s violin flourishes without playing wrong notes—I always regretted, as I say, and I still regret, that M. de Charlus never wrote anything. Of course one cannot draw from the eloquence of his conversation or even of his correspondence the conclusion that he would have been a talented writer. Those merits are not on the same plane. One has come across purveyors of conversational banality who have written masterpieces, and supreme talkers who have proved inferior to the most mediocre hack as soon as they turned to writing. Nevertheless I believe that if M. de Charlus had tried his hand at prose, to begin with on those artistic subjects about which he knew so much, the fire would have blazed, the lightning would have flashed, and the society dilettante would have become a master of the pen. I often told him so, but he never wished to try his hand, perhaps simply from laziness, or because his time was taken up with dazzling entertainments and sordid diversions, or from a Guermantes need to go on gossiping indefinitely. I regret it all the more because in his most brilliant conversation the wit was never divorced from the character, the inspired invention of the one from the arrogance of the other. If he had written books, instead of being admired and hated as he was in drawing-rooms where, in his most remarkable moments of inventive intelligence, he at the same time trampled down the weak, took revenge on people who had not insulted him, basely sought to sow discord between friends—if he had written books, one would have had his spiritual qualities in isolation, drained of evil, the admiration would have been unalloyed, and friendship kindled by many a trait.

  In any case, even if I am mistaken about what he might have achieved with the merest page of prose, he would have performed a rare service by writing, for, while he observed and distinguished everything, he also knew the name of everything he distinguished. Certain it is that by talking to him, if I did not learn to see (the natural tendency of my mind and sensibility lying elsewhere), at least I glimpsed things that without him would have remained invisible to me, though their names, which would have helped me to recall their design or their colour, I always forgot fairly quickly. If he had written books, even bad ones (though I do not believe they would have been bad), what a delightful dictionary, what an inexhaustible inventory they would have been! But after all, who knows? Instead of bringing to the task his knowledge and his taste, perhaps, through that daemon that so often thwarts our destinies, he would have written insipid romances or pointless books of travel and adventure.

  “Yes, she knows how to dress, or more precisely how to wear clothes,” M. de Charlus went on apropos of Albertine. “My only doubt is whether she dresses in conformity with her particular style of beauty, and I am in fact to some extent responsible for this, as a result of some rather ill-considered advice I gave her. What I often used to tell her on the way to La Raspelière, which was perhaps dictated—I regret to say—by the nature of the countryside, the proximity of the beaches, rather than by your cousin’s distinctive type of looks, has made her err slightly on the side of flimsiness. I have seen her, I admit, in some very pretty muslins, some charming gauze scarves, and a certain pink toque by no means disfigured by a little pink feather. But I feel that her beauty, which is real and solid, demands more than dainty chiffons. Does a toque really suit that enormous head of hair which a kakochnyk would set off to full advantage? Very few women are suited by old-fashioned dresses which give an impression of theatre or fancy dress. But the beauty of this young girl who is already a woman is an exception, worthy of some old dress in Genoese velvet” (I thought at once of Elstir and of Fortuny’s dresses) “which I would not be afraid of weighing down even more with incrustations or pendants of stones, marvellous and outmoded—I can think of no higher praise—such as the peridot, the marcasite and the incomparable labradorite. Moreover she herself seems to have an instinct for the counter-balance that a somewhat heavy beauty calls for. Remember, on the way to dinner at La Raspelière,
all that accompaniment of pretty cases and weighty bags, into which, when she is married, she will be able to put more than the whiteness of face-powder or the crimson of cosmetics but—in a casket of lapis lazuli not too tinged with indigo—those of pearls and rubies, not imitation ones, I suspect, for she may well marry into money.”

  “Well, well, Baron,” interrupted Brichot, fearing that I might be distressed by these last words, for he had some doubts as to the purity of my relations and the authenticity of my cousinage with Albertine, “you do take an interest in young ladies!”

  “Will you please hold your tongue in front of this child, you nasty thing,” M. de Charlus replied with a giggle, raising and lowering, in the gesture of imposing silence on Brichot, a hand which he did not fail to let fall on my shoulder. “We shall regret your cousin’s absence this evening. But you did just as well, perhaps, not to bring her with you. Vinteuil’s music is admirable. But I heard from Charlie this morning that there’ll be the composer’s daughter and her friend, who both have a terrible reputation. That sort of thing is always awkward for a young girl. I’m even a trifle worried about my guests. But since they’re practically all of advanced years it’s of no consequence to them. They’ll be there, unless the two young ladies haven’t been able to come, because they were to have been present without fail all afternoon at a rehearsal Mme Verdurin was giving earlier and to which she had invited only the bores, the family, the people who were not to be invited this evening. But just before dinner, Charlie told me that the Misses Vinteuil, as we call them, though positively expected, had failed to turn up.”

  In spite of the intense pain I felt at this sudden association (as of the cause, at last discovered, with the effect, which I had already known) of Albertine’s desire to be there that afternoon with the expected presence (unknown to me) of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, I still had the presence of mind to notice that M. de Charlus, who had told us a few minutes earlier that he had not seen Charlie since the morning, was now brazenly admitting that he had seen him before dinner. But my anguish was becoming visible.

  “Why, what’s the matter with you?” said the Baron, “you’ve turned quite green. Come, let’s go in; you’ll catch cold, you don’t look at all well.”

  It was not my first doubt as to Albertine’s virtue that M. de Charlus’s words had awakened in me. Many others had penetrated my mind already. Each new doubt makes us feel that the limit has been reached, that we cannot cope with it; then we manage to find room for it all the same, and once it is introduced into the fabric of our lives it enters into competition there with so many longings to believe, so many reasons to forget, that we speedily become accustomed to it, and end by ceasing to pay attention to it. It lies there dormant like a half-healed pain, a mere threat of suffering which, the reverse side of desire, a feeling of the same order that has become, like it, the focus of our thoughts, irradiates them from infinite distances with wisps of sadness, as desire irradiates them with unidentifiable pleasures, wherever anything can be associated with the person we love. But the pain revives as soon as a new doubt enters our mind intact; even if we assure ourselves almost at once: “I shall deal with this, there’ll be some way of avoiding suffering, it can’t be true,” nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it. If we had merely limbs, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable. Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie—that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others—coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms. Let us not speak of the brain, for our mind may go on reasoning interminably in the course of these spasms, but it does no more to mitigate them than by taking thought we can soothe an aching tooth. It is true that this person is blameworthy for having lied to us, for she had sworn to us that she would always tell us the truth. But we know, from our own shortcomings towards other people, how little such vows are worth. And we wanted to give credence to them when they came from her, the very person in whose interest it has always been to lie to us, and whom, moreover, we did not choose for her virtues. It is true that, later on, she would almost cease to have any need to lie to us—precisely when our heart will have grown indifferent to her lying—because then we shall no longer take an interest in her life. We know this, and, notwithstanding, we deliberately sacrifice our own life, either by killing ourselves for her sake, or by getting ourselves sentenced to death for having murdered her, or simply by spending our whole fortune on her in a few years and then being obliged to commit suicide because we have nothing left in the world. Moreover, however easy in one’s mind one may imagine oneself to be when one loves, one always has love in one’s heart in a state of precarious balance. The smallest thing is enough to place it in the position of happiness; one glows with it, one smothers with affection not her whom we love but those who have raised one in her esteem, who have protected her from every evil temptation; one feels easy in one’s mind, and a single word is enough—“Gilberte is not coming,” “Mademoiselle Vinteuil is expected”—for all the preconceived happiness towards which we were reaching out to collapse, for the sun to hide its face, for the compass card to revolve and let loose the inner tempest which one day we shall be incapable of resisting. On that day, the day on which the heart has become so fragile, friends who admire us will grieve that such trifles, that certain persons, can so affect us, can bring us to death’s door. But what can they do? If a poet is dying of septic pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is a man of talent and that it ought to let him recover? My doubt, in so far as it referred to Mlle Vinteuil, was not entirely new. But even to that extent, my jealousy of the afternoon, inspired by Lea and her friends, had abolished it. The danger of the Trocadéro once removed, I had felt, I had believed that I had recaptured for ever complete peace of mind. But what was entirely new to me was a certain excursion as to which Andrée had told me: “We went to this place and that, and we didn’t meet anyone,” but during which, on the contrary, Mlle Vinteuil had evidently arranged to meet Albertine at Mme Verdurin’s. At this moment I would gladly have allowed Albertine to go out by herself, to go wherever she might choose, provided that I might lock up Mlle Vinteuil and her friend somewhere and be certain that Albertine would not meet them. The fact is that jealousy is as a rule partial, intermittent and localised, whether because it is the painful extension of an anxiety which is provoked now by one person, now by another of whom one’s mistress may be enamoured, or because of the exiguity of one’s thought which is able to realise only what it can represent to itself and leaves everything else in a vague penumbra from which one can suffer relatively little.

  Just as we were about to enter the courtyard we were overtaken by Saniette, who had not at first recognised us. “And yet I contemplated you for some time,” he told us breathlessly. “Is not it curious that I should have hesitated?”

  To say “Is it not curious” would have seemed to him wrong, and he had acquired a familiarity with obsolete forms of speech that was becoming exasperating. “Albeit you are people whom one may acknowledge as friends.” His grey complexion seemed to be illuminated by the livid glow of a storm. His breathlessness, which had been noticeable, as recently as last summer, only when M. Verdurin “jumped down his throat,” was now continuous.

  “I understand that an unknown work of Vinteuil is to be performed by excellent artists, and singularly by Morel.”

  “Why singularly?” inquired the Baron, who detected a criticism in the adverb.

  “Our friend Saniette,” Brichot made haste to explain, playing the part of interpreter, “is prone to speak, like the excellent scholar that he is, the language of an age in which ‘singularly’ was
equivalent to our ‘in particular.’”

  As we entered the Verdurins’ hall, M. de Charlus asked me whether I was engaged upon any work, and as I told him that I was not, but that I was greatly interested at the moment in old dinner-services of silver and porcelain, he assured me that I could not see any finer than those that the Verdurins had; that indeed I might have seen them at La Raspelière, since, on the pretext that one’s possessions are also one’s friends, they were foolish enough to take everything down there with them; that it would be less convenient to bring everything out for my benefit on the evening of a party, but that he would nevertheless ask them to show me anything I wished to see. I begged him not to do anything of the sort. M. de Charlus unbuttoned his overcoat and took off his hat, and I saw that the top of his head had now turned silver in patches. But like a precious shrub which is not only coloured with autumn tints but certain leaves of which are protected with cotton-wool or incrustations of plaster, M. de Charlus received from these few white hairs at his crest only a further variegation added to those of his face. And yet, even beneath the layers of different expressions, of paint and of hypocrisy which formed such a bad “make-up,” his face continued to hide from almost everyone the secret that it seemed to me to be crying aloud. I was almost embarrassed by his eyes, for I was afraid of his surprising me in the act of reading it therein as in an open book, and by his voice which seemed to me to repeat it in every conceivable key, with unrelenting indecency. But secrets are well kept by such people, for everyone who comes in contact with them is deaf and blind. The people who learned the truth from someone else, from the Verdurins for instance, believed it, but only for so long as they had not met M. de Charlus. His face, so far from disseminating, dispelled every scandalous rumour. For we have so extravagant a notion of certain entities that we cannot identify it with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance. And we find it difficult to believe in such a person’s vices, just as we can never believe in the genius of a person with whom we went to the Opera only last night.