M. de Charlus was engaged in handing over his overcoat with the instructions of a familiar guest. But the footman to whom he was handing it was a newcomer, and quite young. Now M. de Charlus was inclined these days sometimes to “lose his bearings,” as they say, and did not always remember what was or was not “done.” The praiseworthy desire that he had had at Balbec to show that certain topics did not alarm him, that he was not afraid to say of someone or other: “He’s a nice-looking boy,” to say, in a word, the same things as might have been said by somebody who was not like himself, this desire he had now begun to express by saying on the contrary things which nobody who was not like him could ever have said, things upon which his mind was so constantly fixed that he forgot that they do not form part of the habitual preoccupation of people in general. And so, looking at the new footman, he raised his forefinger in the air in a menacing fashion and, thinking that he was making an excellent joke, said: “You are not to make eyes at me like that, do you hear?” and, turning to Brichot: “He has a quaint little face, that boy, his nose is rather fun;” then, rounding off his pleasantry, or yielding to a desire, he lowered his forefinger horizontally, hesitated for an instant, and, unable to control himself any longer, thrust it irresistibly towards the footman and touched the tip of his nose, saying “Pif!,” then walked into the drawing-room followed by Brichot, myself and Saniette, who told us that Princess Sherbatoff had died at six o’clock. “That’s a rum card,” the footman said to himself, and inquired of his companions whether the Baron was a joker or a madman. “It’s just a way he has,” said the butler (who regarded the Baron as slightly “touched,” “a bit barmy”), “but he’s one of Madame’s friends for whom I’ve always had the greatest respect, he has a good heart.”
“Will you be returning to Incarville this year?” Brichot asked me. “I believe that our hostess has taken La Raspelière again, although she had some trouble with her landlords. But that’s nothing, a mere passing cloud,” he added in the optimistic tone of the newspapers that say: “Mistakes have been made, it is true, but who does not make mistakes at times?” But I remembered the state of anguish in which I had left Balbec, and felt no desire to return there. I kept putting off to the morrow my plans for Albertine.
“Why, of course he’s coming back, we need him, he’s indispensable to us,” declared M. de Charlus with the dictatorial and uncomprehending egoism of benevolence.
M. Verdurin, to whom we expressed our sympathy over Princess Sherbatoff, said: “Yes, I believe she is rather ill.”
“No, no, she died at six o’clock,” exclaimed Saniette.
“Oh you, you exaggerate everything,” was M. Verdurin’s brutal retort, for, the evening not having been cancelled, he preferred the hypothesis of illness, thereby unconsciously imitating the Duc de Guermantes.
Saniette, fearful of catching cold, for the outer door was continually being opened, stood waiting resignedly for someone to take his hat and coat.
“What are you hanging about there for like a whipped dog?” M. Verdurin asked him.
“I am waiting until one of the persons who are charged with the cloakroom can take my coat and give me a number.”
“What’s that you say?” demanded M. Verdurin with a stern expression. “‘Charged with the cloakroom’? Are you going gaga? ‘In charge of the cloakroom’ is what we say. Have we got to teach you to speak your own language, like someone who’s had a stroke?”
“Charged with a thing is the correct form,” murmured Saniette in a wheezy tone; “the abbé Le Batteux …”
“You madden me, you do,” cried M. Verdurin in a voice of thunder. “How you do wheeze! Have you just walked up six flights of stairs?”
The effect of M. Verdurin’s rudeness was that the servants in the cloakroom allowed other guests to take precedence over Saniette and, when he tried to hand over his things, said to him: “Wait for your turn, Sir, don’t be in such a hurry.”
“There’s system for you, there’s competence. That’s right, my lads,” said M. Verdurin with an approving smile, in order to encourage them in their inclination to keep Saniette waiting till last. “Come along,” he said to us, “the creature wants us all to catch our death hanging about in his beloved draught. Come and warm up in the drawing-room. ‘Charged with the cloakroom,’ indeed. What an idiot!”
“He is inclined to be a little precious, but he’s not a bad fellow,” said Brichot.
“I never said he was a bad fellow, I said he was an idiot,” M. Verdurin retorted sourly.
Meanwhile Mme Verdurin was in deep conclave with Cottard and Ski. Morel had just declined (because M. de Charlus could not be present) an invitation from some friends of hers to whom she had promised the services of the violinist. The reason for Morel’s refusal, which we shall presently see reinforced by others of a far more serious kind, might have found its justification in a habit peculiar to the leisured classes in general but more particularly to the little nucleus. To be sure, if Mme Verdurin intercepted between a newcomer and one of the faithful a whispered remark which might let it be supposed that they knew each other or wished to become better acquainted (“On Friday, then, at So-and-so’s,” or “Come to the studio any day you like. I’m always there until five o’clock, I shall look forward to seeing you”), she would become restless and excited, assuming that the newcomer occupied a “position” which would make him a brilliant recruit to the little clan, and while pretending not to have heard anything, and preserving in her fine eyes, ringed with dark shadows by addiction to Debussy more than they would have been by addiction to cocaine, the exhausted look induced by musical intoxication alone, would revolve nevertheless behind her splendid brow, bulging with all those quartets and the resultant headaches, thoughts which were not exclusively polyphonic; and unable to contain herself any longer, unable to postpone the injection for another instant, would fling herself upon the speakers, draw them apart, and say to the newcomer, pointing to the “faithful” one: “You wouldn’t care to come and dine with him, next Saturday, shall we say, or any day you like, with some really nice people? Don’t speak too loud, as I don’t want to invite all this mob” (a term used to designate for five minutes the little nucleus, disdained for the moment in favour of the newcomer in whom so many hopes were placed).
But this need for new enthusiasms, and also for bringing people together, had its reverse side. Assiduous attendance at their Wednesdays aroused in the Verdurins an opposite tendency. This was the desire to set people at odds, to estrange them from one another. It had been strengthened, had almost been carried to a frenzy during the months spent at La Raspelière, where they were all together morning, noon and night. M. Verdurin would go out of his way to catch someone out, to spin webs in which he might hand over to his spider mate some innocent fly. Failing a grievance, he would try ridicule. As soon as one of the faithful had been out of the house for half an hour, the Verdurins would make fun of him in front of the others, would feign surprise that their guests had not noticed how his teeth were never clean, or how on the contrary he had a mania for brushing them twenty times a day. If anyone took the liberty of opening a window, this want of breeding would cause host and hostess to exchange a glance of disgust. A moment later Mme Verdurin would ask for a shawl, which gave M. Verdurin an excuse for saying in a tone of fury: “No, I shall close the window. I wonder who had the impertinence to open it,” in the hearing of the guilty wretch who blushed to the roots of his hair. You were rebuked indirectly for the quantity of wine you had drunk. “Doesn’t it make you ill? It’s all right for navvies!” If two of the faithful went for walks together without first obtaining permission from the Mistress, these walks were the subject of endless comment, however innocent they might be. Those of M. de Charlus with Morel were not innocent. It was only the fact that M. de Charlus was not staying at La Raspelière (because of Morel’s garrison life) that retarded the hour of satiety, disgust, nausea. That hour was, however, about to strike.
Mme Verdurin was furiou
s and determined to “enlighten” Morel as to the ridiculous and detestable role that M. de Charlus was making him play. “I must add,” she went on (for when she felt that she owed someone a debt of gratitude which would weigh upon her, and was unable to rid herself of it by killing him, she would discover a serious defect in him which would honourably dispense her from showing her gratitude), “I must add that he gives himself airs in my house which I do not at all like.” The truth was that Mme Verdurin had another reason more serious than Morel’s refusal to play at her friends’ party for resentment against M. de Charlus. The latter, highly conscious of the honour he was doing the Mistress by bringing to the Quai Conti people who after all would never have come there for her sake, had, on hearing the first few names put forward by Mme Verdurin of people who ought to be invited, pronounced the most categorical veto on them in a peremptory tone which blended the rancorous arrogance of a crotchety nobleman with the dogmatism of the artist who is an expert in questions of entertainment and who would withdraw his piece and withhold his collaboration sooner than agree to concessions which in his opinion would ruin the overall effect. M. de Charlus had given his approval, hedging it round with reservations, to Saintine alone, with whom, in order not to be lumbered with his wife, Mme de Guermantes had passed from a daily intimacy to a complete severance of relations, but whom M. de Charlus, finding him intelligent, continued to see. True, it was in a middle-class circle cross-bred with minor nobility, where people are merely very rich and connected by marriage with an aristocracy which the higher aristocracy does not know, that Saintine, at one time the flower of the Guermantes set, had gone to seek his fortune and, he imagined, a social foothold. But Mme Verdurin, knowing the blue-blooded pretensions of the wife’s circle, and unaware of the husband’s position (for it is what is immediately above our head that gives us the impression of altitude and not what is almost invisible to us, so far is it lost in the clouds), thought to justify an invitation for Saintine by pointing out that he knew a great many people, “having married Mlle—.” The ignorance which this assertion, the direct opposite of the truth, revealed in Mme Verdurin caused the Baron’s painted lips to part in a smile of indulgent scorn and generous understanding. He did not deign to reply directly, but as he was always ready, in social matters, to elaborate theories in which his fertile intelligence and lordly pride were combined with the hereditary frivolity of his preoccupations, “Saintine ought to have consulted me before marrying,” he said. “There’s such a thing as social as well as physiological eugenics, in which I am perhaps the only specialist in existence. There could be no argument about Saintine’s case: it was clear that, in marrying as he did, he was tying a stone round his neck, and hiding his light under a bushel. His social career was at an end. I should have explained this to him, and he would have understood me, for he is intelligent. Conversely, there was a certain person who had everything that he required to make his position exalted, predominant, world-wide, only a terrible cable bound him to the earth. I helped him, partly by pressure, partly by force, to break his moorings and now he has won, with a triumphant joy, the freedom, the omnipotence that he owes to me. It required, perhaps, a little determination on his part, but what a reward! Thus a man can himself, when he has the sense to listen to me, become the artificer of his destiny.” (It was only too clear that M. de Charlus had not been able to influence his own; action is a different thing from words, however eloquent, and from thought, however ingenious.) “But, so far as I am concerned, I live the life of a philosopher who looks on with interest at the social reactions which he has foretold, but does not assist them. And so I have continued to see Saintine, who has always shown me the cordial deference which is my due. I have even dined with him in his new abode, where one is as heavily bored, in the midst of the most sumptuous splendour, as one used to be amused in the old days when, living from hand to mouth, he used to assemble the best society in a little attic. Him, therefore, you may invite; I authorise it. But I must impose a veto on all the other names that you have proposed. And you will thank me for it, for if I am an expert in the matter of marriages, I am no less an expert in the matter of festivities. I know the rising personalities who can lift a gathering, give it tone and distinction; and I know also the names that will bring it down to the ground, make it fall flat.”
These exclusions of the Baron’s were not always based on the resentments of a crackpot or the subtleties of an artist, but on the wiles of an actor. When he brought off, at the expense of somebody or something, an entirely successful tirade, he was anxious to let it be heard by the largest possible audience, but took care not to admit to the second performance the audience of the first who could have borne witness that the piece had not changed. He reconstituted his audience precisely because he did not alter his programme, and, when he had scored a success in conversation, would willingly have organised a tour and given performances in the provinces. Whatever the various motives for these exclusions, they did not merely annoy Mme Verdurin, who felt her authority as a hostess impaired; they also did her great damage socially, and for two reasons. The first was that M. de Charlus, even more touchy than Jupien, used to quarrel for no apparent reason with the people who were most suited to be his friends. Naturally, one of the first punishments that he could inflict upon them was that of not allowing them to be invited to a reception which he was organising at the Verdurins’. Now these pariahs were often people who ruled the roost, as the saying is, but who in M. de Charlus’s eyes had ceased to rule it from the day on which he had quarrelled with them. For his imagination, in addition to manufacturing faults in people in order to quarrel with them, was no less ingenious in stripping them of all importance as soon as they ceased to be his friends. If, for instance, the guilty person came of an extremely old family whose dukedom, however, dates only from the nineteenth century—the Montesquious for instance—from that moment all that counted for M. de Charlus was the seniority of the dukedom, the family becoming nothing. “They’re not even dukes,” he would exclaim. “It’s the title of the Abbé de Montesquiou which passed most irregularly to a collateral, less than eighty years ago. The present duke, if duke he can be called, is the third. You may talk to me if you like of people like the Uzès, the La Trémoïlles, the Luynes, who are tenth or fourteenth dukes, or my brother who is twelfth Duc de Guermantes and seventeenth Prince de Condom. Even if the Montesquious are descended from an old family, what would that prove, supposing that it were proved? They have descended so far that they’ve reached the fourteenth storey below stairs.” Had he on the contrary quarrelled with a gentleman who possessed an ancient dukedom, who boasted the most magnificent connexions, was related to ruling princes, but to whose line this distinction had come quite suddenly without any great length of pedigree, a Luynes for instance, the case was altered, pedigree alone counted. “I ask you—Monsieur Alberti, who does not emerge from the mire until Louis XIII! Why should we be impressed because court favour allowed them to pick up dukedoms to which they had no right?” What was more, with M. de Charlus the fall followed close upon the high favour because of that tendency peculiar to the Guermantes family to expect from conversation, from friendship, something that these are incapable of giving, as well as the symptomatic fear of becoming the object of slander. And the fall was all the greater the higher the favour had been. Now nobody had ever found such favour with the Baron as he had ostentatiously shown to Comtesse Mole. By what sign of indifference did she prove one fine day that she had been unworthy of it? The Countess herself always declared that she had never been able to discover. The fact remains that the mere sound of her name aroused in the Baron the most violent rage, provoked the most eloquent but the most terrible philippics. Mme Verdurin, to whom Mme Mole had been extremely amiable and who, as we shall see, was founding great hopes upon her, had rejoiced in anticipation at the thought that the Countess would meet in her house all the noblest names, as the Mistress said, “of France and of Navarre”: she at once proposed inviting “Madame de Mo
le.” “Goodness gracious me! I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world,” M. de Charlus had replied, “and if you, Madame, feel a desire to converse with Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme,11 I’m only too delighted, but let it be on an evening when I am not present. I could see as soon as you opened your mouth that we don’t speak the same language, since I was talking of aristocratic names and you come up with the most obscure names of lawyers, of crooked little commoners, evil-minded tittle-tattles, and of little ladies who imagine themselves patronesses of the arts because they echo an octave lower the manners of my Guermantes sister-in-law, like a jay trying to imitate a peacock. I must add that it would be positively indecent to admit to a celebration which I am pleased to give at Mme Verdurin’s a person whom I have with good reason excluded from my society, a goose of a woman devoid of birth, loyalty or wit who is foolish enough to suppose that she is capable of playing the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes, a combination which is in itself idiotic, since the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes are poles apart. It is as though a person should pretend to be at once Reichenberg and Sarah Bernhardt. In any case, even if it were not wholly incompatible, it would be extremely ridiculous. Even though I myself may smile at times at the exaggerations of the one and regret the limitations of the other, that is my right. But that little middle-class toad trying to inflate herself to the magnitude of two great ladies who at least always exhibit the incomparable distinction of blood, it’s enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh. The Mole! That is a name which must not be uttered in my hearing, or I shall be obliged to withdraw,” he concluded with a smile, in the tone of a doctor who, having the good of his patient at heart in spite of the patient himself, lets it be understood that he will not tolerate the collaboration of a homoeopath.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 28