In addition to this, certain persons whom M. de Charlus regarded as negligible might indeed be so for him but not for Mme Verdurin. M. de Charlus, from the height of his exalted birth, could afford to dispense with the most elegant people, the assemblage of whom would have made Mme Verdurin’s drawing-room one of the first in Paris. But Mme Verdurin was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the bus, not to mention the enormous setback that the social error of the Dreyfus case had inflicted upon her—though it had not been an unmixed bane. “I forget whether I’ve told you,” I might ask the reader, as one might ask a friend with regard to whom one has forgotten, after so many conversations, whether one has remembered or had a chance to tell him something, “how disapproving the Duchesse de Guermantes had been of certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the Affair, excluded fashionable women from their drawing-rooms and admitted others who were not fashionable, because they were in favour of a retrial or against it, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies as being lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social formalities above the national interest?” Whether I have done so or not, the attitude of the Duchesse de Guermantes at that time can easily be imagined, and indeed if we look at it in the light of subsequent history may appear, from the social point of view, perfectly correct. M. de Cambremer regarded the Dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the Intelligence Service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the French people, to pave the way for invasion. Literature being, apart from a few of La Fontaine’s fables, a closed book to the Marquis, he left it to his wife to show that the cruelly probing literature of the day had, by creating a spirit of disrespect, brought about a parallel upheaval. “M. Reinach and M. Hervieu are in league,” she would say. Nobody will accuse the Dreyfus case of having premeditated such dark designs upon Society. But there it certainly broke down barriers. Society people who refuse to allow politics into their world are as far-sighted as soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like sexual behaviour, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices. The reason that they were nationalists gave the Faubourg Saint-Germain the habit of entertaining ladies from another class of society; the reason vanished with nationalism, but the habit remained. Mme Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her house certain writers of distinction who for the moment were of no use to her socially, because they were Dreyfusards. But political passions are like all the rest, they do not last. New generations arise which no longer understand them; even the generation that experienced them changes, experiences new political passions which, not being modelled exactly upon their predecessors, rehabilitate some of the excluded, the reason for exclusion having altered. Monarchists no longer cared, at the time of the Dreyfus case, whether a man had been republican, or even radical, or even indeed anti-clerical, provided he was anti-semitic and nationalist. Should a war ever come, patriotism would assume another form and if a writer was chauvinistic enough nobody would stop to think whether he had or had not been a Dreyfusard.
It was thus that, from each political crisis, from each artistic revival, Mme Verdurin had picked up one by one, like a bird building its nest, the several scraps, temporarily unusable, of what would one day be her salon. The Dreyfus case had passed, Anatole France remained. Mme Verdurin’s strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble she took for her faithful, the marvellous dinners that she gave for them alone, without inviting anyone from fashionable society. Each of the faithful was treated at her table as Bergotte had been treated at Mme Swann’s. When a familiar guest of this sort becomes one fine day a famous man whom everyone wants to come and see, his presence in the house of a Mme Verdurin has none of the artificial, adulterated quality of an official banquet or a college feast with a menu by Potel and Chabot,12 but is like a delicious everyday meal which you would have found there in the same perfection on a day when there was no party at all. At Mme Verdurin’s, the cast was trained to perfection, the repertory most select; all that was lacking was an audience. And now that the public taste had begun to turn from the rational Gallic art of Bergotte and was developing a taste for exotic forms of music, Mme Verdurin, a sort of accredited representative in Paris of all foreign artists, would soon be making her appearance, by the side of the exquisite Princess Yourbeletieff, as an aged Fairy Godmother, grim but all-powerful, to the Russian dancers. This charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of critics protested, infected Paris, as we know, with a fever of curiosity less agonising, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused by the Dreyfus case. There too Mme Verdurin, but with a very different result socially, was to be in the vanguard. Just as she had been seen by the side of Mme Zola, immediately below the judges’ bench, during the trial in the Assize Court, so when the new generation, in their enthusiasm for the Russian ballet, thronged to the Opera, they invariably saw in a stage box Mme Verdurin, crowned with fantastic aigrettes, by the side of Princess Yourbeletieff. And just as, after the excitements of the law courts, people used to go in the evening to Mme Verdurin’s to meet Picquart or Labori in the flesh, and above all to hear the latest news, to learn what hopes might be placed in Zurlinden, Lou-bet, Colonel Jouaust, so years later, little inclined for sleep after the enthusiasm aroused by Sheherazade or the dances from Prince Igor, they would again repair to Mme Verdurin’s, where, under the auspices of Princess Yourbeletieff and their hostess, an exquisite supper brought together every night the dancers themselves, who had abstained from dinner in order to remain more elastic, their director, their designers, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, a permanent little nucleus around which, as round the supper-table of M. and Mme Helvétius, the greatest ladies in Paris and foreign royalty were not too proud to gather. Even those society people who professed to be endowed with taste and drew otiose distinctions between the various Russian ballets, regarding the production of Les Sylphides as somehow more “delicate” than that of Sheherazade, which they were almost prepared to attribute to the inspiration of Negro art, were enchanted to meet face to face these great theatrical innovators who, in an art that is perhaps a little more artificial than painting, had created a revolution as profound as Impressionism itself.
To revert to M. de Charlus, Mme Verdurin would not have minded so much if he had placed on his Index only Mme Bontemps, whom she had picked out at Odette’s on the strength of her love of the arts, and who during the Dreyfus case had come to dinner occasionally with her husband, whom Mme Verdurin called “lukewarm” because he was not making any move for a fresh trial but who, being extremely intelligent, and glad to form relations in every camp, was delighted to show his independence by dining at the same table as Labori, to whom he listened without uttering a word that might compromise himself, but slipping in at the right moment a tribute to the honesty, recognised by all parties, of Jaurès. But the Baron had similarly proscribed several ladies of the aristocracy with whom Mme Verdurin, on the occasion of some musical festivity or fashion show, had recently formed an acquaintanceship and who, whatever M. de Charlus might think of them, would have been, far more than himself, essential ingredients in the formation of a fresh nucleus, this time aristocratic. Mme Verdurin had indeed been counting on this party to mingle her new friends with ladies of the same set whom M. de Charlus would be bringing, and had been relishing in advance the surprise of the former on meeting at the Quai Conti their own friends or relations invited there by the Baron. She was disappointed and furious at his veto. It remained to be seen whether, in these circumstances, the evening would result in profit or loss to herself. The loss would not be too serious if, at least, M. de Charlus’s guests proved so well-disposed towards her that they would become her friends in the future. In this case no great harm would be done, and sooner or later these two sections of the fashionable world, which the Baron had
insisted upon keeping apart, could be brought together even if it meant excluding him on the evening in question. And so Mme Verdurin was awaiting the Baron’s guests with a certain trepidation. It would not be long before she discovered the frame of mind in which they were coming and could judge what sort of relationship she could hope to have with them. In the meantime she was taking counsel with the faithful, but, on seeing M. de Charlus enter the room with Brichot and myself, stopped short.
Greatly to our astonishment, when Brichot told her how sorry he was to learn that her dear friend was so seriously ill, Mme Verdurin replied: “You know, I’m bound to confess that I feel no regret at all. It’s no use feigning emotions one doesn’t feel …” No doubt she spoke thus from want of energy, because she shrank from the idea of wearing a long face throughout her reception; from pride, in order not to appear to be seeking excuses for not having cancelled it; yet also from fear of what people might think of her and from social shrewdness, because the absence of grief which she displayed was more honourable if it could be attributed to a particular antipathy, suddenly revealed, for the Princess, rather than to a general insensitivity, and because her hearers could not fail to be disarmed by a sincerity as to which there could be no doubt: for if Mme Verdurin had not been genuinely indifferent to the death of the Princess, would she, in order to explain why she was entertaining, have gone so far as to accuse herself of a far more serious fault? This was to forget that Mme Verdurin would have had to admit, at the same time as confessing her grief, that she had not had the strength of mind to forgo a pleasure; whereas the indifference of the friend was something more shocking, more immoral, but less humiliating and consequently easier to confess than the frivolity of the hostess. In matters of crime, where there is danger for the culprit, it is self-interest that dictates confessions; where the offence incurs no penalty, it is self-esteem. Whether it was that, doubtless finding rather hackneyed the excuse of people who, in order not to allow a bereavement to interrupt their life of pleasure, go about saying that it seems to them futile to wear on their sleeves a grief which they feel in their hearts, she preferred to imitate those intelligent culprits who are repelled by the clichés of innocence and whose defence—a partial admission, though they do not know it—consists in saying that they would see no harm in doing what they are accused of doing, although, as it happens, they have had no occasion to do it, or whether, having adopted the theory of indifference in order to explain her conduct, she found, once she had started on the downward slope of her unnatural feeling, that there was some originality in having felt it, a rare perspicacity in having managed to diagnose it, and a certain “nerve” in proclaiming it, Mme Verdurin kept dwelling upon her want of grief, not without something of the complacent pride of a paradoxical psychologist and daring dramatist.
“Yes, it’s very odd,” she said, “it made scarcely any impression on me. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I wouldn’t rather she were still alive, she wasn’t a bad person.”
“Yes she was,” put in M. Verdurin.
“Ah! he doesn’t approve of her because he thought I was doing myself harm by having her here, but he’s rather pig-headed about that.”
“Do me the justice to admit,” said M. Verdurin, “that I never approved of the association. I always told you that she had a bad reputation.”
“But I’ve never heard a thing against her,” protested Saniette.
“What!” exclaimed Mme. Verdurin, “everybody knew; bad isn’t the word, it was shameful, degrading. No, but it has nothing to do with that. I couldn’t myself explain what I feel. I didn’t dislike her, but she meant so little to me that when we heard that she was seriously ill my husband himself was quite surprised and said: ‘Anyone would think you didn’t mind.’ Why, earlier this evening he offered to put off the rehearsal, and I insisted upon having it because I should have thought it a farce to show a grief which I don’t feel.”
She said this because she felt that it had an intriguing smack of the “independent theatre,” and was at the same time singularly convenient; for avowed insensitivity or immorality simplifies life as much as does easy virtue; it converts reprehensible actions, for which one no longer need seek excuses, into a duty imposed by sincerity. And the faithful listened to Mme Verdurin’s words with the mixture of admiration and uneasiness which certain cruelly realistic and painfully observant plays used at one time to cause; and while they marvelled to see their beloved Mistress display her rectitude and independence in a new form, more than one of them, although he assured himself that after all it would not be the same thing, thought of his own death, and wondered whether, on the day it occurred, they would drop a tear or give a party at the Quai Conti.
“I’m very glad for my guests’ sake that the evening hasn’t been cancelled,” said M. de Charlus, not realising that in expressing himself thus he was offending Mme Verdurin.
Meanwhile I was struck, as was everybody who approached Mme Verdurin that evening, by a far from pleasant odour of rhino-gomenol. This was how it came about. We know that Mme Verdurin never expressed her artistic emotions in a mental but always in a physical way, so that they might appear more inescapable and more profound. Now, if one spoke to her of Vinteuil’s music, her favourite, she would remain unmoved, as though she expected to derive no emotion from it. But after looking at you for a few moments with a fixed, almost abstracted gaze, she would answer you in a sharp, matter of fact, scarcely civil tone (as though she had said to you: “I don’t in the least mind your smoking, but it’s because of the carpet; it’s a very fine one—not that that matters either—but it’s highly inflammable, I’m dreadfully afraid of fire, and I shouldn’t like to see you all roasted because someone had carelessly dropped a lighted cigarette end on it”), not professing any admiration, but coldly expressing her regret that something of his was being played that evening: “I have nothing against Vinteuil; to my mind, he’s the greatest composer of the age. Only, I can never listen to that sort of stuff without weeping all the time” (there was not the slightest suggestion of pathos in the way she said “weeping;” she would have used precisely the same tone for “sleeping;” certain slandermongers used indeed to insist that the latter verb would have been more applicable, though no one could ever be certain, for she listened to the music with her face buried in her hands, and certain snoring sounds might after all have been sobs). “I don’t mind weeping, not in the least; only I get the most appalling sniffles afterwards. It stuffs up my mucous membrane, and forty-eight hours later I look like an old drunk. I have to inhale for days on end to get my vocal cords functioning. However, one of Cottard’s pupils …” “Oh, by the way, I never offered you my condolences: he was carried off very quickly, poor fellow!” “Ah, yes, there we are, he died, as everyone has to. He’d killed enough people for it to be his turn to have a bit of his own medicine.13 Anyhow, I was saying that one of his pupils, a delightful creature, has been treating me for it. He goes by quite an original rule: ‘Prevention is better than cure.’ And he greases my nose before the music begins. The effect is radical. I can weep like all the mothers who ever lost a child, and not a trace of a cold. Sometimes a little conjunctivitis, that’s all. It’s completely efficacious. Otherwise I could never have gone on listening to Vinteuil. I was just going from one bronchial attack to another.”
I could not refrain from mentioning Mlle Vinteuil. “Isn’t the composer’s daughter to be here,” I asked Mme Verdurin, “with one of her friends?”
“No, I’ve just had a telegram,” Mme Verdurin said evasively, “they were obliged to remain in the country.”
I had a momentary hope that there might never have been any question of their coming and that Mme Verdurin had announced the presence of these representatives of the composer only in order to make a favourable impression on the performers and their audience.
“What, so they didn’t even come to the rehearsal this afternoon?” said the Baron with feigned curiosity, anxious to appear not to have seen Charlie.
The latter came up to greet me. I whispered a question in his ear about Mlle Vinteuil’s non-appearance; he seemed to me to know little or nothing about the matter. I signed to him to keep his voice down and told him we would talk again later. He bowed, and assured me that he would be entirely at my disposal. I observed that he was far more polite, far more respectful, than he had been in the past. I spoke warmly of him—since he might perhaps be able to help me to clear up my suspicions—to M. de Charlus who replied: “He only does what he should: there would be no point in his living among respectable people if he didn’t learn good manners.” These, according to M. de Charlus, were the old manners of France, without a hint of British stiffness. Thus when Charlie, returning from a tour in the provinces or abroad, arrived in his travelling suit at the Baron’s, the latter, if there were not too many people present, would kiss him without ceremony on both cheeks, perhaps a little in order to banish by so ostentatious a display of his affection any idea of its being criminal, perhaps because he could not deny himself a pleasure, but still more, no doubt, for literary reasons, as upholding and illustrating the traditional manners of France, and, just as he would have protested against the Munich or modern style of furniture by keeping old armchairs that had come to him from a great-grandmother, countering British phlegm with the affection of a warmhearted eighteenth-century father who does not conceal his joy at seeing his son again. Was there indeed a trace of incest in this paternal affection? It is more probable that the way in which M. de Charlus habitually appeased his vice—as to which we shall learn something in due course—did not meet his emotional needs, which had remained unsatisfied since the death of his wife; certain it is that after having thought more than once of remarrying, he was now devoured by a maniacal desire to adopt an heir, and certain persons close to him feared that it might be fulfilled in favour of Morel. And there is nothing extraordinary in this. The invert who has been able to feed his passion only on a literature written for women-loving men, who used to think of men when he read Musset’s Nuits, feels the need to enter in the same way into all the social activities of the man who is not an invert, to keep a lover, as the old frequenter of the Opera keeps ballet-girls, to settle down, to marry or form a permanent tie, to become a father.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 29