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

by Marcel Proust

  M. de Charlus took Morel aside, on the pretext of getting him to explain what was going to be played, but above all taking a sweet delight, while Charlie showed him his music, in displaying thus publicly their secret intimacy. In the meantime I was surrounded by enchantment. For although the little clan included few girls, a fair number were invited on big occasions. There were several present, very pretty ones, whom I knew. They sent smiles of greeting to me across the room. The air was thus continually embellished with charming girlish smiles. They are the multifarious scattered adornment of evenings as of days. One remembers an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it.

  On the other hand, people might have been greatly surprised had they overheard the furtive remarks which M. de Charlus exchanged with a number of important men at this party. These were two dukes, a distinguished general, a celebrated author, an eminent physician and a great lawyer. And the remarks in question were: “By the way, did you notice that footman, no, I mean the little fellow they take on the carriage … And at your cousin Guermantes’s, you don’t know of anyone?” “At the moment, no.” “I say, though, outside the door, where the carriages stop, there was a little blonde person in short breeches, who seemed to me most attractive. She called my carriage most charmingly. I’d gladly have prolonged the conversation.” “Yes, but I believe she’s altogether hostile, and besides, she makes such a fuss! Since you like to get down to business at once, you’d be fed up. Anyhow, I know there’s nothing doing, a friend of mine tried.” “That’s a pity, I thought the profile very fine, and the hair superb.” “Really, you found her as nice as that? I think if you’d seen a little more of her you would have been disillusioned. No, in the supper-room only two months ago you would have seen a real marvel, a big strapping fellow over six feet tall, with a perfect skin, and loves it, too. But he’s gone off to Poland.” “Ah, that’s a bit far.” “You never know, he may come back. One always meets again somewhere.” There is no great social function that does not, if one takes a cross-section of it and cuts sufficiently deep, resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past: “That’s Joan of Arc.”

  “I feel it’s our duty to enlighten him,” Mme Verdurin said to Brichot. “I don’t mean any harm to Charlus, far from it. He’s an agreeable man, and as for his reputation, I may say that it isn’t of the kind that can do me any harm! You know how much, in the interests of our little clan and our table talk, I detest flirting, men talking nonsense to a woman in a corner instead of discussing interesting topics, but with Charlus I’ve never been afraid of what happened to me with Swann, and Elstir, and lots of others. With him I felt no need to worry; he would come to my dinners, all the women in the world might be there, yet you could be certain that the general conversation wouldn’t be disturbed by flirting and whispering. Charlus is a special case, one doesn’t have to worry, it’s like having a priest. But he simply can’t be allowed to take charge of the young men he meets here and cause trouble in our little nucleus, otherwise it will be even worse than having a womaniser.” And Mme Verdurin was sincere in thus proclaiming her tolerance of Charlusism. Like every ecclesiastical power, she regarded human frailties as less dangerous than anything that might undermine the principle of authority, impair the orthodoxy, modify the ancient creed of her little Church. “Otherwise,” she went on, “I shall bare my teeth. What do you say to a gentleman who prevents Charlie from coming to a recital because he himself hasn’t been invited? So he’s going to be taught a lesson, and I hope he’ll profit by it, otherwise he can simply take his hat and go. Upon my word, he keeps the boy cooped up!” And, using exactly the same expressions that almost anyone else might have used, for there are certain phrases not in common currency which some particular subject, some given circumstance, will recall almost infallibly to the mind of the talker who imagines he is speaking his mind freely when he is merely repeating mechanically the universal version, she continued: “It’s impossible to see Morel nowadays without that great spindle-shanks hanging round him like a bodyguard.”

  M. Verdurin offered to take Charlie out of the room for a minute to talk to him, on the pretext of asking him something. Mme Verdurin was afraid that this might upset him, and that he would play badly in consequence. “It would be better to postpone this performance until after the other. Perhaps even until a later occasion.” For however much Mme Verdurin might look forward to the delicious emotion that she would feel when she knew that her husband was engaged in enlightening Charlie in the next room, she was afraid, if the plan misfired, that he would lose his temper and fail to appear on the 16th.

  What caused M. de Charlus’s downfall that evening was the ill-breeding—so common in those circles—of the people whom he had invited and who were now beginning to arrive. Having come there partly out of friendship for M. de Charlus and also out of curiosity to explore these novel surroundings, each duchess made straight for the Baron as though it were he who was giving the party, and then said to me, within a yard of the Verdurins, who could hear every word: “Show me which is Mother Verdurin. Do you think I really need to get myself introduced to her? I do hope, at least, that she won’t put my name in the paper tomorrow; nobody in my family would ever speak to me again. What, that woman with the white hair? But she looks quite presentable.” Hearing some mention of Mlle Vinteuil, who, however, was not in the room, several of them said: “Ah! the sonata-man’s daughter? Show me her.” And, each of them finding a number of her friends, they formed a group by themselves, watched, bubbling over with ironical curiosity, the arrival of the faithful, but were able at the most to point a finger at the somewhat peculiar hair-style of a person who, a few years later, was to make this the fashion in the highest society, and, in short, regretted that they did not find this salon as different from the salons they knew as they had hoped to find it, feeling the same disappointment that they might have felt if, having gone to Bruant’s nightclub in the hope that the chansonnier would make a butt of them, they found themselves greeted on their arrival with a polite bow instead of the expected refrain: “Ah! look at that mug, look at that phizog. There’s a sight for sore eyes.”

  M. de Charlus had, at Balbec, given me a perspicacious criticism of Mme de Vaugoubert who, in spite of her considerable intelligence, and after her husband’s unexpected success, had brought about his irremediable disgrace. The rulers to whose court M. de Vaugoubert was accredited, King Theodosius and Queen Eudoxia, having returned to Paris, but this time for a prolonged visit, daily festivities had been held in their honour in the course of which the Queen, on friendly terms with Mme de Vaugoubert whom she had seen for the last ten years in her own capital, and knowing neither the wife of the President of the Republic nor the wives of his ministers, had neglected these ladies and kept entirely aloof with the Ambassadress. The latter, believing her own position to be unassailable—M. de Vaugoubert having been responsible for the alliance between King Theodosius and France—had derived from the preference that the Queen showed for her society a self-satisfied pride but no anxiety at the danger which threatened her and which took shape a few months later in M. de Vaugoubert’s brutal retirement from the service, an event wrongly considered impossible by the over-confident couple. M. de Charlus, remarking in the “twister” upon the downfall of his childhood friend, expressed his astonishment that an intelligent woman had not in such circumstances used all her influence with the King and Queen to persuade them to behave as though she had none, and to transfer their civility to the wives of the President and his ministers who would have been all the more flattered by it, that is to say all the more inclined in their self-contentedness to be grateful to the Vaugouberts, inasmuch as they would have supposed that civility to be spontaneous and not dictated by them. But the man who can see other people’s errors often succumbs to them himself if sufficiently intoxicated by cir
cumstances. And M. de Charlus, while his guests elbowed their way towards him to congratulate him and thank him as though he were the master of the house, never thought of asking them to say a few words to Mme Verdurin. Only the Queen of Naples, in whom survived the same noble blood that had flowed in the veins of her sisters the Empress Elisabeth and the Duchesse d’Alençon, made a point of talking to Mme Verdurin as though she had come for the pleasure of meeting her rather than for the music and for M. de Charlus, made endless gracious speeches to her hostess, never stopped telling her how much she had always wanted to make her acquaintance, complimented her on her house and spoke to her on all manner of subjects as though she were paying a call. She would so much have liked to bring her niece Elisabeth, she said (the niece who shortly afterwards was to marry Prince Albert of Belgium), who would be so disappointed! She stopped talking when she saw the musicians mount the platform, and asked which of them was Morel. She could scarcely have been under any illusion as to the motives that led M. de Charlus to desire that the young virtuoso should be surrounded with so much glory. But the venerable wisdom of a sovereign in whose veins flowed the blood of one of the noblest families in history, one of the richest in experience, scepticism and pride, made her merely regard the inevitable blemishes of the people whom she loved best, such as her cousin Charlus (whose mother had been a Duchess of Bavaria like herself), as misfortunes that rendered more precious to them the support that they might find in her and consequently gave her all the more pleasure in providing it. She knew that M. de Charlus would be doubly touched by her having taken the trouble to come in these circumstances. Only, being as kind as she had long ago shown herself brave, this heroic woman who, a soldier-queen, had herself fired her musket from the ramparts of Gaeta, always ready to place herself chivalrously on the side of the weak, seeing Mme Verdurin alone and abandoned, and moreover unaware that she ought not to leave the Queen, had sought to pretend that for her, the Queen of Naples, the centre of the evening, the focal point of attraction that had brought her there, was Mme Verdurin. She apologised endlessly for not being able to stay until the end, since, although she never went anywhere, she had to go on to another reception, and begged that by no means, when she had to go, should any fuss be made on her account, thus discharging Mme Verdurin from the honours which the latter did not even know that she ought to render her.

  It must however be said in fairness to M. de Charlus that if he entirely forgot Mme Verdurin and allowed her to be ignored to a scandalous degree by the people “of his own world” whom he had invited, he did, on the other hand, realise that he must not allow them to display, during the “musical presentation” itself, the bad manners they were exhibiting towards the Mistress. Morel had already mounted the platform, and the musicians were assembling, but one could still hear conversations, not to say laughter, and remarks such as “Apparently you have to be initiated in order to understand it.” Immediately M. de Charlus, drawing himself erect as though he had entered a different body from the one I had seen, a short while before, dragging itself towards Mme Verdurin’s door, assumed a prophetic expression and glared at the assembly with a severity which signified that this was no time for laughter, thus bringing a sudden blush to the cheeks of more than one lady caught out like a schoolgirl by her teacher in front of the whole class. To my mind, M. de Charlus’s attitude, so noble in other respects, was somehow slightly comic; for at one moment he withered the guests with his blazing eyes, and at the next, in order to indicate to them with a sort of vade-mecum the religious silence it was proper to observe, the detachment from any worldly preoccupation, he himself presented, raising his white-gloved hands to his handsome forehead, a model (to which they were expected to conform) of gravity, already almost of ecstasy, ignoring the greetings of latecomers so indelicate as not to realise that it was now the time for High Art. They were all hypnotised; no one dared to utter another sound, to move a chair; respect for music—by virtue of Palamède’s prestige—had been instantaneously inculcated in a crowd as ill-bred as it was elegant.

  When I saw not only Morel and a pianist but other instrumentalists too line up on the little platform, I supposed that the programme was to begin with works of composers other than Vinteuil. For I imagined that the only work of his in existence was his sonata for piano and violin.

  Mme Verdurin sat alone, the twin hemispheres of her pale, slightly roseate brow magnificently bulging, her hair drawn back, partly in imitation of an eighteenth-century portrait, partly from the need for coolness of a feverish person reluctant to reveal her condition, aloof, a deity presiding over the musical rites, goddess of Wagnerism and sick-headaches, a sort of almost tragic Norn, conjured up by the spell of genius in the midst of all these “bores,” in whose presence she would scorn even more than usual to express her feelings upon hearing a piece of music which she knew better than they. The concert began; I did not know what was being played; I found myself in a strange land. Where was I to place it? Who was the composer? I longed to know, and, seeing nobody near me whom I could ask, I should have liked to be a character in those Arabian Nights which I never tired of reading and in which, in moments of uncertainty, there appears a genie, or a maiden of ravishing beauty, invisible to everyone else but not to the perplexed hero to whom she reveals exactly what he wishes to learn. And indeed at that very moment I was favoured with just such a magical apparition. As when, in a stretch of country which one thinks one does not know and which in fact one has approached from a new direction, after turning a corner one finds oneself suddenly emerging on to a road every inch of which is familiar, but one had simply not been in the habit of approaching it that way, one suddenly says to oneself: “Why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the X—s; I’m only two minutes from their house,” and there, indeed, is their daughter who has come out to greet one as one goes by; so, all of a sudden, I found myself, in the midst of this music that was new to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil’s sonata; and, more marvellous than any girl, the little phrase, sheathed, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant sonorities, as light and soft as silken scarves, came to me, recognisable in this new guise. My joy at having rediscovered it was enhanced by the tone, so friendly and familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, and yet without subduing the shimmering beauty with which it glowed. Its intention, however, this time was merely to show me the way, which was not the way of the sonata, for this was an unpublished work of Vinteuil in which he had merely amused himself, by an allusion that was explained at this point by a sentence in the programme which one ought to have been reading simultaneously, by reintroducing the little phrase for a moment. No sooner was it thus recalled than it vanished, and I found myself once more in an unknown world, but I knew now, and everything that followed only confirmed my knowledge, that this world was one of those which I had never even been capable of imagining that Vinteuil could have created, for when, weary of the sonata which was to me a universe thoroughly explored, I tried to imagine others equally beautiful but different, I was merely doing what those poets do who fill their artificial paradise with meadows, flowers and streams which duplicate those existing already upon earth. What was now before me made me feel as keen a joy as the sonata would have given me if I had not already known it, and consequently, while no less beautiful, was different. Whereas the sonata opened upon a lily-white pastoral dawn, dividing its fragile purity only to hover in the delicate yet compact entanglement of a rustic bower of honeysuckle against white geraniums, it was upon flat, unbroken surfaces like those of the sea on a morning that threatens storm, in the midst of an eerie silence, in an infinite void, that this new work began, and it was into a rose-red daybreak that this unknown universe was drawn from the silence and the night to build up gradually before me. This redness, so new, so absent from the tender, pastoral, unadorned sonata, tinged all the sky, as dawn does, with a mysterious hope. And a song already pierced the air, a song on seven notes, but the strangest, the most remote
from anything I had ever imagined, at once ineffable and strident, no longer the cooing of a dove as in the sonata, but rending the air, as vivid as the scarlet tint in which the opening bars had been bathed, something like a mystical cock-crow, the ineffable but ear-piercing call of eternal morning. The atmosphere, cold, rain-washed, electric—of a quality so different, subject to quite other pressures, in a world so remote from the virginal, plant-strewn world of the sonata—changed continually, eclipsing the crimson promise of the dawn. At noon, however, in a burst of scorching but transitory sunlight, it seemed to reach fulfilment in a heavy, rustic, almost cloddish gaiety in which the lurching, riotous clangour of bells (like those which set the church square of Combray aglow and which Vinteuil, who must often have heard them, had perhaps discovered at that moment in his memory like a colour which a painter has at hand on his palette) seemed the material representation of the coarsest joy. Truth to tell, this joyous motif did not appeal to me aesthetically; I found it almost ugly, its rhythm was so laboriously earth-bound that one could have imitated almost all its essentials simply with the noises made by rapping on a table with drumsticks in a particular way. It seemed to me that Vinteuil had been lacking, here, in inspiration, and consequently I was a little lacking also in the power of attention.