Nor was M. de Charlus content with leaving Mme Verdurin out of the conversation while he spoke of all manner of subjects (which he seemed to take a delight in developing and varying, for the cruel pleasure which he had always enjoyed of keeping indefinitely “queuing up” on their feet the friends who were waiting with excruciating patience for their turn to come); he even criticised all that part of the entertainment for which Mme Verdurin was responsible. “But, talking of cups, what in the world are those strange little bowls which remind me of the vessels in which, when I was a young man, people used to get sorbets from Poiré Blanche? Somebody said to me just now that they were for ‘iced coffee.’ But I have seen neither coffee nor ice. What curious little objects, with so ill-defined a purpose!”
While saying this M. de Charlus had placed his white-gloved hands vertically over his lips and cautiously swivelled his eyes with a meaning look as though he were afraid of being heard and even seen by his host and hostess. But this was only a pretence, for in a few minutes he would be offering the same criticisms to the Mistress herself, and a little later would be insolently enjoining her: “No more iced-coffee cups, remember! Give them to one of your friends whose house you wish to disfigure. But warn her not to have them in the drawing-room, or people might think that they had come into the wrong room, the things are so exactly like chamberpots.”
“But, cousin,” said the guest, lowering her voice too and casting a questioning glance at M. de Charlus, for fear of offending not Mme Verdurin but the Baron himself, “perhaps she doesn’t yet quite know these things …”
“She shall be taught.”
“Oh!” laughed the guest, “she couldn’t have a better teacher! She is lucky! If you’re in charge one can be sure there won’t be a false note.”
“There wasn’t one, if it comes to that, in the music.”
“Oh! it was sublime. One of those pleasures which can never be forgotten. Talking of that marvellous violinist,” she went on, imagining in her innocence that M. de Charlus was interested in the violin for its own sake, “do you happen to know one whom I heard the other day playing a Fauré sonata wonderfully well. He’s called Frank …”
“Oh, he’s ghastly,” replied M. de Charlus, oblivious of the rudeness of a contradiction which implied that his cousin was lacking in taste. “As far as violinists are concerned, I advise you to confine yourself to mine.”
This led to a fresh exchange of glances, at once furtive and watchful, between M. de Charlus and his cousin, for, blushing and seeking by her zeal to repair her blunder, Mme de Mortemart was about to suggest to M. de Charlus that she might organise an evening to hear Morel play. Now, for her the object of the evening was not to bring an unknown talent into prominence, though this was the object which she would pretend to have in mind and which was indeed that of M. de Charlus. She regarded it simply as an opportunity for giving a particularly elegant reception and was calculating already whom she would invite and whom she would leave out. This process of selection, the chief preoccupation of people who give parties (the people whom “society” journalists have the nerve or the stupidity to call “the elite”), alters at once the expression—and the handwriting—of a hostess more profoundly than any hypnotic suggestion. Before she had even thought of what Morel was to play (which she rightly regarded as a secondary consideration, for even if everybody observed a polite silence during the music, from fear of M. de Charlus, nobody would even think of listening to it), Mme de Mortemart, having decided that Mme de Valcourt was not to be one of the “chosen,” had automatically assumed that secretive, conspiratorial air which so degrades even those society women who can most easily afford to ignore what “people will say.”
“Might it be possible for me to give a party for people to hear your friend play?” murmured Mme de Mortemart, who, while addressing herself exclusively to M. de Charlus, could not refrain, as though mesmerised, from casting a glance at Mme de Valcourt (the excluded one) in order to make certain that she was sufficiently far away not to hear her. “No, she can’t possibly hear what I’m saying,” Mme de Mortemart concluded inwardly, reassured by her own glance which in fact had had a totally different effect upon Mme de Valcourt from that intended: “Why,” Mme de Valcourt had said to herself when she caught this glance, “Marie-Therese is arranging something with Palamède to which I’m not to be invited.”
“You mean my protégé,” M. de Charlus corrected, as merciless to his cousin’s choice of words as he was to her musical endowments. Then, without paying the slightest attention to her mute entreaties, for which she herself apologised with a smile, “Why, yes …” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room, “although there is always a risk in that sort of exportation of a fascinating personality into surroundings that must inevitably diminish his transcendent gifts and would in any case have to be adapted to them.”
Mme de Mortemart told herself that the mezza voce, the pianissimo of her question had been a waste of effort, after the megaphone through which the answer had issued. She was mistaken: Mme de Valcourt heard nothing, for the simple reason that she did not understand a single word. Her anxiety subsided, and would quickly have evaporated entirely, had not Mme de Mortemart, afraid that she might have been given away and might have to invite Mme de Valcourt, with whom she was on too intimate terms to be able to leave her out if the other knew about her party beforehand, raised her eyelids once again in Edith’s direction, as though not to lose sight of a threatening peril, lowering them again briskly so as not to commit herself too far. She intended, on the morning after the party, to write her one of those letters, the complement of the revealing glance, letters which are meant to be subtle but are tantamount to a full and signed confession. For instance: “Dear Edith, I’ve been missing you. I did not really expect you last night” (“How could she have expected me,” Edith would say to herself, “since she never invited me?”) “as I know that you’re not very fond of gatherings of that sort which rather bore you. We should have been greatly honoured, all the same, by your company” (Mme de Mortemart never used the word “honoured,” except in letters in which she attempted to cloak a lie in the semblance of truth). “You know that you are always welcome in our house. In any case you were quite right, as it was a complete failure, like everything that is got up at a moment’s notice.” But already the second furtive glance darted at her had enabled Edith to grasp everything that was concealed by the complicated language of M. de Charlus. This glance was indeed so potent that, after it had struck Mme de Valcourt, the obvious secrecy and intention to conceal that it betrayed rebounded upon a young Peruvian whom Mme de Mortemart intended, on the contrary, to invite. But being of a suspicious nature, seeing all too plainly the mystery that was being made without realising that it was not intended to mystify him, he at once conceived a violent hatred for Mme de Mortemart and vowed to play all sorts of disagreeable hoaxes on her, such as ordering fifty iced coffees to be sent to her house on a day when she was not entertaining, or, on a day when she was, inserting a notice in the papers to the effect that the party was postponed, and publishing mendacious accounts of subsequent parties in which would appear the notorious names of all the people whom for various reasons a hostess does not invite or even allow to be introduced to her.
Mme de Mortemart need not have bothered herself about Mme de Valcourt. M. de Charlus was about to take it upon himself to denature the projected entertainment far more than that lady’s presence would have done. “But, my dear cousin,” she said in response to the remark about “adapting the surroundings,” the meaning of which her momentary state of hyperaesthesia had enabled her to discern, “we shall spare you the least trouble. I undertake to ask Gilbert to arrange everything.”
“Not on any account, and moreover he will not be invited. Nothing will be done except through me. The first thing is to exclude all those who have ears and hear not.”
M. de Charlus’s cousin, who had been reckoning on Morel as an attraction in order to g
ive a party at which she could say that, unlike so many of her kinswomen, she had “had Palamède,” abruptly switched her thoughts from this prestige of M. de Charlus’s to all the people with whom he would get her into trouble if he took it upon himself to do the inviting and excluding. The thought that the Prince de Guermantes (on whose account, partly, she was anxious to exclude Mme de Valcourt, whom he declined to meet) was not to be invited alarmed her. Her eyes assumed an uneasy expression.
“Is this rather bright light bothering you?” inquired M. de Charlus with an apparent seriousness the underlying irony of which she failed to perceive.
“No, not at all. I was thinking of the difficulty, not because of me of course, but because of my family, if Gilbert were to hear that I had given a party without inviting him, when he never has half a dozen people in without …”
“But precisely, we must begin by eliminating the half-dozen people, who would only jabber. I’m afraid that the din of talk has prevented you from realising that it was a question not of doing the honours as a hostess but of conducting the rites appropriate to every true celebration.”
Then, having decided, not that the next person had been kept waiting too long, but that it did not do to exaggerate the favours shown to one who had in mind not so much Morel as her own visiting-list, M. de Charlus, like a doctor cutting short a consultation when he considers that it has lasted long enough, served notice on his cousin to withdraw, not by bidding her good-night but by turning to the person immediately behind her.
“Good evening, Madame de Montesquiou. It was marvellous, wasn’t it? I didn’t see Helene. Tell her that any policy of general abstention, even the most noble, that is to say hers, must allow exceptions, if they are dazzling enough, as has been the case tonight. To show that one is rare is good, but to subordinate one’s rarity, which is only negative, to what is precious is better still. In your sister’s case—and I value more than anyone her systematic absence from places where what is in store for her is not worthy of her—here tonight, on the contrary, her presence at so memorable an occasion as this would have been a precedence, and would have given your sister, already so prestigious, an additional prestige.”
Then he turned to a third lady.
I was greatly astonished to see there, as friendly and flattering towards M. de Charlus as he had been curt with him in the past, insisting on being introduced to Charlie and telling him that he hoped he would come and see him, M. d’Argencourt, that terrible scourge of the species of men to which M. de Charlus belonged. At the moment he was living in the thick of them. It was certainly not because he had become one of them himself. But for some time past he had more or less deserted his wife for a young society woman whom he adored. Being intelligent herself, she made him share her taste for intelligent people, and was most anxious to have M. de Charlus to her house. But above all M. d’Argencourt, extremely jealous and somewhat impotent, feeling that he was failing to satisfy his conquest and anxious to keep her amused, could do so without risk to himself only by surrounding her with innocuous men, whom he thus cast in the role of guardians of his seraglio. The latter found that he had become quite pleasant and declared that he was a great deal more intelligent than they had supposed, a discovery that delighted him and his mistress.
The remainder of M. de Charlus’s guests drifted away fairly rapidly. Several of them said: “I don’t want to go to the sacristy” (the little room in which the Baron, with Charlie by his side, was receiving congratulations), “but I must let Palamède see me so that he knows that I stayed to the end.” Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mme Verdurin. Some pretended not to recognise her and deliberately said good-night to Mme Cottard, appealing to me for confirmation with a “That is Mme Verdurin, isn’t it?” Mme d’Arpajon asked me in our hostess’s hearing: “Tell me, has there ever been a Monsieur Verdurin?” The duchesses who still lingered, finding none of the oddities they had expected in this place which they had hoped to find more different from what they were used to, made the best of a bad job by going into fits of laughter in front of Elstir’s paintings; for everything else, which they found more in keeping than they had expected with what they were already familiar with, they gave the credit to M. de Charlus, saying: “How clever Palamède is at arranging things! If he were to stage a pantomime in a shed or a bathroom, it would still be perfectly ravishing.” The most noble ladies were those who showed most fervour in congratulating M. de Charlus upon the success of a party of the secret motive for which some of them were not unaware, without however being embarrassed by the knowledge, this class of society—remembering perhaps certain epochs in history when their own families had already arrived in full consciousness at a similar effrontery—carrying their contempt for scruples almost as far as their respect for etiquette. Several of them engaged Charlie on the spot for different evenings on which he was to come and play them Vinteuil’s septet, but it never occurred to any of them to invite Mme Verdurin.
The latter was already blind with fury when M. de Charlus who, his head in the clouds, was incapable of noticing her state, decided that it was only seemly to invite the Mistress to share his joy. And it was perhaps to indulge his taste for literature rather than from an overflow of pride that this specialist in artistic entertainments said to Mme Verdurin: “Well, are you satisfied? I think you have reason to be. You see that when I take it upon myself to organise a festivity there are no half-measures. I don’t know whether your heraldic notions enable you to gauge the precise importance of the event, the weight that I have lifted, the volume of air that I have displaced for you. You have had the Queen of Naples, the brother of the King of Bavaria, the three premier peers. If Vinteuil is Muhammad, we may say that we have brought to him some of the least movable of mountains. Bear in mind that to attend your party the Queen of Naples came up from Neuilly, which is a great deal more difficult for her than it was to leave the Two Sicilies,” he added with malicious intent, notwithstanding his admiration for the Queen. “It’s a historic event. Just think that it’s perhaps the first time she has gone anywhere since the fall of Gaeta. It may well be that the history books will record as climactic dates the day of the fall of Gaeta and that of the Verdurin reception. The fan that she laid down the better to applaud Vinteuil deserves to become more famous than the fan that Mme de Metternich broke because the audience hissed Wagner.”
“In fact she left it here,” said Mme Verdurin, momentarily appeased by the memory of the Queen’s kindness to her, and she showed M. de Charlus the fan which was lying on a chair.
“Oh, how moving!” exclaimed M. de Charlus, approaching the relic with veneration. “It is all the more touching for being so hideous; the little violet is incredible!” And spasms of emotion and irony ran through him by turns. “Oh dear, I don’t know whether you feel these things as I do. Swann would positively have died of convulsions if he had seen it. I know that whatever price it fetches, I shall buy that fan at the sale of the Queen’s belongings, for she’s bound to be sold up, she hasn’t a penny,” he went on, for he never ceased to intersperse the cruellest gossip with the most sincere veneration, although they sprang from two opposing natures, which, however, were combined in him. (They might even be brought to bear alternately on the same fact. For the M. de Charlus who from his comfortable position as a rich man jeered at the poverty of the Queen was the same who was often to be heard extolling that poverty and who, when anyone spoke of Princess Murat, Queen of the Two Sicilies, would reply: “I don’t know who you mean. There is only one Queen of Naples, a sublime person who does not keep a carriage. But from her omnibus she annihilates every carriage in the street and one could kneel down in the dust on seeing her drive past.”) “I shall bequeath it to a museum. In the meantime, it must be sent back to her, so that she need not hire a cab to come and fetch it. The wisest thing, in view of the historical interest of such an object, would be to steal the fan. But that would be awkward for her—since it is probable that she does not possess another!” he added with a
shout of laughter. “Anyhow, you see that for my sake she came. And that is not the only miracle I have performed. I don’t believe that anyone at the present day has the power to shift the people whom I persuaded to come. However, everyone must be given his due. Charlie and the rest of the musicians played divinely. And, my dear hostess,” he added condescendingly, “you yourself have played your part on this occasion. Your name will not go unrecorded. History has preserved that of the page who armed Joan of Arc when she set out for battle. In sum, you served as a connecting link, you made possible the fusion between Vinteuil’s music and its inspired interpreter, you had the intelligence to appreciate the cardinal importance of the whole concatenation of circumstances which would enable the interpreter to benefit from the whole weight of a considerable—if I were not referring to myself I might almost say providential—personage, whom you had the good sense to ask to ensure the success of the gathering, to bring before Morel’s violin the ears directly attached to the tongues that have the widest hearing; no, no, it’s by no means negligible. Nothing is negligible in so complete a realisation. Everything has its part. The Duras was marvellous. In fact, everything; that is why,” he concluded, for he could not resist admonishing people, “I set my face against your inviting those human divisors who, among the superior people whom I brought you, would have played the part of the decimal points in a sum, reducing the others to a merely fractional value. I have a very exact appreciation of that sort of thing. You realise that we must avoid social blunders when we are giving a party which is to be worthy of Vinteuil, of his inspired interpreter, of yourself, and, I venture to say, of me. If you had invited the Mole woman, everything would have been spoiled. It would have been the tiny counteracting, neutralising drop which deprives a potion of its virtue. The electric lights would have fused, the pastries would not have arrived in time, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomach-ache. She was the one person not to have here. At the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-tale, not a note would have issued from the brass; the flute and the oboe would have suddenly lost their voices. Morel himself, even if he had succeeded in playing a few bars, would not have been in tune, and instead of Vinteuil’s septet you would have had a parody of it by Beckmesser, ending amid catcalls. I who believe strongly in the influence of personalities could feel quite plainly in the blossoming of a certain largo, which opened out like a flower, and in the supreme fulfilment of the finale, which was not merely allegro but incomparably lively,14 that the absence of the Mole was inspiring the musicians and causing the very instruments to swell with joy. In any case, when one is at home to queens one does not invite one’s concierge.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 33