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

by Marcel Proust

  “Forgive me if I return to the subject,” I said quickly to M. de Charlus, for I could hear Brichot returning, “but could you let me know by wire if you should hear that Mlle Vinteuil or her friend is expected in Paris, letting me know exactly how long they will be staying and without telling anybody that I asked you.”

  I had almost ceased to believe that she had been expected, but I wanted thus to be forewarned for the future.

  “Yes, I will do that for you. First of all because I owe you a great debt of gratitude. By not accepting what I proposed to you long ago, you rendered me, to your own loss, an immense service: you left me my liberty. It is true that I have abdicated it in another fashion,” he added in a melancholy tone which betrayed a desire to confide in me. “But it’s something that I continue to regard as a major factor, a whole combination of circumstances which you failed to turn to your own account, possibly because fate warned you at that precise minute not to obstruct my path. For always man proposes and God disposes. If, that day when we came away together from Mme de Villeparisis’s, you had accepted, perhaps—who knows?—many things that have since happened would never have occurred.”

  In some embarrassment, I turned the conversation by seizing on the name of Mme de Villeparisis, and saying how sad I had been to hear of her death.19 “Ah, yes,” M. de Charlus muttered drily and insolently, taking note of my condolences without appearing to believe in their sincerity for a moment. Seeing that in any case the subject of Mme de Villeparisis was not painful to him, I sought to find out from him, since he was so well qualified in every respect, for what reasons she had been held at arm’s length by the aristocratic world. Not only did he not give me the solution to this little social problem, he did not even appear to be aware of it. I then realised that the position of Mme de Villeparisis, which was in later years to appear great to posterity, and even in the Marquise’s lifetime to the ignorant commonalty, had appeared no less great—at the opposite extremity of society, that which touched Mme de Villeparisis—to the Guermantes family. She was their aunt; they saw first and foremost birth, connexions by marriage, the opportunity of impressing this or that sister-in-law with the importance of their family. They saw it all less from the social than from the family point of view. Now this was more lustrous in the case of Mme de Villeparisis than I had supposed. I had been struck when I heard that the title Villeparisis was falsely assumed. But there are other examples of great ladies who have married beneath them and preserved a leading position in society. M. de Charlus began by informing me that Mme de Villeparisis was a niece of the famous Duchesse de—, the most celebrated member of the higher aristocracy during the July Monarchy, who had nevertheless refused to associate with the Citizen King and his family. I had so longed to hear stories about this duchess! And Mme de Villeparisis, the kind Mme de Villeparisis, with those cheeks that for me had represented the cheeks of a middle-class lady, Mme de Villeparisis who sent me so many presents and whom I could so easily have seen every day, Mme de Villeparisis was her niece, brought up by her, in her very home, in the Hotel de—.

  “She asked the Duc de Doudeauville,” M. de Charlus told me, “speaking of the three sisters, ‘Which of the sisters do you prefer?’ And when Doudeauville said: ‘Mme de Villeparisis,’ the Duchesse de—replied ‘Pig!’ For the Duchess was extremely witty” said M. de Charlus, giving the word the importance and the special emphasis that was customary among the Guermantes. That he should find the expression so “witty” did not moreover surprise me, for I had on many other occasions remarked the centrifugal, objective tendency which leads men to abjure, when they are relishing the wit of others, the severity with which they would judge their own, and to observe and treasure what they would have scorned to create.

  “But what on earth is he doing? That’s my overcoat he’s bringing,” he said, on seeing that Brichot had made so long a search to no better effect. “I would have done better to go myself. However, you can put it over your shoulders. Are you aware that it’s highly compromising, my dear boy, it’s like drinking out of the same glass: I shall be able to read your thoughts. No, not like that, come, let me do it,” and arranging his overcoat round me, he smoothed it over my shoulders, fastened it round my throat, and brushed my chin with his hand apologetically. “At his age, he doesn’t know how to put on a coat, one has to cosset him. I’ve missed my vocation, Brichot, I was born to be a nanny.”

  I wanted to leave, but M. de Charlus having expressed his intention of going in search of Morel, Brichot detained us both. Moreover, the certainty that when I went home I should find Albertine there, a certainty as absolute as that which I had felt in the afternoon that she would return home from the Trocadéro, made me at this moment as little impatient to see her as I had been then, while sitting at the piano after Françoise had telephoned me. And it was this sense of security that enabled me, whenever, in the course of this conversation, I attempted to rise, to obey the injunctions of Brichot who was afraid that my departure might prevent Charlus from remaining until Mme Verdurin came to fetch us.

  “Come,” he said to the Baron, “stay with us a little longer, you shall give him the accolade presently.” Brichot focused upon me as he spoke his almost sightless eyes, to which the many operations that he had undergone had restored some degree of life, but which no longer had the mobility necessary to the sidelong expression of malice.

  “The accolade, how absurd!” cried the Baron, in a shrill and rapturous tone. “I tell you, dear boy, he always imagines he’s at a prize-giving, he day-dreams about his young pupils. I often wonder whether he doesn’t sleep with them.”

  “You wish to meet Mlle Vinteuil,” said Brichot, who had overheard the last words of our conversation. “I promise to let you know if she comes. I shall hear of it from Mme Verdurin.” For he doubtless foresaw that the Baron was in grave danger of imminent expulsion from the little clan.

  “I see, so you think that I have less claim than yourself upon Mme Verdurin,” said M. de Charlus, “to be informed of the arrival of these terribly disreputable persons. They’re quite notorious, you know. Mme Verdurin is wrong to allow them to come here, they’re only fit for low company. They’re friends with a terrible gang, and they must meet in the most appalling places.”

  At each of these words, my anguish was augmented by a new anguish, and its aspect constantly changed. And, suddenly remembering certain gestures of impatience which Albertine instantly repressed, I was terrified that she had already conceived a plan to leave me. This suspicion made it all the more necessary for me to prolong our life together until such time as I should have recovered my serenity. And in order to rid Albertine of the idea, if she entertained it, of forestalling my plan to break with her, in order to make her chains seem lighter until I could put my intention into practice without too much pain, the shrewd thing to do (perhaps I was infected by the presence of M. de Charlus, by the unconscious memory of the play-acting he liked to indulge in), the shrewd thing to do seemed to be to give Albertine to understand that I myself intended to leave her. As soon as I returned home, I would simulate farewells, a final rupture.

  “Of course I don’t think I have more influence with Mme Verdurin than you do,” Brichot emphatically declared, afraid that he might have aroused the Baron’s suspicions. And seeing that I was anxious to leave, he sought to detain me with the bait of the promised entertainment: “There is one thing which the Baron seems to me not to have taken into account when he speaks of the reputation of these two ladies, namely that a person’s reputation may be at the same time appalling and undeserved. Thus for instance, in the more notorious of these groups which I may venture to call unofficial, it is certain that miscarriages of justice are many and that history has recorded convictions for sodomy against illustrious men who were wholly innocent of the charge. The recent discovery of Michelangelo’s passionate love for a woman is a fresh fact which should entitle the friend of Leo X to the benefit of a posthumous retrial. The Michelangelo case seems to me to be emin
ently calculated to excite the snobs and mobilise the underworld when another case, in which anarchy was all the rage and became the fashionable sin of our worthy dilettantes, but which must not even be mentioned now for fear of stirring up quarrels, shall have run its course.”

  From the moment Brichot had begun to speak of masculine reputations, M. de Charlus had betrayed all over his features that special sort of impatience which one sees on the face of a medical or military expert when society people who know nothing about the subject begin to talk nonsense about points of therapeutics or strategy.

  “You don’t know the first thing about these matters,” he finally said to Brichot. “Give me a single example of an undeserved reputation. Mention a few names … Yes, I know it all,” he retorted vehemently to a timid interruption by Brichot, “the people who tried it once long ago out of curiosity, or out of affection for a dead friend, and the person who’s afraid he has gone too far, and if you speak to him of the beauty of a man, replies that it’s all Greek to him, that he can no more distinguish between a beautiful man and an ugly one than between the engines of two motor-cars, mechanics not being in his line. That’s all stuff and nonsense. Mind you, I don’t mean to say that a bad (or what is conventionally so called) and yet undeserved reputation is absolutely impossible. But it’s so exceptional, so rare, that for practical purposes it doesn’t exist. At the same time, I who am by nature inquisitive and enjoy ferreting things out, have known cases which were not mythical. Yes, in the course of my life I have verified (I mean scientifically verified—I’m not talking hot air) two unjustified reputations. They generally arise from a similarity of names, or from certain outward signs, a profusion of rings, for instance, which persons who are not qualified to judge imagine to be characteristic of what you were mentioning, just as they think that a peasant never utters a sentence without adding jarniguié, ‘I d’ny God,’ or an Englishman ‘Goddam.’ It’s the conventionalism of the boulevard theatre.”

  M. de Charlus surprised me greatly when he cited among the inverts the “friend of the actress” whom I had seen at Balbec and who was the leader of the little society of the four friends.

  “But this actress, then?”

  “She serves him as a cover, and besides he has relations with her, perhaps more than with men, with whom he has hardly any.”

  “Does he have relations with the other three?”

  “No, not at all! They’re not at all friends in that way! Two are entirely for women. One of them is, but isn’t sure about his friend, and in any case they hide their doings from each other. What will surprise you is that the unjustified reputations are those most firmly established in the eyes of the public. You yourself, Brichot, who would stake your life on the virtue of some man or other who comes to this house and whom the initiated would recognise a mile away, you feel obliged to believe like everyone else what is said about someone in the public eye who is the incarnation of those propensities to the common herd, when as a matter of fact he doesn’t care a sou for that sort of thing. I say a sou, because if we were to offer twenty-five louis, we should see the number of plaster saints dwindle down to nothing. As things are, the average rate of sanctity, if you see any sanctity in that sort of thing, is somewhere between three and four out of ten.”

  If Brichot had transferred to the male sex the question of bad reputations, in my case, conversely, it was to the female sex that, thinking of Albertine, I applied the Baron’s words. I was appalled at his statistic, even when I bore in mind that he probably inflated his figures in accordance with what he himself would have wished, and based them moreover on the reports of persons who were scandalmongers and possibly liars, and had in any case been led astray by their own desire, which, added to that of M. de Charlus himself, doubtless falsified his calculations.

  “Three out of ten!” exclaimed Brichot. “Why, even if the proportions were reversed I should still have to multiply the guilty a hundredfold. If it is as you say, Baron, and you are not mistaken, then we must confess that you are one of those rare visionaries who discern a truth which nobody round them has ever suspected. Just as Barrès made discoveries as to parliamentary corruption the truth of which was afterwards established, like the existence of Leverrier’s planet. Mme Verdurin would cite for preference men whom I would rather not name who detected in the Intelligence Bureau, in the General Staff, activities inspired, I’m sure, by patriotic zeal but which I had never imagined. On freemasonry, German espionage, drug addiction, Leon Daudet concocts day by day a fantastic fairy-tale which turns out to be the barest truth. Three out of ten!” Brichot repeated in stupefaction. And it is true to say that M. de Charlus taxed the great majority of his contemporaries with inversion, excepting, however, the men with whom he himself had had relations, their case, provided there had been some element of romance in those relations, appearing to him more complex. So it is that we see Lotharios who refuse to believe in women’s honour making an exception in the case of one who has been their mistress and of whom they protest sincerely and with an air of mystery: “No, no, you’re mistaken, she isn’t a whore.” This unlooked-for tribute is dictated partly by their own vanity for which it is more flattering that such favours should have been reserved for them alone, partly by their gullibility which all too easily swallows everything that their mistress has led them to believe, partly from that sense of the complexity of life whereby, as soon as one gets close to other people, other lives, ready-made labels and classifications appear unduly crude. “Three out of ten! But have a care, Baron: less fortunate than the historians whose conclusions the future will justify, if you were to present to posterity the statistics that you offer us, it might find them erroneous. Posterity judges only on documentary evidence, and will insist on being shown your files. But as no document would be forthcoming to authenticate this sort of collective phenomenon which the initiated are only too concerned to leave in obscurity, the tender-hearted would be moved to indignation, and you would be regarded as nothing more than a slanderer or a lunatic. After having won top marks and unquestioned supremacy in the social examinations on this earth, you would taste the sorrows of being blackballed beyond the grave. The game is not worth the candle, to quote—may God forgive me—our friend Bossuet.”

  “I’m not interested in history,” replied M. de Charlus, “this life is sufficient for me, it’s quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.”

  “What, you knew Swann, Baron? I didn’t know that. Tell me, was he that way inclined?” Brichot inquired with an air of misgiving.

  “What a mind the man has! So you think I only know men of that sort? No, I don’t think so,” said Charlus, looking at the ground and trying to weigh the pros and cons. And deciding that, since he was dealing with Swann whose contrary tendencies had always been so notorious, a half-admission could only be harmless to him who was its object and flattering to him who let it out in an insinuation: “I don’t deny that long ago in our schooldays, once in a while,” said the Baron, as though in spite of himself and thinking aloud; then pulling himself up: “But that was centuries ago. How do you expect me to remember? You’re embarrassing me,” he concluded with a laugh.

  “In any case he was never what you’d call a beauty!” said Brichot who, himself hideous, thought himself good-looking and was always ready to pronounce other men ugly.

  “Hold your tongue,” said the Baron, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. In those days he had a peaches-and-cream complexion, and,” he added, finding a fresh note for each syllable, “he was as pretty as a cherub. Besides he was always charming. The women were madly in love with him.”

  “But did you ever know his wife?”

  “Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged—it’s terrible how malicious people are—that I went to b
ed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her. And it was I who, later on, was responsible for taking her out. That, my boy, is what comes of having a good reputation, you see. Though I only half deserved it. She used to force me to get up the most dreadful orgies for her, with five or six men.”