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

by Marcel Proust

  “If he had only said it to us it wouldn’t matter,” the Mistress went on, “we know better than to pay any attention to what he says, and besides, what does a man’s origin matter, you have your worth, you’re what you make yourself, but that he should use it to make Mme de Portefin laugh” (Mme Verdurin named this lady on purpose because she knew that Charlie admired her) “that’s what makes us sick. My husband said to me when he heard him: ‘I’d sooner he had struck me in the face.’ For he’s as fond of you as I am, you know, is Gustave” (it was thus that one learned that M. Verdurin’s name was Gustave). “He’s really very sensitive.”

  “But I never told you I was fond of him,” muttered M. Verdurin, acting the kind-hearted curmudgeon. “It’s Charlus who’s fond of him.”

  “Oh, no! Now I realise the difference. I was betrayed by a wretch and you, you’re good,” Charlie fervently exclaimed.

  “No, no,” murmured Mme Verdurin, seeking to safeguard her victory (for she felt that her Wednesdays were safe) but not to abuse it, “wretch is too strong; he does harm, a great deal of harm, unwittingly; you know that tale about the Legion of Honour was only a momentary squib. And it would be painful to me to repeat all that he said about your family,” she added, although she would have been greatly embarrassed had she been asked to do so.

  “Oh, even if it was only momentary, it proves that he’s a traitor,” cried Morel.

  It was at this moment that we returned to the drawing-room. “Ah!” exclaimed M. de Charlus when he saw that Morel was in the room, and, advancing upon the musician with the alacrity of a man who has skilfully organised a whole evening’s entertainment for the purpose of an assignation with a woman, and in his excitement never imagines that he has with his own hands set the snare in which he will be caught and publicly thrashed by bravoes stationed in readiness by her husband, “so here you are at last. Well, are you pleased, young hero, and presently young knight of the Legion of Honour? For very soon you will be able to sport your Cross,” he said to Morel with a tender and triumphant air, but by the very mention of the decoration endorsing Mme Verdurin’s lies, which appeared to Morel to be indisputable truth.

  “Leave me alone. I forbid you to come near me,” Morel shouted at the Baron. “You know what I mean all right. I’m not the first person you’ve tried to pervert!”

  My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and the Verdurins pulverised by M. de Charlus. For a thousand times less than that I had been visited with his furious rage; no one was safe from it; a king would not have intimidated him. Instead of which, an extraordinary thing happened. M. de Charlus stood speechless, dumbfounded, measuring the depths of his misery without understanding its cause, unable to think of a word to say, raising his eyes to gaze at each of the company in turn, with a questioning, outraged, suppliant air, which seemed to be asking them not so much what had happened as what answer he ought to make. And yet M. de Charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity, when, seized by a rage which had been simmering for a long time, he reduced someone to despair with the most cruel words in front of a shocked society group which had never imagined that anyone could go so far. M. de Charlus, on these occasions, almost foamed at the mouth, working himself up into a veritable frenzy which left everyone trembling. But in these instances he had the initiative, he was on the attack, he said whatever came into his head (just as Bloch was able to make fun of the Jews yet blushed if the word Jew was uttered in his hearing). These people whom he hated, he hated because he thought they looked down on him. Had they been civil to him, instead of flying into a furious rage with them he would have taken them to his bosom. Perhaps what now struck him speechless was—when he saw that M. and Mme Verdurin turned their eyes away from him and that no one was coming to his rescue—his present anguish and, still more, his dread of greater anguish to come; or else the fact that, not having worked himself up and concocted an imaginary rage in advance, having no ready-made thunderbolt at hand, he had been seized and struck down suddenly at a moment when he was unarmed (for, sensitive, neurotic, hysterical, he was genuinely impulsive but pseudo-brave—indeed, as I had always thought, and it was something that had rather endeared him to me, pseudo-cruel—and did not have the normal reactions of an outraged man of honour); or else that, in a milieu that was not his own, he felt less at ease and less courageous than he would in the Faubourg. The fact remains that, in this salon which he despised, this great nobleman (in whom superiority over commoners was no more essentially inherent than it had been in this or that ancestor of his trembling before the revolutionary tribunal) could do nothing, in the paralysis of his every limb as well as his tongue, but cast around him terror-stricken, suppliant, bewildered glances, outraged by the violence that was being done to him. In a situation so cruelly unforeseen, this great talker could do no more than stammer: “What does it all mean? What’s wrong?” His question was not even heard. And the eternal pantomime of panic terror has so little changed that this elderly gentleman to whom a disagreeable incident had occurred in a Parisian drawing-room unconsciously re-enacted the basic formal attitudes in which the Greek sculptors of the earliest times symbolised the terror of nymphs pursued by the god Pan.

  The disgraced ambassador, the under-secretary placed suddenly on the retired list, the man about town who finds himself cold-shouldered, the lover who has been shown the door, examine, sometimes for months on end, the event that has shattered their hopes; they turn it over and over like a projectile fired at them they know not from whence or by whom, almost as though it were a meteorite. They long to know the constituent elements of this strange missile which has burst upon them, to learn what animosities may be detected therein. Chemists have at least the means of analysis; sick men suffering from a disease the origin of which they do not know can send for the doctor; criminal mysteries are more or less unravelled by the examining magistrate. But for the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men we rarely discover the motives. Thus M. de Charlus—to anticipate the days that followed this evening to which we shall presently return—could see in Charlie’s attitude one thing alone that was self-evident. Charlie, who had often threatened the Baron that he would tell people of the passion that he inspired in him, must have seized the opportunity to do so when he considered that he had now sufficiently “arrived” to be able to stand on his own feet. And he must, out of sheer ingratitude, have told Mme Verdurin everything. But how had she allowed herself to be taken in (for the Baron, having made up his mind to deny the story, had already persuaded himself that the sentiments of which he would be accused were imaginary)? Friends of Mme Verdurin’s, themselves perhaps with a passion for Charlie, must have prepared the ground. Accordingly, during the next few days M. de Charlus wrote ferocious letters to a number of the faithful, who were entirely innocent and concluded that he must be mad; then he went to Mme Verdurin with a long and affecting tale, which had not at all the effect that he had hoped. For in the first place Mme Verdurin simply said to him: “All you need do is pay no more attention to him, treat him with scorn, he’s a mere boy.” Now the Baron longed only for a reconciliation, and to bring this about by depriving Charlie of everything he had felt assured of, he asked Mme Verdurin not to invite him again; a request which she met with a refusal that brought her angry and sarcastic letters from M. de Charlus. Flitting from one supposition to another, the Baron never hit upon the truth, which was that the blow had not come from Morel. It is true that he could have learned this by asking him if they could have a few minutes’ talk. But he felt that this would be prejudicial to his dignity and to the interests of his love. He had been insulted; he awaited an explanation. In any case, almost invariably, attached to the idea of a talk which might clear up a misunderstanding, there is another idea which, for whatever reason, prevents us from agreeing to that talk. The man who has abased himself and shown his weakness on a score of occasions will make a show of pride on the twenty-first, the only occasion on which it would be advisab
le not to persist in an arrogant attitude but to dispel an error which is taking root in his adversary failing a denial. As for the social side of the incident, the rumour spread abroad that M. de Charlus had been turned out of the Verdurins’ house when he had attempted to rape a young musician. The effect of this rumour was that nobody was surprised when M. de Charlus did not appear again at the Verdurins’, and whenever he chanced to meet somewhere else one of the faithful whom he had suspected and insulted, as this person bore a grudge against the Baron who himself abstained from greeting him, people were not surprised, realising that no member of the little clan would ever wish to speak to the Baron again.

  While M. de Charlus, momentarily stunned by Morel’s words and by the attitude of the Mistress, stood there in the pose of a nymph seized with Panic terror, M. and Mme Verdurin had retired to the outer drawing-room, as a sign of diplomatic rupture, leaving M. de Charlus by himself, while on the platform Morel was putting his violin in its case: “Now you must tell us exactly what happened,” Mme Verdurin exclaimed avidly to her husband.

  “I don’t know what you can have said to him,” said Ski. “He looked quite upset; there were tears in his eyes.”

  Pretending not to have understood, “I’m sure nothing that I said could have affected him,” said Mme Verdurin, employing one of those stratagems which deceive no one, so as to force the sculptor to repeat that Charlie was in tears, tears which excited the Mistress’s pride too much for her to be willing to run the risk that one or other of the faithful, who might have misheard, remained in ignorance of them.

  “Oh, but it must have: I saw big tears glistening in his eyes,” said the sculptor in a low voice with a smile of malicious connivance and a sidelong glance to make sure that Morel was still on the platform and could not overhear the conversation. But there was somebody who did overhear and whose presence, as soon as it was observed, would restore to Morel one of the hopes that he had forfeited. This was the Queen of Naples, who, having left her fan behind, had thought it more polite, on coming away from another party to which she had gone on, to call back for it in person. She had entered the room quietly, as though she were a little embarrassed, prepared to make apologies for her presence, and not to outstay her welcome now that the other guests had gone. But no one had heard her enter in the heat of the incident, the meaning of which she had at once gathered and which set her ablaze with indignation.

  “Ski says he had tears in his eyes. Did you notice that?” said Mme Verdurin. “I didn’t see any tears. Ah, yes, I remember now,” she corrected herself, afraid that her denial might be believed. “As for Charlus, he’s almost done in, he ought to take a chair, he’s tottering on his feet, he’ll be on the floor in another minute,” she said with a pitiless laugh.

  At that moment Morel hastened towards her: “Isn’t that lady the Queen of Naples?” he asked (although he knew quite well that she was), pointing to the sovereign who was making her way towards Charlus. “After what has just happened, I can no longer, I’m afraid, ask the Baron to introduce me.”

  “Wait, I shall take you to her myself,” said Mme Verdurin, and, followed by a few of the faithful, but not by myself and Brichot who made haste to go and collect our hats and coats, she advanced upon the Queen who was chatting to M. de Charlus. The latter had imagined that the fulfilment of his great desire that Morel should be presented to the Queen of Naples could be prevented only by the improbable demise of that lady. But we picture the future as a reflexion of the present projected into an empty space, whereas it is the result, often almost immediate, of causes which for the most part escape our notice. Not an hour had passed, and now M. de Charlus would have given anything to prevent Morel from being presented to the Queen. Mme Verdurin made the Queen a curtsey. Seeing that the other appeared not to recognise her, “I am Mme Verdurin,” she said. “Your Majesty doesn’t remember me.”

  “Quite well,” said the Queen, continuing to talk to M. de Charlus so naturally and with such a casual air that Mme Verdurin doubted whether it was to herself that this “Quite well” was addressed, uttered as it was in a marvellously off-hand tone, which wrung from M. de Charlus, despite his lover’s anguish, the grateful and epicurean smile of an expert in the art of rudeness. Morel, who had watched from the distance the preparations for his presentation, now approached. The Queen offered her arm to M. de Charlus. With him, too, she was vexed, but only because he did not make a more energetic stand against vile detractors. She was crimson with shame on his behalf that the Verdurins should dare to treat him in this fashion. The unaffected civility which she had shown them a few hours earlier, and the arrogant pride with which she now confronted them, had their source in the same region of her heart. The Queen was a woman of great kindness, but she conceived of kindness first and foremost in the form of an unshakeable attachment to the people she loved, to her own family, to all the princes of her race, among whom was M. de Charlus, and, after them, to all the people of the middle classes or of the humblest populace who knew how to respect those whom she loved and were well-disposed towards them. It was as to a woman endowed with these sound instincts that she had shown kindness to Mme Verdurin. And no doubt this is a narrow conception of kindness, somewhat Tory and increasingly obsolete. But this does not mean that her kindness was any less genuine or ardent. The ancients were no less strongly attached to the human group to which they devoted themselves because it did not go beyond the limits of their city, nor are the men of today to their country, than those who in the future will love the United States of the World. In my own immediate surroundings, I had the example of my mother, whom Mme de Cambremer and Mme de Guermantes could never persuade to take part in any philanthropic undertaking, to join any patriotic ladies’ work party, to sell raffle tickets or sponsor charity shows. I do not say that she was right in acting only when her heart had first spoken, and in reserving for her own family, for her servants, for the unfortunate whom chance brought in her way, the riches of her love and generosity, but I do know that these, like those of my grandmother, were inexhaustible and exceeded by far anything that Mme de Guermantes or Mme de Cambremer ever could have done or did. The case of the Queen of Naples was altogether different, but it must be admitted that lovable people were conceived of by her not at all as in those novels of Dostoievsky which Albertine had taken from my shelves and hoarded, that is to say in the guise of wheedling parasites, thieves, drunkards, obsequious one minute, insolent the next, debauchees, even murderers. Extremes, however, meet, since the noble man, the close relative, the outraged kinsman whom the Queen sought to defend was M. de Charlus, that is to say, notwithstanding his birth and all the family ties that bound him to the Queen, a man whose virtue was hedged round by many vices. “You don’t look at all well, my dear cousin,” she said to M. de Charlus. “Lean on my arm. You may be sure that it will always support you. It is strong enough for that.” Then, raising her eyes proudly in front of her (where, Ski later told me, Mme Verdurin and Morel were standing): “You know how in the past, at Gaeta, it held the mob at bay. It will be a shield to you.” And it was thus, taking the Baron on her arm and without having allowed Morel to be presented to her, that the glorious sister of the Empress Elisabeth left the house.

  It might have been assumed, in view of M. de Charlus’s ferocious temper and the persecutions with which he terrorised even his own family, that after the events of this evening he would have unleashed his fury and taken reprisals upon the Verdurins. Nothing of the sort happened, and the principle reason was certainly that the Baron, having caught cold a few days later, and contracted the septic pneumonia which was very rife that winter, was for long regarded by his doctors, and regarded himself, as being at the point of death, and lay for many months suspended between it and life. Was there simply a physical metastasis, and the substitution of a different malady for the neurosis that had previously made him lose all control of himself in veritable orgies of rage? For it is too simple to suppose that, never having taken the Verdurins seriously from the s
ocial point of view, he was unable to feel the same resentment against them as he would have felt against his equals; too simple also to recall that neurotics, irritated at the slightest provocation by imaginary and inoffensive enemies, become on the contrary inoffensive as soon as anyone takes the offensive against them, and that they are more easily calmed by flinging cold water in their faces than by attempting to prove to them the inanity of their grievances. But it is probably not in a metastasis that we ought to seek the explanation of this absence of rancour, but far more in the disease itself. It exhausted the Baron so completely that he had little leisure left in which to think about the Verdurins. He was almost moribund. We mentioned offensives; even those that will have only a posthumous effect require, if they are to be properly “staged,” the sacrifice of a part of one’s strength. M. de Charlus had too little strength left for the activity of preparation required. We hear often of mortal enemies who open their eyes to gaze on one another in the hour of death and close them again, satisfied. This must be a rare occurrence, except when death surprises us in the midst of life. It is, on the contrary, when we have nothing left to lose that we do not embark upon the risks which, when full of life, we would have undertaken lightly. The spirit of vengeance forms part of life; it deserts us as a rule—in spite of exceptions which, in one and the same character, as we shall see, are human contradictions—on the threshold of death. After having thought for a moment about the Verdurins, M. de Charlus felt that he was too weak, turned his face to the wall, and ceased to think about anything. It was not that he had lost his eloquence, which demanded little effort. It still flowed freely, but it had changed. Detached from the violence which it had so often adorned, it was now a quasi-mystical eloquence, embellished with words of meekness, parables from the Gospel, an apparent resignation to death. He talked especially on the days when he thought that he would live. A relapse made him silent. This Christian meekness into which his splendid violence had been transposed (as into Esther the so different genius of Andromaque) provoked the admiration of those who came to his bedside. It would have provoked that of the Verdurins themselves, who could not have helped adoring a man whose weaknesses had made them hate him. It is true that thoughts which were Christian only in appearance rose to the surface. He would implore the Archangel Gabriel to appear and announce to him, as to the Prophet, precisely when the Messiah would come. And, breaking off with a sweet and sorrowful smile, he would add: “But the Archangel mustn’t ask me, as he asked Daniel, to have patience for ‘seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks,’ for I should be dead before then.” The person whom he awaited thus was Morel. And so he asked the Archangel Raphael to bring him to him, as he had brought the young Tobias. And, introducing more human measures (like sick Popes who, while ordering masses to be said, do not neglect to send for their doctors), he insinuated to his visitors that if Brichot were to bring him without delay his young Tobias, perhaps the Archangel Raphael would consent to restore Brichot’s sight, as he had done to the father of Tobias, or as had happened in the purifying waters of Bethesda. But, notwithstanding these human lapses, the moral purity of M. de Charlus’s conversation had none the less become charming. Vanity, slander, the madness of malevolence and pride, had alike disappeared. Morally M. de Charlus had risen far above the level at which he had lived in the past. But this moral improvement, as to the reality of which, it must be said, his oratorical skill was capable of deceiving somewhat his impressionable audience, vanished with the malady which had laboured on its behalf. M. de Charlus redescended the downward slope with a speed which, as we shall see, continued steadily to increase. But the Verdurins’ attitude towards him was by that time no more than a somewhat distant memory which more immediate outbursts prevented from reviving.