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

by Marcel Proust

  To turn back to the Verdurin reception, when the host and hostess were alone, M. Verdurin said to his wife: “You know why Cottard didn’t come? He’s with Saniette, whose attempt to recover his losses on the Stock Exchange has failed. Learning that he hadn’t a penny in the world and nearly a million francs of debts, Saniette had a stroke.”

  “But then why did he gamble? It’s idiotic, he was the last person in the world to succeed at that game. Cleverer men than he get plucked at it, and he was born to let himself be swindled by every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

  “But of course, we’ve always known he was an idiot,” said M. Verdurin. “Anyhow, this is the result. Here you have a man who will be turned out of house and home tomorrow by his landlord, and who’s going to find himself in utter penury; his relations don’t like him, Forcheville is the last man in the world who would do anything for him. And so it occurred to me—I don’t wish to do anything that doesn’t meet with your approval, but we might perhaps be able to scrape up a small income for him so that he shan’t be too conscious of his ruin, so that he can keep a roof over his head.”

  “I entirely agree with you, it’s very good of you to have thought of it. But you say ‘a roof; the fool has kept on an apartment beyond his means, he can’t remain in it, we shall have to find him a couple of rooms somewhere. I understand that at present he’s still paying six or seven thousand francs.”

  “Six thousand five hundred. But he’s greatly attached to his home. And after all, he’s had a first stroke, he can scarcely live more than two or three years. Suppose we were to spend ten thousand francs on his behalf for three years. It seems to me that we should be able to afford that. We might for instance this year, instead of renting La Raspelière again, take somewhere more modest. With our income, it seems to me that to write off ten thousand francs for three years isn’t out of the question.”

  “So be it. The only trouble is that people will get to know about it, and we’ll be expected to do it for others.”

  “You can imagine that I thought of that. I shall do it only on the express condition that nobody knows about it. I’ve no wish for us to become the benefactors of the human race, thank you very much. No philanthropy! What we might do is to tell him that the money has been left to him by Princess Sherbatoff.”

  “But will he believe it? She consulted Cottard about her will.”

  “If the worst comes to the worst, we might take Cottard into our confidence. He’s used to professional secrecy, he makes an enormous amount of money, he won’t be like one of those busybodies for whom one’s obliged to cough up. He may even perhaps be willing to say that the Princess appointed him as her executor. In that way we wouldn’t even appear. That would avoid all the nuisance of scenes of gratitude, effusions and speeches.”

  M. Verdurin added an expression which made quite plain the kind of touching scenes and speeches which they were anxious to avoid. But it could not be reported to me precisely, for it was not a French expression, but one of those terms that are employed in certain families to denote certain things, annoying things especially, probably because people wish to be able to refer to them in the hearing of the persons concerned without being understood. An expression of this sort is generally a survival from an earlier condition of the family. In a Jewish family, for instance, it will be a ritual term diverted from its true meaning, and perhaps the only Hebrew word with which the family, now thoroughly Gallicised, is still acquainted. In a family that is strongly provincial, it will be a term of local dialect, albeit the family no longer speaks or even understands that dialect. In a family that has come from South America and no longer speaks anything but French, it will be a Spanish word. And, in the next generation, the word will no longer exist save as a childhood memory. It will be remembered perfectly well that the parents used to allude to the servants who were waiting at table by employing some such word, but the children have no idea what the word meant, whether it was Spanish, Hebrew, German, dialect, if indeed it ever belonged to any language and was not a proper name or a word entirely made up. The uncertainty can be cleared up only if they have a great-uncle or an old cousin still alive who must have used the same expression. As I never knew any relations of the Verdurins, I was never able to reconstruct the word. All I know is that it certainly drew a smile from Mme Verdurin, for the use of such a vocabulary, less general, more personal, more secret, than everyday speech, inspires in those who use it among themselves an egocentric feeling which is always accompanied by a certain self-satisfaction. After this moment of mirth, “But if Cottard talks,” Mme Verdurin objected. “He won’t talk.” He did talk, to myself at least, for it was from him that I learned the story a few years later, actually at Saniette’s funeral. I was sorry that I had not known of it earlier. For one thing the knowledge would have brought me more rapidly to the idea that we ought never to bear a grudge against people, ought never to judge them by some memory of an unkind action, for we do not know all the good that, at other moments, their hearts may have sincerely desired and realised. And thus, even simply from the point of view of prediction, one is mistaken. For doubtless the evil aspect which we have noted once and for all will recur; but the heart is richer than that, has many other aspects which will recur also in the same person and which we refuse to acknowledge because of his earlier bad behaviour. But from a more personal point of view, this revelation of Cottard’s, if it had been made to me earlier, would have dispelled the suspicions I had formed as to the part that the Verdurins might be playing between Albertine and myself—would have dispelled them wrongly perhaps as it happened, for if M. Verdurin had virtues, he nevertheless teased and bullied to the point of the most savage persecution, and was so jealous of his position of dominance in the little clan as not to shrink from the basest falsehoods, from the fomentation of the most unjustified hatreds, in order to sever any ties among the faithful which had not as their sole object the strengthening of the little group. He was a man capable of disinterestedness, of unostentatious generosity, but that does not necessarily mean a man of feeling, or a likeable man, or a scrupulous or a truthful or always a kind man. A partial kindness—in which there subsisted, perhaps, a trace of the family whom my great-aunt had known—probably existed in him before I discovered it through this fact, as America or the North Pole existed before Columbus or Peary. Nevertheless, at the moment of my discovery, M. Verdurin’s nature offered me a new and unsuspected facet; and I concluded that it is as difficult to present a fixed image of a character as of societies and passions. For a character alters no less than they do, and if one tries to take a snapshot of what is relatively immutable in it, one finds it presenting a succession of different aspects (implying that it is incapable of keeping still but keeps moving) to the disconcerted lens.

  Seeing how late it was, and fearing that Albertine might be growing impatient, I asked Brichot, as we left the Verdurins’ party, to be so kind as to drop me home first, and my carriage would then take him on. He commended me for going straight home like this (unaware that a girl was waiting for me in the house) and for ending the evening so early and so wisely, when in fact all I had done was postpone its real beginning. Then he spoke to me about M. de Charlus. The latter would doubtless have been amazed had he heard the Professor, who was so amiable to him, the Professor who always assured him: “I never repeat anything,” speaking of him and of his life without the slightest reticence. And Brichot’s indignant amazement would perhaps have been no less sincere if M. de Charlus had said to him: “I’m told you’ve been speaking ill of me.” Brichot did indeed have an affection for M. de Charlus, and if he had had to call to mind some conversation that had turned upon him, would have been far more likely to remember the friendly feelings he had had for the Baron, while saying the same things about him as everyone else, than those things themselves. He would not have thought that he was lying if he had said: “I who speak of you with such friendliness,” since he did feel friendly when he was speaking about M. de Charlus. The Baron had for
Brichot the charm which he demanded above all else from the world of society—that of offering him real specimens of what he had long supposed to be an invention of the poets. Brichot, who had often expounded the second Eclogue of Virgil without really knowing whether its fiction had any basis in reality, belatedly found, in conversing with Charlus, some of the pleasure which he knew that his masters, M. Mérimée and M. Renan, and his colleague M. Maspéro, had felt when travelling in Spain, Palestine and Egypt on recognising in the landscapes and the present inhabitants of Spain, Palestine and Egypt the settings and the selfsame actors of the ancient scenes which they themselves had expounded in their books.

  “Be it said without offence to that knight of noble lineage,” Brichot declared to me in the carriage that was taking us home, “he is quite simply prodigious when he illustrates his satanic catechism with a dash of Bedlamite verve and the obsessiveness, I was going to say the candour, of a blanc d’Espagne21 or an émigré. I can assure you, if I dare express myself like Mgr d’Hulst, I am by no means bored on the days when I receive a visit from that feudal lord who, seeking to defend Adonis against our age of miscreants, has followed the instincts of his race, and, in all sodomist innocence, has gone crusading.”

  I listened to Brichot, and I was not alone with him. As, for that matter, I had never ceased to feel since I left home that evening, I felt myself, in however obscure a fashion, tied fast to the girl who was at that moment in her bedroom. Even when I was talking to someone or other at the Verdurins’, I had somehow felt that she was by my side, I had that vague impression of her that we have of our own limbs, and if I happened to think of her it was as we think, with annoyance at being bound to it in complete subjection, of our own body.

  “And what a fund of scandal,” Brichot went on, “enough to supply all the appendixes of the Causeries du Lundi, is the conversation of that apostle! Just imagine, I learned from him that the treatise on ethics which I had always admired as the most splendid moral edifice of our age was inspired in our venerable colleague X by a young telegraph messenger. Needless to say, my eminent friend omitted to give us the name of this ephebe in the course of his demonstrations. In this he showed more circumspection, or, if you prefer, less gratitude, than Phidias, who inscribed the name of the athlete whom he loved upon the ring of his Olympian Zeus. The Baron had not heard this last story. Needless to say, it appealed to his orthodoxy. You can readily imagine that whenever I have to discuss with my colleague a candidate’s thesis, I find in his dialectic, which for that matter is extremely subtle, the additional savour which spicy revelations added, for Sainte-Beuve, to the insufficiently confidential writings of Chateaubriand. From our colleague, whose wisdom is golden but who had little money, the telegraph-boy passed into the hands of the Baron, ‘with the most honourable intentions’ (you should have heard his voice when he said it). And as this Satan is the most obliging of men, he found his protégé a post in the Colonies, from which the young man, who has a sense of gratitude, sends him from time to time the most excellent fruit. The Baron offers these to his distinguished friends; some of the young man’s pineapples appeared quite recently on the table at the Quai Conti, causing Mme Verdurin to remark, with no malicious intent: ‘You must have an uncle or a nephew in America, M. de Charlus, to get pineapples like these!’ I admit that I ate them with a certain gaiety, reciting to myself the opening lines of a Horatian ode which Diderot loved to recall. In fact, like my colleague Boissier, strolling from the Palatine to Tibur, I derive from the Baron’s conversation a singularly more vivid and more savoury idea of the writers of the Augustan age, without mentioning those of the Decadence, or harking back to the Greeks, although I once said to the excellent Baron that in his company I felt like Plato in the house of Aspasia. To tell the truth, I had considerably enlarged the scale of the two characters and, as La Fontaine says, my example was taken ‘from smaller animals.’ However that may be, you do not, I imagine, suppose that the Baron took offence. Never have I seen him so ingenuously delighted. A childish excitement caused him to depart from his aristocratic phlegm. ‘What flatterers all these Sorbonnards are!’ he exclaimed with rapture. ‘To think that I should have had to wait until my age before being compared to Aspasia! An old fright like me! Oh, my youth!’ I should have loved you to see him as he said this, outrageously powdered as he always is, and, at his age, scented like a young fop. All the same, beneath his genealogical obsessions, the best fellow in the world. For all these reasons, I should be distressed were this evening’s rupture to prove final. What did surprise me was the way in which the young man turned on him. His manner towards the Baron has been, for some time past, that of a henchman, of a feudal vassal, which scarcely betokened such an insurrection. I hope that, in any event, even if (quod di omen avertant) the Baron were never to return to the Quai Conti, this schism will not extend to me. Each of us derives too much benefit from the exchange that we make of my feeble stock of learning with his experience.” (We shall see that if M. de Charlus showed no violent rancour towards Brichot, at any rate his affection for the Professor vanished so completely as to allow him to judge him without indulgence.) “And I swear to you that the exchange is so much in my favour that when the Baron yields up to me what his life has taught him, I am unable to endorse the opinion of Sylvestre Bonnard that a library is still the best place in which to ponder the dream of life.”

  We had now reached my door. I got out of the carriage to give the driver Brichot’s address. From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine’s room, that window, formerly quite black at night when she had not been staying in the house, which the electric light from inside, segmented by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold. This magic scroll, clear as it was to myself, tracing before my tranquil mind precise images, near at hand, of which I should presently be taking possession, was invisible to Brichot who had remained in the carriage and was almost blind, and would in any case have been incomprehensible to him since, like the friends who called on me before dinner, when Albertine had returned from her drive, the Professor was unaware that a girl who was all my own was waiting for me in a bedroom adjoining mine. The carriage drove off. I remained for a moment alone on the pavement. It was true that I endowed those luminous streaks which I could see from below, and which to anyone else would have seemed quite superficial, with the utmost plenitude, solidity and volume, because of all the significance that I placed behind them, in a treasure unsuspected by the rest of the world which I had hidden there and from which those horizontal rays emanated, but a treasure in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought. If Albertine had not been up there, and indeed if I had merely been in search of pleasure, I would have gone to demand it of unknown women, into whose life I should have attempted to penetrate, in Venice perhaps, or at least in some corner of nocturnal Paris. But now what I had to do when the time came for love-making was not to set out on a journey, was not even to leave my own house, but to return there. And to return there not to find myself alone and, after taking leave of the friends who provide one from the outside with food for one’s thoughts, to find myself at any rate compelled to seek it in myself, but to be on the contrary less alone than when I was at the Verdurins’, welcomed as I was about to be by the person to whom I had abdicated, to whom I had handed over most completely my own person, without having for an instant the leisure to think of myself nor even requiring the effort, since she would be by my side, to think of her. So that, as I raised my eyes for one last look from the outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself, I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the inflexible bars of gold.