‘You remember our conversations at Doncières, I said to him. – Ah! those were good times. What a gulf there is between then and now! Will those happy days ever surface again
du gouffre interdit à nos sondes.
Comme montent au ciel les soleils rajeunis
Après s’être lavés au fond des mers profondes?40
– Don’t let’s think about those conversations merely in order to recall how enjoyable they were, I said. I was trying, through them, to reach a certain sort of truth. So has this war, which has upset everything, especially, as you say, the idea of war, rendered obsolete what you used to tell me then about battles, for instance the battles of Napoleon which were to provide a pattern for wars in the future? – Not at all! he replied. The Napoleonic battle is still with us, especially in this war, since Hindenburg is imbued with the Napoleonic spirit. His rapid troop movements, his feints, whether in just leaving a thin cordon of troops in front of one of his enemies in order to fall with all his forces on the other (Napoleon, 1814), or in launching such a sustained diversionary attack that the enemy is forced to keep its forces committed to a front which is not its principal one (as for example Hindenburg’s feint before Warsaw, as a result of which the Russians were misled into concentrating their resistance at that point, and were beaten at the Mazurian Lakes), or tactical withdrawals analogous to those with which Austerlitz, Arcole, Eckmühl all began, everything he does is Napoleonic, and it is not over yet. Let me also say, though, that if, when I am at the front again, you want to try to interpret the events of this war as it progresses, don’t trust too exclusively in this particular side of Hindenburg to discover either the meaning of what he is doing, or the key to what he will do next. A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan. Remember that a diversion, for example, should be made only at a point of sufficient importance, and imagine a diversion that is successful beyond all expectation, while the main operation ends in failure; then the diversion may become the principal operation. I am waiting for Hindenburg to try one typical Napoleonic battle strategy, though, and that’s the one that consists in driving apart two of his opponents, the English and us.’
All the time I was recollecting Saint-Loup’s visit, I had been walking and had come far out of my way; I was almost at the Pont des Invalides. The lamps, of which there were only a few (because of the Gothas41), had been lighted, slightly too early because the ‘time change’42 had been made slightly too early, when the night still came fairly quickly, but had been fixed then for the whole of the summer (just as heating-stoves are lit or turned off from a certain date) and, above the nocturnally illuminated city, in a whole section of the sky – the sky which was unaware of summer-time and winter-time, and which did not deign to know that half past eight had become half past nine – in a whole section of the bluish sky the day still lingered. Across all that part of the city dominated by the towers of the Trocadéro, the sky looked like a vast turquoise-coloured sea on the ebb, disclosing a whole slender line of black rocks, which might even perhaps have been a row of simple fishing nets, but which were really small clouds. Sea for that moment coloured turquoise, and carrying all mankind, unawares, away with it, swept up by the immense revolution of the earth, that earth on which they are mad enough to continue their own revolutions, and their pointless wars, like the one that was at that moment steeping France in blood. Then as I continued to gaze at the lazy and impossibly beautiful sky, which regarded it as beneath its dignity to change its time-table and above the illuminated city gently prolonged, in these shades of blue, the last moments of its day, vertigo seized me, it was no longer a level sea but a vertical progression of blue glaciers. And the towers of the Trocadéro which seemed so close to the turquoise steps must, in fact, be very far away from them, like the twin towers in some Swiss towns which, seen from a distance, seem almost adjacent to the sloping peaks. I started to retrace my steps, but by the time I had left the Pont des Invalides the daylight had vanished from the sky, there were scarcely any lights in the city, and stumbling here and there against rubbish bins, mistaking one way for another, I unexpectedly found that by having mechanically followed a maze of dark streets, I was out on the boulevards. There the impression of the Orient which I had felt earlier came back to me, though this time my vision of the Paris of the Directory was replaced by one of the Paris of 1815. Just as in 1815, there was a stream of disparate Allied uniforms; and among them some Africans in red skirts and Hindus in white turbans were enough for me to create out of the Paris through which I was walking an entire, exotic, imaginary city, in an Orient both minutely precise as to costumes and the colour of faces, and arbitrarily chimerical as to setting, in the same way as Carpaccio turned the town where he lived into a Jerusalem or a Constantinople by assembling a crowd whose marvellous pattern of colour was no more varied than this one of mine. Walking close behind two Zouaves43 who appeared to be taking almost no notice of him, I noticed a tall, stout man, in a soft felt hat and a long greatcoat, to whose florid features I hesitated whether I should put the name of an actor or a painter, each of whom was well known for numberless sodomitic scandals. I was quite sure, at all events, that I did not know the walking figure, so I was very surprised, when his gaze met mine, to see that he looked embarrassed and deliberately stopped and came towards me like a man who wants to show you that you have not surprised him in an occupation he would prefer to have kept secret. For a moment I wondered who was greeting me: it was M. de Charlus. One might say that in his case the development of his illness or the revolution of his vice had reached that extreme point at which the earliest character of the individual, his ancestral qualities, had been entirely eclipsed by the transit across them of the generic weakness or illness that comes with them. M. de Charlus had reached the most distant possible point from himself, or rather he himself was so perfectly disguised by what he had become and which did not belong to himself alone but to many other inverts, that at first I had taken him to be just another one of them, strolling after those Zouaves down the open boulevard, just another one of them who was not M. de Charlus, not a great aristocrat, not a man of imagination and intellect, and whose only resemblance to the Baron was that expression common to all of them, which now in his case, at least until one had looked more closely, cloaked him completely.
So it was that having set out to visit Mme Verdurin, I had run into M. de Charlus. I would certainly not have met him, as once I might have, at her house; their quarrel had only grown worse and Mme Verdurin even turned current events to her advantage in order to discredit him further. Having long said that she thought he was worn out, finished, more dated in his supposed audacity than the most boring traditionalist, she had now summed up her condemnation, and alienated everybody from him, by pronouncing him ‘pre-war’. Between him and the present, according to the little set, the war had created a gulf which left him stuck in a completely moribund past.
Moreover – and this was addressed more to the world of politics, which was less well-informed – she made him out to be just as ‘bogus’, just as ‘out of touch’ socially as he was intellectually. ‘He sees nobody, nobody receives him,’ she said to M. Bontemps, who was easily persuaded by her. And there was some truth in her words. M. de Charlus’s situation had changed. Caring less and less for society, having fallen out with people because of his touchy nature, and having, out of a sense of his own social worth, disdained to be reconciled with most of the people who were the flower of society, he lived in a relative isolation which, unlike that in which Mme de Villeparisis had died, was not caused by the ostracism of the aristocracy, but which in the eyes of the public appeared for two reasons to be worse. The bad reputation of M. de Charlus, which was now widely known, made the ill-informed think that this was the reason why people did not associate with him, when in fact it was he himself who
declined to associate with them. So that something which was the result of his atrabilious temper seemed to be contempt on the part of those people against whom it was exercised. And secondly, Mme de Villeparisis had had one great bulwark: the family. But M. de Charlus had multiplied the quarrels between his family and himself. In addition to this, it had seemed – especially on the old Faubourg side, the Courvoisier side – of no interest to him. And he who, out of opposition to the Courvoisiers, had made such bold overtures towards art, had not the least idea that what would have made somebody like Bergotte most interested in him was his kinship with the whole of the old Faubourg, and his capacity to describe to him the almost provincial life led by his female cousins, from the rue de la Chaise to the place du Palais-Bourbon and the rue Garancière.
Then taking up a position which was less transcendent but more practical, Mme Verdurin affected to believe that he was not French. ‘What nationality is he, exactly, isn’t he Austrian?’ M. Verdurin asked innocently. ‘No, absolutely not,’ replied the Comtesse Molé, whose first reaction was always one of common sense rather than bitterness. ‘No of course not, he’s Prussian, said the Patronne. I know perfectly well what I’m talking about, he’s told us often enough himself that he was a hereditary member of the Prussian House of Lords and a Durchlaucht. – But the Queen of Naples told me… – But you know she’s a dreadful spy,’ cried Mme Verdurin, who had not forgotten the way that deposed sovereign had behaved at her house one evening. ‘I know, and I have it on very good authority, that it has been her only source of income. If we had a more energetic government, people like that would all be in concentration camps. Goodness me! Whatever else, you would be well advised not to receive people like that, because I know that the Minister of the Interior has his eye on them, and your house would be watched. Nothing will persuade me that Charlus did not spend two years spying on my house.’ And thinking probably that some people might have doubts about how far detailed reports on the organization of the little set would interest the German government, Mme Verdurin pronounced, with an air of quiet perceptivity, like someone who knows that what she has to say will seem only the more valuable for her not raising her voice to say it: ‘Let me tell you, on the very first day I said to my husband: “I don’t like the way that man has inveigled his way in here. There’s something fishy about him.” We used to have a house that was situated high up above a bay. I’m convinced the Germans told him to set up a base there for their submarines. There were things about him which surprised me then, and which now I understand. For instance, at first he did not want to travel by train with the rest of my guests. Then, in the nicest way, I offered him a room in the house. But oh no! he preferred to live in Doncières where there were all those troops. It all smelled very strongly of espionage to me.’
About the first of the accusations levelled against the Baron de Charlus, that he was out of date, society people were only too willing to agree with Mme Verdurin. Actually in this they were ungrateful, for M. de Charlus was in a sense their poet, the man who had been able to extract from the social world a sort of poetry, in which there were elements of history, of beauty, of the picturesque, of the comic and of frivolous elegance. But the people in society, incapable of understanding this poetry, could see none of it in their own lives, so sought for it elsewhere, and set far above M. de Charlus in their estimation men who were infinitely his inferior, but who pretended to despise fashionable society and instead professed theories of sociology and political economy. M. de Charlus used to delight in recounting the involuntarily characteristic remarks, and in describing the skilfully graceful outfits, of the Duchesse de Montmorency, making her out to be the sublime of womanhood, which resulted in his being regarded as little short of an imbecile by those fashionable women who thought the Duchesse de Montmorency a silly woman of no interest, and that dresses were made to be worn while looking as if no attention had been given to them, whereas they, being more intelligent, were always rushing to the Sorbonne, or going to hear Deschanel speak in the Chamber.
In short, fashionable society had become disenchanted with M. de Charlus, not because it had seen through, but because it had never begun to penetrate his uncommon intellectual worth. People thought him ‘pre-war’, old-fashioned, because the very people who are least capable of assessing merit are the ones who, in order to classify people, are quickest to follow the dictates of fashion. They have not exhausted, not even skimmed the surface of the men of merit in one generation, and suddenly they have to condemn them all en bloc, because now there is a new generation, with its new label, which they will not understand any better than the last.
As for the second accusation, that of pro-Germanism, the tendency of people in society to eschew extremes led them to reject it, but it had found a tireless and particularly cruel spokesman in Morel, who, having been able to retain, in the newspaper world and even in society, the position which M. de Charlus, both times at a great deal of trouble to himself, had managed to obtain for him, but not thereafter to have rescinded, harried the Baron with a hatred all the more blameworthy for the fact that, whatever his relations may have been with the Baron, Morel had known a side of him that he concealed from so many people, namely his profound kindness. M. de Charlus had shown the violinist such generosity, such delicacy, had been so scrupulous in keeping his word to him, that when he left him, the impression that Charlie took with him was not at all that of a man of vice (and anyway he regarded the Baron’s vice as a sickness), but of a man with the most lofty principles he had ever encountered, a man of extraordinary sensitivity, a kind of saint. He was so far from repudiating him, even after their quarrel, that he would say to parents in all sincerity: ‘You can entrust your son to him, he can have nothing but the best influence on him.’ So when he tried to cause him pain by the articles he wrote, in his mind it was not his vice but his virtue that he despised.
Shortly before the war, certain pieces in the gossip columns, transparent to the so-called initiated, had begun to do serious harm to the reputation of M. de Charlus. Of one called ‘The Misfortunes of a Dowager ending in -us, or The Last Days of the Baroness’, Mme Verdurin had bought fifty copies to lend to her acquaintances, and M. Verdurin, declaring that Voltaire himself had not written better, used to read it aloud. But since the war, their tone had changed. Not only was the Baron’s inversion denounced, but also his alleged German nationality. Frau Bosch, Frau van den Bosch, were the habitual nicknames of M. de Charlus. One rather poetic piece took its title from some of Beethoven’s dance tunes: ‘An Allemande’. And two short stories, ‘American Uncle and Frankfurt Queen’ and ‘The Poop Deck, or The Strapping Young Man Behind’, which the little set read in proof, delighted Brichot himself, who exclaimed: ‘I do hope the most-high and all-powerful Anastasia44 doesn’t blue-pencil us!’
The articles themselves were better than their ridiculous titles. Their style derived from Bergotte but, as I shall explain, in a way which I was perhaps the only person to understand. Morel had not been influenced at all by Bergotte’s writings. The fertilization happened in a most peculiar way, so rare that it is on that account alone that I record it here. I have indicated at an earlier point the special way Bergotte had, when he spoke, of choosing and pronouncing his words. Morel, who for a long time used to see him at the Saint-Loups’, used to do ‘imitations’ of him, in which he mimicked his voice perfectly, and used exactly the same words as he would have done. And now, when he wrote, Morel would transcribe conversations in the manner of Bergotte, but without subjecting them to the kind of transposition that would have turned them into written Bergotte. Few people having spoken with Bergotte, nobody recognized the tone of his voice, which was different from his written style. This oral fertilization is so uncommon that I wanted to mention it here. It never produces anything, however, except sterile flowers.
Morel, who was in the Press Office, then discovered, the French blood boiling in his veins like the juice of Combray grapes, that working in an office during wartime was
not very satisfactory, and in the end he enlisted, despite Mme Verdurin’s doing everything she could to persuade him to stay in Paris. She was certainly indignant that M. Cambremer, at his age, should be on the General Staff, and was wont to say of any man who did not accept her invitations: ‘Where on earth has he managed to hide himself away?’ and if someone asserted that the man in question had been in the front line from the beginning, she would reply with no scruples about lying, or perhaps because she was so used to being wrong: ‘No, no, he’s never been out of Paris, he does something about as dangerous as taking a minister for walks, take my word for it, I’m telling you, I heard it from someone who saw him’; but for the faithful it was quite a different matter, she did not want to let them go, regarding the war as a great ‘bore’ which made them abandon her. Thus she did everything she could to get them to stay, which gave her the double pleasure of having them to dine and, before they arrived, or after their departure, castigating their inactivity. But the faithful also had to acquiesce in being found cushy jobs, and she was most upset to see Morel behave so recalcitrantly in this regard; it was to no avail that she kept on telling him: ‘But you are serving your country in the office, more than you would be at the front. The important thing is to be useful, to be really part of the war, to be involved. Some people are involved and some people manage to wangle their way out of it. Now you, you’re involved, and don’t worry, everybody knows that, nobody’s going to cast stones at you.’ In the same way, in different circumstances, when men were not yet so scarce and she was not obliged as she now was to make do chiefly with women, if a man lost his mother she had not hesitated to persuade him that there could be no objection to his continuing to attend her receptions. ‘We bear our grief in our hearts. If you were thinking of going to a dance’ (she didn’t give dances) ‘I should be the first to advise you against it, but here at my little Wednesdays or in a box at the theatre, nobody will raise an eyebrow. We all know that you are grieving.’ Men were scarcer now, and mourning more frequent, and not even needed to prevent men going to parties, the war being enough to do that. Mme Verdurin clung on to those who remained. She tried to persuade them that they were more use to France if they stayed in Paris, as she might formerly have assured them that the deceased would have been happier to see them enjoying themselves. Yet despite everything she had very few men; perhaps she sometimes regretted having set such an irrevocable seal upon her break with M. de Charlus.
In Search of Lost Time Page 10