In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  The Baron even bore a slight grudge against Jupien because he knew that in this house, which he had instructed his factotum to buy for him and to manage through a subordinate, everybody, as a result of the tactlessness of Mlle d’Oloron’s uncle, was more or less aware of his identity and his name (though many thought it was only a nickname, which they then distorted by mispronouncing it, so that their own stupidity, rather than Jupien’s discretion, had become the Baron’s protection). But he found it simpler to allow himself to be reassured by Jupien’s assurances, and, soothed by the knowledge that they could not be heard, the Baron said to him: ‘I did not want to say anything in front of that boy, who is very nice and who does the best he can. But he is not rough enough. I like his face, but when he calls me a piece of filth, it’s as if he were just reciting a lesson. – Oh no, nobody has said a word to him,’ replied Jupien, not seeing the improbability of this assertion. ‘What’s more, he was involved in the murder of a concierge at La Villette. – Ah! that’s more interesting, said the Baron with a smile. – But I tell you what, I do have the ox-killer here, the slaughterhouse man, and he looks quite similar. He just happened to drop in. Would you like to try him? – Oh yes, I certainly would.’ I saw the slaughterhouse man enter the room, and he did indeed look a little like Maurice, but the odd thing was that both of them possessed something which, although I had never consciously noticed it, I now recognized as being typical of Morel’s appearance; they bore a resemblance, if not to Morel as I had seen him, at least to a face which somebody seeing Morel with eyes other than mine might have put together out of his features. The minute that I had formed, out of the features borrowed from my memories of Morel, this mental sketch of the way that he might appear to somebody else, I realized that both these young men, one of whom was a jeweller’s assistant and the other a hotel employee, were in some vague way substitutes for Morel. Was I to conclude from this that M. de Charlus, at least in one aspect of his loves, was always faithful to a specific type and that the desire which had made him choose these two men one after another was the same as that which had made him stop Morel on the station platform at Doncières; that all three somewhat resembled the ephebe whose form, intagliated on the sapphire of M. de Charlus’s eyes, gave his expression that curious quality which had alarmed me so much the first day in Balbec? Or that, his love for Morel having modified the ideal type he was searching for, to console himself for Morel’s absence he sought out men who looked like him? One other possibility that occurred to me was that perhaps, in spite of appearances, there had never been anything but a relation of friendship between Morel and himself, and that M. de Charlus persuaded young men who bore some resemblance to Morel to come to Jupien’s so that he could have the illusion, with them, of taking his pleasure with Morel himself. Thinking of everything that M. de Charlus had done for Morel, this possibility would admittedly have seemed unlikely, if one were not also aware that love not only drives us to make the greatest sacrifices for the person we love, but also sometimes drives us to the sacrifice of our desire itself, which moreover is all the harder to satisfy when the person we love senses that we love them with an unreciprocated intensity.

  Another thing that makes this possibility less unlikely than at first it seems (even though it probably does not correspond to the reality) lies in the nervous temperament and the profoundly passionate character of M. de Charlus, in which he resembled Saint-Loup, and which may have played the same part at the outset of his relations with Morel, in a more decent and negative way, that it did at the start of his nephew’s relationship with Rachel. Relations with a woman one loves (and this also goes for the love of a young man) may remain platonic for reasons other than the woman’s virtue or the unsensual nature of the love that she inspires. It may be that the lover, made over-impatient by the extremity of his love, cannot wait with a sufficient pretence of indifference for the moment when he will obtain his desire. He constantly returns to the attack, writes incessantly to the woman he loves, tries all the time to see her, she refuses, he is in despair. At that point she understands: if she grants him her company and her friendship, these will seem such substantial blessings to him who thought he would never attain them, that she can refrain from giving him anything else, and take advantage of a moment when he can no longer bear not to see her, when he wants to end the war at any price, to impose upon him a peace whose prime condition will be the platonic nature of their relationship. Furthermore, for the whole of the time leading up to this treaty, the lover, always anxious, constantly waiting for a letter, or a look, has ceased to think about physical possession, the desire for which had tormented him to begin with, but which has become worn out with waiting and been replaced by needs of a different sort which, if not satisfied, are even more painful. Then the pleasure, which at the outset one had hoped to obtain from caresses, one receives later recast in the form of friendly words, promises of her presence, which, after the pangs of uncertainty, sometimes simply after a look from eyes clouded with coldness, making her seem so distant that one thinks one will never see her again, bring with them a delicious easing of tension. Women divine all this, and know that they can afford the luxury of never giving themselves to men of whose incurable desire for them, if they were too agitated to hide it from them at the beginning, they have become aware. The woman is only too happy that, without giving anything, she receives much more than she usually gets when she gives herself. In this way, these temperamental men come to believe in the virtue of their idols. And the halo they place upon them is thus a product, albeit as we have seen an indirect one, of the extremity of their love. The woman then has something of the same effect as occurs in a mechanical way with unwittingly crafty drugs, such as morphine or the soporifics. It is not the people to whom they bring the pleasure of sleep or genuine well-being who find them absolutely necessary, not these who would pay anything for them or exchange them for all the sick person possesses, but those other sick people (who may indeed be the same individuals, having, after several years, become irretrievably altered), for whom the drug no longer brings sleep, to whom it gives no thrill of pleasure, but who, as long as they do not have it, are prey to an agitation which they want to end at any price, even if it means their death.

  For M. de Charlus, whose situation, by and large, allowing for the slight differentiation due to identity of sex, falls under the general laws of love, it did not matter that he belonged to a family older than the Capets,68 that he was rich, that he was sought after in vain by smart society while Morel was nobody, it would have been no use saying to Morel, as he had said to me: ‘I am a prince, I have your interests at heart,’ Morel still had the upper hand so long as he did not want to surrender. And for him not to want to, it was perhaps enough that he felt loved. The horror that grand people have for the snobs who strive so hard to make their acquaintance is also felt by masculine men for inverts, and by women for every man who is too much in love with them. M. de Charlus not only possessed every advantage himself, but would have offered enormous advantages to Morel. But it is possible that all this was unavailing against will-power. In which case there would have been a similarity between M. de Charlus and the Germans, with whom in fact by descent he belonged, and who, in the war as it was progressing at that moment, were indeed, as the Baron was rather too fond of repeating, victorious on all fronts. But what good were these victories to them when, after each one, they found the Allies more determined than ever to refuse the one thing that they, the Germans, had hoped to obtain, namely peace and reconciliation? Napoleon, too, entered Russia and magnanimously invited the authorities to meet with him. But nobody came.

  I went back downstairs and into the little ante-room where Maurice, uncertain whether he would be called back, and whom Jupien had told to wait just in case, was in the middle of a game of cards with one of his friends. There was a great deal of excitement about a croix de guerre which had been found on the floor: nobody knew who had lost it and to whom it should be returned to prevent the owner�
�s being punished. Then there was talk about the generosity of an officer who had been killed trying to save his batman. ‘You see? Some rich people are all right. I wouldn’t mind getting myself killed for someone like that,’ said Maurice, who obviously performed his terrible fustigations of the Baron only out of mechanical habit, a neglected education, need of money and a preference for getting it in a way that was meant to be less trouble than working, but which may in fact have been worse. But, as M. de Charlus had feared, he was perhaps a kind-hearted young man, as well, it seemed, as admirably brave. He practically had tears in his eyes as he spoke of the officer’s death, and the young man of twenty-two was no less upset. ‘Yes, they’re good blokes all right. Poor sods like us haven’t got much to lose, but a gentleman who’s got loads of servants, who can go out for fancy drinks at six o’clock every day, that’s pretty wonderful! You can laugh if you like, but when you see blokes like that dying it really gets to you. God shouldn’t let rich blokes like that die, apart from anything else they’re too useful to us workers. A death like that, you want to kill all the Boches, every single one; and as for what they did at Louvain, and cutting the hands off little kids! No, I don’t know, I’m no better than anyone else, but I’d sooner refuse and get a bullet in the head than obey orders from barbarians like them; because they aren’t men, they’re just barbarians, there’s no other word for them.’ All these young men were patriots really. Only one, who had a slight arm-wound and was soon going to have to return to the front, was not quite so enthusiastic as the others, saying: ‘It wasn’t the right sort of wound, worse luck’ (the sort that gets you discharged as unfit), in the same way as Mme Swann used once to say: ‘I’ve somehow managed to catch this tiresome influenza.’

  The door opened to re-admit the chauffeur, who had gone out for a moment to get a breath of fresh air. ‘What, finished already? That didn’t take long,’ he said catching sight of Maurice, whom he had thought would still be busy beating the person they had nicknamed The Man in Chains, an allusion to a newspaper that was appearing at the time.69 ‘It may not seem long to you, out there in the fresh air,’ replied Maurice, ruffled at being seen to have failed to give satisfaction upstairs. ‘But if you’d had to beat someone as hard as you could in this heat, like I have! If it wasn’t for the fifty francs I get. – But he’s well-spoken, you can see he’s educated. Did he say it’ll soon be over? – He says we’ll never be able to beat them, it’ll end without either side winning. – For God’s sake, he must be a Boche then… – I told you before, you’re talking too loud,’ said the older man to the others, noticing me. ‘Have you finished with the room? – Oh, shut up, you’re not in charge here. – Yes, I’ve finished, I’ve come to pay. – It’d be better if you paid the boss. Maurice, go and find him. – But I don’t want to put you to any trouble. – It’s no trouble.’ Maurice went upstairs and came back saying: ‘The boss is just coming down.’ I gave him two francs for his pains. He blushed with pleasure. ‘Oh, thanks very much. I’ll send it to my brother who’s a prisoner. No, he’s not too badly off. It depends a lot on what camp you’re in.’

  While this was going on, two very elegant clients, wearing white tie and tails beneath their overcoats – two Russians, – I thought from their slight accent – were standing in the doorway and deliberating whether or not they should enter. It was clearly the first time they had been there, somebody must have told them about the place, and they seemed torn between desire, temptation and very cold feet. One of them – a good-looking young man – kept saying every few moments to the other, with a smile that was half enquiring and half intended to persuade: ‘Well? After all, what does it matter?’ But although he may have meant by that after all the consequences did not matter, it is likely that it mattered more than he let on, for the remark was followed not by any motion of entering but by another glance towards his friend, followed by the same smile and the same after all, what does it matter? This after all, what does it matter? was a very good example of that wonderful language, so different from the one we normally speak, in which emotion deflects what we wanted to say and in its place brings into being a quite different phrase, which emerges from an unknown lake where all these expressions live that are unrelated to thought but which for precisely that reason reveal what we are thinking. I remember how once Albertine, just as Françoise, whom we had not heard, was coming into the room at a moment when my lover was completely naked in my arms, said without thinking, in an attempt to warn me: ‘Oh heavens, here’s the lovely Françoise!’ Françoise, whose sight was no longer very good and who was merely going across the room at some distance from us, would probably not have noticed anything. But the unfamiliar words ‘the lovely Françoise’, which Albertine had never uttered before in her life, themselves betrayed their origin, she sensed that they had been garnered randomly by emotion, did not need to see anything to understand everything, and went out muttering in her dialect the word ‘poutana’.70 And another time, much later, when Bloch, by then a family man, had married off one of his daughters to a Catholic, an ill-bred gentleman said to her that he thought he had heard that she was the daughter of a Jew and asked her his name. The young woman, who had been Mlle Bloch since her birth, replied, pronouncing it in the German way, just as the Duc de Guermantes might have done, ‘Bloch’ (pronouncing the ch not as a c or a k but with a Germanic ch).

  But to go back to the scene in the hotel (the two Russians having finally decided to take the plunge: ‘after all, what does it matter?’), the manager had still not arrived when Jupien came in to complain that people were talking too loud and that the neighbours would complain. But when he saw me he stopped in amazement. ‘Outside on the landing, all of you.’ But as they were all jumping up, I said to him: ‘It would be easier if these young men stayed here and you and I went outside for a moment.’ He followed me, extremely flustered. I explained why I was there. Clients could be heard asking the manager whether he couldn’t introduce them to a footman, a choirboy or a black chauffeur. Every occupation interested these old maniacs, as well as troops from every branch of the services, and from all the Allied nations. Some asked especially for Canadians, influenced perhaps unwittingly by the charm of an accent so slight that it is difficult to know whether it comes from an older France or from England. Because of their kilts, and because certain lacustrine dreams are often associated with these desires, the Scots were at a premium. And as every sort of madness derives its particular traits from circumstances, if indeed it is not intensified by them, one old man, whose curiosity had doubtless been assuaged on every other front, was insistently asking whether it might be possible for him to meet a disabled soldier. We heard slow footsteps on the stairs. With his natural indiscretion Jupien could not help telling me that it was the Baron who was coming down, and that whatever happened he must not see me, but that if I wanted to go into the bedroom adjacent to the lobby where the young men were, he would open the fanlight, a method he had devised so that the Baron could see and hear without being seen, and which, he said, he would turn to my advantage against him. ‘Only don’t move.’ And having pushed me into the darkness, he left me. There was no other room he could give me, anyway, his hotel, despite the war, being full. The one I had just left had been taken by the Vicomte de Courvoisier, who, having managed to leave the Red Cross at —— for two days, had come to relax in Paris for an hour before going on to join the Vicomtesse at the Château de Courvoisier, where he would say that he had not been able to catch the fast train. He never suspected that M. de Charlus was a few metres away from him, any more than the latter suspected his presence, never having encountered his cousin at Jupien’s establishment, where even Jupien was unaware of the Vicomte’s carefully concealed identity.

  The Baron soon came in, walking with some difficulty on account of his injuries, even though he obviously must have been used to them. Although he had had his pleasure and came in only to give Maurice the money he owed him, he let his eyes travel, with a tender and curious gaze, around the wh
ole circle of young men, clearly intending to enjoy with each of them the pleasure of a few quite platonic but lovingly prolonged words. And once again, in the spirited frivolity he displayed in the face of this harem which seemed almost to intimidate him, I recognized that manner of moving his body and tossing his head, those rarefied glances, which had struck me on the evening of his first appearance at La Raspelière, graces inherited from a grandmother whom I had not known and which in his everyday life were concealed on his face by more masculine expressions, but which would be caused to blossom there coquettishly, in certain circumstances where he was anxious to please an inferior audience, by the desire to appear a grande dame.

  Jupien had commended them to the Baron’s good favour by swearing to him that they were all Belleville pimps and that they would sell their own sisters for a few francs. And in fact what Jupien said was simultaneously both untrue and true. Better, and less insensitive than he claimed to the Baron, they did not belong to a race of savages. But the people who believed them to be villains none the less talked to them with complete honesty, as if these terrifying beings were bound to do the same. A sadist may believe he is with a murderer, but his purity of mind is not thereby altered, and he will still be amazed by the way these people lie, who are not murderers at all, but simply trying to turn an easy ‘buck’, and whose fathers or mothers or sisters are alternately brought back to life and killed off again, as they contradict themselves in conversations with the client whom they are trying to please. The client, in his naïvety, and with his arbitrary conception of the gigolo, is stunned, for while he is delighted by the number of murders he believes him to be guilty of, he is horrified by each lie or contradiction he discovers in his words.