In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  Everybody seemed to know him, and M. de Charlus paused for a long while with each one, talking to them in what he took to be their own language, both out of a pretentious affectation of local colour and because he took a masochistic pleasure in mixing with the world of villainy. ‘You, you’re disgusting, I saw you outside the Olympia with two scrubbers. Trying to get hold of a few readies, I expect. That’s the way you cheat on me.’ Fortunately for the man to whom these words were addressed, he did not have time to declare that he would never have accepted ‘readies’ from a woman, a fact which would have diminished the Baron’s excitement, and reserved his protest for the concluding phrase, saying: ‘Oh no, I don’t cheat on you.’ This remark gave keen pleasure to M. de Charlus, and as, in spite of himself, the kind of intelligence which was naturally his emerged from beneath the façade he affected, he turned to Jupien: ‘It is nice of him to say that. And how well he says it! One might almost think it was the truth. Anyway, what does it matter whether it is the truth or not since he manages to make me believe it? What pretty little eyes he’s got. Look, I’m going to give you two big kisses for your trouble, dear boy. You will think of me in the trenches. It’s not too bad there, is it? – Blimey, there are some days when a grenade goes past your ear…’ And the young man proceeded to imitate the sound of the grenade, the aeroplanes, etc. ‘But you just have to get on with it like everyone else, we’ll carry on right to the end, you can count on that. – To the end! If only one knew what the end will be!’ said the Baron melancholically, being a ‘pessimist’. ‘You didn’t see what Sarah Bernhardt said in the papers: “France will go on to the end. The French will give up their lives, down to the last man.” – I do not doubt for a moment that the French will fight bravely to the last man,’ said M. de Charlus as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and although he himself had no intention of doing anything at all. But by saying it he was trying to correct the impression of pacifism he made when he forgot himself. ‘I do not doubt it, but I do wonder how far Madame Sarah Bernhardt is qualified to speak in the name of France. But I don’t think I know this charming, this delightful young man,’ he added, catching sight of another, whom he did not recognize or perhaps had never seen before. He greeted him as he might have greeted a prince at Versailles, and, in order to make the most of the chance of some free supplementary pleasure, just as when I was little and my mother had completed an order at Boissier’s or Gouache’s,71 I would take, at the invitation of one of the ladies behind the counter, a sweet from one of the glass jars between which they held sway, taking the hand of the charming young man and pressing it in his for several moments, in the Prussian manner, gazing at him with a smile for the interminable length of time it once took photographers to pose you when the light was bad: ‘I am charmed, Sir, enchanted to make your acquaintance. He’s got lovely hair,’ he said, turning to Jupien. Then he went over to Maurice to give him his fifty francs, but first, putting his arm round his waist: ‘You never told me that you’d knifed an old concierge in Belleville.’ And M. de Charlus moaned with rapture and brought his face close to Maurice’s: ‘Oh! M. le Baron,’ said the gigolo, whom they had forgotten to warn, ‘how could you think such a thing?’ Either the story was in fact false, or, if it were true, its perpetrator none the less thought it abominable and something to be denied. ‘Me lay hands on a fellow-creature? On a Boche, yes, because that’s war, but not on a woman, let alone an old woman!’ This declaration of virtuous principles affected the Baron like a douche of cold water and he moved abruptly back from Maurice, still giving him his money, but with the disappointed look of a man who has been cheated, who pays because he does not want to make a fuss, but is not happy about it. The bad impression received by the Baron was further aggravated by the way in which the beneficiary thanked him, as he said: ‘I’ll send this to the old dears and save a bit of it for our kid at the front.’ These touching sentiments disappointed M. de Charlus almost as much as their rather conventional peasant expression irritated him. Jupien did sometimes warn them that they ought to be more perverse. Then one or other of them, as if confessing to something diabolically evil, would venture to say: ‘I tell you something, Baron, you won’t believe this, but when I was a kid I used to look through the keyhole and watch my parents making love. Pretty wicked, eh? You look as if you think I’m having you on, but I swear to you it’s the honest truth.’ And M. de Charlus would be driven both to despair and to exasperation by this contrived attempt at perversity, which resulted only in revealing so much stupidity and so much innocence. In fact even the most determined thief or murderer would not have satisfied him, for they do not talk about their crimes; and anyway sadists – however kind they may be, in fact the kinder they are – have a thirst for evil which villains acting in pursuit of other goals are incapable of satisfying.

  The young man, realizing his mistake too late, proclaimed in vain that he could not stand coppers and even dared say to the Baron: ‘Give us a meet, then,’ but the spell had vanished. It rang false, like passages in books where the author has tried to write slang. It was to no avail that the young man detailed all the ‘filthy things’ that he did with his wife. M. de Charlus was merely struck by how insignificant these filthy things were. Nor was this just insincerity on his part. There is nothing more limited than pleasure and vice. In that sense, changing the meaning of the phrase slightly, it can truly be said that we are always going round in the same vicious circle.

  If M. de Charlus was thought to be a prince, there was equally a great deal of sadness in the establishment at the death of someone of whom the gigolos would say: ‘I don’t know his name, but it seems he is a Baron,’ and who was none other than the Prince de Foix (the father of Saint-Loup’s friend). Believed by his wife to spend long hours at his club, in reality he passed his time chatting at Jupien’s, gossiping with the low-life about fashionable society. He was a tall, good-looking man, like his son. Strangely enough, M. de Charlus, probably because he had always encountered him socially, was unaware that he shared his tastes. It was even said that at one time they had been directed towards his own son, when he was still at school (and the friend of Saint-Loup), which was probably not true. On the contrary, very well informed about kinds of behaviour which most people are unaware of, he kept a close eye on the company kept by his son. One day, when a man, and a man moreover of humble origins, had followed the young Prince de Foix to his father’s house, where he had thrown a note through the window, the father had picked it up. But the follower, although not, aristocratically speaking, part of the same world as M. de Foix the father, did share it from another point of view. He had no difficulty in finding, among their mutual accomplices, an intermediary who procured M. de Foix’s silence by demonstrating that it was the young man who had himself provoked this bare-faced action by an elderly man. And this was quite possible. For the Prince de Foix had been able successfully to preserve his son from contact with bad company, but not from heredity. But this was an aspect of the young Prince de Foix, as of his father, of which the people in their circle remained ignorant, although in other circles he was as extreme as anybody.

  ‘How natural he is! You’d never think he was a Baron,’ said several of the regular customers after M. de Charlus had left, accompanied as far as the street by Jupien, to whom the Baron complained at length about the young man’s virtuousness. From the displeasure evinced by Jupien, who ought to have schooled the young man in advance, it was clear that the make-believe murderer was about to receive a very severe telling-off. ‘It is the complete opposite of what you told me,’ added the Baron so that Jupien might learn the lesson for a future occasion. ‘He seems very good-natured, he shows feelings of respect for his family. – He doesn’t get on with his father, though, objected Jupien, they live together, but they work in different bars.’ This was clearly an insubstantial crime compared with murder, but Jupien had been caught off-guard. The Baron said nothing more because, while he wanted his pleasures prepared for him, he also wanted to retai
n the illusion that they were not prepared. ‘He really is a crook, he told you all that stuff to mislead you, you’re too gullible,’ Jupien added, in an attempt to vindicate himself which only hurt M. de Charlus’s pride.

  ‘They say he gets through a million francs a day,’ said the young man of twenty-two, seeing nothing improbable in this assertion. Shortly afterwards, we heard, a short distance away, the sound of the car which had come to fetch M. de Charlus. At the same time, I noticed somebody whom I took to be an elderly lady, in a black skirt, stepping slowly into the room at the side of a soldier who had evidently emerged with her from an adjoining room. I soon realized my mistake: it was a priest. It was that very rare thing, almost unheard of in France, a rotten priest. The soldier was obviously teasing his companion about the fact that his conduct suited ill with his cloth, because the latter, with an air of gravity, raising a finger to his hideous face like a doctor of divinity, said sententiously: ‘What can you expect, I’m no’ (and I expected him to say ‘saint’) ‘angel.’ He was on the point of leaving, and said good-bye to Jupien who, having seen the Baron out, had just come back upstairs, but absent-mindedly the rotten priest forgot to pay for his room. Jupien, whose quick wit never deserted him, shook the collection box into which he put each client’s contribution, rattling it, and said: ‘Towards the expenses of worship, M. l’Abbé!’ The ugly character apologized, dropped in his coin, and disappeared.

  Jupien came to find me in the dark lair where I had been lurking, not daring to move. ‘Come into the vestibule for a moment where my young men are sitting, while I go up and shut the room; you’ve taken a room, so it’s perfectly natural.’ The manager was there, and I paid him. At that moment a young man in a dinner-jacket came in and asked the manager, with an air of authority: ‘May I have Léon tomorrow morning at a quarter to eleven instead of eleven o’clock, as I’m lunching in town? – That depends, replied the manager, on how long the abbé keeps him.’ This response appeared not to satisfy the young man in evening dress, who seemed to be on the point of cursing the abbé, but his anger took a new course when he caught sight of me; going straight up to the manager: ‘Who’s that? What is the meaning of this?’ he asked in a voice of quiet fury. The manager, very embarrassed, explained that my presence was of no significance, that I had taken a room. The young man in evening dress seemed to be entirely unappeased by this explanation. He continued to repeat: ‘This is extremely disagreeable, things like this ought not to happen; you know I hate it, and you’ll be lucky if I ever set foot here again.’ The implementation of this threat did not however appear to be imminent, for he went off angrily, but still advising that Léon should try to be free at a quarter to eleven, or if possible at half past ten. Jupien came back to find me, and went down with me into the street.

  ‘I wouldn’t like you to think ill of me, he said, this house does not bring in as much money as you might think, I have to let rooms to respectable people, though it’s true that if I had to rely on them and nothing else, I’d be throwing my money away. Here it’s the opposite of the Carmelites, it’s the vice that takes care of virtue.72 No, I took this house, or rather I got the manager whom you have seen to take it, simply as a way of helping the Baron and amusing him in his old age.’ Jupien was not talking only about scenes of sadism such as the ones I had witnessed, or to the actual practice of vice by the Baron. The latter now, even for conversation, for company, or for a game of cards, only enjoyed being with working-class people who exploited him. Low-life snobbery is no more difficult to understand than the other sort. And both had long since come together, the one alternating with the other, in M. de Charlus, who thought nobody smart enough for him to be socially acquainted with, nor enough of a hooligan to be known in any other circumstances. ‘I detest half-hearted works, he would say, bourgeois comedy is stilted, I have to have the princesses of classical tragedy or else broad farce. Phèdre or Les Saltimbanques,73 nothing in between.’ Finally, though, the balance between these two kinds of snobbery had been broken. Perhaps because of the tiredness of age, perhaps because sensuality had started to affect even his most commonplace relationships, the Baron now lived only among his ‘inferiors’, thus following involuntarily in the footsteps of those great ancestors of his, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the Prince d’Harcourt and the Duc de Berry, whom Saint-Simon describes spending their lives with their lackeys, who extracted vast sums from them, sharing their entertainments, to the point where people who had to visit them were embarrassed on behalf of these great noblemen when they discovered them familiarly ensconced with their servants, playing cards or drinking. ‘It is mainly, went on Jupien, to keep him out of trouble, because the Baron, you see, is just a great child. Even now, when he’s got everything he could wish for here, he still goes out looking for whatever wickedness he can find. And with his generosity, that could easily lead to all sorts of problems these days. There was a hotel bellboy, just the other day, who nearly died of fright because of all the money the Baron offered him to go home with him. (To his own house, of all the reckless things!) The boy, who anyway is interested only in women, was reassured when he realized what was wanted of him. Hearing all those promises of money, he had thought the Baron was a spy. He felt a lot more comfortable when he realized he was not being asked to hand over his country, just his body, which may not be any more moral, but is less dangerous, and certainly easier.’ Listening to Jupien, I said to myself: ‘What a pity it is that M. de Charlus is not a novelist or a poet! Not so much in order to describe what he sees, but because the position in which somebody like Charlus finds himself in relation to desire gives rise to scandals around him, forces him to take life seriously, prevents him from separating emotions and pleasure, and from getting stuck in an ironic and externalized view of things, by constantly reopening a stream of pain within him. Almost every time he propositions somebody, he suffers a humiliation, if not the risk of being sent to prison.’ It is not just children who learn from a clip on the ear, poets do too. If M. de Charlus had been a novelist, the house which Jupien had set up for him, by much diminishing the risks, at least (for there was always the danger of a police raid) the risks involved in an encounter in the street with a person of whose inclination the Baron could never be completely certain, would have been a disaster for him. But M. de Charlus was no more than a dilettante in matters of art, never dreamed of writing and had no talent for it.

  ‘Anyway, I may as well admit, went on Jupien, that I don’t really have any scruples about earning money this way. What actually goes on here, there’s no point in trying to hide the fact now, is what I like doing, it’s what I really enjoy. But I ask you, is there a law against getting paid for things you see no harm in? You’re better educated than I am, and you’ll probably tell me how Socrates believed he couldn’t accept money for his lessons. But these days philosophy teachers don’t think like that, nor do doctors or painters or playwrights or theatre managers. Don’t think that I come into contact only with riff-raff in this job. Obviously the manager of an establishment of this sort, like a great courtesan, receives only men, but he receives men eminent in all walks of life and who are generally, in their own way, among the most intelligent, the most sensitive and the pleasantest in their professions. The house could easily, I assure you, be turned into a school of wit and a news agency.’ I, however, was still preoccupied with the memory of the blows I had seen M. de Charlus receiving.

  And to tell the truth, when one knew M. de Charlus well, with his pride, his satiety with the pleasures of society, his whims which so easily became passions for men of the lowest class and the worst sort, one could easily understand how the possession of that huge fortune, which would have delighted a self-made man, had it fallen to him, by enabling him to marry his daughter to a duke and to invite royalty to his shooting parties, pleased M. de Charlus because it enabled him to control and enjoy one, perhaps several, establishments where there was a permanent supply of the young men with whom he got on best. Quite possibly his vice may not e
ven have been necessary for that. He was the heir to so many great noblemen, princes of the blood or dukes, of whom Saint-Simon tells us that they never associated with anyone ‘who had a name’ and spent their time playing cards with valets to whom they gave enormous sums of money!

  ‘But meanwhile, I said to Jupien, this house is something else entirely, it is worse than a madhouse, because here the madness of the inmates is staged, it is played out, it is all on display. It is complete pandemonium. I thought at first that, like the Caliph in the Arabian Nights, I had arrived just in time to rescue a man who was being beaten, and then I found a quite different tale from the Arabian Nights being enacted in front of me, the one where a woman who has been changed into a dog deliberately lets herself be beaten in order to regain her original shape.’ Jupien was clearly very disconcerted by my words, realizing that I had seen the Baron being beaten. He remained silent for a few moments while I hailed a passing cab; then suddenly, with that refreshing wit which had so often struck me in this self-educated man when, in greeting Françoise or me in the courtyard of our house, he would produce some elegant turn of phrase: ‘You’ve mentioned several tales from the Arabian Nights, he said. But I can think of another one, not unrelated to the title of a book which I believe I’ve seen at the Baron’s’ (he was alluding to a translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies74 which I had sent M. de Charlus). ‘If you were ever curious, one evening, to see, I shan’t say forty, but a dozen thieves, you have only to come here; to know whether I’m in, you have only to look up at that window, I’ll leave it open a crack so that the light shows, meaning that I’m there and you may come in; it’s my own private Sesame. Only Sesame, mind. Because if it’s lilies you’re looking for, I’d advise you to look elsewhere.’ And with a rather off-hand wave, for an aristocratic clientele and the piratical way he ran his band of young men had given him a certain familiarity of manner, he was on the point of taking leave of me, when the noise of an explosion, a bomb which had pre-empted the warning sirens, made him advise me to stay where I was for a moment. Soon the anti-aircraft barrage started up with such intensity that we realized that the German aeroplane’s position was very close, just above our heads.