In an instant the streets became completely black. Just occasionally an enemy aeroplane flying very low would light up the spot where it wanted to drop a bomb. I was no longer sure of my way. I thought about the day when, on the way to La Raspelière, I had encountered an aeroplane and my horse had reared in terror as if confronted by a god. I was thinking that this time the encounter would be different and that the god of evil would kill me. I increased my pace to get away, like a traveller pursued by a tidal bore, going round and round dark squares from which I could find no way out. Finally the flames from a burning building lit up the surrounding area and I was able to find my way again, while the guns continued to crackle all the time. But my thoughts had turned to another subject. I was thinking about Jupien’s house, now perhaps reduced to ashes, for a bomb had fallen very near me just after I had left it, the house on which M. de Charlus might prophetically have written ‘Sodoma’ as had, with no less prescience or perhaps as the volcano was starting to erupt and the catastrophe had begun, the unknown inhabitant of Pompeii. But what did sirens or Gothas matter to men who had come looking for pleasure? The social framework or the natural setting that surrounds our lovemaking is something we hardly think about. The storm rages out at sea, the ship pitches and rolls, wind-torn sheets of rain fall from the sky, and, as we take steps to prevent it from discommoding us, we give perhaps a second’s attention to this vast scene in which we are so insignificant, we and the body we are trying to get close to. The siren with its warning of bombs no more disturbed Jupien’s visitors than an iceberg would have done. In fact the threat of physical danger freed them from the fear by which they had been morbidly persecuted for so long. For it is wrong to think that the scale of fear corresponds to the scale of the danger that inspires it. One may be afraid of not sleeping and quite unafraid of a serious duel, afraid of a rat, but not of a lion. But for these few hours the police would be concerned with nothing beyond such trivial matters as the lives of the city’s inhabitants, and would be posing no threat to their reputations. Several, rather than rediscovering their moral freedom, were tempted by the darkness which had suddenly fallen on the streets. Some of these Pompeians on whom the sky was already raining fire descended into the passages of the Métro, dark as catacombs. They knew that they would not be the only ones there. And darkness, enveloping everything like a new element, has the effect, irresistibly tempting to some, of suppressing the first stage of pleasure and allowing us immediate access to a realm of caresses which normally we reach only after some time. Whether the object of desire be a woman or a man, even supposing the initial approach easy, and the eternal badinage of the drawing-room (at least in daylight) unnecessary, on an evening (even in the most dimly lighted street) there is at least a preamble in which the eyes alone enjoy the delights in store, and fear of passers-by, even of the creature in question, prevents us from doing more than looking and speaking. In the dark, the whole of this old-fashioned routine is removed, and hands, lips and bodies can go straight to work. There is still the excuse of darkness and the mistakes it engenders if we are not well received. But if we are, the immediate response of a body which does not pull away, which presses closer, gives us an idea of the woman (or the man) whom we are silently addressing as being unprejudiced, dissolute, an idea which adds extra spice to the pleasure of being able to bite straight into the fruit without coveting it with our eyes and without asking permission. Meanwhile the darkness continues. Plunged into this new element, the men from Jupien’s imagined themselves explorers, witnesses of a natural phenomenon like a tidal wave or an eclipse, and enjoying, instead of a carefully prepared, sedentary pleasure, that of a chance encounter in the unknown, celebrated, to the volcanic rumbling of the bombs, as it were in the bowels of a Pompeian house of ill fame, secret rites in the dark shadows of the catacombs.
In one large room were gathered a number of men who had not wanted to leave. They did not know one another, but one could see none the less that they came from more or less the same sort of world, rich and aristocratic. Each man’s appearance had something repugnant about it, which must have reflected their lack of resistance to degrading pleasures. One, a huge man, had a face covered with red blotches like a drunkard. I learned, though, that he had not been one to begin with, and used simply to get his pleasure by making young men drink a lot. But terrified at the idea of being called up (although he certainly looked over fifty), and being rather fat, he had started to drink continuously in an attempt to increase his weight to more than a hundred kilos, the point above which one was rejected for service. And now, this calculated behaviour having become a passion, wherever he was left alone, he could always be found in a wine shop. But as soon as he spoke I saw that, ordinary though his intelligence may have been, he was a man of some knowledge, education and culture. Another man, of equally high social standing but very young and of great physical distinction, also came in. In his case there were as yet, it is true, no external marks of vice but, more disturbingly, there were internal ones. Very tall, with a charming face, his manner of speaking revealed an intelligence of quite a different order from that of his alcoholic neighbour, one that could without exaggeration be described as really remarkable. But everything he said was accompanied by an expression more appropriate to some quite different remark. As if, though possessing the whole wealth of human facial expressions, he lived in another world, he put on these expressions in the wrong order, seeming to shed smiles and glances randomly without any relation to the intended subject matter. I hope for his sake, if he is still alive, as he must be, that he was the victim of a temporary intoxication rather than any lasting disorder. If one had asked all these men for their visiting cards one would probably have been surprised to see that they belonged to the upper class of society. But some vice or other, as well as the greatest of all vices, the lack of will-power that prevented them from resisting any of them, brought them all together here, admittedly in isolated rooms, but, as I was told, every night, so that while their names were known to society hostesses, these had gradually lost sight of their faces, and never any longer had an opportunity to receive them as visitors. They continued to receive invitations but habit always brought them back to the composite site of depravity. They hardly made any secret of it, unlike the young bellboys and working men, etc., who provided their pleasure. And apart from all the other plausible reasons, there is one simple explanation for that. For an industrial worker or a man in service to go there would be like an apparently honest woman going into a brothel. The few who did admit to having gone there would defend themselves by saying that they had never been back, and Jupien himself, lying to protect their reputations or to avoid competition, would insist: ‘Oh no, he doesn’t come to my place, he’d never come there.’ For men of standing it is not so serious, particularly since the other people in their circles who do not go there do not know anything about it and do not concern themselves with how you live. In an aircraft company, on the other hand, if certain of the fitters have been there, their mates who have been spying on them would never dream of going there, for fear of being observed themselves.
Approaching my house, I pondered the speed with which conscience ceases to play a part in our habits, which it leaves to their own development without having anything more to do with them, and consequently how astonished we would be if we observed simply from the outside, while supposing that they involve the whole person, the actions of men whose moral or intellectual qualities may be developing independently in a completely different direction. It was clearly a weakness in their education, or an absence of any education, combined with a fondness for earning money, if not in the least painful (for there must have been plenty of jobs that in the long run were easier, but then does not an invalid, with his fads, sacrifices and medicines, construct a far more painful existence for himself than would be required by the often mild illness which he thinks his measures are countering?), at least in the least laborious way possible, which had led these ‘young people’ almost inn
ocently and for indifferent wages to do things which gave them no pleasure and must to begin with have inspired in them a deep disgust. On this basis one might have thought them fundamentally bad, but not only were they wonderful soldiers during the war, true ‘heroes’, they had just as often been kind and generous in civilian life, even model citizens. They had long ceased to pay any heed to the moral or immoral implications of the life they led, because it was the life that everybody around them led. Thus, when we study certain periods of ancient history, we are amazed to find men or women, good in themselves, taking part without scruple in mass assassinations, human sacrifices, which probably seemed entirely natural to them.
The Pompeian pictures in Jupien’s house, moreover, were well suited, in so far as they recalled the final period of the French Revolution, to the age, rather similar to the Directory, which was about to begin. Already, in anticipation of peace, under the concealment of darkness so as not to infringe the police regulations too openly, new dances were being evolved and danced frantically all night long. At the same time, some artistic opinions less anti-German than those of the first years of the war were gaining currency, enabling suffocated minds to breathe again, but before daring to advance them one needed a certificate of civic responsibility. A professor would write a noteworthy book on Schiller and it would be reviewed in the newspapers. But before saying anything else about the book’s author, they would register the fact, as if it were an imprimatur, that he had been at the Marne, or Verdun, that he had been mentioned five times in despatches, or that he had lost two sons. Only then would they praise the lucidity and profundity of his book on Schiller, whom it was now acceptable to call great as long as, instead of ‘this great German’, one said ‘this great Boche’. That was the password for the article, after which it was free to proceed.
Our own epoch, to anybody who reads its history in two thousand years’ time, will probably seem just as guilty of immersing certain pure and tender consciences in settings which then will look monstrously pernicious, but to which they managed to adapt themselves. I knew few men, for example, indeed I may even say I knew nobody, who in terms of intelligence and sensibility was as gifted as Jupien; for that wonderful ‘accumulated wisdom’ which provided the intellectual framework of his remarks was not the product of the school education or university training which might have made him a truly exceptional man, while so many fashionable young men derive no profit from it. It was simply his innate sense, his natural good taste, which had enabled him, from occasional reading, chosen at random, without guidance, in odd moments, to construct that precise and elegant way of speaking, in which all the symmetry of the language was revealed in its full beauty. The profession he followed, however, might justifiably be regarded, admittedly as one of the most lucrative, but as the worst there is. As for M. de Charlus, whatever the scorn his aristocratic pride may have given him for common gossip, how was it that some feeling of personal dignity and self-respect had not forced him to refuse his sensuality certain satisfactions for which the only excuse would seem to be complete insanity? But in him, as in Jupien, the habitual separation between morality and a whole order of actions (something which must also occur in a number of public offices, sometimes in that of a judge, or perhaps that of a statesman, and in plenty of others too) must have been established for so long that habit (no longer ever asking moral sentiment for its opinion) had grown stronger with every day that passed, until the day when this consenting Prometheus had himself nailed by Force to the rock of pure matter.
No doubt, as I sensed, this constituted a new stage in the sickness of M. de Charlus, which, for as long as I had been aware of it, judging by the different phases I had observed, had pursued its evolution with increasing rapidity. The poor Baron could not now be far away from the end, from death, if indeed that were not preceded, as Mme Verdurin predicted and desired, by a period of imprisonment which, at his age, could only hasten the final outcome. Yet perhaps my phrase ‘rock of pure matter’ is not exactly right. It is possible that in this pure matter there still subsisted a small quantity of mind. This madman was quite aware, despite everything, that he was prey to a kind of madness and, for those few moments, was just playing a part, since he knew perfectly well that the man beating him was no more of a villain than the small boy who draws the short straw in a game of soldiers and has to play the ‘Prussian’, and whom everyone chases in a fervour of genuine patriotism and mock hatred. Prey to a kind of madness, however, into which a little of M. de Charlus’s personality also entered. Even in these aberrations, human nature (as it does in our love affairs or in our travels) betrays its need for belief by its demands for truth. Françoise, if I spoke to her about a church in Milan – a town to which she would probably never go – or the cathedral at Reims – or even just the one at Arras! – which she would not be able to see since it had been more or less destroyed, would express her envy of the rich who could afford to go and look at such treasures, and exclaim, with nostalgic regret: ‘Ah! how beautiful that must have been!’ even though she, who had lived in Paris for so many years, had never had the curiosity to go and look at Notre-Dame. The reason for this, though, was because Notre-Dame was so much a part of Paris, of the town in which the everyday life of Françoise took place, and in which it was difficult for our old servant – as it would have been for me if the study of architecture had not in certain respects corrected in me the instincts of Combray – to situate the objects of her dreams. In the people we love there is, immanent within them, a dream which we cannot always perceive but which haunts us. It was my belief in Bergotte and in Swann which had made me love Gilberte, my belief in Gilbert the Bad75 which had made me love Mme de Guermantes. And what a great expanse of sea had been hidden away in that most painful, jealous and seemingly most individual love of mine, for Albertine! Besides, precisely because of that individuality one is desperately in quest of, our love of specific persons is already something of an aberration. (And are not the diseases of the body themselves, at least those that have anything to do with the nervous system, instances of special tastes or special terrors contracted by our organs or our joints, which thus find that they have a horror of some climates as stubborn and as inexplicable as the fondness some men show, for example, for women who wear pince-nez, or for women who ride? Who can ever say what enduring and unconscious dream lies beneath the desire that is re-awakened by every glimpse of a woman on horseback, a dream as unconscious and mysterious as is, for example, to someone who has suffered all his life from severe asthma, the influence of a certain town, in appearance just like any other town, where for the first time he is able to breathe easily?)
Anyway, aberrations are like love affairs in which pathological defects have spread everywhere, have completely taken over. The presence of love can still be recognized, even in the maddest of them. The insistence of M. de Charlus on having his hands and feet fastened by shackles of proven strength, on begging for the rod of justice,76 and, so Jupien told me, for other ferocious props which, even from sailors, were extremely difficult to obtain – they having been used for the infliction of punishments which have been abolished everywhere, even where discipline is at its most rigorous, on board ship – had its roots in M. de Charlus’s whole dream of virility, attested if necessary by brutal acts, and in all that inner illumination, invisible to us, but glimpses of which he projected through these acts, of penal crosses and feudal tortures, which adorned his medieval imagination. It was the same sentiment that made him, each time he arrived, say to Jupien: ‘I hope there will not be an alert this evening, for I can just see myself consumed by this fire from heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom.’ And he would pretend to be afraid of the Gothas, not because he actually felt the least shadow of fear, but in order to have the pretext, as soon as the sirens started up, of rushing off into the shelters of the Métro, where he hoped for pleasure from casual contacts in the darkness, with vague dreams of medieval dungeons and oubliettes. In short, his desire to be chained and beaten betra
yed, in its ugliness, a dream just as poetic as other men’s desire to go to Venice or to keep a mistress. And M. de Charlus clung so tenaciously to the illusion of reality created by his dream that Jupien had to sell the wooden bed that used to be in Room 43 and replace it with an iron bed that was better suited to the chains.
The all-clear finally sounded as I was nearing my house. A boy in the street was adding his voice to the noise of the fire-engines. I met Françoise coming up from the cellar with the butler. She thought that I had been killed. She told me that Saint-Loup had dropped in, with apologies, to see whether, during the visit he had paid me that morning, he might have dropped his croix de guerre. He had only just realized that he had lost it and, before he rejoined his regiment the next morning, had wanted to see whether by any chance it was at my house. He had searched everywhere with Françoise but had found nothing. Françoise thought he must have lost it before coming to visit me, because, she said, she rather thought, in fact she could have sworn, that he had not had it when she saw him. On which point she was mistaken. So much for the value of evidence and memory! But in any case, it was of no great importance. Saint-Loup was as highly esteemed by his officers as he was loved by his men, and the matter could easily be sorted out.
In Search of Lost Time Page 19