In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  “We must try,” Brichot whispered in my ear, “to get the Baron on to his favourite topic. He’s prodigious.” Now on the one hand I was glad of an opportunity to try to obtain from M. de Charlus information as to the movements of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, information for which I had decided to leave Albertine that evening. On the other hand, I did not wish to leave the latter too long alone, not that she could (being uncertain of the moment of my return, not to mention that, at so late an hour, she could not have received a visitor or left the house herself without being noticed) make any nefarious use of my absence, but simply so that she might not find it too prolonged. And so I told Brichot and M. de Charlus that I must shortly leave them.

  “Come with us all the same,” said the Baron, whose social excitement was beginning to flag, but feeling that need to prolong, to spin out a conversation, which I had already observed in the Duchesse de Guermantes as well as in himself, and which, while peculiarly characteristic of their family, extends in a more general fashion to all those who, offering their minds no other fulfilment than talk, that is to say an imperfect fulfilment, remain unsatisfied even after hours in company and attach themselves more and more hungrily to their exhausted interlocutor, from whom they mistakenly expect a satiety which social pleasures are incapable of giving. “Come, won’t you,” he repeated. “This is the pleasant moment at a party, the moment when all the guests have gone, the hour of Doña Sol; let us hope that it will end less tragically.16 Unfortunately you’re in a hurry, in a hurry, no doubt, to go and do things which you would much better leave undone. People are always in a hurry, and leave at the moment when they ought to be arriving. We’re like Couture’s philosophers,17 this is the time to go over the events of the evening, to carry out what is called in military parlance a review of operations. We might ask Mme Verdurin to send us in a little supper to which we should take care not to invite her, and we might request Charlie—still Hernani—to play for us alone the sublime adagio. Isn’t it simply beautiful, that adagio? But where is the young violinist, I should like to congratulate him; this is the moment for tender words and embraces. Do admit, Brichot, that they played like gods, Morel especially. Did you notice the moment when that lock of hair came loose? Ah, my dear fellow, then you saw nothing at all. There was an F sharp which was enough to make Enesco, Capet and Thibaud die of jealousy. Calm though I am, I don’t mind telling you that at the sound of it I had such a lump in the throat I could scarcely control my tears. The whole room sat breathless. Brichot, my dear fellow,” cried the Baron, gripping the other’s arm and shaking it violently, “it was sublime. Only young Charlie preserved a stony immobility, you couldn’t even see him breathe, he looked like one of those objects of the inanimate world of which Theodore Rousseau speaks, which make us think but do not think themselves. And then all of a sudden,” cried M. de Charlus with a grandiloquent gesture as though miming a coup de théâtre, “then, the Forelock! And meanwhile, the graceful little quadrille of the allegro vivace. You know, that lock was a revelatory sign even for the most obtuse. The Princess of Taormina, deaf until then, for there are none so deaf as those that have ears and hear not, the Princess of Taormina, confronted by the message of the miraculous forelock, suddenly realised that it was music they were playing and not poker. Oh, that was indeed a solemn moment.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting you, Monsieur,” I said to M. de Charlus, to bring him to the subject in which I was interested, “you told me that the composer’s daughter was to be present. I should have been most interested to meet her. Are you certain she was expected?”

  “Oh, that I couldn’t say.”

  M. de Charlus thus complied, perhaps involuntarily, with that universal rule by which one withholds information from a jealous lover, whether with the absurd intention of proving oneself a “good pal”—as a point of honour, and even if one hates her—to the woman who has excited his jealousy, or out of malice towards her because one guesses that jealousy would only intensify his love, or from that need to be disagreeable to other people which consists in telling the truth to the rest of the world but concealing it from the jealous, ignorance increasing their torment, or so at least they suppose—and in order to cause people pain one is guided by what they themselves believe, wrongly perhaps, to be most painful.

  “You know,” he went on, “in this house they’re a trifle prone to exaggerate. They’re charming people, but still they do like to entice celebrities of one sort or another. But you’re not looking well, and you’ll catch cold in this damp room,” he said, pushing a chair towards me. “Since you haven’t been well, you must take care of yourself. Let me go and fetch your coat. No, don’t go for it yourself, you’ll lose your way and catch cold. How careless people are; you might be an infant in arms, you want an old nanny like me to look after you.” “Don’t worry, Baron, I’ll go,” said Brichot, and went off at once: not being precisely aware perhaps of the very warm affection that M. de Charlus had for me and of the charming lapses into simplicity and devotedness that alternated with his frenzied outbursts of arrogance and persecution mania, he was afraid lest the Baron, whom Mme Verdurin had entrusted like a prisoner to his vigilance, might simply be seeking, under the pretext of asking for my overcoat, to return to Morel, and thus upset the Mistress’s plan.

  Meanwhile Ski had sat down, uninvited, at the piano, and assuming—with a playful knitting of his brows, a distant gaze and a slight twist of his lips—what he imagined to be an artistic air, was insisting that Morel should play something by Bizet. “What, you don’t like it, that boyish side to Bizet’s music? Why, my dearr fellow,” he said, with that rolling of the r which was one of his peculiarities, “it’s rravishing.” Morel, who did not like Bizet, said so in exaggerated terms and (as he had the reputation in the little clan of being, though it seems incredible, a wit) Ski, pretending to take the violinist’s diatribes as paradoxes, burst out laughing. His laugh was not, like M. Verdurin’s, the choking fit of a smoker. Ski first of all assumed a subtle air, then let out, as though in spite of himself, a single note of laughter, like the first clang from a belfry, followed by a silence in which the subtle look seemed to be judiciously examining the comic quality of what was said; then a second peal of laughter shook the air, followed presently by a merry angelus.

  I expressed to M. de Charlus my regret that M, Brichot should have put himself out. “Not at all, he’s delighted. He’s very fond of you, everyone’s fond of you. Somebody was saying only the other day: ‘But we never see him now, he’s cut himself off.’ Besides, he’s such a good fellow, Brichot,” M. de Charlus went on, doubtless never suspecting, in view of the frank and affectionate manner in which the Professor of Moral Philosophy conversed with him, that he had no hesitation in pulling him to pieces behind his back. “He is a man of great merit, immensely learned, and his learning hasn’t shrivelled him up, hasn’t turned him into a pedantic bookworm like so many others, who smell of ink. He has retained a breadth of outlook, a tolerance, rare in his kind. Sometimes, when one sees how well he understands life, with what a natural grace he renders everyone his due, one wonders where a humble little Sorbonne professor, a former school-master, can have picked it all up. I’m astonished at it myself.”

  I was even more astonished to see the conversation of this Brichot, which the least discriminating of Mme de Guermantes’s guests would have found so dull and heavy, impressing the most critical of them all, M. de Charlus. Among the influences that had contributed towards this result were those, in other respects different, by virtue of which Swann had on the one hand so long enjoyed the company of the little clan, when he was in love with Odette, and on the other hand, after he married, seen an attraction in Mme Bontemps who, pretending to adore the Swanns, came constantly to call on the wife, revelled in the husband’s stories, and spoke of them with scorn. Like a writer who gives the palm for intelligence, not to the most intelligent man, but to the worldling who utters a bold and tolerant comment on the passion of a man for a woman, a comme
nt which makes the writer’s blue-stocking mistress agree with him in deciding that of all the people who come to her house the least stupid is after all this old beau who is experienced in matters of love, so M. de Charlus found Brichot more intelligent than the rest of his friends, Brichot who was not merely kind to Morel, but would cull from the Greek philosophers, the Latin poets, the oriental storytellers, appropriate texts which decorated the Baron’s propensity with a strange and charming florilegium. M. de Charlus had reached the age at which a Victor Hugo chooses to surround himself mainly with Vacqueries and Meurices.18 He preferred to all others those men who tolerated his outlook upon life. “I see a great deal of him,” he went on in a measured squeak, allowing no movement save of his lips to disturb the grave, powdered mask of his face, over which his ecclesiastical eyelids were deliberately lowered. “I attend his lectures: that Latin Quarter atmosphere refreshes me: there’s a studious, thoughtful breed of young bourgeois, more intelligent, better read than were, in a different milieu, my own contemporaries. It’s another world, which you know probably better than I do: they’re young bourgeois,” he said, detaching the last word to which he prefixed a string of bs, and emphasising it from a sort of elocutionary habit, itself corresponding to a taste for fine shades of meaning that was peculiar to him, but perhaps also from inability to resist the pleasure of giving me a flick of his insolence. This did not in any way diminish the great and affectionate pity that M. de Charlus inspired in me (after Mme Verdurin had revealed her plan in my hearing); it merely amused me, and, even in circumstances when I did not feel so kindly disposed towards him, would not have offended me. I derived from my grandmother such a want of self-importance as could easily make me seem lacking in dignity. Doubtless I was little aware of this, and by dint of having seen and heard, from my schooldays onwards, my most highly regarded companions refuse to tolerate an affront, refuse to overlook disloyal behaviour, I had come in time to exhibit in my speech and actions a second nature which was tolerably proud. It was indeed considered to be extremely proud, because, being not in the least timorous, I was easily provoked into duels, the moral prestige of which, however, I diminished by making little of them, which easily persuaded other people that they were absurd. But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. Thus it is that at times, if we read the latest masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it all those of our own reflexions which we have despised, joys and sorrows which we have repressed, a whole world of feelings we have scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them afresh suddenly teaches us. I had come to learn from my experience of life that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made fun of me, instead of getting angry. But this absence of self-importance and resentment, if I had so far ceased to express it as to have become almost entirely unaware that it existed in me, was nevertheless the primordial vital element in which I was steeped. Anger and spite came to me only in a wholly different manner, in fits of rage. What was more, the notion of justice, to the extent of a complete absence of moral sense, was unknown to me. I was in my heart of hearts entirely on the side of the weaker party, and of anyone who was in trouble. I had no opinion as to the proportion in which good and evil might be blended in the relations between Morel and M. de Charlus, but the thought of the sufferings that were in store for M. de Charlus was intolerable to me. I would have liked to warn him, but did not know how to do so.

  “The spectacle of that industrious little world is very pleasing to an old stick like myself. I do not know them,” he went on, raising his hand with a depreciatory air, in order not to appear to be boasting, to testify to his own purity and not to allow any suspicion to hover over that of the students—“but they are most polite, they often go so far as to keep a place for me, since I’m a very old gentleman. Yes indeed, my dear boy, do not protest, I’m past forty,” said the Baron, who was past sixty. “It’s a trifle stuffy in the hall in which Brichot lectures, but it’s always an interesting experience.”

  Although the Baron preferred to mingle with the scholarly young and indeed to be jostled by them, sometimes, to save him a long wait in the lecture-room, Brichot took him in by his own door. For all that Brichot was at home in the Sorbonne, at the moment when the beadle, loaded with his chains of office, stepped out before him, and the master so admired by his young students followed, he could not overcome a certain shyness, and much as he desired to profit by that moment in which he felt himself so important to display his affability towards Charlus, he was nevertheless slightly embarrassed; so that the beadle should allow him in, he said to him in an artificial tone and with a busy air: “Follow me, Baron, they’ll find a place for you,” then, without paying any further attention to him, to make his own entry he advanced briskly and alone down the aisle. On either side, a double hedge of young lecturers bowed to him; Brichot, anxious not to appear to be posing in front of these young men, in whose eyes he knew that he was a great pundit, bestowed on them countless winks, countless little nods of complicity, to which his desire to remain martial and thoroughly French gave the effect of a sort of cordial encouragement, the sursum corda of an old soldier saying: “We’ll fight them, God damn it!” Then the applause of the students broke out. Brichot sometimes extracted from this attendance by M. de Charlus at his lectures an opportunity for giving pleasure, almost for returning hospitality. He would say to some parent, or to one of his bourgeois friends: “If it would interest your wife or daughter, I may tell you that the Baron de Charlus, Prince d’Agrigente, a scion of the House of Condé, will be attending my lecture. For a young person, to have seen one of the last descendants of our aristocracy who preserves the type will be a memory to cherish. If they care to come, they will recognise him from the fact that he’ll be seated next to my rostrum. Besides, he’ll be the only one, a stout man, with white hair and black moustaches, wearing the military medal.” “Oh, thank you,” the father would say; and although his wife had other things to do, in order not to offend Brichot he would force her to attend the lecture, while the daughter, troubled by the heat and the crowd, nevertheless gazed intently at the descendant of Condé, surprised that he was not wearing a ruff and that he looked just like a man of the present day. He, meanwhile, had no eyes for her, but more than one student, who did not know who he was, would be astonished at his friendly glances and become self-conscious and stiff, and the Baron would depart full of dreams and melancholy.