In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  And the lovers whom Odette had had in succession (she had been with this, that and the other man, not one of whose names had ever been guessed by poor Swann, blinded by jealousy and by love, by turns weighing up the chances and believing in oaths, more affirmative than a contradiction which the guilty woman lets slip, a contradiction far more elusive and yet far more significant, of which the jealous lover might take advantage more logically than of the information which he falsely pretends to have received, in the hope of alarming his mistress), these lovers M. de Charlus began to enumerate with as absolute a certainty as if he had been reciting the list of the Kings of France. And indeed the jealous lover, like the contemporaries of a historical event, is too close, he knows nothing, and it is for strangers that the chronicle of adultery assumes the precision of history, and prolongs itself in lists which are a matter of indifference to them and become painful only to another jealous lover, such as I was, who cannot help comparing his own case with that which he hears spoken of and wonders whether the woman he suspects cannot boast an equally illustrious list. But he can never find out; it is a sort of universal conspiracy, a “blind man’s buff” in which everyone cruelly participates, and which consists, while his mistress flits from one to another, in holding over his eyes a bandage which he is perpetually trying to tear off without success, for everyone keeps him blindfold, poor wretch, the kind out of kindness, the cruel out of cruelty, the coarse-minded out of their love of coarse jokes, the well-bred out of politeness and good-breeding, and all alike respecting one of those conventions which are called principles.

  “But did Swann ever know that you had enjoyed her favours?”

  “What an idea! Confess such a thing to Charles! It’s enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Why, my dear fellow, he would have killed me on the spot, he was as jealous as a tiger. Any more than I ever confessed to Odette, not that she would have minded in the least, that … But you mustn’t make my tongue run away with me. And the joke of it is that it was she who fired a revolver at him, and nearly hit me. Oh! I used to have a fine time with that couple; and naturally it was I who was obliged to act as his second against d’Osmond, who never forgave me. D’Osmond had carried off Odette, and Swann, to console himself, had taken as his mistress, or make-believe mistress, Odette’s sister. But really you mustn’t start making me tell you Swann’s story, or we should be here all night—nobody knows more about it than I do. It was I who used to take Odette out when she didn’t want to see Charles. It was all the more awkward for me as I have a very close kinsman who bears the name Crécy, without of course having any sort of right to it, but still he was none too well pleased. For she went by the name of Odette de Crécy, as she perfectly well could, being merely separated from a Crécy whose wife she still was—an extremely authentic one, he, a most estimable gentleman out of whom she had drained his last farthing. But why should I have to tell you about this Crécy? I’ve seen you with him on the twister, you used to have him to dinner at Balbec. He must have needed it, poor fellow, for he lived on a tiny allowance that Swann made him, and I’m very much afraid that, since my friend’s death, that income must have stopped altogether. What I do not understand,” M. de Charlus said to me, “is that, since you used often to go to Charles’s, you didn’t ask me this evening to present you to the Queen of Naples. In fact I can see that you’re not interested in people as curiosities, and that always surprises me in someone who knew Swann, in whom that sort of interest was so highly developed that it’s impossible to say whether it was I who initiated him in these matters or he me. It surprises me as much as if I met a person who had known Whistler and remained ignorant of what is meant by taste. However, it was chiefly important for Morel to meet her. He was passionately keen to as well, for he’s nothing if not intelligent. It’s a nuisance that she’s gone. However, I shall effect the conjunction one of these days. It’s inevitable that he’ll get to know her. The only possible obstacle would be if she were to die in the night. Well, it’s to be hoped that that won’t happen.”

  All of a sudden Brichot, who was still suffering from the shock of the proportion “three out of ten” which M. de Charlus had revealed to him, and had continued to pursue the idea all this time, burst out with an abruptness which was reminiscent of an examining magistrate seeking to make a prisoner confess but which was in reality the result of the Professor’s desire to appear perspicacious and of the misgivings that he felt about launching so grave an accusation: “Isn’t Ski like that?” he inquired of M. de Charlus with a sombre air. He had chosen Ski in order to show off his alleged intuitive powers, telling himself that since there were only three innocents in every ten, he ran little risk of being mistaken if he named Ski, who seemed to him a trifle odd, suffered from insomnia, used scent, in short was not entirely normal.

  “But not in the least!” exclaimed the Baron with bitter, dogmatic, exasperated irony. “What you say is so wrong, so absurd, so wide of the mark! Ski is like that precisely to the people who know nothing about it. If he was, he wouldn’t look so like it, be it said without any intention to criticise, for he has a certain charm, indeed I find there’s something very engaging about him.”

  “But give us a few names, then,” Brichot persisted. M. de Charlus drew himself up with a haughty air.

  “Ah! my dear Sir, I, as you know, live in the world of the abstract; all this interests me only from a transcendental point of view,” he replied with the querulous touchiness peculiar to men of his kind, and the affectation of grandiloquence that characterised his conversation. “To me, you understand, it’s only general principles that are of any interest. I speak to you of this as I might of the law of gravity.” But these moments of irritable retraction in which the Baron sought to conceal his true life lasted but a short time compared with the hours of continual progression in which he allowed it to betray itself, flaunted it with an irritating complacency, the need to confide being stronger in him than the fear of disclosure. “What I meant to say,” he went on, “is that for one bad reputation that is unjustified there are hundreds of good ones which are no less so. Obviously, the number of those who don’t deserve their reputations varies according to whether you rely on what is said by their own kind or by others. And it is true that if the malevolence of the latter is limited by the extreme difficulty they would find in believing that a vice as horrible to them as robbery or murder can be practised by people whom they know to be sensitive and kind, the malevolence of the former is stimulated to excess by the desire to regard as—how shall I put it?—accessible, men who attract them, on the strength of information given them by people who have been led astray by a similar desire, in fact by the very aloofness with which they are generally regarded. I’ve heard a man who was somewhat ill thought of on account of these tastes say that he supposed that a certain society figure shared them. And his sole reason for believing it was that this society figure had been polite to him! All the more reason for optimism,” said the Baron artlessly, “in the computation of the number. But the true reason for the enormous disparity between the number calculated by the layman and the number calculated by the initiated arises from the mystery with which the latter surround their actions, in order to conceal them from the rest, who, lacking any means of knowing, would be literally stupefied if they were to learn merely a quarter of the truth.”

  “So in our day things are as they were among the Greeks,” said Brichot.

  “What do you mean, among the Greeks? Do you suppose that it hasn’t been going on ever since? Take the reign of Louis XIV. You have Monsieur, young Vermandois, Molière, Prince Louis of Baden, Brunswick, Charolais, Boufflers, the Great Condé, the Duc de Brissac.”

  “Stop a moment. I knew about Monsieur, I knew about Brissac from Saint-Simon, Vendôme of course, and many others as well. But that old pest Saint-Simon often refers to the Great Condé and Prince Louis of Baden and never mentions it.”

  “It seems rather deplorable, I must say, that I should have to teach a Professor of
the Sorbonne his history. But, my dear fellow, you’re as ignorant as a carp.”

  “You are harsh, Baron, but just. But wait a moment, now this will please you: I’ve just remembered a song of the period composed in macaronic verse about a storm in which the Great Condé was caught as he was going down the Rhone in the company of his friend the Marquis de La Moussaye. Condé says:

  Carus Amicus Mussaeus,

  Ah! Deus bonus, quod tempus! Landerirette,

  Imbre sumus perituri.

  And La Moussaye reassures him with:

  Securae sunt nostrae vitae,

  Sumus enim Sodomitae,

  Igne tantum perituri,

  Landeriri.”20

  “I take back what I said,” said Charlus in a shrill and mannered tone, “you are a well of learning. You’ll write it down for me, won’t you? I must preserve it in my family archives, since my great-great-great-grandmother was a sister of M. le Prince.”

  “Yes, but, Baron, with regard to Prince Louis of Baden I can think of nothing. However, I suppose that generally speaking the art of war …”

  “What nonsense! In that period alone you have Vendôme, Villars, Prince Eugene, the Prince de Conti, and if I were to tell you of all our heroes of Tonkin, of Morocco—and I’m thinking of the ones who are truly sublime, and pious, and ‘new generation’—you’d be amazed. Ah! I could teach them a thing or two, the people who conduct inquiries into the new generation, which has rejected the futile complications of its elders, M. Bourget tells us! I have a young friend out there, who’s highly spoken of, who has done great things … However, I’m not going to tell tales out of school; let’s get back to the seventeenth century. You know that Saint-Simon says of the Maréchal d’Huxelles—one among many: ‘Voluptuous in Grecian debaucheries which he made no attempt to conceal, he would hook young officers whom he trained to his purpose, not to mention stalwart young valets, and this openly, in the army and at Strasbourg.’ You’ve probably read Madame’s Letters: all his men called him ‘Putana.’ She’s fairly explicit about it.”

  “And she was in a good position to judge, with her husband.”

  “Such an interesting character, Madame,” said M. de Charlus. “One might take her as model for the definitive portrait, the lyrical synthesis of the ‘Wife of an Auntie.’ First of all, the masculine type; generally the wife of an Auntie is a man—that’s what makes it so easy for him to give her children. Then Madame doesn’t talk about Monsieur’s vices, but she does talk incessantly about the same vice in other men, writing as someone in the know and from that habit which makes us enjoy finding in other people’s families the same defects as afflict us in our own, in order to prove to ourselves that there’s nothing exceptional or degrading in them. I was saying that things have been much the same in every age. Nevertheless, our own is especially remarkable in that respect. And notwithstanding the instances I’ve borrowed from the seventeenth century, if my great ancestor François de La Rochefoucauld were alive in our day, he might say of it with even more justification than of his own—come, Brichot, help me out: ‘Vices are common to every age; but if certain persons whom everyone knows had appeared in the first centuries of our era, would anyone speak today of the prostitutions of Heliogabalus?’ ‘Whom everyone knows’ appeals to me immensely. I see that my sagacious kinsman understood the tricks of his most illustrious contemporaries as I understand those of my own. But men of that sort are not only far more numerous today. There’s also something special about them.”

  I could see that M. de Charlus was about to tell us in what fashion these habits had evolved. And not for a moment while he was speaking, or while Brichot was speaking, was the semi-conscious image of my home, where Albertine awaited me—an image associated with the intimate and caressing motif of Vinteuil—absent from my mind. I kept coming back to Albertine, just as I would be obliged in fact to go back to her presently as to a sort of ball and chain to which I was somehow attached, which prevented me from leaving Paris and which at this moment, while from the Verdurin salon I pictured my home, made me think of it not as an empty space, exalting to the personality if a little melancholy, but as being filled—alike in this to the hotel in Balbec on a certain evening—with that immutable presence, which lingered there for me and which I was sure to find there whenever I chose. The insistence with which M. de Charlus kept reverting to this topic—into which his mind, constantly exercised in the same direction, had indeed acquired a certain penetration—was in a rather complex way distinctly trying. He was as boring as a specialist who can see nothing outside his own subject, as irritating as an initiate who prides himself on the secrets which he possesses and is burning to divulge, as repellent as those people who, whenever their own weaknesses are in question, blossom and expatiate without noticing that they are giving offence, as obsessed as a maniac and as uncontrollably imprudent as a criminal. These characteristics, which at certain moments became as striking as those that stamp a madman or a felon, brought me, as it happened, a certain consolation. For, subjecting them to the necessary transposition in order to be able to draw from them deductions with regard to Albertine, and remembering her attitude towards Saint-Loup and towards me, I said to myself, painful as one of these memories and melancholy as the other was to me, I said to myself that they seemed to preclude the kind of deformation, so distinctive and pronounced, the kind of specialisation, inevitably exclusive it seemed, that emanated so powerfully from the conversation as from the person of M. de Charlus. But the latter, unfortunately, made haste to destroy these grounds for hope in the same way as he had furnished me with them, that is to say unwittingly.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m no longer a stripling, and I’ve already seen many things change round about me. I no longer recognise either society, in which all the barriers have been broken down, in which a mob devoid of elegance or decency dance the tango even in my own family, or fashion, or politics, or the arts, or religion, or anything. But I must admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality. Good heavens, in my day, leaving aside the men who loathed women, and those who, caring only for women, did the other thing merely with an eye to profit, homosexuals were sound family men and never kept mistresses except as a cover. Had I had a daughter to give away, it’s among them that I should have looked for my son-in-law if I’d wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be unhappy. Alas! things have changed. Nowadays they’re also recruited from among the most rabid womanisers. I thought I had a certain flair, and that when I said to myself: ‘Certainly not,’ I couldn’t have been mistaken. Well, now I give up. One of my friends who is well-known for it had a coachman whom my sister-in-law Oriane found for him, a lad from Combray who had dabbled in all sorts of trades but particularly that of chasing skirts, and who, I would have sworn, was as hostile as possible to that sort of thing. He broke his mistress’s heart by deceiving her with two women whom he adored, not to mention the others, an actress and a barmaid. My cousin the Prince de Guermantes, who has the irritating mind of people who are too ready to believe anything, said to me one day: ‘But why in the world doesn’t X—sleep with his coachman? It might give pleasure to Théodore’ (which is the coachman’s name) ‘and he may even be rather hurt that his master doesn’t make advances to him.’ I couldn’t help telling Gilbert to hold his tongue; I was irritated by that would-be perspicacity which, when exercised indiscriminately, is a want of perspicacity, and also by the blatant guile of my cousin who would have liked X—to test the ground so that he himself could follow if the going was good.”

  “Then the Prince de Guermantes has those tastes too?” asked Brichot with a mixture of astonishment and dismay.

  “Good lord,” replied M. de Charlus, highly delighted, “it’s so notorious that I don’t think I’m being guilty of an indiscretion if I tell you that he does. Well, the following year I went to Balbec, where I heard from a sailor who used to take me out fishing occasionally that my Theodore, whose sister, I may mention, is the maid of a f
riend of Mme Verdurin, Baroness Putbus, used to come down to the harbour to pick up this or that sailor, with the most infernal cheek, to go for a boat-trip ‘with extras.’”

  It was now my turn to inquire whether the coachman’s employer, whom I had identified as the gentleman who at Balbec used to play cards all day long with his mistress, was like the Prince de Guermantes.

  “Why, of course, everyone knows. He doesn’t even make any attempt to conceal it.”

  “But he had his mistress there with him.”

  “Well, and what difference does that make? How innocent these children are,” he said to me in a fatherly tone, little suspecting the grief that I extracted from his words when I thought of Albertine. “She’s charming, his mistress.”

  “So then his three friends are like himself?”

  “Not at all,” he cried, stopping his ears as though, in playing some instrument, I had struck a wrong note.

  “Now he’s gone to the other extreme. So a man no longer has the right to have friends? Ah! youth; it gets everything wrong. We shall have to begin your education over again, my boy. Now,” he went on, “I admit that this case—and I know of many others—however open a mind I may try to keep for every form of effrontery, does embarrass me. I may be very old-fashioned, but I fail to understand,” he said in the tone of an old Gallican speaking of certain forms of Ultramontanism, of a liberal royalist speaking of the Action Française or of a disciple of Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists. “I don’t condemn these innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t. If they’re so passionately fond of women, why, and especially in this working-class world where it’s frowned upon, where they conceal it from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? It’s because it represents something else to them. What?”