In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  It was not merely the malice, the rancour of the once poor boy against the master who has enriched him and has moreover (this was in keeping with the character and still more with the vocabulary of M. de Charlus) made him feel the difference of their positions, that had made Charlie turn to Saint-Loup in order to aggravate the Baron’s sufferings. He may also have had an eye to his own profit. I had the impression that Robert must be giving him a great deal of money. After an evening party at which I had met Robert before I went down to Combray—and where the manner in which he flaunted himself by the side of a lady of fashion who was reputed to be his mistress, glued to her, never leaving her for a moment, enveloped publicly in the folds of her skirt, reminded me, but with something more hectic and jumpy about it, of a sort of involuntary repetition of an ancestral gesture which I had had an opportunity of observing in M. de Charlus, when he appeared to be wrapped in the finery of Mme Mole or some other lady, the banner of a gynophile cause which was not his own but which, without having any right to do so, he loved to sport thus, whether because he found it useful as a protection or aesthetically charming—I had been struck, as we came away, by the discovery that this young man, so generous when he was far less rich, had become so careful. That a man clings only to what he possesses, and that he who used to scatter money when he so rarely had any now hoards that with which he is amply supplied, is no doubt a common enough phenomenon, and yet in this instance it seemed to me to have assumed a more particular form. Saint-Loup refused to take a cab, and I saw that he had kept a tramway transfer-ticket. No doubt in so doing Saint-Loup was exercising, for different ends, talents which he had acquired in the course of his liaison with Rachel. A young man who has lived for years with a woman is not as inexperienced as the novice for whom the woman he marries is the first. One had only to see, on the rare occasions when Robert took his wife out to a restaurant, the adroit and considerate way he looked after her, his skill and poise in ordering dinner and giving instructions to waiters, the care with which he smoothed Gilberte’s sleeves before she put on her jacket, to realise that he had been a woman’s lover for a long time before being this one’s husband. Similarly, having had to enter into the minutest details of Rachel’s domestic economy, partly because she herself was useless as a housekeeper, and later because his jealousy made him determined to keep a firm control over her domestic staff, he was able, in the administration of his wife’s property and the management of their household, to go on playing this skilful and competent role which Gilberte, perhaps, might have been unable to fulfil and which she gladly relinquished to him. But no doubt he did so principally in order to be able to give Charlie the benefit of his candle-end economies, maintaining him in affluence without Gilberte’s either noticing it or suffering from it—and perhaps even assuming the violinist to be a spendthrift “like all artists” (Charlie styled himself thus without conviction and without conceit, in order to excuse himself for not answering letters and for a mass of other defects which he believed to form part of the undisputed psychology of the artist). Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it. If, therefore, Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me pain. And yet I realised that the pain I felt would have been as acute if Robert had been a bachelor. In anyone else, his conduct would have left me indifferent. But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could these tastes have come to birth in a young man who had loved women so passionately that I had seen him brought to a state of almost suicidal despair because “Rachel when from the Lord” had threatened to leave him? Had the resemblance between Charlie and Rachel—invisible to me—been the plank which had enabled Robert to pass from his father’s tastes to those of his uncle, in order to complete the physiological evolution which even in the latter had occurred fairly late? At times, however, Aimé’s words came back to my mind to make me uneasy; I remembered Robert that year at Balbec; he had had a trick, when he spoke to the lift-boy, of not paying any attention to him which strongly resembled M. de Charlus’s manner when he addressed certain men. But Robert might easily have derived this from M. de Charlus, from a certain hauteur and a certain physical posture peculiar to the Guermantes family, without for a moment sharing the Baron’s heterodox tastes. For instance, the Duc de Guermantes, who was wholly innocent of such tastes, had the same nervous trick as M. de Charlus of turning his wrist, as though he were straightening a lace cuff round it, and also in his voice certain shrill and affected intonations, mannerisms to all of which, in the case of M. de Charlus, one might have been tempted to ascribe another meaning, to which he had given another meaning himself, the individual expressing his distinctive characteristics by means of impersonal and atavistic traits which are perhaps simply age-old characteristics ingrained in his gestures and voice. On this latter assumption, which borders upon natural history, it would not be M. de Charlus whom one described as a Guermantes affected with a blemish and expressing it to a certain extent by means of traits peculiar to the Guermantes stock, but the Duc de Guermantes who, in a perverted family, would be the exception whom the hereditary disease has so effectively spared that the external stigmata it has left upon him have lost all meaning. I remembered that on the day when I had seen Saint-Loup for the first time at Balbec, so fair-complexioned, fashioned of so rare and precious a substance, his monocle fluttering in front of him, I had found in him an effeminate air which was certainly not the effect of what I had now learned about him, but sprang rather from the grace peculiar to the Guermantes, from the fineness of that Dresden china in which the Duchess too was moulded. I recalled his affection for myself, his tender, sentimental way of expressing it, and told myself that this too, which might have deceived anyone else, meant at the time something quite different, indeed the direct opposite of what I had just learned about him. But when did the change date from? If from the year of my return to Balbec, how was it that he had never once come to see the lift-boy, had never once mentioned him to me? And as for the first year, how could he have paid any attention to the boy, passionately enamoured as he then was of Rachel? That first year, I had found Saint-Loup unusual, as was every true Guermantes. Now he was even odder than I had supposed. But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, are such that we no longer have the means, we have missed the chance, of conveying them to our inmost soul; its communications with the real are blocked and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late. Besides, upon any consideration, this discovery distressed me too deeply for me to be able to appreciate it intellectually. Of course, after what M. de Charlus had told me in Mme Verdurin’s house in Paris, I no longer doubted that Robert’s case was that of any number of respectable people, to be found even among the best and most intelligent of men. To learn this of anyone else would not have affected me, of anyone in the world except Robert. The doubt that Aimé’s words had left in my mind tarnished all our friendship at Balbec and Doncières, and although I did not believe in friendship, or that I had ever felt any real friendship for Robert, when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears.

  NOTES · ADDENDA · SYNOPSIS

  Notes

  1 From Racine’s Esther, Act I, Scene 3.

  2 Famous Siamese twins who appeared in music halls and had a succès de curiosité at the 1900 World’s Fair.

  3 These words appear neither in the libretto of Pelleas et Mélisande nor in any of Rameau’s operas, but in Gluck’s Armide in this form: “Ah, si la liberié
me doit être ravie, est-ce à toi d’être mon vainqueur!” Similarly, one or two of the phrases attributed to Arkel and Golaud in the next paragraph are a little fanciful: Proust invariably quoted from memory.

  4 Maquereau=pimp.

  5 Clarification of this expression can be found in an essay of Proust’s entitled En mémoire des églises assassinées, in which, during a drive through Normandy, he compares his chauffeur with his steering-wheel to the statues of apostles and martyrs in mediaeval cathedrals holding symbolic objects representing the arts which they practised in their lifetimes or the instruments of their martyrdom—in this case a stylised wheel: a circle enclosing a cross. Cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 580.

  6 Comic opera by Adolphe Adam (1836).

  7 Grue means “crane” (in both the ornithological and the mechanical sense) and also, by analogy, “prostitute.” Faire le pied de grue=“to kick one’s heels,” “to stand around for a long time”—like a crane standing on one leg, or a street-walker in search of custom. Morel’s use of the term is grammatically nonsensical.

  8 Claude-Philibert Berthelot, Baron de Rambuteau: politician and administrator, préfet of the Seine in 1833, introduced public urinals with individual compartments.

  9 Famous nineteenth-century tragedian.

  10 This passage was obviously written before Proust composed his account of Bergotte’s death and inserted it at an earlier point in this volume.

  11 Mme Pipelet is the concierge in Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. Mme Gibout and Mme Prudhomme are characters in Henri Monnier’s Scenes populaires and Les Mémoires de Joseph Prudhomme.

  12 Famous Parisian caterers.

  13 Cottard will nevertheless reappear—indeed at this same soiree (see p. 371)—to die during the Great War, in Time Regained.

  14 The French has a play on the words allegro and allègre.

  15 Mme Verdurin uses here the word tapette, no doubt unaware of its popular meaning (see Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, note 18 to p. 594).

  16 The heroine of Victor Hugo’s Hernani: the reference is to the final scene, which ends with Hernani’s enforced suicide after the nuptial feast.

  17 Thomas Couture, nineteenth-century French painter. The allusion is to his picture, Les Romains de la Decadence, shown in the Salon of 1847.

  18 Auguste Vacquerie and Paul Meurice were two devoted disciples of Victor Hugo.

  19 Mme de Villeparisis will reappear, extremely aged but very much alive, in The Fugitive.

  20 To Condé’s lament: “My dear friend La Moussaye,/Ah, God, What weather!/We are going to perish in the flood,” La Moussaye replies: “Our lives are safe,/For we are Sodomites,/We have to die by fire.” There is a marginal note by Proust in the manuscript at this point: “Stress the fact that homosexuality has never precluded bravery, from Caesar to Kitchener.”

  21 The blancs d’Espagne were a group of extreme legitimists who held that the true heirs to the French throne were the Spanish Bourbons who were descended in direct line from Louis XIV through his grandson Philip V of Spain.

  22 Slang for anus. What Albertine had been about to say was “me faire casser le pot,” an obscene slang expression meaning to have anal intercourse (passive).

  23 There is a gap in Proust’s manuscript at this point. For an illustration of the narrator’s point, see Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 315.

  24 Racine’s Esther again.

  25 “Notre mal ne vaut pas un seul de ses regards”—the line is from one of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Helene (cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 738).

  26 Albert, Duc de Broglie, the grandson of Mme de Staël, was exiled by Napoleon I and retired to Chaumont-sur-Loire—whence the association of ideas.

  27 Le chancelier Pasquier, friend of Mme de Boigne, who ran a famous salon under the July Monarchy and whose Mémoires (published in 1907) suggested those of Mme de Beausergent which the narrator’s grandmother loved to read. The Duc de Noailles was a friend and patron of Sainte-Beuve. Mme d’Arbouville was the latter’s mistress.

  28 Mme de Guermantes has told this story before, at the expense of the Prince de Leon (see p. 38).

  29 “The dead are sleeping peacefully” comes from Musset’s La Nuit d’Octobre, “You will make them weep … All those urchins” from Sully-Prudhomme’s Aux Tuileries, and “The very first night” from Charles Cros’s Nocturne.

  30 The reference is to Phèdre, Act II, Scene 5, in which Phèdre declares her love for Hippolyte in cryptic terms: she loves him as she loved Thésée, “non point tel que l’ont vu les Enfers … mais fidèle, mais fier, et mëme un peu farouche.”

  31 Roland Garros: famous French aviator.

  32 An illegitimate daughter of the Duc de Berry, son of Charles X, married a Lucinge-Faucigny.

  33 Sous-maîtresse: euphemism for a brothel-keeper or “madam.”

  34 This passage is a little confusing. Proust never got round to marrying Gilberte to the Duc de Guermantes. In Time Regained she reappears as Saint-Loup’s widow while Oriane is still alive and married to the aged Duke.

  35 Agamemnon in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène.

  36 This signature can be explained by the fact that Charles Morel was Bobby Santois in Proust’s original manuscript.

  37 The widowed Gilberte, in Time Regained, appears to be the mother of an only daughter.

  Addenda

  *There is a brief passage inserted here in Proust’s manuscript which interrupts the thread of the narrative:

  Lying is a very small matter; we live in the midst of it without giving it more than a smile, we practise it without meaning to harm anyone, but jealousy suffers because of it and sees more in it than it conceals (often one’s mistress refuses to spend the evening with one and goes to the theatre simply to prevent us from seeing that she is not looking her best), just as it often remains blind to what the truth conceals. But it can elicit nothing, for women who swear that they are not lying would refuse even with a knife at their throats to confess their true character.

  *The Pléiade editors (references in these Addenda are to the 1954 edition) have relegated to their “Notes and Variants” the following isolated passage which the original editors inserted, somewhat arbitrarily, after “for so long.”

  The curious thing is that, a few days before this quarrel with Albertine, I had already had one with her in Andrée’s presence. Now Andrée, in giving Albertine good advice, always appeared to be insinuating bad. “Come, don’t talk like that, hold your tongue,” she said, as though she were at the peak of happiness. Her face assumed the dry raspberry hue of those pious housekeepers who get all the servants sacked one by one. While I was heaping unjustified reproaches upon Albertine, Andrée looked as though she were sucking a lump of barley sugar with keen enjoyment. At length she was unable to restrain an affectionate laugh. “Come with me, Titine. You know I’m your dear little sister.”

  I was not merely exasperated by this rather sickly exhibition; I wondered whether Andrée really felt the affection for Albertine that she pretended to feel. Seeing that Albertine, who knew Andrée far better than I did, always shrugged her shoulders when I asked her whether she was quite certain of Andrée’s affection, and always answered that nobody in the world cared for her more, I am convinced even now that Andrée’s affection was sincere. Possibly, in her wealthy but provincial family, one might find the equivalent in some of the shops in the Cathedral square, where certain sweetmeats are declared to be “the best going.” But I know that, for my part, even if I had invariably come to the opposite conclusion, I had so strong an impression that Andrée was trying to rap Albertine over the knuckles that my mistress at once regained my affection and my anger subsided.

  *In the place of this passage, the manuscript contains the following:

  “What? You wouldn’t kill yourself after all?” she said with a laugh.

  “No, but it would be the greatest sorrow that I could possibly imagine.” And since, although living exclusively with me, and having become extremely intel
ligent, she none the less remained mysteriously in tune with the atmosphere of the world outside—as the roses in her bedroom flowered again in the spring—and followed as though by a pre-established accord (for she spoke to almost no one) the charmingly idiotic fashions of feminine speech, she said to me: “Is it really true, that great big fib?” And indeed she must, if not love me more than I loved her, at least infer from my niceness to her that my tenderness was deeper than it was in reality, for she added: “You’re very sweet. I don’t doubt it at all, I know you’re fond of me.” And she went on: “Ah, well, perhaps it’s my destiny to die in a riding accident. I’ve often had a presentiment of it, but I don’t care a fig. I accept whatever fate has in store for me.”