On the morning following the day when Robert told me these things about this expected uncle, who had eventually failed to materialize, I was walking back to the hotel when, right in front of the Casino, I had a sudden feeling of being looked at by someone at quite close quarters. I glanced round and saw a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a jet black moustache, who stood there nervously flicking a cane against the leg of his trousers and staring at me with eyes dilated by the strain of attention. At times, they seemed shot through with intense darting glances of a sort which, when directed towards a total stranger, can only ever be seen from a man whose mind is visited by thoughts that would never occur to anyone else, a madman, say, or a spy. He flashed a final look at me, like the parting shot from one who turns to run, daring, cautious, swift and searching; then, having gazed all about, with a sudden air of idle haughtiness, his whole body made a quick side-turn and he began a close study of a poster, humming the while and rearranging the moss rose in his buttonhole. From his pocket he produced a little note-book, and appeared to write down the title of the performance advertised; he looked a couple of times at his fob-watch; he pulled his black straw hat lower on his brow and held his hand to the rim of it like a visor, as though looking out for someone he was expecting; he made the gesture of irritation meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting about, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting; then, pushing back his hat to reveal close-cropped hair with rather long, waved side-wings, he breathed out noisily as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot. It crossed my mind that he might be a hotel-thief who, having perhaps noticed me and my grandmother over the last few days, and having some dishonest intent, had just realized I had noticed him while he was watching my movements; and, so as to put me off the scent, he may only have been trying to express absent-mindedness and nonchalance, but he did it with such marked exaggeration that his purpose appeared to be not just to disarm suspicion, but also to avenge some humiliation which I had inflicted upon him unawares, to make me think not so much that he had not seen me, but that I was so insignificant an object that he could not be bothered to pay the slightest attention to me. He had drawn himself up with a challenging air, setting his lips in a sneer, twirling his moustache and charging his eye with something hard and indifferent, something close to insulting. It was the strangeness of his expression which made me think he must be a thief, if not a madman. Yet his way of dressing, which was the acme of good taste, was both much more serious and much more simple than that of any of the bathers I saw at Balbec, as well as being something of a comfort to me in my suit, which had so often been humiliated by the bright and banal whiteness of their beach outfits. My grandmother now appeared and we went for a little walk. An hour later, she having gone back in for a moment, I was waiting for her outside the hotel when I saw Mme de Villeparisis come out in the company of Robert de Saint-Loup and the stranger who had stared at me near the Casino. His glance flashed rapidly through me just as before; then, as though he had not seen me, it lowered, seemed to settle somewhere outside his eyes, dull and neutral, like a look which feigns to see nothing outside itself, and is incapable of seeing anything inside, the look expressing nothing but the satisfaction of knowing it is edged by eyelashes, among which it merely sits, roundly pleased with its own crass candour, the smug and sanctimonious look of certain hypocrites, the conceited look of certain fools. I saw that he had changed his clothes: the suit he now wore was even darker than the other one – no doubt true elegance is closer to simplicity than is false elegance; but there was something else about him: at close range, one sensed that the almost complete absence of colour from his clothes came not from any indifference to colour, but because, for some reason, he deprived himself of it. The sobriety apparent in his clothing gave the impression of deriving from a self-imposed diet, rather than from any lack of appetite. In the fabric of his trousers, a fine stripe of dark green harmonized with a line visible in his socks, the refinement of this touch revealing the intensity of a preference which, though suppressed everywhere else, had been tolerated in that one form as a special concession, whereas a red design in the cravat remained as imperceptible as a liberty not quite taken, a temptation not quite succumbed to.
‘How are you? Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes,’ said Mme de Villeparisis. The gentleman so named, without looking at me, mumbled a vague ‘How d’you do?’ which he followed with ‘Hmmm, hmmm,’ as though to mark the fact that this politeness had been rather forced upon him; then, withholding his thumb, his little finger and his index finger, he proffered the other two, neither of which bore a ring, and which I shook through his suede glove. Then, still without having given me a glance, he turned his eyes to Mme de Villeparisis.
‘Good heavens! she exclaimed. What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus! Not that it’s a very heinous error – you are, after all, a Guermantes.’
My grandmother appeared and we all walked along the road together. Saint-Loup’s uncle neither spoke a single word to me nor gave me so much as a glance. Though he glared at strangers (two or three times during our brief stroll, he flashed his awesome and searching eye deep into the heart of nondescript passers-by of the most humble extraction), he was in the habit, if his attitude towards me was any guide to his behaviour, of avoiding at all moments the eye of people he knew, like a police officer on a secret mission who excludes his friends from the scope of his professional observations. I fell back a little with Saint-Loup, letting the uncle walk on with my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis:
‘Tell me – did I hear right? Madame de Villeparisis said to your uncle that he was a Guermantes.
– But of course – he’s Palamède de Guermantes.
– Do you mean the same Guermantes family who have a château near Combray and who claim descent from Geneviève de Brabant?
– Absolutely. My uncle, who’s terribly heraldic, would soon let you know that our ‘cry’, our war-cry, which later became Passavant, was originally Combraysis,52 Saint-Loup said with a laugh, which was meant to forestall any suspicion that he might take pride in sharing in the prerogative of the ‘cry’, enjoyed only by houses of nearly royal status, by the greatest war-lords. He is the brother of the present owner of the château.’
Mme de Villeparisis was therefore related, and that very closely, to the Guermantes, though she had for such a long time been only the lady who, when I was little, had given me a duck holding a box of chocolate, more remote in those days from the Guermantes Way than if she had been enclosed in the Méséglise Way, less splendid, less highly valued by me than the optician of Combray, but who now suddenly experienced one of those fantastic elevations, the corollary of equally unexpected devaluations of other objects in our possession, which, whether rising or falling, fill our adolescence and the parts of our lives in which a little of our adolescence lives on with metamorphoses as numerous as those Ovid speaks of.
‘And doesn’t the château contain busts of all the former lords of Guermantes?
– Yes, it’s a grand spectacle!’ Saint-Loup said ironically. Between ourselves, I think all that sort of thing is just a little quaint. But one thing there is at Guermantes that’s really interesting is a very touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière.53 It’s every bit as good as anything by Whistler or Velazquez,’ he added, the tyro’s enthusiasm getting the better, as it sometimes did, of his sense of proportion. ‘And there are other canvasses, very stirring ones, by Gustave Moreau.54 My aunt is the niece of your friend, Mme de Villeparisis, who brought her up, and she then married her cousin, the present Duc de Guermantes, who is also a nephew of my aunt de Villeparisis.
– So what’s your uncle?
– He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Strictly speaking, at the death of my great-uncle, my uncle Palamède should have taken the title of Prince des Laumes, which was his brother’s before he in his turn beca
me the Duc de Guermantes – the people in my family change their titles the way other people change their shirt. However, my uncle has his own way of thinking on such things: he takes the view that there are rather too many Italian duchies and Spanish grandees and the like, and so, though he could have chosen any one of four or five titles which would have made him Prince of This or That, he remained plain Baron de Charlus, as a sort of protest, but with a lot of pride concealed under the apparent simplicity of it. “Nowadays,” he says, “when every Tom, Dick or Harry is a prince, one requires something else with which to differentiate onself. I’ll keep my ‘Prince’ for when I’m travelling incognito.” According to him, there’s no title as ancient as Baron de Charlus: if he undertakes to prove to you that it’s older than the titles of the Montmorency family, who falsely claim to be the first Barons of France, when all they were was Barons of Île-de-France,55 because that’s where their feudal lands were, he’ll take a delight in inundating you, submerging you with facts and figures about it. It must be said that, although he’s very clever, very gifted, he thinks that’s a brilliant topic of conversation, Saint-Loup said with a smile. But I’m not like him and you’re not going to get me to talk for hours about genealogies – life is too short to spend it prattling about boring out-of-date nonsense like that.’
I now realized that the fierce stare which had attracted my attention earlier that afternoon outside the Casino was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte.
‘Did Mme Swann ever happen to be one of the many mistresses you say your uncle, M. de Charlus, used to have?
– Oh, no, absolutely not! He’s a great friend of Swann’s, that is, and has always stood by him, but no one has ever suggested he might have been the wife’s lover. You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.’
I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it.
My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus. There was no doubt that he did attach extreme importance to all matters of birth and social status; but her awareness of this was uncoloured by any of the severe disapproval which is the mark of a secret envy and the vexation of seeing someone else enjoying advantages which one would like to have, but which are out of reach. My grandmother, quite content with her lot in life, untroubled by any wish to live in grander society, exercised on M. de Charlus only her mind, which enabled her to observe his foibles and to speak of this uncle of Saint-Loup with the benevolent, smiling detachment that is close to liking, and is our way of rewarding the object of our disinterested observation for the pleasures we find in it, in this case especially because this object was a personage full of pretensions which, though possibly misplaced, she found at least picturesque, and which sharply differentiated him from all the other people with whom she usually had occasion to mix. But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, marking him off from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things which made my grandmother so indulgent towards his aristocratic bias. Unlike the nephew, the uncle had not sacrificed this preference to values seen as higher: he had reconciled it with them. In his capacity as descendant of the Ducs de Nemours and the Princes de Lamballe, he owned archives, furniture, tapestries, portraits painted for his ancestors by Raphael, Velázquez or Boucher, and could quite properly have said, when merely glancing over a few family souvenirs, that he was visiting a museum or some grand library; and it was this rich heritage of the aristocracy which he valued so highly and his nephew so little. In addition, there being less of the ideologue in him than in Saint-Loup, less readiness to take fine words at face value, more realism in his judgment of men, he may have been loth to neglect something which they see as essential to prestige, something which, as well as affording its disinterested delights to his imagination, could also be powerfully effective as an aid to his practical purposes. There is no common ground between men of his sort and those who aspire to an inner ideal which urges them to divest themselves of such advantages and to devote themselves solely to it, who thereby show a similarity with painters or writers who renounce their virtuosity, artistic peoples who embrace modernization, warlike peoples who opt for total disarmament, dictatorial governments which turn democratic and repeal harsh laws, though often the world will not reward them for this noble effort: some lose their talent, some their hereditary predominance; pacifism can lead to war and indulgence can foster crime. However noble and sincere the impulse of Saint-Loup towards emancipation, when one saw the result, one was convinced that it was just as well it was not shared by M. de Charlus, who had had most of the admirable wood panelling transferred from the Guermantes’ family hôtel to his own house, rather than replace it, as his nephew had done, by an art nouveau décor and paintings by Lebourg and Guillaumin.56 Even so, M. de Charlus’s ideal was factitious in the extreme, and – if one may say such a thing of an ideal – it was one which aspired towards the fashionable world as much as to the world of art. In certain women who were exceptionally beautiful and extraordinarily cultivated, whose great-great-grandmothers, two centuries before, had been part of the full glory and elegance of the ancien régime, he perceived a form of distinction which made them the only women whose company he found at all pleasant; and though no doubt this admiration was sincere, it was coloured by the reminders of history and art which rang for him in their names, just as reminders of Antiquity may explain the pleasure a cultured man enjoys in an ode of Horace, though it may be inferior to poems of our own day which leave him indifferent. In the view of M. de Charlus, a pretty woman of the middle classes, in relation to any of these women, was like a contemporary painting of a road or a wedding-party in relation to an old master, the history of which we know, from the pope or the king who commissioned it to the various personages in whose company it has lived, as a result of donation, purchase, legacy or looting, and because of which it can recall an event or at least a union of two houses, some historical interest, some element of learning, all of which adds to it an extra dimension of usefulness, and increases our appreciation of the richness of what we can possess through memory or erudition. M. de Charlus drew comfort too from the fact that a similar bias to his own prevented these few great ladies from frequenting other women of lesser breeding, thus enabling him to worship them in their unimpaired nobility, as intact as an eighteenth-century façade still supported by its shallow columns of pink marble, unchanged in any particular by modern times.
In celebrating the true nobility of mind and heart of these women, M. de Charlus was playing on a double meaning of the word which deceived him, and in which there lay not only the falseness of such a misbegotten notion, this medley of aristocracy, magnanimity and art, but also its dangerous attractiveness for people such as my grandmother, in whose eyes the flagrant but harmless prejudice of the noble who attends to the number of quarterings in another man’s escutcheon, and for whom nothing else counts, would have seemed too ridiculous; but she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon.57
The three Guermantes took their leave of us in front of the Grand-Hôtel; they were going to lunch with the Princess of Luxembourg. While my grandmother, Saint-Loup and Mme de Villeparisis were saying their farewells, M. de Charlus, who had still not spoken a syllable to me, dropped back a few steps and said, ‘This evening, after dinner, in the rooms of my aunt de Villeparisis, I shall take tea. I hope you will do me the pleasure of attending, in the company of your grandmother.’ He then rejoined the Marquise.
Though it was a Sunday, there were no more cabs in front of the hotel than at the beginning of the season. The wife of the notary from Le Mans, in particular, was of the opinion that it was rather expensive to hire a carriage onc
e a week so as not to go to the Cambremers’, and she preferred to stay in her room all day instead.
‘Is Mme Blandais not well, then? people asked the notary. We haven’t seen her all day.
– She has a slight headache … the heat, you know, this stormy weather. The slightest thing … But I expect you’ll see her tonight. I’ve suggested she should come down. I’m sure it would do her good.’
I imagined that M. de Charlus, by inviting us to the suite of his aunt, whom he had no doubt consulted on the matter, intended to make amends for his discourtesy towards me during our walk that morning. Yet, when I arrived in Mme de Villeparisis’s sitting-room and attempted to greet her nephew, however hard I tried to catch his eye, I found it impossible: he just went on recounting in a shrill voice a rather disobliging story about one of his relatives. I decided to bid him good evening in a loud voice, so that he could be aware of my presence, but I soon saw that he had noticed me: just as I was about to bow, and before a word had passed my lips, I saw his two fingers extended for me to grasp, although he had not even glanced towards me or stopped talking. He had obviously seen me, but had given no hint of it, which was what made me realize that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of pedlars who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking round, in case the police are about. I was also rather surprised to see that Mme de Villeparisis, though pleased to see us come in, had seemed not to have been expecting us; and then I was even more surprised to hear M. de Charlus say to my grandmother, ‘Well, how nice of you to think of dropping in like this! Isn’t it charming of them, Aunt?’ He must have noticed Mme de Villeparisis’s expression of surprise at our arrival and thought, as a man accustomed to setting the tone, that to turn her surprise into pleasure all he had to do was make it plain that he himself took pleasure in the present circumstance, and that pleasure was an appropriate response. In this, he was a good judge, for Mme de Villeparisis, who greatly esteemed her nephew and knew how hard to please he was, instantly appeared to discover new qualities in my grandmother and welcomed her with open arms. It was difficult to accept that in the few hours which had passed since the morning, M. de Charlus could have forgotten an invitation which, though curtly delivered, had had all the appearances of being intentional and premeditated, and that he should now say my grandmother was just ‘dropping in’, when it was he who had asked us to come! With a respect for the facts, which I retained until the day when I realized that the truth about a man’s motive is not to be got from him by direct questioning, and that the damage likely to be done by a misunderstanding which could pass unnoticed may well be less than that done by naïve persistence, I said to him, ‘Surely you must remember, sir, that it was you who asked us to come this evening?’ He gave no hint, either by word or movement, of having heard me. So I repeated my question, like a diplomat or a youngster who, after a falling-out, tries and tries again, with indefatigable but futile good-will, to reason with someone who is determined not to be reasoned with. M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 42