In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV

by Marcel Proust

  When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel’s beauty as though it had no connexion with a proclivity known as a vice, he would discuss that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it. Sometimes indeed he did not hesitate to call it by its name. When after examining the fine binding of his volume of Balzac, I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comédie humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted towards an obsession: “Impossible to choose between tiny miniatures like the Curé de Tours and the Femme abandonnée, or the great frescoes like the series of the Illusions perdues. What! you’ve never read Les Illusions perdues? It’s so beautiful—the scene where Carlos Herrera asks the name of the château he is driving past, and it turns out to be Rastignac, the home of the young man he used to love; and then the abbé falling into a reverie which Swann once called, and very aptly, the Tristesse d’Olympio of pederasty. And the death of Lucien! I forget who the man of taste was who, when he was asked what event in his life had grieved him most, replied: ‘The death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et Miséres.’ ”

  “I know that Balzac is all the rage this year, as pessimism was last,” Brichot interrupted. “But, at the risk of giving pain to hearts that are smitten with the Balzacian fever, without laying any claim, God forbid, to the role of policeman of letters, and drawing up a list of offences against the laws of grammar, I must confess that the copious improviser whose alarming lucubrations you appear to me singularly to overrate has always struck me as being an insufficiently meticulous scribe. I have read these Illusions perdues of which you speak, Baron, flagellating myself to attain to the fervour of an initiate, and I confess in all simplicity of heart that those serial instalments of sentimental balderdash, composed in double or triple Dutch—Esther heureuse, Où mènent les mauvais chemins, À, combien l’amour revient aux vieillards—have always had the effect on me of the mysteries of Rocambole, exalted by an inexplicable preference to the precarious position of a masterpiece.”

  “You say that because you know nothing of life,” said the Baron, doubly irritated, for he felt that Brichot would not understand either his aesthetic reasons or the other kind.

  “I quite realise,” replied Brichot, “that, to speak like Master François Rabelais, you mean that I am moult sorbonagre, sorbonicole et sorboniforme. And yet, just as much as any of our friends here, I like a book to give an impression of sincerity and real life, I am not one of those clerks . . .”

  “The quart d’heure de Rabelais,” 19 Dr Cottard broke in, with an air no longer of uncertainty but of confidence in his own wit.

  “. . . who take a vow of literature following the rule of the Abbaye-aux-Bois under the obedience of M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Grand Master of humbug, according to the strict rule of the humanists. M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand . . .”

  “Chateaubriand aux potatoes?” put in Dr Cottard.

  “He is the patron saint of the brotherhood,” continued Brichot, ignoring the Doctor’s joke, while the latter, alarmed by the scholar’s phrase, glanced anxiously at M. de Charlus. Brichot had seemed wanting in tact to Cottard, whose pun meanwhile had brought a subtle smile to the lips of Princess Sherbatoff: “With the Professor, the mordant irony of the complete sceptic never forfeits its rights,” she said kindly, to show that Cottard’s “quip” had not passed unperceived by herself.

  “The sage is of necessity sceptical,” replied the Doctor. “What do I know? Gn thi seauton, said Socrates. He was quite right, excess in anything is a mistake. But I am dumbfounded when I think that those words have sufficed to keep Socrates’s name alive all this time. What does his philosophy amount to? Very little when all is said. When one thinks that Charcot and others have done work that is a thousand times more remarkable and is at least based on something, on the suppression of the pupillary reflex as a syndrome of general paralysis, and that they are almost forgotten. After all, Socrates was nothing out of the common. Those people had nothing better to do than spend all their time strolling about and splitting hairs. Like Jesus Christ: ‘Love one another!” it’s all very pretty.”

  “My dear,” Mme Cottard implored.

  “Naturally my wife protests, women are all neurotic.”

  “But, my dear Doctor, I’m not neurotic,” murmured Mme Cottard.

  “What, she’s not neurotic! When her son is ill, she develops all the symptoms of insomnia. Still, I quite admit that Socrates, and all the rest of them, are necessary for a superior culture, to acquire the talent of exposition. I always quote his gn thi seauton to my students at the beginning of the course. Old Bouchard, when he heard of it, congratulated me.”

  “I am not an upholder of form for form’s sake, any more than I am inclined to treasure millionaire rhymes in poetry,” Brichot went on. “But all the same, the not very human Comédie humaine is all too egregiously the antithesis of those works in which the art exceeds the matter, as that holy terror Ovid says. And it is permissible to prefer a middle way, which leads to the presbytery of Meudon or the hermitage of Ferney, equidistant from the Valléeaux-Loups, in which René arrogantly performed the duties of a merciless pontificate, and from Les Jardies, where Honoré de Balzac, harried by the bailiffs, never ceased voiding upon paper, like a zealous apostle of gibberish, to please a Polish lady.”

  “Chateaubriand is far more alive than you say, and Balzac is, after all, a great writer,” replied M. de Charlus, still too much impregnated with Swann’s tastes not to be irritated by Brichot, “and Balzac was acquainted even with those passions which the rest of the world ignores, or studies only to castigate them. Without referring again to the immortal Illusions perdues, stories like Sarrazine, La Fille aux yeux d’or, Une passion dans le désert, even the distinctly enigmatic Fausse Maîtresse, can be adduced in support of my argument. When I spoke of this ‘extra-natural’ aspect of Balzac to Swann, he said to me: ‘You are of the same opinion as Taine.’ I never had the honour of knowing Monsieur Taine,” M. de Charlus continued (with that irritating habit of inserting an otiose “Monsieur” to which people in society are addicted, as though they imagine that by styling a great writer “Monsieur” they are doing him an honour, perhaps keeping him at his proper distance, and making it quite clear that they do not know him personally), “I never knew Monsieur Taine, but I felt myself greatly honoured by being of the same opinion as he.”

  Nevertheless, in spite of these ridiculous social affectations, M. de Charlus was extremely intelligent, and it is probable that if some remote marriage had established a connexion between his family and that of Balzac, he would have felt (no less than Balzac himself, for that matter) a satisfaction on which he would yet have been unable to resist preening himself as on a praiseworthy sign of condescension.

  Occasionally, at the station after Saint-Martin-du-Chêne, some young men would get into the train. M. de Charlus could not refrain from looking at them, but as he cut short and concealed the attention that he paid them, he gave the impression of hiding a secret that was even more personal than the real one; it was as though he knew them, and betrayed the knowledge in spite of himself, after having accepted the sacrifice, before turning again to us, like children who, in consequence of a quarrel between parents, have been forbidden to speak to certain of their schoolfellows, but who when they meet them cannot forbear to raise their heads before lowering them again beneath the menacing gaze of their tutor.

  At the word borrowed from the Greek with which M. de Charlus, in speaking of Balzac, had followed his allusion to Tristesse d’Olympio in connexion with Splendeurs et Misères, Ski, Brichot and Cottard had glanced at one another with a smile perhaps not so much ironical as tinged with that satisfaction which people at a dinner-party would show who had succeeded in making Dreyfus talk about his own case, or the Empress Eugénie about her reign. They were hoping to press him a little further upon this subject, but we were already at Doncières, where Morel joined us. In his presence, M. de Charlus kept a careful guard over his conversation and, w
hen Ski tried to bring it back to the love of Carlos Herrera for Lucien de Rubempré, the Baron assumed the vexed, mysterious, and finally (seeing that nobody was listening to him) severe and judicial air of a father who hears a man saying something indecent in front of his daughter. Ski having shown some determination to pursue the subject, M. de Charlus, his eyes starting out of his head, raised his voice and with a meaningful glance at Albertine—who in fact could not hear what we were saying, being engaged in conversation with Mme Cottard and Princess Sherbatoff—and the hint of a double meaning of someone who wishes to teach ill-bred people a lesson, said: “I think it’s high time we began to talk of subjects that might interest this young lady.” But I realised that, for him, the young lady was not Albertine but Morel, and he confirmed, later on, the accuracy of my interpretation by the expressions he employed when he begged that there might be no more such conversations in front of Morel. “You know,” he said to me, speaking of the violinist, “he’s not at all what you might suppose, he’s a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved.” One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet “serious” of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl.

  Then Brichot, to change the subject, asked me whether I intended to remain much longer at Incarville. Although I had pointed out to him more than once that I was staying not at Incarville but at Balbec, he always repeated the mistake, for it was by the name of Incarville or Balbec-Incarville that he referred to this section of the coast. One often finds people speaking thus about the same things as oneself by a slightly different name. A certain lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain used invariably to ask me, when she meant to refer to the Duchesse de Guermantes, whether I had seen Zénaïde lately, or Oriane-Zénaïde, so that at first I did not understand her. Probably there had been a time when, some relative of Mme de Guermantes being named Oriane, she herself, to avoid confusion, had been known as Oriane-Zénaïde. Perhaps, too, there had originally been a station only at Incarville, from which one went on by carriage to Balbec.

  “Why, what have you been talking about?” said Albertine, astonished at the solemn, paternal tone which M. de Charlus had suddenly adopted.

  “About Balzac,” the Baron hastily replied, “and you are wearing this evening the very same costume as the Princesse de Cadignan, not the first, which she wears at the dinner-party, but the second.”

  This coincidence was due to the fact that, in choosing Albertine’s clothes, I drew my inspiration from the taste that she had acquired thanks to Elstir, who had a liking for the sort of sobriety that might have been called British had it not been tempered with a softness that was purely French. As a rule the clothes he preferred offered to the eye a harmonious combination of grey tones, like the dress of Diane de Cadignan. M. de Charlus was almost the only person capable of appreciating Albertine’s clothes at their true value; his eye detected at a glance what constituted their rarity, their worth; he would never have mistaken one material for another, and could always recognise the maker. But he preferred—in women—a little more brightness and colour than Elstir would allow. And so, that evening, Albertine glanced at me with a half-smiling, half-apprehensive expression, wrinkling her little pink cat’s nose. Meeting over her skirt of grey crêpe de chine, her jacket of grey cheviot did indeed give the impression that she was dressed entirely in grey. But, signing to me to help her, because her puffed sleeves needed to be smoothed down or pulled up for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took it off, and as these sleeves were of a Scottish plaid in soft colours, pink, pale blue, dull green, pigeon’s breast, the effect was as though in a grey sky a rainbow had suddenly appeared. And she wondered whether this would find favour with M. de Charlus.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed in delight, “now we have a ray, a prism of colour. I offer you my sincerest compliments.”

  “But it’s this gentleman who has earned them,” Albertine replied politely, pointing to myself, for she liked to show off what she had received from me.

  “It’s only the women who don’t know how to dress that are afraid of colours,” went on M. de Charlus. “One can be brilliant without vulgarity and soft without being dull. Besides, you have not the same reasons as Mme de Cadignan for wishing to appear detached from life, for that was the idea which she wished to instil into d’Arthez with her grey gown.”

  Albertine, who was interested in this mute language of clothes, questioned M. de Charlus about the Princesse de Cadignan. “Oh! it’s such a delightful story,” said the Baron in a dreamy tone. “I know the little garden in which Diane de Cadignan used to stroll with Mme d’Espard. It belongs to one of my cousins.”

  “All this talk about his cousin’s garden,” Brichot murmured to Cottard, “may, like his pedigree, be of some importance to this worthy Baron. But what interest can it have for us who are not privileged to walk in it, do not know the lady, and possess no titles of nobility?” For Brichot had no idea that one might be interested in a dress and in a garden as works of art, and that it was as though in the pages of Balzac that M. de Charlus saw Mme de Cadignan’s garden paths in his mind’s eye. The Baron went on: “But you know her,” he said to me, speaking of this cousin, and flatteringly addressing himself to me as to a person who, exiled amid the little clan, was to him, if not a citizen of his world, at any rate a frequenter of it. “Anyhow you must have seen her at Mme de Villeparisis’s.”

  “Is that the Marquise de Villeparisis who owns the château at Baucreux?” asked Brichot, captivated.

  “Yes, do you know her?” inquired M. de Charlus dryly.

  “No, not at all,” replied Brichot, “but our colleague Norpois spends part of his holidays every year at Baucreux. I have had occasion to write to him there.”

  I told Morel, thinking to interest him, that M. de Norpois was a friend of my father. But not by the slightest flicker of his features did he show that he had heard me, so little did he think of my parents, so far short did they fall in his estimation of what my great-uncle had been, who had employed Morel’s father as his valet, and who moreover, being fond of “cutting a dash,” unlike the rest of the family, had left a golden memory among his servants.

  “It appears that Mme de Villeparisis is a superior woman,” Brichot went on, “but I have never been allowed to judge of that for myself, nor for that matter has any of my colleagues. For Norpois, who is the soul of courtesy and affability at the Institut, has never introduced any of us to the Marquise. I know of no one who has been received by her except our friend Thureau-Dangin, who had an old family connexion with her, and also Gaston Boissier, whom she was anxious to meet because of a study of his that particularly interested her. He dined with her once and came back quite enthralled by her charm. Mme Boissier, however, was not invited.”

  At the sound of these names, Morel melted into a smile. “Ah! Thureau-Dangin,” he said to me with an air of interest as great as had been his indifference when he heard me speak of the Marquis de Norpois and my father. “Thureau-Dangin; why he and your uncle were as thick as thieves. Whenever a lady wanted a front seat for a reception at the Academy, your uncle would say: ‘I shall write to Thureau-Dangin.’ And of course he got it at once, because you can imagine that M. Thureau-Dangin would never have dared refuse your uncle anything, because he’d soon have got his own back. I’m amused to hear the name Boissier, too, because that was where your uncle ordered all the presents he used to give the ladies at New Year. I know all about it, because I knew the person he used to send for them.” He did indeed know him, for it was his father. Some of these affectionate allusions by Morel to my uncle’s memory were prompted by the fact that we did not intend to remain permanently in the Hôtel Guermantes, where we had taken an apartment only on account of my grandmother. From time to time there would be talk of a possible move. Now, to understand the advice that Charles Morel gave me in this connexion, the reader
must know that my great-uncle had lived, in his day, at 40bis Boulevard Malesherbes. The consequence was that, in the family, as we often went to visit my uncle Adolphe until the fatal day when I caused a breach between my parents and him by telling them the story of the lady in pink, instead of saying “at your uncle’s” we used to say “at 40bis.” Some cousins of Mamma’s used to say to her in the most natural tone: “Ah! so we can’t expect you on Sunday since you’re dining at 40bis.” If I were going to call on some relations, I would be warned to go first of all “to 40bis,” in order that my uncle might not be offended by my not having begun my round with him. He was the owner of the house and was very particular as to the choice of his tenants, all of whom either were or became his personal friends. Colonel the Baron de Vatry used to look in every day and smoke a cigar with him in the hope of making him consent to repairs. The carriage entrance was always kept shut. If my uncle caught sight of some washing or a rug hanging from one of the window-sills he would storm in and have it removed in less time than the police would take to do so nowadays. All the same, he did let part of the house, reserving for himself only two floors and the stables. In spite of this, knowing that he was pleased when people praised the excellent upkeep of the house, we used always to extol the comfort of the “little mansion” as though my uncle had been its sole occupant, and he encouraged the pretence, without issuing the formal contradiction that might have been expected. The “little mansion” was certainly comfortable (my uncle having installed in it all the most recent inventions). But it was in no way out of the ordinary. Only my uncle, while referring with false modesty to “my little hovel,” was convinced, or at any rate had instilled into his valet, the valet’s wife, the coachman, the cook, the idea that there was no place in Paris to compare, for comfort, luxury, and general attractiveness, with the little mansion. Charles Morel had grown up in this belief. He had not outgrown it. And so, even on days when he was not talking to me, if in the train I mentioned the possibility of our moving, at once he would smile at me and say with a knowing wink: “Ah! What you want is something in the style of 40bis! That’s a place that would suit you down to the ground! Your uncle knew what he was about. I’m quite sure that in the whole of Paris there’s nothing to compare with 40bis.”