In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (71 page)

I did not have the bad taste to appear annoyed, but this Pudor seemed to me akin—far more than to Kronion—to the reticence that prevents a critic who admires you from speaking of you because the secret temple in which you sit enthroned would be invaded by the mob of ignorant readers and journalists; to the reticence of the statesman who does not recommend you for a decoration because you would be lost in a crowd of people who are not your equals; to the reticence of the Academician who refrains from voting for you in order to spare you the shame of being the colleague of X—— who is devoid of talent; to the reticence, finally, more respectable and at the same time more criminal, of the sons who implore us not to write about their dead father who abounded in merit, in order to ensure silence and repose, to prevent us from maintaining the stir of life and the sound of glory round the deceased, who himself would prefer the echo of his name upon the lips of men to all the wreaths upon his tomb, however piously borne.

If Bloch, while grieving me by his inability to understand the reason that prevented me from going to greet his father, had exasperated me by confessing that he had depreciated me at Mme Bontemps’s (I now understood why Albertine had never made any allusion to this lunch-party and remained silent when I spoke to her of Bloch’s affection for myself), my young Jewish friend had produced upon M. de Charlus an impression that was quite the opposite of annoyance.

Of course, Bloch now believed not only that I was incapable of depriving myself for a second of the company of smart people, but that, jealous of the advances that they might make to him (M. de Charlus, for instance), I was trying to put a spoke in his wheel and to prevent him from making friends with them; but for his part the Baron regretted that he had not seen more of my friend. As was his habit, he took care not to betray this feeling. He began by asking me various questions about Bloch, but in so casual a tone, with an interest that seemed so feigned, that it was as though he was not listening to the answers. With an air of detachment, in a chanting voice that expressed inattention more than indifference, and as though simply out of politeness to myself, M. de Charlus asked: “He looks intelligent, he said he wrote, has he any talent?” I told him that it had been very kind of him to say that he hoped to see Bloch again. The Baron gave not the slightest sign of having heard my remark, and as I repeated it four times without eliciting a reply, I began to wonder whether I had been the victim of an acoustic mirage when I thought I heard M. de Charlus utter those words. “He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus. “No, they’ve taken a place near here, La Commanderie.” Having learned what he wished to know, M. de Charlus pretended to despise Bloch. “How appalling,” he exclaimed, his voice resuming all its clarion vigour. “All the places or properties called La Commanderie were built or owned by the Knights of the Order of Malta (of whom I am one), as the places called Temple or Cavalerie were by the Templars. That I should live at La Commanderie would be the most natural thing in the world. But a Jew! However, I am not surprised; it comes from a curious instinct for sacrilege, peculiar to that race. As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a place in the country he always chooses one that is called Priory, Abbey, Minster, Chantry. I had some business once with a Jewish official, and guess where he lived: at Pont-l’Evêque. When he fell into disfavour, he had himself transferred to Brittany, to Pont-l’Abbé. When they perform in Holy Week those indecent spectacles that are called ‘the Passion,’ half the audience are Jews, exulting in the thought that they are about to hang Christ a second time on the Cross, at least in effigy. At one of the Lamoureux concerts, I had a wealthy Jewish banker sitting next to me. They played the
Childhood of Christ
by Berlioz, and he was thoroughly dismayed. But he soon recovered his habitually blissful expression when he heard the Good Friday music. So your friend lives at the Commanderie, the wretch! What sadism! You must show me the way to it,” he added, resuming his air of indifference, “so that I may go there one day and see how our former domains endure such a profanation. It is unfortunate, for he has good manners, and he seems cultivated. The next thing I shall hear will be that his address in Paris is Rue du Temple!”

M. de Charlus gave the impression, by these words, that he was seeking merely to find a fresh example in support of his theory; but in reality he was asking me a question with a dual purpose, the principal one being to find out Bloch’s address.

“Yes indeed,” put in Brichot, “the Rue du Temple used to be called Rue de la Chevalerie-du-Temple. And in that connexion will you allow me to make a remark, Baron?”

“What? What is it?” said M. de Charlus tartly, the proffered remark preventing him from obtaining his information.

“No, it’s nothing,” replied Brichot in alarm. “It was in connexion with the etymology of Balbec, about which they were asking me. The Rue du Temple was formerly known as the Rue Barre-du-Bec, because the Abbey of Bec in Normandy had its Bar of Justice there in Paris.”

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

“Where does your friend live in Paris? As three streets out of four take their name from a church or an abbey, there seems every chance of further sacrilege there. One can’t prevent Jews from living in the Boulevard de la Madeleine, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré or the Place Saint-Augustin. So long as they do not carry their perfidy a stage further, and pitch their tents in the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, Quai de l’Archevêché, Rue Chanoinesse or Rue de l’Ave-Maria, we must make allowance for their difficulties.”

We could not enlighten M. de Charlus, not being aware of Bloch’s address at the time. But I knew that his father’s office was in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

“Oh, isn’t that the last word in perversity!” exclaimed M. de Charlus, appearing to find a profound satisfaction in his own cry of ironical indignation. “Rue des Blancs-Manteaux!” he repeated, dwelling with emphasis upon each syllable and laughing as he spoke. “What sacrilege! To think that these White Mantles polluted by M. Bloch were those of the mendicant friars, styled Serfs of the Blessed Virgin, whom Saint Louis established there. And the street has always housed religious orders. The profanation is all the more diabolical since within a stone’s throw of the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux there is a street whose name escapes me, which is entirely conceded to the Jews, with Hebrew characters over the shops, bakeries for unleavened bread, kosher butcheries—it’s positively the Judengasse of Paris. That is where M. Bloch ought to reside. Of course,” he went on in a lofty, grandiloquent tone suited to the discussion of aesthetic matters, and giving, by an unconscious atavistic reflex, the air of an old Louis XIII musketeer to his uptilted face, “I take an interest in all that sort of thing only from the point of view of art. Politics are not in my line, and I cannot condemn wholesale, because Bloch belongs to it, a nation that numbers Spinoza among its illustrious sons. And I admire Rembrandt too much not to realise the beauty that can be derived from frequenting the synagogue. But after all a ghetto is all the finer the more homogeneous and complete it is. You may be sure, moreover, so far are business instincts and avarice mingled in that race with sadism, that the proximity of the Hebraic street in question, the convenience of having close at hand the fleshpots of Israel, will have made your friend choose the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. How curious it all is! It was there, by the way, that there lived a strange Jew who boiled the Host, after which I think they boiled him, which is stranger still since it seems to suggest that the body of a Jew can be equivalent to the Body of Our Lord. Perhaps it might be possible to arrange for your friend to take us to see the church of the White Mantles. Just think that it was there that they laid the body of Louis d’Orléans after his assassination by Jean sans Peur, which unfortunately did not rid us of the Orléans family. Personally, I have always been on the best of terms with my cousin the Duc de Chartres, but they are nevertheless a race of usurpers who caused the assassination of Louis XVI and the dethronement of Charles X and Henri V. Of course it runs in the family, since their ancestors include Monsieur, who was so styled doubtless because he was the most astounding old woman, and the Regent and the rest of them. What a family!”

This speech, anti-Jewish or pro-Hebrew—according to whether one pays attention to the overt meaning of its sentences or the intentions that they concealed—had been comically interrupted for me by a remark which Morel whispered to me, to the chagrin of M. de Charlus. Morel, who had not failed to notice the impression that Bloch had made, murmured his thanks in my ear for having “given him the push,” adding cynically: “He wanted to stay, it’s all jealousy, he’d like to take my place. Just like a Yid!”

“We might have taken advantage of this prolonged halt,” M. de Charlus went on, “to ask your friend for some interpretations of ritual. Couldn’t you fetch him back?” he pleaded desperately.

“No, it’s impossible, he has gone away in a carriage, and besides, he’s vexed with me.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Morel murmured.

“Your excuse is preposterous, one can always overtake a carriage, there is nothing to prevent your taking a car,” replied M. de Charlus, in the tone of a man accustomed to carry everything before him. But observing my silence: “What is this more or less imaginary carriage?” he said to me insolently, and with a last ray of hope.

“It is an open post-chaise which must by this time have reached La Commanderie.”

M. de Charlus bowed before the impossible and made a show of jocularity. “I can understand their recoiling from the idea of a new brougham. It might have swept them clean.”

At last we were warned that the train was about to start, and Saint-Loup left us. But this was the only day on which by getting into our carriage he unwittingly caused me pain, when I momentarily thought of leaving him with Albertine in order to go with Bloch. On every other occasion his presence did not torment me. For of her own accord Albertine, to spare me any uneasiness, would on some pretext or other place herself in such a position that she could not even unintentionally brush against Robert, almost too far away even to shake hands with him; turning her eyes away from him, she would plunge, as soon as he appeared, into ostentatious and almost affected conversation with one of the other passengers, continuing this make-believe until Saint-Loup had gone. So that the visits which he paid us at Doncières, causing me no pain, no worry even, were in no way discordant from the rest, all of which I found pleasing because they brought me so to speak the homage and the hospitality of this land. Already, as the summer drew to a close, on our journeys from Balbec to Douville, when I saw in the distance the little resort of Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs where, for a moment in the evening, the crest of the cliffs glittered pink like the snow on a mountain at sunset, it no longer recalled to my mind—let alone the melancholy which its strange, sudden emergence had aroused in me on the first evening, when it filled me with such a longing to take the train back to Paris instead of going on to Balbec—the spectacle that in the morning, Elstir had told me, might be enjoyed from there, at the hour before sunrise, when all the colours of the rainbow are refracted from the rocks, and when he had so often wakened the little boy who had served him as model one year, to paint him, nude, upon the sands. The name Saint-Pierre-desIfs announced to me merely that there would presently appear a strange, witty, painted fifty-year-old with whom I should be able to talk about Chateaubriand and Balzac. And now, in the mists of evening, behind that cliff of Incarville which had filled my mind with so many dreams in the past, what I saw, as though its old sandstone wall had become transparent, was the comfortable house of an uncle of M. de Cambremer in which I knew that I should always find a warm welcome if I did not wish to dine at La Raspelière or return to Balbec. So that it was not merely the place-names of this district that had lost their initial mystery, but the places themselves. The names, already half-stripped of a mystery which etymology had replaced by reasoning, had now come down a stage further still. On our homeward journeys, at Hermenonville, at Incarville, at Harambouville, as the train came to a standstill, we could make out shadowy forms which we did not at first identify and which Brichot, who could see nothing at all, might perhaps have mistaken in the darkness for the ghosts of Herimund, Wiscar and Herimbald. But they came up to our carriage. It was merely M. de Cambremer, now completely estranged from the Verdurins, who had come to see off his own guests and who, on behalf of his wife and his mother, came to ask me whether I would not let him “snatch me away” to spend a few days at Féterne where I should be entertained successively by a lady of great musical talent who would sing me the whole of Gluck, and a famous chess-player with whom I could have some splendid games, which would not interfere with the fishing expeditions and yachting trips in the bay, or even with the Verdurin dinner-parties, for which the Marquis gave me his word of honour that he would “lend” me, sending me there and fetching me back again, for my greater convenience and also to make sure of my returning. “But I cannot believe that it’s good for you to go so high up. I know my sister could never stand it. She would come back in a fine state! She’s not at all well just now . . . Really, you had such a bad attack as that! Tomorrow you’ll hardly be able to stand!” And he shook with laughter, not from malevolence but for the same reason which made him laugh whenever he saw a lame man hobbling along the street, or had to talk to a deaf person. “And before that? What, you hadn’t had an attack for a fortnight? Do you know, that’s simply marvellous. Really, you ought to come and stay at Féterne, you could talk to my sister about your attacks.”