The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (227 page)

“No; please don’t bother. I had an appointment with M. le Baron, but it’s now very late, and if he’s busy this evening I can come back another day.”

“Oh no, sir, you mustn’t go away,” cried the servant. “M. le Baron might be vexed. I will try again.”

I was reminded of the things I had heard about M. de Charlus’s servants and their devotion to their master. One could not quite say of him as of the Prince de Conti that he sought to give pleasure as much to the valet as to the minister, but he had shown such skill in making of the least thing that he asked of them a sort of personal favour that at night, when his body-servants were assembled round him at a respectful distance, and after running his eye over them he said: “Coignet, the candlestick!” or “Ducret, the nightshirt!” it was with an envious murmur that the rest used to withdraw, jealous of him who had been singled out by his master’s favour. Two of them, indeed, who could not abide one another, used each to try to snatch the favour from his rival by going on the most flimsy pretext with a message to the Baron, if he had gone upstairs earlier than usual, in the hope of being invested for the evening with the charge of candlestick or nightshirt. If he addressed a few words directly to one of them on some subject outside the scope of his duty, still more if in winter, in the garden, knowing that one of his coachmen had caught cold, he said to him after ten minutes: “Put your cap on!” the others would not speak to the fellow again for a fortnight, in their jealousy of the great distinction that had been conferred on him.

I waited ten minutes more, and then, after requesting me not to stay too long as M. le Baron was tired and had had to send away several most important people who had made appointments with him many days before, they admitted me to his presence. These histrionic trappings with which M. de Charlus surrounded himself seemed to me a great deal less impressive than the simplicity of his brother Guermantes, but already the door stood open, and I could see the Baron, in a Chinese dressing-gown, with his throat bare, lying on a settee. My eye was caught at the same moment by a tall hat, its nap flashing like a mirror, which had been left on a chair with a cape, as though the Baron had but recently come in. The valet withdrew. I supposed that M. de Charlus would rise to greet me. Without moving a muscle he fastened on me a pair of implacable eyes. I went towards him and said good evening; he did not hold out his hand, made no reply, did not ask me to take a chair. After a moment’s silence I asked him, as one would ask an ill-mannered doctor, whether it was necessary for me to remain standing. I said this with no ill intent, but my words seemed only to intensify the cold fury on M. de Charlus’s face. I was not aware, moreover, that at home, in the country, at the Château de Charlus, he was in the habit after dinner (so much did he love to play the king) of sprawling in an armchair in the smoking-room, letting his guests remain standing round him. He would ask for a light from one, offer a cigar to another and then, after a few minutes’ interval, would say: “But Argencourt, why don’t you sit down? Take a chair, my dear fellow,” and so forth, having made a point of keeping them standing simply to remind them that it was from him that they must receive permission to be seated. “Put yourself in the Louis XIV seat,” he answered me with an imperious air, as though rather to force me to move further away from him than to invite me to be seated. I took an armchair which was comparatively near. “Ah! so that is what you call a Louis XIV seat! I can see you are a well-educated young man,” he exclaimed in derision. I was so taken aback that I did not move, either to leave the house, as I ought to have done, or to change my seat, as he wished. “Sir,” he next said to me, weighing each of his words, to the more insulting of which he prefixed a double yoke of consonants, “the interview which I have condescended to grant you, at the request of a person who desires to remain nameless, will mark the final point in our relations. I make no secret of the fact that I had hoped for better things! I should perhaps be straining the meaning of the words a little—which one ought not to do, even with people who are ignorant of their value, simply out of the respect due to oneself—were I to tell you that I had felt a certain
liking
for you. I think, however, that
benevolence
, in its most effectively patronising sense, would exceed neither what I felt nor what I was proposing to display. I had, immediately on my return to Paris, given you to understand, while you were still at Balbec, that you could count upon me.” I who remembered with what a torrent of abuse M. de Charlus had parted from me at Balbec made an instinctive gesture of denial. “What!” he shouted angrily, and indeed his face, convulsed and white, differed as much from his ordinary face as does the sea when, on a stormy morning, one sees instead of its customary smiling surface a myriad writhing snakes of spray and foam, “do you mean to pretend that you did not receive my message—almost a declaration—that you were to remember me? What was there in the way of decoration round the cover of the book that I sent you?”

“Some very pretty plaited garlands with ornaments,” I told him.

“Ah!” he replied scornfully, “the young in France know little of the treasures of our land. What would be said of a young Berliner who had never heard of the
Walküre
? Besides, you must have eyes to see and see not, since you yourself told me that you had spent two hours contemplating that particular treasure. I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do about styles. Don’t protest that you know about styles,” he cried in a shrill scream of rage, “you don’t even know what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a Directory fireside chair as a Louis XIV
bergère
. One of these days you’ll be mistaking Mme de Villeparisis’s lap for the lavatory, and goodness knows what you’ll do in it. Similarly, you did not even recognise on the binding of Bergotte’s book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there have been a clearer way of saying to you: ‘Forget me not!’?”

I looked at M. de Charlus. Undoubtedly his magnificent head, though repellent, yet far surpassed that of any of his relatives; he was like an ageing Apollo; but an olive-hued, bilious juice seemed ready to start from the corners of his malevolent mouth; as for intellect, one could not deny that his, over a vast compass, had a grasp of many things which would always remain unknown to his brother Guermantes. But whatever the fine words with which he embellished all his hatreds, one felt that, whether he was moved by offended pride or disappointed love, whether his motivating force was rancour, sadism, teasing or obsession, this man was capable of committing murder, and of proving by dint of logic that he had been right in doing it and was still head and shoulders above his brother, his sister-in-law, or any of the rest.

“As, in Velazquez’s
Surrender of Breda
,” he went on, “the victor advances towards him who is the humbler in rank, and as is the duty of every noble nature, since I was everything and you were nothing, it was I who took the first steps towards you. You have made an imbecilic reply to what it is not for me to describe as an act of grandeur. But I did not allow myself to be discouraged. Our religion enjoins patience. The patience I have shown towards you will be counted, I hope, to my credit, and also my having only smiled at what might be denounced as impertinence, were it within your power to be impertinent to one who is so infinitely your superior. However, all this is now neither here nor there. I have subjected you to the test which the one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test of untoward kindness, and which he rightly declares to be the most terrible of all, the only one that can separate the wheat from the chaff. I can scarcely reproach you for having undergone it without success, for those who emerge from it triumphant are very few. But at least, and this is the conclusion which I am entitled to draw from the last words that we shall exchange on this earth, at least I intend to protect myself against your calumnious fabrications.”

So far, I had never dreamed that M. de Charlus’s rage could have been caused by an unflattering remark which had been repeated to him; I searched my memory; I had not spoken about him to anyone. Some ill-wisher had invented the whole thing. I protested to M. de Charlus that I had said absolutely nothing about him. “I don’t think I can have annoyed you by saying to Mme de Guermantes that I was a friend of yours.” He gave a disdainful smile, raised his voice to the supreme pitch of its highest register, and there, softly attacking the shrillest and most contumelious note, “Oh! Sir,” he said, returning by the most gradual stages to a natural intonation, and seeming to revel as he went in the oddities of this descending scale, “I think you do yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were
friends
. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in one who could all too easily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo chair, but really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more and more sardonically winning until a charming smile actually began to play about his lips, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were
friends
! As for your having boasted that you had been
presented
to me, had
talked
to me,
knew
me slightly, had obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of becoming my
protégé
, I find it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done so. The extreme difference in age that there is between us enables me to recognise without absurdity that that
presentation
, those
talks
, that vague prospect of future
relations
were for you, it is not for me to say an honour, but still, when all is said and done, an advantage as to which I consider that your folly lay not in divulging it but in not having had the sense to keep it. I will even go so far as to say,” he went on, switching suddenly and momentarily from haughty anger to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I thought he was going to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered the proposal I made to you here in Paris, it seemed to me so unbelievable on your part, you who had struck me as well brought up and of a good
bourgeois
family” (on this adjective alone his voice gave a little hiss of impertinence), “that I was ingenuous enough to imagine all the tall stories that never happen, letters miscarrying, addresses misread. I recognise that it was extremely naïve of me, but St Bonaventure preferred to believe that an ox could fly rather than that his brother was capable of lying. However, all that is over: the idea did not appeal to you, there is no more to be said. It seems to me only that you might have brought yourself” (and there were genuine tears in his voice), “were it only out of consideration for my age, to write to me. I had conceived and planned for you infinitely seductive things, which I had taken good care not to divulge to you. You preferred to refuse without knowing what they were; that is your affair. But, as I say, one can always
write
. In your position, and indeed in my own, I should have done so. For that reason I prefer mine to yours—I say ‘for that reason,’ because I believe that all our positions are equal, and I have more fellow-feeling for an intelligent labourer than for many a duke. But I can say that I prefer my position, because in the whole course of my life, which is beginning now to be a pretty long one, I am conscious that I have never done what you did.” (His head was turned away from the light, and I could not see if tears were falling from his eyes, as his voice led one to suppose.) “I said that I had advanced a long way towards you; the effect that had was to make you withdraw twice as far. Now it is for me to withdraw, and we shall know one another no longer. I shall retain not your name but your case, so that at moments when I might be tempted to believe that men have good manners, or simply the intelligence not to let slip an unparalleled opportunity, I may remember that that is ranking them too highly. No, that you should have said that you knew me when it was true—for henceforward it will cease to be true—I regard that as only natural, and I take it as an act of homage, that is to say something agreeable. Unfortunately, elsewhere and in other circumstances, you have uttered remarks of a very different nature.”

“Monsieur, I swear to you that I have said nothing that could offend you.”

“And who says that I am offended?” he screamed in fury, raising himself into an erect posture on the sofa on which hitherto he had been reclining motionless, while, as the pallid, frothing snakes twisted and stiffened in his face, his voice became alternately shrill and solemn like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The force with which he habitually spoke, which made strangers turn round in the street, was multiplied a hundredfold, as is a musical forte if, instead of being played on the piano, it is played by an orchestra, and changed into a fortissimo as well. M. de Charlus roared.) “Do you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You are evidently not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?”

While he was speaking, my desire to persuade M. de Charlus that I had never spoken or heard anyone else speak ill of him had given place to a wild rage, provoked by the words which, to my mind, were dictated to him solely by his colossal pride. Perhaps they were indeed the effect, in part at any rate, of this pride. Almost all the rest sprang from a feeling of which I was then still ignorant, and for which I could not therefore be blamed for not making due allowance. Failing this unknown element, I might, had I remembered the words of Mme de Guermantes, have been tempted to assume a trace of madness in his pride. But at that moment the idea of madness never even entered my head. There was in him, in my view, only pride, while in me there was only fury. This fury (at the moment when M. de Charlus ceased to shout, in order to refer to his august toes, with a majesty that was accompanied by a grimace, a vomit of disgust at his obscure blasphemers), this fury could contain itself no longer. I felt a compulsive desire to strike something, and, a lingering trace of discernment making me respect the person of a man so much older than myself, and even, in view of their dignity as works of art, the pieces of German porcelain that were grouped around him, I seized the Baron’s new silk hat, flung it to the ground, trampled it, picked it up again, began blindly pulling it to pieces, wrenched off the brim, tore the crown in two, heedless of the continuing vociferations of M. de Charlus, and, crossing the room in order to leave, opened the door. To my intense astonishment, two footmen were standing one on either side of it, who moved slowly away, so as to appear only to have been casually passing in the course of their duty. (I afterwards learned their names; one was called Burnier, the other Charmel.) I was not taken in for a moment by the explanation which their leisurely gait seemed to offer me. It was highly improbable; three others appeared to me to be less so: one was that the Baron sometimes entertained guests against whom, in case he happened to need assistance (but why?), he deemed it necessary to keep reinforcements posted close at hand; the second was that, drawn by curiosity, they had stopped to listen at the keyhole, not thinking that I should come out so quickly; the third, that, the whole of the scene which M. de Charlus had made having been a piece of play-acting rehearsed in advance, he had himself told them to listen, from a love of spectacle combined, perhaps, with a
nunc erudimini
, “Be wise now,” by which everyone would profit.