The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (351 page)

At the moment when, the music having come to an end, his guests came to take leave of him, M. de Charlus committed the same error as on their arrival. He did not ask them to shake hands with their hostess, to include her and her husband in the gratitude that was being showered on himself. There was a long procession, a procession which led to the Baron alone, and of which he was clearly aware, for as he said to me a little later: “The form of the artistic celebration ended in a ‘few-words-in-the-vestry’
touch that was quite amusing.” The guests even prolonged their expressions of gratitude with various remarks which enabled them to remain for a moment longer in the Baron’s presence, while those who had not yet congratulated him on the success of his party hung around impatiently in the rear. (Several husbands wanted to go; but their wives, snobs even though duchesses, protested: “No, no, even if we have to wait for an hour, we can’t go away without thanking Palamède, who has gone to so much trouble. There’s nobody else these days who can give entertainments like this.” Nobody would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme Verdurin any more than to the attendant in a theatre to which some great lady has for one evening brought the entire aristocracy.)

“Were you at Eliane de Montmorency’s yesterday, cousin?” asked Mme de Mortemart, seeking an excuse to prolong their conversation.

“As a matter of fact, no; I’m fond of Eliane, but I never can understand her invitations. I must be very dense, I’m afraid,” he went on with a beaming smile, while Mme de Mortemart realised that she was to be made the first recipient of “one of Palamède’s” as she had often been of “one of Oriane’s.” “I did indeed receive a card a fortnight ago from the charming Eliane. Above the questionably authentic name of ‘Montmorency’ was the following kind invitation: ‘My dear cousin, will you do me the honour of thinking of me next Friday at halfpast nine.’ Underneath were written the two less gracious words: ‘Czech Quartet.’ These seemed to me to be unintelligible, and in any case to have no more connexion with the sentence above than in those letters on the back of which one sees that the writer had begun another with the
words ‘My dear—’ and nothing else, and failed to take a fresh sheet, either from absentmindedness or in order to save paper. I’m fond of Eliane, and so I bore her no ill-will; I merely ignored the strange and inappropriate allusion to a Czech Quartet, and, as I am a methodical man, I placed on my chimney-piece the invitation to think of Madame de Montmorency on Friday at half past nine. Although renowned for my obedient, punctual and meek nature, as Buffon says of the camel”—at this, laughter seemed to radiate from M. de Charlus, who knew that on the contrary he was regarded as the most impossibly difficult man—“I was a few minutes late (the time that it took me to change my clothes), though without feeling undue remorse, thinking that half past nine meant ten. At the stroke of ten, in a comfortable dressing-gown, with warm slippers on my feet, I sat down in my chimney corner to think of Eliane as she had requested me, and with an intensity which did not begin to falter until half past ten. Do tell her, if you will, that I complied strictly with her audacious request. I am sure she will be gratified.”

Mme de Mortemart swooned with laughter, in which M. de Charlus joined. “And tomorrow,” she went on, oblivious of the fact that she had already long exceeded the time that could reasonably be allotted to her, “are you going to our La Rochefoucauld cousins?”

“Oh, that, now, is quite impossible. They have invited me, and you too, I see, to a thing it is utterly impossible to imagine, which is called, if I am to believe the invitation card, a
‘the dansant.’
I used to be considered pretty nimble when I was young, but I doubt whether I could ever decently have drunk a cup of tea while dancing. And I have never cared to eat or drink in an unseemly
fashion. You will remind me that my dancing days are done. But even sitting down comfortably drinking my tea—of the quality of which I am in any case suspicious since it is called ‘dancing’—I should be afraid lest other guests younger than myself, and less nimble possibly than I was at their age, might spill their cups over my tails and thus interfere with my pleasure in draining my own.”

Nor was M. de Charlus content with leaving Mme Verdurin out of the conversation while he spoke of all manner of subjects (which he seemed to take a delight in developing and varying, for the cruel pleasure which he had always enjoyed of keeping indefinitely “queuing up” on their feet the friends who were waiting with excruciating patience for their turn to come); he even criticised all that part of the entertainment for which Mme Verdurin was responsible. “But, talking of cups, what in the world are those strange little bowls which remind me of the vessels in which, when I was a young man, people used to get sorbets from Poiré Blanche? Somebody said to me just now that they were for ‘iced coffee.’ But I have seen neither coffee nor ice. What curious little objects, with so ill-defined a purpose!”

While saying this M. de Charlus had placed his white-gloved hands vertically over his lips and cautiously swivelled his eyes with a meaning look as though he were afraid of being heard and even seen by his host and hostess. But this was only a pretence, for in a few minutes he would be offering the same criticisms to the Mistress herself, and a little later would be insolently enjoining her: “No more iced-coffee cups, remember! Give them to one of your friends whose house you wish to disfigure. But warn her not to have them in the drawing-room, or people
might think that they had come into the wrong room, the things are so exactly like chamberpots.”

“But, cousin,” said the guest, lowering her voice too and casting a questioning glance at M. de Charlus, for fear of offending not Mme Verdurin but the Baron himself, “perhaps she doesn’t yet quite know these things …”

“She shall be taught.”

“Oh!” laughed the guest, “she couldn’t have a better teacher! She
is
lucky! If you’re in charge one can be sure there won’t be a false note.”

“There wasn’t one, if it comes to that, in the music.”

“Oh! it was sublime. One of those pleasures which can never be forgotten. Talking of that marvellous violinist,” she went on, imagining in her innocence that M. de Charlus was interested in the violin for its own sake, “do you happen to know one whom I heard the other day playing a Fauré sonata wonderfully well. He’s called Frank …”

“Oh, he’s ghastly,” replied M. de Charlus, oblivious of the rudeness of a contradiction which implied that his cousin was lacking in taste. “As far as violinists are concerned, I advise you to confine yourself to mine.”

This led to a fresh exchange of glances, at once furtive and watchful, between M. de Charlus and his cousin, for, blushing and seeking by her zeal to repair her blunder, Mme de Mortemart was about to suggest to M. de Charlus that she might organise an evening to hear Morel play. Now, for her the object of the evening was not to bring an unknown talent into prominence, though this was the object which she would pretend to have in mind and which was indeed that of M. de Charlus. She
regarded it simply as an opportunity for giving a particularly elegant reception and was calculating already whom she would invite and whom she would leave out. This process of selection, the chief preoccupation of people who give parties (the people whom “society” journalists have the nerve or the stupidity to call “the elite”), alters at once the expression—and the handwriting—of a hostess more profoundly than any hypnotic suggestion. Before she had even thought of what Morel was to play (which she rightly regarded as a secondary consideration, for even if everybody observed a polite silence during the music, from fear of M. de Charlus, nobody would even think of listening to it), Mme de Mortemart, having decided that Mme de Valcourt was not to be one of the “chosen,” had automatically assumed that secretive, conspiratorial air which so degrades even those society women who can most easily afford to ignore what “people will say.”

“Might it be possible for me to give a party for people to hear your friend play?” murmured Mme de Mortemart, who, while addressing herself exclusively to M. de Charlus, could not refrain, as though mesmerised, from casting a glance at Mme de Valcourt (the excluded one) in order to make certain that she was sufficiently far away not to hear her. “No, she can’t possibly hear what I’m saying,” Mme de Mortemart concluded inwardly, reassured by her own glance which in fact had had a totally different effect upon Mme de Valcourt from that intended: “Why,” Mme de Valcourt had said to herself when she caught this glance, “Marie-Therese is arranging something with Palamède to which I’m not to be invited.”

“You mean my protégé,” M. de Charlus corrected, as merciless to his cousin’s choice of words as he was to her
musical endowments. Then, without paying the slightest attention to her mute entreaties, for which she herself apologised with a smile, “Why, yes …” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room, “although there is always a risk in that sort of exportation of a fascinating personality into surroundings that must inevitably diminish his transcendent gifts and would in any case have to be adapted to them.”

Mme de Mortemart told herself that the mezza voce, the pianissimo of her question had been a waste of effort, after the megaphone through which the answer had issued. She was mistaken: Mme de Valcourt heard nothing, for the simple reason that she did not understand a single word. Her anxiety subsided, and would quickly have evaporated entirely, had not Mme de Mortemart, afraid that she might have been given away and might have to invite Mme de Valcourt, with whom she was on too intimate terms to be able to leave her out if the other knew about her party beforehand, raised her eyelids once again in Edith’s direction, as though not to lose sight of a threatening peril, lowering them again briskly so as not to commit herself too far. She intended, on the morning after the party, to write her one of those letters, the complement of the revealing glance, letters which are meant to be subtle but are tantamount to a full and signed confession. For instance: “Dear Edith, I’ve been missing you. I did not really expect you last night” (“How could she have expected me,” Edith would say to herself, “since she never invited me?”) “as I know that you’re not very fond of gatherings of that sort which rather bore you. We should have been greatly honoured, all the same, by your company” (Mme de Mortemart never used the word
“honoured,” except in letters in which she attempted to cloak a lie in the semblance of truth). “You know that you are always welcome in our house. In any case you were quite right, as it was a complete failure, like everything that is got up at a moment’s notice.” But already the second furtive glance darted at her had enabled Edith to grasp everything that was concealed by the complicated language of M. de Charlus. This glance was indeed so potent that, after it had struck Mme de Valcourt, the obvious secrecy and intention to conceal that it betrayed rebounded upon a young Peruvian whom Mme de Mortemart intended, on the contrary, to invite. But being of a suspicious nature, seeing all too plainly the mystery that was being made without realising that it was not intended to mystify him, he at once conceived a violent hatred for Mme de Mortemart and vowed to play all sorts of disagreeable hoaxes on her, such as ordering fifty iced coffees to be sent to her house on a day when she was not entertaining, or, on a day when she was, inserting a notice in the papers to the effect that the party was postponed, and publishing mendacious accounts of subsequent parties in which would appear the notorious names of all the people whom for various reasons a hostess does not invite or even allow to be introduced to her.

Mme de Mortemart need not have bothered herself about Mme de Valcourt. M. de Charlus was about to take it upon himself to denature the projected entertainment far more than that lady’s presence would have done. “But, my dear cousin,” she said in response to the remark about “adapting the surroundings,” the meaning of which her momentary state of hyperaesthesia had enabled her to discern,
“we shall spare you the least trouble. I undertake to ask Gilbert to arrange everything.”

“Not on any account, and moreover he will not be invited. Nothing will be done except through me. The first thing is to exclude all those who have ears and hear not.”

M. de Charlus’s cousin, who had been reckoning on Morel as an attraction in order to give a party at which she could say that, unlike so many of her kinswomen, she had “had Palamède,” abruptly switched her thoughts from this prestige of M. de Charlus’s to all the people with whom he would get her into trouble if he took it upon himself to do the inviting and excluding. The thought that the Prince de Guermantes (on whose account, partly, she was anxious to exclude Mme de Valcourt, whom he declined to meet) was not to be invited alarmed her. Her eyes assumed an uneasy expression.

“Is this rather bright light bothering you?” inquired M. de Charlus with an apparent seriousness the underlying irony of which she failed to perceive.

“No, not at all. I was thinking of the difficulty, not because of me of course, but because of my family, if Gilbert were to hear that I had given a party without inviting him, when he never has half a dozen people in without …”

“But precisely, we must begin by eliminating the half-dozen people, who would only jabber. I’m afraid that the din of talk has prevented you from realising that it was a question not of doing the honours as a hostess but of conducting the rites appropriate to every true celebration.”

Then, having decided, not that the next person had
been kept waiting too long, but that it did not do to exaggerate the favours shown to one who had in mind not so much Morel as her own visiting-list, M. de Charlus, like a doctor cutting short a consultation when he considers that it has lasted long enough, served notice on his cousin to withdraw, not by bidding her good-night but by turning to the person immediately behind her.

“Good evening, Madame de Montesquiou. It was marvellous, wasn’t it? I didn’t see Helene. Tell her that any policy of general abstention, even the most noble, that is to say hers, must allow exceptions, if they are dazzling enough, as has been the case tonight. To show that one is rare is good, but to subordinate one’s rarity, which is only negative, to what is precious is better still. In your sister’s case—and I value more than anyone her systematic
absence
from places where what is in store for her is not worthy of her—here tonight, on the contrary, her presence at so memorable an occasion as this would have been a precedence, and would have given your sister, already so prestigious, an additional prestige.”