In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (14 page)

Just as I reached this room, I was stopped by the Marquise de Citri, still beautiful though practically foaming at the mouth. Of decently noble birth, she had sought and made a brilliant match in marrying M. de Citri, whose great-grandmother had been an Aumale-Lorraine. But no sooner had she tasted this satisfaction than her natural cantankerousness had given her a horror of high society which did not absolutely preclude social life. Not only, at a party, did she deride everyone present, but her derision was so violent that mere laughter was not sufficiently acrid and developed into a guttural hiss. “Ah!” she said to me, pointing to the Duchesse de Guermantes who had now left my side and was already some way off, “what defeats me is that she can lead this sort of existence.” Was this the remark of a frenzied saint, astonished that the Gentiles did not come of their own accord to perceive the Truth, or that of an anarchist athirst for carnage? In any case there could be no possible justification for this criticism. In the first place, the “existence led” by Mme de Guermantes differed very little (except in indignation) from that led by Mme de Citri. Mme de Citri was amazed to find the Duchess capable of that mortal sacrifice: attendance at one of Marie-Gilbert’s parties. It must be said in this particular instance that Mme de Citri was genuinely fond of the Princess, who was indeed the kindest of women, and knew that by attending her reception she was giving her great pleasure. Hence, in order to come to the party, she had put off a dancer whom she regarded as a genius and who was to have initiated her into the mysteries of Russian choreography. Another reason which to some extent stultified the concentrated rage which Mme de Citri felt on seeing Oriane greet one or other of the guests was that the Duchess, although at a far less advanced stage, showed the symptoms of the malady that was devouring Mme de Citri. We have seen, moreover, that she had carried the germs of it from her birth. In fact, being more intelligent than Mme de Citri, Mme de Guermantes would have had more justification than she for this nihilism (which was more than merely social), but it is true that certain qualities help us to endure the defects of our neighbour more than they make us suffer from them; and a man of great talent will normally pay less attention to other people’s foolishness than would a fool. We have already described at sufficient length the nature of the Duchess’s wit to convince the reader that, if it had nothing in common with high intelligence, it was at least wit, a wit adroit in making use (like a translator) of different grammatical forms. Now nothing of this sort seemed to entitle Mme de Citri to look down upon qualities so closely akin to her own. She found everyone idiotic, but in her conversation, in her letters, showed herself distinctly inferior to the people whom she treated with such disdain. She had moreover such a thirst for destruction that, when she had more or less given up society, the pleasures that she then sought were subjected, each in turn, to her terrible undermining power. After she had given up parties for musical evenings, she used to say: “You like listening to that sort of thing, to music? Goodness me, it depends on the mood. But how deadly it can be! Ah, Beethoven!—what a bore! (
la barbe
).” With Wagner, then with Franck, with Debussy, she did not even take the trouble to say the word
barbe
, but merely drew her hand over her face with a tonsorial gesture. Presently, everything became boring. “Beautiful things are such a bore. Ah, pictures!—they’re enough to drive you mad. How right you are, it is such a bore having to write letters!” Finally it was life itself that she declared to be boring (
rasante
), leaving you to wonder where she took her term of comparison.

I do not know whether it was the effect of what the Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening when I first dined at her house, had said of this interior, but the card-room or smoking-room, with its pictorial floor, its tripods, its figures of gods and animals that gazed at you, the sphinxes stretched out along the arms of the chairs, and most of all the huge table of marble or enamelled mosaic, covered with symbolical signs more or less imitated from Etruscan and Egyptian art, gave me the impression of a magician’s cell. And, indeed, on a chair drawn up to the glittering augural table, M. de Charlus in person, never touching a card, oblivious of what was going on around him, incapable of observing that I had entered the room, seemed precisely a magician applying all the force of his will and reason to drawing a horoscope. Not only were his eyes starting from his head like the eyes of a Pythian priestess on her tripod, but, so that nothing might distract him from labours which required the cessation of the most simple movements, he had (like a mathematician who will do nothing else until he has solved his problem) laid down beside him the cigar which he had previously been holding between his lips but had no longer the necessary equanimity of mind to think of smoking. Seeing the two crouching deities on the arms of the chair that stood facing him, one might have thought that the Baron was endeavouring to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, had it not been rather that of a young and living Oedipus seated in that very armchair where he had settled down to play. Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying all his mental powers with such concentration, and which was not in fact one of the sort that are commonly studied
more geometrico
, was that which was proposed to him by the lineaments of the young Comte de Surgis; it appeared, so profound was M. de Charlus’s absorption in front of it, to be some rebus, some riddle, some algebraical problem, of which he must try to penetrate the mystery or to work out the formula. In front of him the sibylline signs and the figures inscribed upon that Table of the Law seemed the grimoire which would enable the old sorcerer to tell in what direction the young man’s destiny was shaping. Suddenly he became aware that I was watching him, raised his head as though he were waking from a dream, smiled at me and blushed. At that moment Mme de Surgis’s other son came up behind the one who was playing, to look at his cards. When M. de Charlus had learned from me that they were brothers, his face could not conceal the admiration he felt for a family which could create masterpieces so splendid and so diverse. And what would have added to the Baron’s enthusiasm would have been the discovery that the two sons of Mme de Surgis-le-Duc were sons not only of the same mother but of the same father. The children of Jupiter are dissimilar, but that is because he married first Metis, whose destiny it was to bring into the world wise children, then Themis, and after her Eurynome, and Mnemosyne, and Leto, and only as a last resort Juno. But to a single father Mme de Surgis had borne these two sons who had each received beauty from her, but a different beauty.

At last I had the pleasure of seeing Swann come into this room, which was extremely large, so large that he did not at first catch sight of me. A pleasure mingled with sadness, a sadness which the other guests did not, perhaps, feel, their feeling consisting rather in that sort of fascination which is exercised by the strange and unexpected signs of an approaching death, a death that a man already has, in the popular saying, written on his face. And it was with an almost offensive amazement, in which there were elements of tactless curiosity, of cruelty, of relieved and at the same time anxious self-scrutiny (a blend of
suave mari magno
and
memento quia pulvis
, Robert would have said), that all eyes were fastened on that face the cheeks of which had been so eaten away, so whittled down, by illness, like a waning moon, that except at a certain angle, the angle doubtless from which Swann looked at himself, they stopped short like a flimsy piece of scenery to which only an optical illusion can add the appearance of depth. Whether because of the absence of those cheeks, no longer there to modify it, or because arteriosclerosis, which is also a form of intoxication, had reddened it as would drunkenness, or deformed it as would morphine, Swann’s punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois. Perhaps, too, in these last days, the physical type that characterises his race was becoming more pronounced in him, at the same time as a sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life, and which, one after another, his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-semitic propaganda had reawakened. There are certain Jews, men of great refinement and social delicacy, in whom nevertheless there remain in reserve and in the wings, ready to enter their lives at a given moment, as in a play, a cad and a prophet. Swann had arrived at the age of the prophet. Certainly, with that face of his from which, under the influence of his disease, whole segments had vanished, as when a block of ice melts and whole slabs of it fall off, he had of course changed. But I could not help being struck by the much greater extent to which he had changed in relation to myself. Admirable and cultivated though he was, a man I was anything but bored to meet, I could not for the life of me understand how I had been able to invest him long ago with such mystery that his appearance in the Champs-Elysées in his silk-lined cape would make my heart beat to the point where I was ashamed to approach him, and that at the door of the flat where such a being dwelt I could not ring the bell without being overcome with boundless agitation and alarm. All this had vanished not only from his house but from his person, and the idea of talking to him might or might not be agreeable to me, but had no effect whatever upon my nervous system.

And furthermore, how he had changed since that very afternoon, when I had met him—after all, only a few hours earlier—in the Duc de Guermantes’s study! Had he really had a scene with the Prince, which had deeply upset him? The supposition was not necessary. The slightest efforts that are demanded of a person who is very ill quickly become for him an excessive strain. He has only to be exposed, when already tired, to the heat of a crowded drawing-room, for his features to change dramatically and turn blue, as happens in a few hours with an overripe pear or milk that is about to turn. Besides this, Swann’s hair had thinned in places, and, as Mme de Guermantes remarked, needed attention from the furrier, looked as if it had been camphorated, and camphorated badly. I was just crossing the room to speak to Swann when unfortunately a hand fell upon my shoulder.

“Hallo, old boy, I’m in Paris for forty-eight hours. I called at your house and they told me you were here, so that it’s to you that my aunt is indebted for the honour of my company at her party.” It was Saint-Loup. I told him how greatly I admired the house. “Yes, it’s very much the historic monument. Personally I find it deadly. We mustn’t go near my uncle Palamède, or we shall be caught. Now that Mme Molé has gone (she’s the one who rules the roost just now) he’s rather at a loose end. I gather it was quite a spectacle, he never let her out of his sight for a moment, and didn’t leave her until he’d seen her into her carriage. I bear my uncle no ill will, only I do think it odd that my family council, which has always been so hard on me, should be composed of the very ones who have lived it up the most, beginning with the biggest roisterer of the lot, my uncle Charlus, who is my surrogate guardian, has had more women than Don Juan, and is still carrying on in spite of his age. There was talk at one time of having me made a ward of court. I bet when all those gay old dogs met to consider the question and had me up to preach to me and tell me I was breaking my mother’s heart, they dared not look one another in the face for fear of laughing. If you examined the composition of the council, you’d think they had deliberately chosen the greatest skirt-chasers.”

Leaving aside M. de Charlus, with regard to whom my friend’s astonishment did not seem to me more justified—though for different reasons, reasons which, moreover, were afterwards to undergo some modification in my mind—Robert was quite wrong to think it extraordinary that lessons in worldly wisdom should be given to a young man by people who have played the fool or are still doing so. Even if it is simply a question of atavism and family likeness, it is inevitable that the uncle who delivers the lecture should have more or less the same failings as the nephew whom he has been deputed to scold. Nor is the uncle in the least hypocritical in so doing, deluded as he is by the faculty people have of believing, in every new set of circumstances, that “this is quite different,” a faculty which enables them to adopt artistic, political and other errors without perceiving that they are the same errors which they exposed, ten years ago, in another school of painting which they condemned, another political affair which they felt to deserve a loathing that they no longer feel, and espouse those errors without recognising them in a fresh disguise. Besides, even if the faults of the uncle are different from those of the nephew, heredity may none the less to a certain extent be responsible, for the effect does not always resemble the cause, as a copy resembles its original, and even if the uncle’s faults are worse, he may easily believe them to be less serious.

When M. de Charlus had made indignant remonstrances to Robert, who in any case was unaware of his uncle’s true inclinations at the time—and even if it had still been the time when the Baron used to denounce his own inclinations—he might perfectly well have been sincere in considering, from the point of view of a man of the world, that Robert was infinitely more culpable than himself. Had not Robert, at the time when his uncle had been deputed to make him listen to reason, come within an inch of getting himself ostracised by society? Had he not very nearly been blackballed at the Jockey? Had he not made himself a public laughing-stock by the vast sums that he threw away upon a woman of the lowest type, by his friendships with people—authors, actors, Jews—not one of whom moved in society, by his opinions, which were indistinguishable from those held by traitors, by the grief he was causing to all his family? How could this scandalous existence be compared with that of M. de Charlus who had managed, so far, not only to retain but to enhance still further his position as a Guermantes, being in society an absolutely privileged person, sought after, adulated in the most exclusive circles, and a man who, married to a Bourbon princess, a woman of eminence, had succeeded in making her happy, had shown a devotion to her memory more fervent, more scrupulous than is customary in society, and had thus been as good a husband as a son?

“But are you sure that M. de Charlus has had all those mistresses?” I asked, not, of course, with the diabolical intention of revealing to Robert the secret that I had discovered, but irritated, nevertheless, at hearing him maintain an erroneous theory with such smug assurance. He merely shrugged his shoulders in response to what he took for ingenuousness on my part. “Not that I blame him in the least, I consider that he’s perfectly right.” And he proceeded to outline to me a theory of conduct that would have horrified him at Balbec (where he was not content with branding seducers, death seeming to him the only punishment adequate to their crime). Then, however, he had still been in love and jealous. Now he even went so far as to sing the praises of houses of assignation. “They’re the only places where you can find a shoe to fit you, sheathe your weapon, as we say in the Army.” He no longer felt for places of that sort the disgust that had inflamed him at Balbec when I made an allusion to them, and hearing what he now said, I told him that Bloch had introduced me to one, but Robert replied that the one which Bloch frequented must be “pretty vile, a poor man’s paradise!—It all depends, though: where was it?” I remained vague, for I had just remembered that it was there that Rachel whom Robert had so passionately loved used to give herself for a louis. “Anyhow, I can take you to some far better ones, full of stunning women.” Hearing me express the desire that he should take me as soon as possible to the ones he knew, which must indeed be far superior to the house to which Bloch had introduced me, he expressed sincere regret that he would be unable to do so on this occasion as he was leaving Paris next day. “It will have to be my next leave,” he said. “You’ll see, there are young girls there, even,” he added with an air of mystery. “There’s a little Mademoiselle de . . . I think it’s d’Orgeville—I can let you have the exact name—who is the daughter of quite tip-top people; her mother was by way of being a La Croix-l’Evêque, and they’re really out of the top drawer—in fact they’re more or less related, if I’m not mistaken, to my aunt Oriane. Anyhow, you have only to see the child to realise at once that she must be somebody’s daughter” (I could detect, hovering for a moment over Robert’s voice, the shadow of the Guermantes family genie, which passed like a cloud, but at a great height and without stopping). “She looks to me a marvellous proposition. The parents are always ill and can’t look after her. Gad, the child must have some amusement, and I count upon you to provide it!” “Oh, when are you coming back?” “I don’t know. If you don’t absolutely insist upon duchesses” (duchess being for the aristocracy the only title that denotes a particularly brilliant rank, as the lower orders talk of “princesses”), “in a different class of goods there’s Mme Putbus’s chambermaid.”

At this moment, Mme de Surgis entered the room in search of her sons. As soon as he saw her M. de Charlus went up to her with a friendliness by which the Marquise was all the more agreeably surprised in that an icy coldness was what she had expected from the Baron, who had always posed as Oriane’s protector and alone of the family—the rest being too often inclined to indulgence towards the Duke’s irregularities because of his wealth and from jealousy of the Duchess—kept his brother’s mistresses ruthlessly at a distance. And so Mme de Surgis would have fully understood the motives for the attitude that she dreaded to find in the Baron, but never for a moment suspected those for the wholly different welcome that she did receive from him. He spoke to her with admiration of the portrait that Jacquet had painted of her years before. This admiration waxed indeed to an enthusiasm which, if it was partly calculating, with the object of preventing the Marquise from going away, of “engaging” her, as Robert used to say of enemy armies whose forces one wants to keep tied down at a particular point, was also perhaps sincere. For, if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not in itself provoke desire, but feeds, with the aesthetic admiration that it does provoke, the desires that it awakens. These now gave in retrospect a voluptuous charm to Jacquet’s portrait itself, and at that moment the Baron would gladly have purchased it to study therein the physiological pedigree of the two Surgis boys.

“You see, I wasn’t exaggerating,” Robert said in my ear. “Just look at my uncle’s attentiveness to Mme de Surgis. Though I must say it does surprise me. If Oriane knew, she would be furious. Really, there are enough women in the world without his having to go and pounce on her,” he went on. Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages. Besides, while completely mistaken about his uncle, whom he supposed to be devoted to women, Robert, in his rancour, spoke too lightly of M. de Charlus. One is not always somebody’s nephew with impunity. It is often through him that a hereditary habit is transmitted sooner or later. We might indeed arrange a whole gallery of portraits, named like the German comedy
Uncle and Nephew
, in which we should see the uncle watching jealously, albeit unconsciously, for his nephew to end by becoming like himself. I might even add that this gallery would be incomplete were we not to include in it uncles who are not blood relations, being the uncles only of their nephews’ wives. For the Messieurs de Charlus of this world are so convinced that they themselves are the only good husbands, and what is more the only ones of whom a wife would not be jealous, that generally, out of affection for their niece, they make her marry another Charlus. Which tangles the skein of family likenesses. And, to affection for the niece is added at times affection for her betrothed as well. Such marriages are not uncommon, and are often what is called happy.

“What were we talking about? Oh yes, that big, fair girl, Mme Putbus’s maid. She goes with women too, but I don’t suppose you mind that. I tell you frankly, I’ve never seen such a gorgeous creature.” “I imagine her as being rather Giorgionesque?” “Wildly Giorgionesque! Oh, if I only had a little time in Paris, what wonderful things there are to be done! And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know, I’ve finished with all that.”

I soon discovered, to my surprise, that he had equally finished with literature, whereas it was merely with regard to literary men that he had struck me as being disillusioned at our last meeting. (“They’re practically all a pack of scoundrels,” he had said to me, a remark that was to be explained by his justified resentment towards certain of Rachel’s friends. For they had persuaded her that she would never have any talent if she allowed Robert, “scion of an alien race,” to acquire an influence over her, and with her used to make fun of him, to his face, at the dinners he gave for them.) But in reality Robert’s love of Letters was in no sense profound, did not spring from his true nature, was only a by-product of his love of Rachel, and had faded with the latter at the same time as his loathing for voluptuaries and his religious respect for the virtue of women.

“There’s something rather strange about those two young men. Look at that curious passion for gambling, Marquise,” said M. de Charlus, drawing Mme de Surgis’s attention to her two sons, as though he were completely unaware of their identity. “They must be a pair of orientals, they have certain characteristic features, they’re perhaps Turks,” he went on, so as to give further support to his feigned innocence and at the same time to exhibit a vague antipathy, which, when in due course it gave place to affability, would prove that the latter was addressed to the young men solely in their capacity as sons of Mme de Surgis, having begun only when the Baron discovered who they were. Perhaps, too, M. de Charlus, whose insolence was a natural gift which he delighted in exercising, was taking advantage of the few moments in which he was supposed not to know the name of these two young men to have a little fun at Mme de Surgis’s expense and to indulge in his habitual mockery, as Scapin takes advantage of his master’s disguise to give him a sound drubbing.

“They are my sons,” said Mme de Surgis, with a blush that would not have coloured her cheeks had she been shrewder without necessarily being more virtuous. She would then have understood that the air of absolute indifference or of sarcasm which M. de Charlus displayed towards a young man was no more sincere than the wholly superficial admiration which he showed for a woman expressed his true nature. The woman to whom he could go on indefinitely paying the prettiest compliments might well be jealous of the look which, while talking to her, he shot at a man whom he would pretend afterwards not to have noticed. For that look was different from the looks which M. de Charlus kept for women; a special look, springing from the depths, which even at a party could not help straying naïvely in the direction of young men, like the look in a tailor’s eye which betrays his profession by immediately fastening upon your attire.

“Oh, how very odd!” replied M. de Charlus with some insolence, as though his mind had to make a long journey to arrive at a reality so different from what he had pretended to suppose. “But I don’t know them,” he added, fearing lest he might have gone a little too far in the expression of his antipathy and have thus paralysed the Marquise’s intention of effecting an introduction. “Would you allow me to introduce them to you?” Mme de Surgis inquired timidly. “Why, good gracious, just as you please, I don’t mind, but I’m perhaps not very entertaining company for such young people,” M. de Charlus intoned with the air of chilly reluctance of someone allowing himself to be forced into an act of politeness.

“Arnulphe, Victurnien, come here at once,” said Mme de Surgis. Victurnien rose purposefully. Arnulphe, though he could not see further than his brother, followed him meekly.

“It’s the sons’ turn, now,” muttered Saint-Loup. “It’s enough to make one die laughing. He tries to curry favour with everyone, down to the dog in the yard. It’s all the funnier as my uncle detests pretty boys. And just look how seriously he’s listening to them. If it was me who tried to introduce them to him, he’d send me away with a flea in my ear. Listen, I shall have to go and say howd’ye-do to Oriane. I have so little time in Paris that I want to try and see all the people here that otherwise I ought to leave cards on.”

“How well brought-up they seem, what charming manners,” M. de Charlus was saying.

“Do you think so?” Mme de Surgis replied, highly delighted.

Swann, having caught sight of me, came over to Saint-Loup and myself. His Jewish gaiety was less subtle than his socialite witticisms: “Good evening,” he said to us. “Heavens! all three of us together—people will think it’s a meeting of the Syndicate. In another minute they’ll be looking for the money-box!” He had not observed that M. de Beauserfeuil was just behind him and could hear what he said. The General could not help wincing. We heard the voice of M. de Charlus close beside us: “What, so you’re called Victurnien, after the
Cabinet des Antiques
,” the Baron was saying, to prolong his conversation with the two young men. “By Balzac, yes,” replied the elder Surgis, who had never read a line of that novelist’s work, but to whom his tutor had remarked, a few days earlier, upon the similarity of his Christian name and d’Esgrignon’s. Mme de Surgis was delighted to see her son shine, and M. de Charlus in ecstasy at such a display of learning.

“It appears that Loubet
⁴
is entirely on our side, I have it from an absolutely trustworthy source,” Swann informed Saint-Loup, but this time in a lower tone so as not to be overheard by the General. He had begun to find his wife’s Republican connexions more interesting now that the Dreyfus case had become his chief preoccupation. “I tell you this because I know that you are with us up to the hilt.”

“Not quite to that extent; you’re completely mistaken,” Robert replied. “It’s a bad business, and I’m sorry I ever got involved in it. It was no affair of mine. If it were to begin over again, I should keep well clear of it. I’m a soldier, and my first loyalty is to the Army. If you stay with M. Swann for a moment, I shall be back presently. I must go and talk to my aunt.”

But I saw that it was with Mlle d’Ambresac that he went to talk, and was distressed by the thought that he had lied to me about the possibility of their engagement. My mind was set at rest when I learned that he had been introduced to her half an hour earlier by Mme de Marsantes, who was anxious for the marriage, the Ambresacs being extremely rich.

“At last,” said M. de Charlus to Mme de Surgis. “I find a young man with some education, who has read a bit, who knows who Balzac is. And it gives me all the more pleasure to meet him where that sort of thing has become most rare, in the house of one of my peers, one of ourselves,” he added, laying stress upon the words. It was all very well for the Guermantes to profess to regard all men as equal; on the great occasions when they found themselves among “well-born” people, especially if they were not quite so “well-born” as themselves, whom they were anxious and able to flatter, they did not hesitate to trot out old family memories. “At one time,” the Baron went on, “the word aristocrat meant the best people, in intellect and in heart. Now, here is the first person I’ve come across in our world who has ever heard of Victurnien d’Esgrignon. No, I’m wrong in saying the first. There are also a Polignac and a Montesquiou,” added M. de Charlus, who knew that this twofold association must inevitably thrill the Marquise. “However, in your sons’ case it runs in the family: their maternal grandfather had a famous eighteenth-century collection. I will show you mine if you will give me the pleasure of coming to luncheon with me one day,” he said to the young Victurnien. “I can show you an interesting edition of the
Cabinet des Antiques
with corrections in Balzac’s own hand. I shall be charmed to bring the two Victurniens face to face.”