In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (15 page)

I could not bring myself to leave Swann. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body becomes a mere retort in which to study chemical reactions. His face was mottled with tiny spots of Prussian blue, which seemed not to belong to the world of living things, and emitted the sort of odour which, at school, after “experiments,” makes it so unpleasant to have to remain in a “science” classroom. I asked him if it was true that he had had a long conversation with the Prince de Guermantes and if he would tell me what it had been about.

“Yes,” he said, “but go for a moment first with M. de Charlus and Mme de Surgis. I’ll wait for you here.”

And indeed M. de Charlus, having suggested to Mme de Surgis that they should leave this room, which was too hot, and go and sit for a while in another, had invited not the two sons to accompany their mother, but myself. In this way he had made himself appear, after having successfully hooked them, to have lost all interest in the two young men. He was moreover paying me an inexpensive compliment, Mme de Surgis-le-Duc being socially in rather bad odour.

Unfortunately, no sooner had we sat down in an alcove from which there was no way of escape than Mme de Saint-Euverte, a favourite butt for the Baron’s jibes, came past. She, perhaps to mask or else openly to disregard the ill will which she inspired in M. de Charlus, and above all to show that she was on intimate terms with a woman who was talking so familiarly to him, gave a disdainfully friendly greeting to the famous beauty, who acknowledged it while peeping out of the corner of her eye at M. de Charlus with a mocking smile. But the alcove was so narrow that Mme de Saint-Euverte, when she went behind us to continue her canvass of her guests for the morrow, found herself cornered and could not easily escape—a heaven-sent opportunity which M. de Charlus, anxious to display his insolent wit before the mother of the two young men, took good care not to let slip. A silly question which I put to him without any malicious intent gave him the cue for a triumphal tirade of which the wretched Saint-Euverte, more or less immobilised behind us, could not have missed a single word.

“Would you believe it, this impertinent young man,” he said, indicating me to Mme de Surgis, “has just asked me, without the slightest concern for the proper reticence in regard to such needs, whether I was going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, in other words, I suppose, whether I was suffering from diarrhoea. I should endeavour in any case to relieve myself in some more comfortable place than the house of a person who, if my memory serves me, was celebrating her centenary when I first began to move in society, that is to say, not in her house. And yet who could be more interesting to listen to? What a host of historic memories, seen and lived through in the days of the First Empire and the Restoration, and intimate revelations, too, which certainly had nothing of the ‘Saint’ about them but must have been extremely ‘vertes’
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if one may judge by the friskiness still left in those venerable hams. What would prevent me from questioning her about those thrilling times is the sensitiveness of my olfactory organ. The proximity of the lady is enough. I suddenly say to myself: oh, good lord, someone has broken the lid of my cesspool, when it’s simply the Marquise opening her mouth to emit some invitation. And you can imagine that if I had the misfortune to go to her house, the cesspool would expand into a formidable sewage-cart. She bears a mystic name, though, which has always made me think with jubilation, although she has long since passed the date of her jubilee, of that stupid line of so-called ‘deliquescent’ poetry: ‘Ah, green, how green my soul was on that day . . .’ But I require a cleaner sort of verdure. They tell me that the indefatigable old street-walker gives ‘garden-parties.’ Myself, I should describe them as ‘invitations to explore the sewers.’ Are you going to wallow there?” he asked Mme de Surgis, who now found herself in a quandary. Wishing to pretend for the Baron’s benefit that she was not going, and knowing that she would give days of her life rather than miss the Saint-Euverte party, she got out of it by a compromise, that is to say by expressing uncertainty. This uncertainty took a form so clumsily amateurish and so miserably tacked together that M. de Charlus, not afraid of offending Mme de Surgis, whom nevertheless he was anxious to please, began to laugh to show her that “it didn’t wash.”

“I always admire people who make plans,” she said. “I often change mine at the last moment. There’s a question of a summer frock which may alter everything. I shall act upon the inspiration of the moment.”

For my part, I was incensed at the abominable little speech that M. de Charlus had just made. I would have liked to shower blessings upon the giver of garden-parties. Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners. Mme de Saint-Euverte, who had succeeded in escaping from the alcove to which we were barring the entry, brushed against the Baron inadvertently as she passed him, and, by a reflex of snobbishness which wiped out all her anger, perhaps even in the hope of securing an opening of a kind at which this could not be the first attempt, exclaimed: “Oh! I beg your pardon, Monsieur de Charlus, I hope I did not hurt you,” as though she were kneeling before her lord and master. The latter did not deign to reply otherwise than by a broad ironical smile, and conceded only a “Good evening,” which, uttered as though he had noticed the Marquise’s presence only after she had greeted him, was an additional insult. Finally, with an extreme obsequiousness which pained me for her sake, Mme de Saint-Euverte came up to me and, drawing me aside, murmured in my ear: “Tell me, what have I done to M. de Charlus? They say that he doesn’t consider me smart enough for him,” she added, laughing heartily. I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody, really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

“Other people assure me that he is cross because I don’t invite him. But he doesn’t give me much encouragement. He seems to avoid me.” (This expression struck me as inadequate.) “Try to find out, and come and tell me tomorrow. And if he feels remorseful and wishes to come too, bring him. Forgive and forget. Indeed, I should be quite glad to see him, because it would annoy Mme de Surgis. I give you a free hand. You have a remarkable flair for these matters and I don’t wish to appear to be begging my guests to come. In any case, I count upon you absolutely.”

It occurred to me that Swann must be getting tired of waiting for me. Moreover I did not wish to be too late in returning home because of Albertine, and, taking leave of Mme de Surgis and M. de Charlus, I went in search of my invalid in the card-room. I asked him whether what he had said to the Prince in their conversation in the garden was really what M. de Bréauté (whom I did not name) had reported to us, about a little play by Bergotte. He burst out laughing: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not one, it’s a complete fabrication and would have been an utterly stupid thing to say. It’s really incredible, this spontaneous generation of falsehood. I won’t ask who it was that told you, but it would be really interesting, in a field as limited as this, to work back from one person to another and find out how the story arose. Anyhow, what concern can it be of other people, what the Prince said to me? People are very inquisitive. I’ve never been inquisitive, except when I was in love, and when I was jealous. And a lot I ever learned! Are you jealous?” I told Swann that I had never experienced jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. “Well, you can count yourself lucky. A little jealousy is not too unpleasant, for two reasons. In the first place, it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one other at any rate. And then it makes one feel the pleasure of possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing her to go about by herself. But that’s only in the very first stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete. In between, it’s the most agonising torment. However, I must confess that I haven’t had much experience even of the two pleasures I’ve mentioned—the first because of my own nature, which is incapable of sustained reflexion; the second because of circumstances, because of the woman, I should say the women, of whom I’ve been jealous. But that makes no difference. Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp. The memory of those feelings is something that’s to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustn’t laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that I’ve been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, those old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me—it’s the mania of all collectors—very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which I’m now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all. But, to come back to my conversation with the Prince, I shall tell one person only, and that person is going to be you.”

My attention was distracted by the conversation that M. de Charlus, who had returned to the card-room, was carrying on endlessly nearby. “And are you a reader too? What do you do?” he asked Comte Arnulphe, who had never heard even the name of Balzac. But his short-sightedness, since it caused him to see everything very small, gave him the appearance of seeing great distances, so that—rare poetry in a statuesque Greek god—remote, mysterious stars seemed to be engraved upon his pupils.

“Suppose we took a turn in the garden,” I said to Swann, while Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seemed to indicate that mentally at least his development was incomplete, replied to M. de Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: “Oh, you know, mainly golf, tennis, football, running, and especially polo.” Thus had Minerva, having subdivided herself, ceased in certain cities to be the goddess of wisdom, and had become partly incarnated in a purely sporting, horse-loving deity, Athene Hippia. And he went to St Moritz also to ski, for Pallas Tritogeneia frequents the high peaks and outruns swift horsemen. “Ah!” replied M. de Charlus with the transcendental smile of the intellectual who does not even take the trouble to conceal his derision, but, on the other hand, feels himself so superior to other people and so far despises the intelligence of those who are least stupid that he barely differentiates between them and the most stupid, as long as the latter are attractive to him in some other way. While talking to Arnulphe, M. de Charlus felt that by the mere act of addressing him he was conferring upon him a superiority which everyone else must recognise and envy. “No,” Swann replied, “I’m too tired to walk about. Let’s sit down somewhere in a corner, I cannot remain on my feet any longer.” This was true, and yet the act of beginning to talk had already restored to him a certain vivacity. For it is a fact that in the most genuine exhaustion there is, especially in highly-strung people, an element that depends on attention and is preserved only by an act of memory. We feel suddenly weary as soon as we are afraid of feeling weary, and, to throw off our fatigue, it suffices us to forget about it. To be sure, Swann was far from being one of those indefatigable invalids who, entering a room worn out and ready to drop, revive in conversation like a flower in water and are able for hours on end to draw from their own words a reserve of strength which they do not, alas, communicate to their hearers, who appear more and more exhausted the more the talker comes back to life. But Swann belonged to that stout Jewish race, in whose vital energy, its resistance to death, its individual members seem to share. Stricken severally by their own diseases, as it is stricken itself by persecution, they continue indefinitely to struggle against terrible agonies which may be prolonged beyond every apparently possible limit, when already one can see only a prophet’s beard surmounted by a huge nose which dilates to inhale its last breath, before the hour strikes for the ritual prayers and the punctual procession of distant relatives begins, advancing with mechanical movements as upon an Assyrian frieze.

We went to sit down, but, before moving away from the group formed by M. de Charlus with the two young Surgis and their mother, Swann could not resist fastening upon the lady’s bosom the lingering, dilated, concupiscent gaze of a connoisseur. He even put up his monocle for a better view, and, while he talked to me, kept glancing in her direction.

“Here, word for word,” he said to me when we were seated, “is my conversation with the Prince, and if you remember what I said to you just now, you will see why I choose you as my confidant. There is another reason as well, which you will learn one day. ‘My dear Swann,’ the Prince de Guermantes said to me, ‘you must forgive me if I have appeared to be avoiding you for some time past.’ (I had never even noticed it, having been ill and avoiding society myself.) ‘In the first place, I had heard it said, and I fully expected, that in the unhappy affair which is splitting the country in two your views were diametrically opposed to mine. Now, it would have been extremely painful to me to hear you express these views in my presence. I was so sensitive on the matter that when the Princess, two years ago, heard her brother-in-law, the Grand Duke of Hesse, say that Dreyfus was innocent, she was not content with promptly challenging the assertion but refrained from repeating it to me in order not to upset me. At about the same time, the Crown Prince of Sweden came to Paris and, having probably heard someone say that the Empress Eugénie was a Dreyfusist, confused her with the Princess (a strange confusion, you will admit, between a woman of the rank of my wife and a Spaniard, a good deal less well-born than people make out, and married to a mere Bonaparte) and said to her: Princess, I am doubly glad to meet you, for I know that you hold the same view as myself of the Dreyfus case, which does not surprise me since Your Highness is Bavarian. Which drew down upon the Prince the answer: Sir, I am no longer anything but a French Princess, and I share the views of all my fellow-countrymen. Well, my dear Swann, about eighteen months ago, a conversation I had with General de Beauserfeuil made me suspect that, not an error, but grave illegalities, had been committed in the conduct of the trial.’ ”