In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (16 page)

We were interrupted (Swann did not want his story to be overheard) by the voice of M. de Charlus who (without, as it happened, paying us the slightest attention) came past escorting Mme de Surgis and stopped in the hope of detaining her for a moment longer, either on account of her sons or from that reluctance common to all the Guermantes to bring anything to an end, which kept them plunged in a sort of anxious inertia. Swann informed me in this connexion, a little later, of something that, for me, stripped the name Surgis-le-Duc of all the poetry that I had found in it. The Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc boasted a far higher social position, far grander connexions by marriage, than her cousin the Comte de Surgis, who had no money and lived on his estate in the country. But the suffix to her title, “le Duc,” had not at all the origin which I attributed to it, and which had made me associate it in my imagination with Bourg-l’Abbé, Bois-le-Roi, etc. All that had happened was that a Comte de Surgis had married, under the Restoration, the daughter of an immensely rich industrial magnate, M. Leduc, or Le Duc, himself the son of a chemical manufacturer, the richest man of his day and a peer of France. King Charles X had created for the son born of this marriage the marquisate of Surgis-le-Duc, a marquisate of Surgis existing already in the family. The addition of the bourgeois surname had not prevented this branch from allying itself, on the strength of its enormous fortune, with the first families of the realm. And the present Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc, being extremely well-born, could have enjoyed a very high position in society. A demon of perversity had driven her, scorning the position ready-made for her, to flee from the conjugal roof and live a life of open scandal. Whereupon the society she had scorned at twenty, when it was at her feet, had cruelly spurned her at thirty, when, after ten years, nobody except a few faithful friends greeted her any longer, and she had had to set to work to reconquer laboriously, inch by inch, what she had possessed as a birthright (a round trip that isn’t uncommon).

As for the great nobles, her kinsmen, whom she had disowned in the past, and who in their turn had disowned her, she found an excuse for the joy that she would feel in gathering them again to her bosom in the memories of childhood that she would be able to recall with them. And in saying this, with the object of disguising her snobbery, she was perhaps being less untruthful than she supposed. “Basin is all my girlhood!” she said on the day on which he came back to her. And indeed it was partly true. But she had miscalculated when she chose him for her lover. For all the women friends of the Duchesse de Guermantes were to rally round her, and so Mme de Surgis must descend for the second time that slope up which she had so laboriously toiled. “Well!” M. de Charlus was saying to her in an effort to prolong the conversation, “you must lay my tribute at the feet of the beautiful portrait. How is it? What has become of it?” “Why,” replied Mme de Surgis, “you know I haven’t got it now; my husband wasn’t pleased with it.” “Not pleased! With one of the greatest works of art of our time, equal to Nattier’s Duchesse de Châteauroux, and, moreover, perpetuating no less majestic and heart-shattering a goddess. Oh, that little blue collar! I swear, Vermeer himself never painted a fabric more consummately—but we must not say it too loud or Swann will fall upon us to avenge his favourite painter, the Master of Delft.” The Marquise, turning round, addressed a smile and held out her hand to Swann, who had risen to greet her. But almost without concealment, because his advanced years had deprived him either of the will, from indifference to the opinion of others, or the physical power, from the intensity of his desire and the weakening of the controls that help to disguise it, as soon as Swann, on taking the Marquise’s hand, had seen her bosom at close range and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, drugged by her perfume, quivered like the wings of a butterfly about to alight upon a half-glimpsed flower. Abruptly he shook off the intoxication that had seized him, and Mme de Surgis herself, although embarrassed, stifled a deep sigh, so contagious can desire prove at times. “The painter was offended,” she said to M. de Charlus, “and took it back. I have heard that it is now at Diane de Saint-Euverte’s.” “I decline to believe,” said the Baron, “that a great picture can have such bad taste.”*

“He is talking to her about her portrait. I could talk to her about that portrait just as well as Charlus,” said Swann, affecting a drawling, raffish tone as he followed the retreating couple with his eyes. “And I should certainly enjoy talking about it more than Charlus,” he added.

I asked him whether the things that were said about M. de Charlus were true, in doing which I was lying twice over, for if I had no proof that anybody ever had said anything, I had on the other hand been perfectly aware since that afternoon that what I was hinting at was true. Swann shrugged his shoulders, as though I had suggested something quite absurd.

“It’s quite true that he’s a charming friend. But I need hardly add that his friendship is purely platonic. He is more sentimental than other men, that’s all; on the other hand, as he never goes very far with women, that has given a sort of plausibility to the idiotic rumours to which you refer. Charlus is perhaps greatly attached to his men friends, but you may be quite certain that the attachment is only in his head and in his heart. However, now we may perhaps be left in peace for a moment. Well, the Prince de Guermantes went on to say: ‘I don’t mind telling you that this idea of a possible illegality in the conduct of the trial was extremely painful to me, because I have always, as you know, worshipped the Army. I discussed the matter again with the General, and, alas, there could be no room for doubt. I need hardly tell you that, all this time, the idea that an innocent man might be undergoing the most infamous punishment had never even crossed my mind. But tormented by this idea of illegality, I began to study what I had always declined to read, and then the possibility, this time not only of illegality but of the prisoner’s innocence, began to haunt me. I did not feel that I could talk about it to the Princess. Heaven knows that she has become just as French as myself. From the day of our marriage, I took such pride in showing her our country in all its beauty, and what to me is its greatest splendour, its Army, that it would have been too painful for me to tell her of my suspicions, which involved, it is true, a few officers only. But I come of a family of soldiers, and I was reluctant to believe that officers could be mistaken. I discussed the case again with Beauserfeuil, and he admitted that there had been culpable intrigues, that the memorandum was possibly not in Dreyfus’s writing, but that an overwhelming proof of his guilt did exist. This was the Henry document. And a few days later we learned that it was a forgery. After that, unbeknownst to the Princess, I began to read the
Siècle
and the
Aurore
every day. Soon I had no more doubts, and I couldn’t sleep. I confided my distress to our friend, the abbé Poiré, who, I was astonished to find, held the same conviction, and I got him to say masses for Dreyfus, his unfortunate wife and their children. Meanwhile, one morning as I went into the Princess’s room, I saw her maid trying to hide something from me that she had in her hand. I asked her, chaffingly, what it was, and she blushed and refused to tell me. I had the greatest confidence in my wife, but this incident disturbed me considerably (and the Princess too, no doubt, who must have heard about it from her maid), for my dear Marie barely uttered a word to me that day at luncheon. I asked the abbé Poiré that day whether he could say my mass for Dreyfus the following morning . . .’ And so much for that!” exclaimed Swann, breaking off his narrative.

I looked up, and saw the Duc de Guermantes bearing down upon us. “Forgive me for interrupting you, my boys. Young man,” he went on, addressing me, “I am instructed to give you a message from Oriane. Marie and Gilbert have asked us to stay and have supper at their table with only five or six other people: the Princess of Hesse, Mme de Ligne, Mme de Tarente, Mme de Chevreuse, the Duchesse d’Arenberg. Unfortunately, we can’t stay—we’re going on to a little ball of sorts.” I was listening, but whenever we have something definite to do at a given moment, we depute a certain person inside us who is accustomed to that sort of duty to keep an eye on the clock and warn us in time. This inner servant reminded me, as I had asked him to remind me a few hours before, that Albertine, who at the moment was far from my thoughts, was to come and see me immediately after the theatre. And so I declined the invitation to supper. This does not mean that I was not enjoying myself at the Princesse de Guermantes’s. The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other. But the latter, if it is apparent, or rather if it alone is apparent, may put people off the scent of the other, reassure or mislead the jealous, create a false impression. And yet, all that is needed to make us sacrifice it to the other is a little happiness or a little suffering. Sometimes a third category of pleasures, more serious, but more essential, does not yet exist for us, its potential existence betraying itself only by arousing regrets and discouragement. And yet it is to these pleasures that we shall devote ourselves in time to come. To give a very minor example, a soldier in time of peace will sacrifice social life to love, but, once war is declared (and without there being any need to introduce the idea of patriotic duty), will sacrifice love to the passion, stronger than love, for fighting. For all that Swann assured me that he was happy to tell me his story, I could feel that his conversation with me, because of the lateness of the hour, and because he was so ill, was one of those exertions for which those who know that they are killing themselves by sitting up late, by overdoing things, feel an angry regret when they return home, a regret similar to that felt at the wild extravagance of which they have again been guilty by the spendthrifts who will nevertheless be unable to restrain themselves from throwing money out of the window again tomorrow. Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether it is caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep outside our normal habits, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance. The talker continues to talk, from politeness, from excitement, but he knows that the hour at which he might still have been able to go to sleep has already passed, and he knows also the reproaches that he will heap upon himself during the insomnia and fatigue that must ensue. Already, moreover, even the momentary pleasure has come to an end, body and brain are too far drained of their strength to welcome with any readiness what seems entertaining to one’s interlocutor. They are like a house on the morning before a journey or removal, where visitors become a perfect plague, to be received sitting upon locked trunks, with our eyes on the clock.

“At last we’re alone,” he said. “I quite forget where I was. Oh yes, I had just told you, hadn’t I, that the Prince asked the abbé Poiré if he could say his mass next day for Dreyfus. ‘No, the abbé informed me’ (“I say
me
,” Swann explained to me, “because it’s the Prince who is speaking, you understand?”), ‘for I have another mass that I’ve been asked to say for him tomorrow as well.—What, I said to him, is there another Catholic as well as myself who is convinced of his innocence?—It appears so.—But this other supporter’s conviction must be more recent than mine.—Maybe, but this other was asking me to say masses when you still believed Dreyfus guilty.—Ah, I can see that it’s no one in our world.—On the contrary!—Really, there are Dreyfusists among us, are there? You intrigue me; I should like to unbosom myself to this rare bird, if it is someone I know.—It is.—What is his name?—The Princesse de Guermantes. While I was afraid of offending my dear wife’s nationalistic opinions, her faith in France, she had been afraid of alarming my religious opinions, my patriotic sentiments. But privately she had been thinking as I did, though for longer than I had. And what her maid had been hiding as she went into her room, what she went out to buy for her every morning, was the
Aurore
. My dear Swann, from that moment I thought of the pleasure that I should give you if I told you how closely akin my views upon this matter were to yours; forgive me for not having done so sooner. If you bear in mind that I had never said a word to the Princess, it will not surprise you to be told that thinking the same as yourself must at that time have kept me further apart from you than thinking differently. For it was an extremely painful topic for me to broach. The more I believe that an error, that crimes even, have been committed, the more my heart bleeds for the Army. It had never occurred to me that opinions like mine could possibly cause you similar pain, until I was told the other day that you emphatically condemned the insults to the Army and the fact that the Dreyfusists agreed to ally themselves with those who insulted it. That settled it. I admit that it has been most painful for me to confess to you what I think of certain officers, few in number fortunately, but it is a relief to me not to have to keep away from you any longer, and above all a relief to make it clear to you that if I had other feelings it was because I hadn’t a shadow of doubt as to the soundness of the verdict. As soon as my doubts began, I could wish for only one thing, that the mistake should be rectified.’ I confess that I was deeply moved by the Prince de Guermantes’s words. If you knew him as I do, if you could realise the distance he has had to travel in order to reach his present position, you would admire him as he deserves. Not that his opinion surprises me, his is such an upright nature!”

Swann was forgetting that during the afternoon he had on the contrary told me that people’s opinions as to the Dreyfus case were dictated by atavism. At the most he had made an exception on behalf of intelligence, because in Saint-Loup it had managed to overcome atavism and had made a Dreyfusard of him. Now he had just seen that this victory had been of short duration and that Saint-Loup had passed into the opposite camp. And so it was to moral uprightness that he now assigned the role which had previously devolved upon intelligence. In reality we always discover afterwards that our adversaries had a reason for being on the side they espoused, which has nothing to do with any element of right that there may be on that side, and that those who think as we do do so because their intelligence, if their moral nature is too base to be invoked, or their uprightness, if their perception is weak, has compelled them to.