In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (69 page)

Morel had piously taken in this history lesson, which was perhaps a trifle cursory; he looked upon these matters as though he were himself a Guermantes and hoped that he might some day have an opportunity of meeting the false La Tour d’Auvergnes in order to let them see, by the contemptuous way he shook hands with them, that he did not take them very seriously. As for the Cambremers, here was his very chance to prove to them that they were no better than “the humblest in his regiment.” He did not answer their invitation, and on the evening of the dinner declined at the last moment by telegram, as pleased with himself as if he had behaved like a Prince of the Blood. It must be added here that it is impossible to imagine the degree to which, in a more general sense, M. de Charlus could be intolerable, meddlesome and even—he who was so clever—stupid, in all the circumstances where the flaws in his character came into play. We may say indeed that these flaws are like an intermittent disease of the mind. Who has not observed the phenomenon in women, and even in men, endowed with remarkable intelligence but afflicted with nervous irritability? When they are happy, calm, satisfied with their surroundings, we marvel at their precious gifts; it is the truth, literally, that speaks through their lips. A touch of headache, the slightest prick to their self-esteem, is enough to alter everything. The luminous intelligence, become brusque, convulsive and shrunken, no longer reflects anything but an irritable, suspicious, teasing self, doing everything possible to displease.

The anger of the Cambremers was extreme; and in the meantime other incidents brought about a certain tension in their relations with the little clan. As we were returning, the Cottards, Charlus, Brichot, Morel and I, from a dinner at La Raspelière one evening after the Cambremers, who had been to lunch with friends at Harambouville, had accompanied us for part of our outward journey, “Since you’re so fond of Balzac, and can find examples of him in the society of today,” I had remarked to M. de Charlus, “you must feel that those Cambremers come straight out of the
Scènes de la vie de province
.” But M. de Charlus, for all the world as though he had been their friend and I had offended him by my remark, at once cut me short: “You say that because the wife is superior to the husband,” he remarked drily. “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that she was the
Muse du département
, or Mme de Bargeton, although . . .” M. de Charlus again interrupted me: “Say rather, Mme de Mortsauf.” The train stopped and Brichot got out. “Didn’t you see us making signs to you? You’re incorrigible.” “What do you mean?” “Why, haven’t you noticed that Brichot is madly in love with Mme de Cambremer?” I could see from the attitude of the Cottards and Charlie that there was not a shadow of doubt about this in the little nucleus. I thought that it must be malice on their part. “What, you didn’t notice how distressed he became when you mentioned her,” went on M. de Charlus, who liked to show that he had experience of women, and spoke of the sentiment they inspire as naturally as if it was what he himself habitually felt. But a certain equivocally paternal tone in addressing all young men—in spite of his exclusive affection for Morel—gave the lie to the womanising views which he expressed. “Oh! these children,” he said in a shrill, mincing, sing-song voice, “one has to teach them everything, they’re as innocent as newborn babes, they can’t even tell when a man is in love with a woman. I was more fly than that at your age,” he added, for he liked to use the expressions of the underworld, perhaps because they appealed to him, perhaps so as not to appear, by avoiding them, to admit that he consorted with people whose current vocabulary they were. A few days later, I was obliged to bow to the facts and acknowledge that Brichot was enamoured of the Marquise. Unfortunately he accepted several invitations to lunch with her. Mme Verdurin decided that it was time to put a stop to these proceedings. Quite apart from what she saw as the importance of such an intervention for the politics of the little nucleus, she had developed an ever-keener taste for remonstrations of this sort and the dramas to which they gave rise, a taste which idleness breeds just as much in the bourgeoisie as in the aristocracy. It was a day of great excitement at La Raspelière when Mme Verdurin was seen to disappear for a whole hour with Brichot, whom (it transpired) she proceeded to inform that Mme de Cambremer cared nothing for him, that he was the laughing-stock of her drawing-room, that he would be dishonouring his old age and compromising his situation in the academic world. She went so far as to refer in touching terms to the laundress with whom he lived in Paris, and to their little girl. She won the day; Brichot ceased to go to Féterne, but his grief was such that for two days it was thought that he would lose his sight altogether, and in any case his disease had taken a leap forward from which it never retreated. In the meantime, the Cambremers, who were furious with Morel, deliberately invited M. de Charlus on one occasion without him. Receiving no reply from the Baron, they began to fear that they had committed a gaffe, and, deciding that rancour was a bad counsellor, wrote somewhat belatedly to Morel, an ineptitude which made M. de Charlus smile by proving to him the extent of his power. “You shall answer for us both that I accept,” he said to Morel. When the evening of the dinner came, the party assembled in the great drawing-room of Féterne. In reality, the Cambremers were giving this dinner for those fine flowers of fashion M. and Mme Féré. But they were so afraid of displeasing M. de Charlus that although she had got to know the Férés through M. de Chevregny, Mme de Cambremer went into a frenzy of alarm when, on the day of the dinner-party, she saw him arrive to pay a call on them at Féterne. She thought up every imaginable excuse for sending him back to Beausoleil as quickly as possible, not quickly enough, however, for him not to run into the Férés in the courtyard, who were as shocked to see him dismissed like this as he himself was ashamed. But, whatever happened, the Cambremers wished to spare M. de Charlus the sight of M. de Chevregny, whom they judged to be provincial because of certain little points which can be overlooked within the family but have to be taken into account in front of strangers, who are in fact the last people in the world to notice them. But we do not like to display to them relatives who have remained at the stage which we ourselves have struggled to outgrow. As for M. and Mme Féré, they were in the highest degree what is described as “out of the top drawer.” In the eyes of those who so defined them, no doubt the Guermantes, the Rohans and many others were also out of the top drawer, but their name made it unnecessary to say so. Since not everyone was aware of the exalted birth of M. Féré’s mother, or of Mme Féré’s, or of the extraordinarily exclusive circle in which she and her husband moved, when you mentioned their name you invariably added by way of explanation that they were “out of the very top drawer.” Did their obscure name prompt them to a sort of haughty reserve? The fact remains that the Férés refused to know people on whom the La Trémoïlles would not have forborne to call. It had needed the position of queen of her particular stretch of coast, which the old Marquise de Cambremer held in the Manche, to make the Férés consent to come to one of her afternoons every year. The Cambremers had invited them to dinner and were counting largely on the effect that M. de Charlus was going to make on them. It was discreetly announced that he was to be one of the party. It chanced that Mme Féré did not know him. Mme de Cambremer, on learning this, felt a keen satisfaction, and the smile of a chemist who is about to bring into contact for the first time two particularly important bodies hovered over her lips. The door opened, and Mme de Cambremer almost fainted when she saw Morel enter the room alone. Like a private secretary conveying his minister’s apologies, like a morganatic wife expressing the Prince’s regret that he is unwell (as Mme de Clinchamp used to do on behalf of the Duc d’Aumale), Morel said in the airiest of tones: “The Baron can’t come. He’s not feeling very well, at least I think that’s the reason . . . I haven’t seen him this week,” he added, these last words completing the despair of Mme de Cambremer, who had told M. and Mme Féré that Morel saw M. de Charlus at every hour of the day. The Cambremers pretended that the Baron’s absence was a blessing in disguise, and, without letting Morel hear them, said to their other guests: “We can do very well without him, can’t we, it will be all the more agreeable.” But they were furious, suspected a plot hatched by Mme Verdurin, and, tit for tat, when she invited them again to La Raspelière, M. de Cambremer, unable to resist the pleasure of seeing his house again and of mingling with the little group, came, but came alone, saying that the Marquise was so sorry, but her doctor had ordered her to stay at home. The Cambremers hoped by this partial attendance at the same time to teach M. de Charlus a lesson and to show the Verdurins that they were not obliged to treat them with more than a limited politeness, as Princesses of the Blood used in the old days to show duchesses out, but only as far as the middle of the second chamber. After a few weeks, they were scarcely on speaking terms.

M. de Cambremer explained it to me as follows: “I must tell you that with M. de Charlus it was rather difficult. He is an extreme Dreyfusard . . .”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes he is . . . Anyhow his cousin the Prince de Guermantes is, and they’ve come in for a lot of abuse because of it. I have some relatives who are very particular about that sort of thing. I can’t afford to mix with those people, I should alienate the whole of my family.”

“Since the Prince de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard, that will make things all the easier,” said Mme de Cambremer, “because Saint-Loup, who is said to be going to marry his niece, is one too. In fact it may well be the reason for the marriage.”

“Come now, my dear,” her husband replied, “you mustn’t say that Saint-Loup, who’s a great friend of ours is a Dreyfusard. One oughtn’t to make such allegation. lightly. You’ll make him highly popular in the Army!”

“He was once, but he isn’t any longer,” I explained to M. de Cambremer. “As for his marrying Mlle de Guermantes-Brassac, is there any truth in that?”

“People are talking of nothing else, but you shoul be in a position to know.”

“But I tell you, he himself told me he was a Drey fusard,” said Mme de Cambremer, “—not that there isn’ every excuse for him, the Guermantes are half German.”

“As regards the Guermantes of the Rue de Varenne you can say entirely,” said Cancan, “but Saint-Loup is another kettle of fish; he may have any number of German relations, but his father insisted on maintaining his title as a French nobleman; he joined the colours in 1871 and was killed in the war in the most gallant fashion. Although I’m a stickler in these matters, it doesn’t do to exaggerate either one way or the other.
In medio
. . .
virtus
, ah, I forget the exact words. It’s a remark I’ve heard Dr Cottard make. Now, there’s a man who always has a word for it. You ought to have a
Petit Larousse
here.”

To avoid having to give a verdict on the Latin quotation, and to get away from the subject of Saint-Loup, as to whom her husband seemed to think that she was wanting in tact, Mme de Cambremer fell back upon the Mistress, whose quarrel with them was even more in need of an explanation. “We were delighted to let La Raspelière to Mme Verdurin,” said the Marquise. “The only trouble is that she appears to imagine that together with the house and everything else that she has managed to lay her hands on, the use of the meadow, the old hangings all sorts of things which weren’t in the lease at all, she should also be entitled to make friends with us. The two things are entirely distinct. Our mistake lay in not getting everything done quite simply through a lawyer or an agency. At Féterne it doesn’t much matter, but I can just imagine the face my aunt de Ch’nouville would make if she saw old mother Verdurin come marching in on one of my days with her hair all over the place. As for M. de Charlus, of course he knows some very nice people, but he knows some very nasty people too.” I asked who. Driven into a corner, Mme de Cambremer finally said: “People say that it was he who was keeping a certain Monsieur Moreau, Morille, Morue, I can’t remember exactly. Nothing to do, of course, with Morel the violinist,” she added, blushing. “When I realised that Mme Verdurin imagined that because she was our tenant in the Manche she would have the right to come and call upon me in Paris, I saw that it was time to cut the painter.”

Notwithstanding this quarrel with the Mistress, the Cambremers were on quite good terms with the faithful, and would readily get into our compartment when they were travelling by the train. Just before we reached Douville, Albertine, taking out her mirror for the last time, would sometimes deem it necessary to change her gloves or to take off her hat for a moment, and, with the tortoiseshell comb which I had given her and which she wore in her hair, to smooth out the knots, to fluff up the curls, and if necessary to push up her chignon over the waves which descended in regular valleys to her nape. Once we were in the carriages which had come to meet us, we no longer had any idea where we were; the roads were not lighted; we could tell by the louder noise of the wheels that we were passing through a village, we thought we had arrived, we found ourselves once more in the open country, we heard bells in the distance, we forgot that we were in evening dress, and we had almost fallen asleep when, at the end of this long stretch of darkness which, what with the distance we had travelled and the hitches and delays inseparable from railway journeys, seemed to have carried us on to a late hour of the night and almost half-way back to Paris, suddenly, after the crunching of the carriage wheels over a finer gravel had revealed to us that we had turned into the drive, there burst forth, reintroducing us into a social existence, the dazzling lights of the drawing-room, then of the dining-room where we were suddenly taken aback by hearing eight o’clock strike when we imagined it was long past, while the endless dishes and vintage wines would circulate among the men in tails and the women with bare arms, at a dinner glittering with light like a real metropolitan dinner-party but surrounded, and thereby changed in character, by the strange and sombre double veil which, diverted from their primal solemnity, the nocturnal, rural, maritime hours of the journey there and back had woven for it. Soon indeed the return journey obliged us to leave the radiant and quickly forgotten splendour of the lighted drawing-room for the carriages, in which I arranged to be with Albertine so that she should not be alone with other people, and often for another reason as well, which was that we could both do many things in a dark carriage, in which the jolts of the downward drive would moreover give us an excuse, should a sudden ray of light fall upon us, for clinging to one another. When M. de Cambremer was still on visiting terms with the Verdurins, he would ask me: “You don’t think this fog will bring on your spasms? My sister’s were terribly bad this morning. Ah! you’ve been having them too,” he said with satisfaction. “I shall tell her tonight. I know that as soon as I get home the first thing she’ll ask will be whether you’ve had any lately.” He spoke to me of my sufferings only to lead up to his sister’s, and made me describe mine in detail simply that he might point out the difference between them and hers. But notwithstanding these differences, as he felt that his sister’s spasms entitled him to speak with authority, he could not believe that what “succeeded” with hers was not indicated as a cure for mine, and it irritated him that I would not try these remedies, for if there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people. “Not that I need speak, a mere layman, when you are here before the Areopagus, at the fountainhead of wisdom. What does Professor Cottard think about them?”