In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (76 page)

“I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, and I really must apologise for keeping you waiting in this nasty cab,” he said, in order to fill the vacuum in his anxious mind with words, and oblivious of the fact that the nasty cab must on the contrary seem perfectly nice to a bus conductor. “I hope you will give me the pleasure of spending an evening, a comfortable evening with me. Are you never free except in the evenings?”

“Only on Sundays.”

“Ah! you’re free on Sunday afternoons? Excellent. That makes everything much simpler. Do you like music? Do you ever go to concerts?”

“Yes, I often goes.”

“Ah! very good indeed. You see how nicely we’re getting on already? I really am delighted to know you. We might go to a Colonne concert. I often have the use of my cousin de Guermantes’s box, or my cousin Philippe de Coburg’s” (he did not dare say the King of Bulgaria for fear of seeming to be “showing off,” but although the bus conductor had no idea what the Baron was talking about and had never heard of the Coburgs, this princely name seemed already too showy to M. de Charlus, who in order not to give the impression of over-rating what he was offering, modestly proceeded to disparage it). “Yes, my cousin Philippe de Coburg—you don’t know him?” and at once, as a rich man might say to a third-class traveller: “One’s so much more comfortable than in first-class,” he went on: “All the more reason for envying you, really, because he’s a bit of a fool, poor fellow. Or rather, it’s not so much that he’s a fool, but he’s irritating—all the Coburgs are. But in any case I envy you: that open-air life must be so agreeable, seeing so many different people, and in a charming spot, surrounded by trees—for I believe my friend Jupien told me that the terminus of your line was at La Muette. I’ve often wanted to live out there. There’s nowhere more beautiful in the whole of Paris. So it’s agreed, then: we’ll go to a Colonne concert. We can have the box closed. Not that I shouldn’t be extremely flattered to be seen with you, but we’d be more peaceful . . . Society is so boring, isn’t it? Of course I don’t mean my cousin Guermantes who is charming and so beautiful.”

Just as shy scholars who are afraid of being accused of pedantry abbreviate an erudite allusion and only succeed in appearing more long-winded by becoming totally obscure, so the Baron, in seeking to belittle the splendour of the names he cited, made his discourse completely unintelligible to the bus conductor. The latter, failing to understand its terms, tried to interpret it according to its tone, and as the tone was that of someone who is apologising, he was beginning to fear that he might not receive the sum that Jupien had led him to expect.

“When you go to concerts on Sunday, do
you
go to the Colonne ones too?”

“Pardon?”

“What concert-hall do you go to on Sundays?” the Baron repeated, slightly irritated.

“Sometimes to Concordia, sometimes to the Apéritif Concert, or to the Concert Mayol. But I prefer to stretch me legs a bit. It ain’t much fun having to stay sitting down all day long.”

“I don’t like Mayol. He has an effeminate manner that I find horribly unpleasant. On the whole I detest all men of that type.”

Since Mayol was popular, the conductor understood what the Baron said, but was even more puzzled as to why he had wanted to see him, since it could not be for something he hated.

“We might go to a museum together,” the Baron went on. “Have you ever been to a museum?”

“I only know the Louvre and the Waxworks Museum.”

I returned to the Princess, bringing back her letter. In her disappointment, she burst out at me angrily, but apologised at once.

“You’re going to hate me,” she said. “I hardly dare ask you to go back a third time.”

I stopped the cab a little before the cul-de-sac, and turned into it. The carriage was still there. M. de Charlus was saying to Jupien: “Well, the most sensible thing is for you to get out first with him, and see him on his way, and then rejoin me here . . . All right, then, I hope to see you again. How shall we arrange it?”

“Well, you could send me a message when you go out for a meal at noon,” said the conductor.

If he used this expression, which applied less accurately to the life of M. de Charlus, who did not “go out for a meal at noon,” than to that of omnibus employees and others, this was doubtless not from lack of intelligence but from contempt for local colour. In the tradition of the old masters, he treated the character of M. de Charlus as a Veronese or a Racine those of the husband at the marriage feast in Cana or Orestes, whom they depict as though this legendary Jew and this legendary Greek had belonged, the one to the luxury-loving patriciate of Venice, the other to the court of Louis XIV. M. de Charlus was content to overlook the inaccuracy, and replied: “No, it would be simpler if you would arrange it with Jupien. I’ll speak to him about it. Good-night, it’s been delightful,” he added, unable to relinquish either his worldly courtesy or his aristocratic hauteur. Perhaps he was even more formally polite at such moments than he was in society; for when one steps outside one’s habitual sphere, shyness renders one incapable of invention, and it is the memory of one’s habits that one calls upon for practically everything; hence it is upon the actions whereby one hoped to emancipate oneself from one’s habits that the latter are most forcibly brought to bear, almost in the manner of those toxic states which intensify when the toxin is withdrawn.

Jupien got out with the conductor.

“Well then, what did I tell you?”

“Ah, I wouldn’t mind a few evenings like that! I quite like hearing someone chatting away like that, steady like, a chap who doesn’t get worked up. He isn’t a priest?”

“No, not at all.”

“He looks like a photographer I went to one time to get my picture taken. It’s not him?”

“No, not him either.”

“Come off it,” said the conductor, who thought that Jupien was trying to deceive him and feared, since M. de Charlus had remained rather vague about future assignations, that he might “stand him up,” “come off it, you can’t tell me it isn’t the photographer. I recognised him all right. He lives at 3, Rue de l’Echelle, and he’s got a little black dog called Love, I think—so you see I know.”

“You’re talking rubbish,” said Jupien. “I don’t say there isn’t a photographer who has a little black dog, but I do say he’s not the man I introduced you to.”

“All right, all right, you can say what you like, but I’m sticking to my own opinion.”

“You can stick to it as long as you like for all I care. I’ll call round tomorrow about the rendezvous.”

Jupien returned to the cab, but the Baron, restive, had already got out of it.

“He’s nice, most agreeable and well-mannered. But what’s his hair like? He isn’t bald, I hope? I didn’t dare ask him to take his cap off. I was as nervous as a kitten.”

“What a big baby you are!”

“Anyway we can discuss it, but the next time I should prefer to see him performing his professional functions. For instance I could take the corner seat beside him in his tram. And if it was possible by doubling the price, I should even like to see him do some rather cruel things—for example, pretend not to see the old ladies signalling to the tram and then having to go home on foot.”

“You vicious thing! But that, dearie, would not be very easy, because there’s also the driver, you see. He wants to be well thought of at work.”

As I emerged from the cul-de-sac, I remembered the evening at the Princesse de Guermantes’s (the evening which I interrupted in the middle of describing it with this anticipatory digression, but to which I shall return) when M. de Charlus denied being in love with the Comtesse Molé, and I thought to myself that if we could read the thoughts of the people we know we would often be astonished to find that the biggest space in them was occupied by something quite other than what we suspected. I walked round to M. de Charlus’s house. He had not yet returned. I left the letter. It was learned next day that the Princesse de Guermantes had poisoned herself by mistaking one medicine for another, an accident after which she was for several months at death’s door and withdrew from society for several years. It sometimes happened to me also after that evening, on taking a bus, to pay my fare to the conductor whom Jupien had “introduced” to M. de Charlus in the cab. He was a big man, with an ugly, pimpled face and a short-sightedness that made him now wear what Françoise called “specicles.” I could never look at him without thinking of the perturbation followed by amazement which the Princesse de Guermantes would have shown if I had had her with me and had said to her: “Wait a minute, I’m going to show you the person for whose sake M. de Charlus resisted your three appeals on the evening you poisoned yourself, the person responsible for all your misfortunes. You’ll see him in a moment, he isn’t far from here.” Doubtless the Princess’s heart would have beaten wildly in anticipation. And her curiosity would perhaps have been mixed with a secret admiration for a person who had been so attractive as to make M. de Charlus, as a rule so kind to her, deaf to her entreaties. How often, in her grief mingled with hatred and, in spite of everything, a certain fellow-feeling, must she not have attributed the most noble features to that person, whether she believed it to be a man or a woman! And then, on seeing this creature, ugly, pimpled, vulgar, with red-rimmed, myopic eyes, what a shock! Doubtless the cause of our sorrows, embodied in a human form beloved of another, is sometimes comprehensible to us; the Trojan elders, seeing Helen pass by, said to one another:

One single glance from her eclipses all our griefs.

But the opposite is perhaps more common, because (just as, conversely, admirable and beautiful wives are always being abandoned by their husbands) it often happens that people who are ugly in the eyes of almost everyone excite inexplicable passions; for what Leonardo said of painting can equally well be said of love, that it is
cosa mentale
, something in the mind. Moreover one cannot even say that the reaction of the Trojan elders is more or less common than the other (stupefaction on seeing the person who has caused our sorrows): for one has only to let a little time go by and the case of the Trojan elders almost always merges with the other; in other words there is only one case. Had the Trojan elders never seen Helen, and had she been fated to grow old and ugly, if one had said to them one day: “You’re about to see the famous Helen,” it is probable that, confronted with a dumpy, red-faced, misshapen old woman, they would have been no less stupefied than the Princesse de Guermantes would have been at the sight of the bus conductor.

In place of this paragraph, the manuscript gives the following long development
:

Moving away from the dazzling “house of pleasure” insolently erected there despite the protests fruitlessly addressed to the mayor by the local families, I made for the cliffs and followed the sinuous paths leading towards Balbec. And I remembered certain walks along these paths with my grandmother. I had had a brief meeting earlier with a local doctor whom I was never to see again and who had told me that my grandmother would die soon; he was one of those people, perhaps malevolent, perhaps mad, perhaps afflicted with a fear of death which they want to induce in others as well, who later remind one of those witch-like vagrants encountered on a roadside who hurl some baneful and plausible prophecy at you. It was the first time I had thought of the possibility of her death. I could neither confide my anguish to her nor bear it myself when she left me. And whenever we took some particularly beautiful path together, I told myself that one day she would no longer be there when I took that path, and the mere idea that she would die one day turned my happiness in being with her to such torment that what I longed to do more than anything else was to forestall her and to die myself then and there. Now it was these same paths or similar ones that I was taking, and already the anguish I had felt in the train was fading, and if I had met Rosemonde [Albertine] I would have asked her to come with me. Suddenly I was attracted by the scent of the hawthorns which, as at Combray in the month of May, array themselves alongside a hedge in their large white veils and decorate this green French countryside with the Catholic whiteness of their demure procession. I went nearer, but my eyes did not know at what adjustment to set their optical apparatus in order to see the flowers at the same time along the hedge and in myself. Belonging at one and the same time to many springtimes, the petals stood out against a sort of magical deep background which, in spite of the strong sunlight, was plunged in semi-darkness either because of the twilight of my indistinct memories or because of the nocturnal hour of the Month of Mary. And then, in the flower which opened up before me in the hedge and which seemed to be animated by the clumsy flickering of my blurred and double vision, the flower that rose from my memory revolved without being able to fit itself exactly on to the elusive living blossoms in the tremulous hesitancy of their petals.

The hawthorns brought out the heaviness of the blossom of an apple-tree sumptuously established opposite them, like those dowryless girls of good family who, while being friends of the daughters of a big cider-maker and acknowledging their fresh complexions and good appearance, know that they themselves have more chic in their crumpled white dresses. I did not have the heart to remain beside them, and yet I had been unable to resist stopping. But Bloch’s sisters, whom I caught sight of without their seeing me, did not even turn their heads towards the hawthorns. The latter had made no sign to them, had said nothing to them; they were like those devout young girls who never miss a Month of Mary, during which they are not afraid to steal a glance at a young man with whom they will make an assignation in the countryside, and by whom they will even allow themselves to be kissed in the chapel when there is no one about, but would never dream—because it has been strictly forbidden—of speaking to or playing with children of another religion.

Synopsis

PART ONE

Discovery concerning M. de Charlus
. Reflections on the laws of the vegetable kingdom
. Meeting between M. de Charlus and Jupien
; amatory display
. Eavesdropping
. M. de Charlus’s revelations on the peculiarities of his amatory behaviour
.