In Search of Lost Time Page 11

  But although M. de Charlus and Mme Verdurin no longer met one another socially, they nevertheless continued, Mme Verdurin to hold receptions, M. de Charlus to go about his pleasures, as if nothing had changed – apart from a few unimportant minor differences: Cottard, for example, came to Mme Verdurin’s receptions in a colonel’s uniform straight out of L’Île du rêve,45 looking just like a Haitian admiral, with a broad sky-blue ribbon on his jacket reminiscent of those worn by the Enfants de Marie; and M. de Charlus, finding himself in a city where the grown men, who had hitherto been where his tastes lay, had disappeared, had done the same as some Frenchmen, who in France had loved women, but who now lived in the colonies: he had, out of necessity, developed first the habit of, and then a taste for, little boys.

  Yet the first of these characteristic traits disappeared quickly enough, for Cottard soon died ‘facing the enemy’ as the newspapers said, although he had not left Paris and had in fact just worked too hard for someone of his age, followed soon afterwards by M. Verdurin, whose death upset only one person, that, oddly enough, being Elstir. I had been able to study Elstir’s work from a point of view that was, in a way, untrammelled. But he, especially as he grew older, linked it more and more superstitiously with the society which had provided his models; and society, after having thus been transformed in his studio, by the alchemy of impressions, into a work of art, had given him his public, his spectators. Inclining increasingly to the materialist belief that a substantial part of beauty resides in objects themselves, as at the outset he had adored in Mme Elstir the type of the rather heavy beauty he had pursued and caressed in his paintings and tapestries, he saw vanish with M. Verdurin one of the last vestiges of the social framework, the ephemeral framework – as rapidly obsolete as the sartorial fashions which partly constituted it – which underpins an art, and certifies its authenticity, just as the Revolution, by destroying the elegance of the eighteenth century, might have desolated a painter of fêtes galantes,46 or as the disappearance of Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette distressed Renoir; but more than anything else, with M. Verdurin he saw vanish the eyes and the brain which had best been able to see his paintings, and in which his painting, as a cherished memory, had always in some sense continued to exist. Of course young people had come along who also loved painting, but another kind of painting, and they had not, as Swann or M. Verdurin had, received the lessons in taste from Whistler, or the lessons in truth from Monet, which would enable them to make a just assessment of Elstir. Thus he felt himself more alone after the death of M. Verdurin, even though he had fallen out with him so many years earlier; for him, it was as if a little of the beauty of his work had been eclipsed along with a little of what awareness there was in the universe of that beauty.

  As for the change that had overtaken the pleasures of M. de Charlus, this remained intermittent: keeping up a plentiful correspondence with men at the front, he was not short of sufficiently mature soldiers when they came on leave.

  At the time when I believed what people said, I would have been tempted, hearing first Germany, then Bulgaria and Greece protesting their peaceable intentions, to have given them credence. But since life with Albertine and Françoise had accustomed me to suspecting them of thoughts and plans to which they gave no expression, I allowed none of the fair-seeming words of William II, Ferdinand of Bulgaria or Constantine of Greece to deceive my instinct, which sensed what each of them was up to. My quarrels with Françoise and with Albertine, of course, had been merely private quarrels, of interest only to the life of that little intelligent cell that is a human being. But just like animal and human bodies, that is to say like collections of cells each of which in relation to a single cell is as big as Mont Blanc, there are huge organized agglomerations of individuals which we call nations; their life merely repeats on a larger scale the lives of its component cells; and anybody who is incapable of understanding the mystery, the reactions, the laws of such entities will utter nothing but empty words when he talks about the struggle between nations. But if he has mastered individual psychology, then these colossal masses of conglomerated individuals confronting one another will take on a beauty in his eyes more powerful than that of a struggle arising merely from the conflict of two characters; and he will see them in the same scale as the body of a tall man would appear to infusoria, more than ten thousand of which are required to fill one cubic millimetre. Thus for some time the great figure of France, filled to its perimeter with millions of little irregular polygons, and the figure, filled with even more polygons, of Germany, had both been engaged in such a quarrel. Seen from this point of view, the body Germany and the body France, and the other Allied and enemy bodies, were behaving to a certain extent like individuals. But the blows they were exchanging were governed by the multifarious rules of boxing, whose principles Saint-Loup had explained to me; and since, even if one thought of them as individuals, they were also giant agglomerations of individuals, the quarrel took on immense and magnificent forms, like an ocean rising up in millions of waves in an attempt to batter down an ancient line of cliffs, or like gigantic glaciers which by their slow, destructive fluctuations attempt to break down the mountain ranges that circumscribe them.

  For all this, life continued almost unchanged for plenty of the characters who have figured in this narrative, not least for M. de Charlus and the Verdurins, just as if the Germans were not in fact so close to them, the permanent presence of a threat of danger, even if temporarily checked, leaving us completely indifferent as long as we do not think about it. People generally go about their pleasures without ever thinking that, if the moderating and etiolating influences should ever stop, the proliferation of infusoria would reach its maximum, that is, in the space of a few days would make a leap of many millions of miles, would change from occupying a cubic millimetre to become a mass a million times bigger than the sun, at the same time destroying all the oxygen and the other substances by which we live, and that there would no longer be any humanity, or animals or earth; and also without imagining that an irremediable and entirely probable catastrophe may be induced in the ether by the incessant and frenetic activity normally hidden by the apparent immutability of the sun: they carry on with their own affairs without giving a thought to those two worlds, the one too small, the other too big for them to perceive the cosmic dangers that hover all around us.

  So the Verdurins continued to give dinners (then after a little while, Mme Verdurin gave them on her own, for M. Verdurin died shortly afterwards) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures, never dreaming that the Germans – albeit immobilized by a bloody yet constantly replenished barrier – were an hour by car from Paris. The Verdurins must have thought about it, one would have imagined, as they held a political salon at which people every evening discussed the situation not only of the army but of the fleet as well. And they did, it is true, think about the hecatombs of regiments annihilated and passengers swallowed by the sea; but a reciprocal process both so far multiplies whatever concerns our own well-being, and divides by such a formidable number whatever does not concern us, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly troubles us, and we find it scarcely as disagreeable as a cold draught. Mme Verdurin, suffering from migraines again now that there were no more croissants to dip in her coffee, had finally obtained an order from Cottard allowing her to have them made for her at a certain restaurant we have spoken about. This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the croissant she was soaking, she said: ‘How awful! It’s worse than the most horrific tragedy.’ But the loss of all those people at sea must have been a thousand million times reduced before it struck her, because even while she uttered, through a mouthful of croissant, these distressing thoughts, the look whi
ch lingered on her face, probably induced by the taste of the croissant, so valuable in preventing migraine, was more like one of quiet satisfaction.

  As for M. de Charlus, his position was but slightly different, but even worse, because not only did he not hope passionately for a French victory, he hoped rather, without admitting it, that Germany should, if not triumph, then at least not be crushed in the way that everybody wanted. The reason for this was that in these quarrels the great gatherings of individuals called nations behave to some extent as if they were individuals. The logic they follow is completely internal, and perpetually recast by passion, just like that of people confronting one another in a domestic or amorous quarrel, like a son’s quarrel with his father, or a cook’s with her mistress, or a wife’s with her husband. The one in the wrong thinks he is in the right – as was the case with Germany – and the one who is right sometimes offers, quite justifiably, arguments which seem irrefutable to him only because they correspond to his passion. In these quarrels between individuals, the best way to be convinced of the rightness of either party is actually to be that party, a spectator will never agree quite so completely. Within a nation an individual, if he is really part of the nation, is no more than one cell within the nation-individual. Brain-washing is a term that makes no sense. If the French had been told that they were going to be beaten, no one Frenchman would have been in despair any more than if he had been told he was going to be killed by a Big Bertha. The real brain-washing is what we tell ourselves because of hope, which is one form of the instinct of national self-preservation, if we are really a living member of the nation. The best way to remain blind to what was unjust in the cause of the Germany-individual and to be aware at every moment of what was just in the cause of the France-individual was not for a German to have no judgment and for a Frenchman to possess it, the best way for both was to be patriotic. M. de Charlus, who did have unusual moral qualities, who was susceptible to pity, generous, capable of affection and devotion, also, for a whole variety of reasons – among which having a mother who was a Duchess of Bavaria may have played a part – did not have a sense of patriotism. In consequence he was no more part of the France-body than of the Germany-body. If I had been devoid of patriotism, instead of feeling myself to be one of the cells of the France-body, I do not think that I could have judged the quarrel in the same way as I might have done in the past. In my adolescence, when I believed exactly what I was told, I would, I am sure, hearing the German government protesting its good faith, have been tempted not to doubt it; but for a long time now I had known that our thoughts and our actions are not always in accord; not only had I, one day, from the staircase window, discovered a Charlus I had never suspected, but more than anything else with Françoise, and then, alas, with Albertine, I had seen decisions and plans take shape which were so contrary to what they said that, even as a simple spectator, I could never have allowed any of the apparently honest pronouncements of the German emperor, or the king of Bulgaria, to deceive my instinct, which would have sensed, as with Albertine, what they were secretly plotting. But in the end I can only imagine what I would have done if I had not been a participant, if I had not been part of the France-participant, just as in my quarrels with Albertine my sad expression or the feeling of breathlessness in my chest were a part of my individual being that was passionately involved in my cause, so that I could never feel completely detached. The detachment of M. de Charlus was total. And, seeing that he was merely a spectator, everything was bound to make him pro-German from the moment when, although not truly French, he started living in France. He was very intelligent, and in all countries most of the people are silly; no doubt if he had been living in Germany he would have been equally irritated by the way the German fools defended, passionately and foolishly, an unjust cause; but living in France, he was no less irritated by the passionate and foolish defence of a cause that was just. The logic of passion, even if it is in the service of the right, is never irrefutable for somebody who is not passionately committed to it. M. de Charlus’s keen mind seized on each instance of false reasoning on the part of the patriots. The satisfaction an imbecile derives from having right on his side and being certain of success is especially irritating. M. de Charlus was particularly irritated by the triumphal optimism of people who did not know, as he did, Germany’s strength, and who each month believed that she would be crushed within the month, and a year later were making equally confident new predictions, as if they had never made wrong ones with such assurance, which anyway they had forgotten, saying, if they were reminded of them, that it was not the same thing. M. de Charlus, profound though in some ways his mind was, would perhaps not have understood that in art ‘it is not the same thing’ is what the detractors of Manet retort to those who tell them ‘they said the same thing about Delacroix’.

  Ultimately M. de Charlus’s position was a compassionate one, the idea of a loser made him feel ill, he always took the side of the weak, he never read the judicial reports in the newspapers so as not to have to suffer in his own body the pain of the condemned man and the impossibility of assassinating the judge, the executioner and the crowd cheering the fact that ‘justice had been done’. He was convinced in any case that France could not now be beaten, and he also knew that the Germans were suffering from famine, and would be obliged, at some time or other, to surrender. This idea was made the more disagreeable to him by the fact that he was living in France. Also, his recollections of Germany were very distant, while the French people who annoyed him by talking so gleefully about crushing Germany were the people whose weaknesses he knew, whose faces he disliked. In such situations we feel sorry for the people we do not know, those whom we imagine, rather than those who are close to us in the vulgarity of everyday life, unless we are completely the same as them and form one flesh with them; that is the miracle of patriotism, which makes one take the side of one’s country just as one takes one’s own side in a quarrel between lovers.

  So for M. de Charlus the war provided an unusually fertile ground for the growth of those hatreds of his which blossomed in an instant and, while lasting only a short time, took the most violent hold of him. Whenever he read the newspapers, the triumphal tone of the editorials, presenting a daily picture of Germany brought low, ‘the Beast at bay, reduced to powerlessness’, when the opposite was all too true, would intoxicate him with rage by their flippant and ferocious stupidity. The newspapers were partly written at that point by well-known figures for whom that was a way of ‘continuing to be of service’, by men such as Brichot, Norpois, Morel himself, and Legrandin. M. de Charlus longed to encounter them and devastate them with the most withering sarcasm. Always particularly well informed about sexual irregularities, he was aware of those of several people who, thinking that nobody knew about them, took pleasure in denouncing them in the rulers of the ‘predatory empires’, in Wagner, etc. He had a burning desire to come face to face with them, to rub their noses in their own vice in front of the whole world and to leave those who insulted a beaten opponent dishonoured and gasping for breath.

  M. de Charlus also had more private reasons for his pro-Germanism. One was that as a man of society he had passed a great deal of his time among the people of society, among honourable people, men of honour, people who would not shake hands with a scoundrel, and he understood their sensitivity and their severity; he knew that they were impervious to the tears of a man they have had expelled from a club or with whom they refuse to fight a duel, even though their act of ‘moral scrupulousness’ might lead to the death of the black sheep’s mother. Despite himself, whatever admiration he may have had for England, and for the admirable way she had entered the war, this impeccable England, incapable of lying, by preventing wheat and milk from entering Germany, smacked too much of the man of honour among nations, of the dueller’s official second, of the arbiter in affairs of honour; whereas he knew that men of uncertain reputation, scoundrels, like some of Dostoyevsky’s characters, may be better human beings, although
I could never understand why he identified the Germans with them, lying and trickery not being adequate evidence of a good heart, which the Germans do not seem to have displayed.