In Search of Lost Time Read online

  M. de Charlus literally did not know which way to look, and often he glanced upward, regretting that he did not have a pair of binoculars, although they would not have been a great deal of use, since, because of the Zeppelin raid of two days earlier which had made the authorities extend their vigilance, there were soldiers in larger numbers than usual, even in the sky. The aeroplanes which I had seen some hours earlier looking like insects, brown spots against the blue sky, now passed through the night, the darkness of which was further intensified by the partial extinction of the street-lights, like gleaming fire-ships. The greatest impression of beauty that these human shooting stars made us experience was perhaps to make us look at the sky, towards which normally we hardly ever raise our eyes. In this Paris, whose almost defenceless beauty, in 1914, I had seen awaiting the threat of the approaching enemy, there was, certainly, now as then, the ancient, unchanged splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene which poured over the still intact monuments the useless beauty of its light, but as in 1914, and to a greater extent than in 1914, there was also something else, different lights, intermittent beams which, whether they came from aeroplanes or from the searchlights on the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of feeling, inspired the same sort of thankfulness and calm as I had experienced in Saint-Loup’s room, in the cell of that military cloister where so many eager-hearted and disciplined young men were in training for the day when, unhesitatingly and in the prime of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.

  After the raid of two days earlier, when the sky had been more turbulent than the earth, it was now as quiet as the sea after a storm. But like the sea after a storm it had not regained absolute calm. Aeroplanes still climbed like rockets to join the stars, and searchlights cast slowly across the sky they transected what looked like a pale dust of stars, or wandering Milky Ways. Meanwhile the aeroplanes took up their places among the constellations and looking at those ‘new stars’ one might easily have believed oneself to be in another hemisphere.

  M. de Charlus spoke to me of his admiration for these airmen and, as he could no longer prevent himself from giving as free a rein to his pro-Germanism as to his other penchants, while denying it as firmly as he denied the rest, continued: ‘All the same, I must add that I have just as much admiration for the Germans who go up in their Gothas. As for the Zeppelins, think of the courage it must take! They are quite simply heroes. What difference can it make that their targets are civilians, when our batteries are shooting at them? Are you afraid of the Gothas and the artillery fire?’ I confessed I was not, but I may perhaps have been wrong. No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way. How can one be afraid of cannon fire when one is convinced that it is not going to hit one that day? Anyway, isolated thoughts about bombs being thrown, or about the possibility of death, added nothing tragic to the image I had formed of the passing German airships, until, from one of them, buffeted by winds and partly hidden from my gaze by the billowing mists of a troubled sky, from an aeroplane which, even though I knew it was murderous, I still imagined only to be stellar and heavenly, I had seen, one evening, the gesture of a bomb dropped down towards us. For the true reality of a danger is perceived only in that new thing, irreducible to what one already knows, which we call an impression and which is often, as in this instance, summed up in a line, a line describing an intention, a line which contains the latent potentiality of its distorting fulfilment, while on the Pont de la Concorde, all around the menacing, hunted aeroplane, as if they were reflections in the clouds of the fountains of the Champs-Élysées, the place de la Concorde and the Tuileries, the luminous water-jets of the searchlights curved across the sky, in lines equally full of intention, of the far-sighted and protective intentions of wise and powerful men to whom I was grateful, as I had been one night in the army quarters in Doncières, that they were prepared to use their might to watch over us with such beautiful precision.

  The night was as beautiful as in 1914, when Paris had also been threatened. The moonlight seemed like a soft, continuous, magnesium flare allowing one for a last time to take nocturnal pictures of these lovely groups of buildings like the place Vendôme or the place de la Concorde, to which the terror that I had of the shells which were perhaps about to destroy them gave by contrast a sort of fullness in their still-intact beauty, as if they were putting themselves forward, offering their defenceless architecture to be shot. ‘Aren’t you afraid? repeated M. de Charlus. The Parisians don’t realize. They say that Mme Verdurin has parties every day. I know that only from hearsay, I don’t know anything about them myself, I have broken with them completely,’ he added, lowering not only his eyes, as if a telegraph boy had passed, but also his head and shoulders, and raising his arm in the gesture that signifies, if not ‘I wash my hands of them’, then at least ‘I can’t tell you anything else’ (even though I was not asking him anything). ‘I know that Morel still goes there a great deal,’ he said (this was the first time he had spoken about him again). ‘It is said that he very much regrets the past, that he wants a reconciliation,’ he added, demonstrating both the same credulity as the man of the Faubourg who says: ‘A lot of people are saying that France is closer than ever to discussions with Germany, and even that the talks have already begun,’ and the lover who fails to be convinced by the harshest rebuffs. ‘In any case, if that is what he wants, he has only to say so, I am older than him, it is not up to me to make the first move.’ And really there was no point in saying this, as it was so obvious. But also it was not even sincere, which is why one was so embarrassed for M. de Charlus, because one felt that by saying that it was not up to him to make the first move he was in fact making it, and was expecting me to offer to arrange the reconciliation.

  Of course, I was familiar with the naïve or feigned credulity of people who love someone, or simply fail to be invited to someone’s house, and impute to the person in question a desire which, despite tiresome solicitations, he has never manifested. But from the suddenly tremulous voice in which M. de Charlus uttered these words, from the uneasy look that flickered behind his eyes, I had the feeling that there was something other than ordinary insistence involved here. I was not mistaken, and I will recount straight away the two facts which subsequently showed me to have been right (I anticipate myself by a number of years for the second of these, which was posterior to the death of M. de Charlus. This did not occur until much later, and we shall have the opportunity of seeing him several times, considerably changed from the man we have known, at a time when he had completely forgotten about Morel.) As for the first of these events, it happened only two or three years after the evening on which I thus walked down the boulevards with M. de Charlus. About two years after this evening, I ran into Morel. Immediately I thought of M. de Charlus, and how pleased he would be to see the violinist again, and I pressed him to go and see him, even if only once. ‘He has been good to you, I said to Morel, and now he is old, he may die, you ought to put your old quarrels aside and wipe out the traces of your feud.’ Morel seemed to be entirely of my opinion about the desirability of making peace, but he none the less refused categorically to make even a single visit to M. de Charlus. ‘You are wrong, I told him. Is it out of obstinacy, or laziness, or meanness, or misplaced vanity, or virtue (you can rest assured it won’t be attacked), or coyness?’ Then the violinist, his features distorted by an admission which must have been extremely hard to make, replied with a shudder: ‘No, it’s not anything like that; I don’t give a damn about virtue. Meanness? On the contrary, I’m beginning to pity him. It is not coyness, there would be no point in that. Nor is it laziness, I have whole days with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs. No, it’s got nothing to do with any of those things, it’s, don’t mention this to anyone, I must be crazy to tell you, it’s, it’s… it’s out of fear!’ He began to tremble
all over. I confessed that I did not understand him. ‘No, don’t ask me, let’s not talk about it, you don’t know him like I do, in fact I might say you don’t know him at all. – But what harm can he do to you? And anyway he would be even less likely to do anything if there was no longer any bitterness between you. And you know that, fundamentally, he is very kind. – Good Lord, yes, I know how kind he is! And how considerate, and honest. But leave me alone, don’t talk to me about it any more, I beg you, it makes me ashamed to say it, but I am afraid.’

  The second event dates from after the death of M. de Charlus. I was brought a number of mementoes he had left me, along with a letter enclosed in three envelopes, written at least ten years before his death. At the time, he had been seriously ill, and had made his final arrangements, but then recovered his health, before later falling into the state in which we shall see him on the day of an afternoon party given by the Princesse de Guermantes – and the letter, placed in a strong-box with the objects he was bequeathing to various friends, had remained there for seven years, seven years in the course of which he had completely forgotten Morel. The letter, written in a fine, firm hand, took the following form:

  My dear friend, the ways of Providence are inscrutable. Sometimes it uses the failing of a merely ordinary being to prevent a just man falling from his supereminence. You know Morel, whence he came, and the pinnacle to which I wanted to raise him, namely to my own level. You know that he preferred to return, not to the dust and as hes from which each man, for man is the true phoenix, may be reborn, but to the mud in which the viper crawls. His falling prevented worse befalling me. You know that my coat of arms contains the device of Our Lord himself: Inculcabis super leonem et aspidem,65 with a man represented as having beneath the soles of his feet, as heraldic support, a lion and a serpent. Now if I have been able thus to crush the lion that I am, it is thanks to the serpent and his prudence which a moment ago I too glibly called a failing, for the profound wisdom of the Gospel makes it a virtue, or at least a virtue for other people. Our serpent, whose hissings were once harmoniously modulated, when he had a charmer – himself much charmed, moreover – was not only musical and reptilian, he possessed to the point of cowardice this virtue, prudence, which I now take to be divine. It was this divine prudence that made him resist the appeals to come back and see me which I had others convey to him, and unless I confess this to you I shall have no peace in this world nor hope of forgiveness in the next. In this he was the instrument of divine wisdom, for I was resolved that he should not leave my house alive. One of the two of us had to disappear. I had decided to kill him. God counselled him prudence to save me from a crime. I do not doubt that the intercession of the Archangel Michael, my patron saint, played a large part in this and I beseech him to pardon me for having so neglected him over the years and for having responded so ill to the innumerable kindnesses he has shown me, most of all in my struggle against evil. I owe to this servant of God, and I say this in the fullness of my faith and of my understanding, the fact that the heavenly Father inspired Morel not to come. And so it is I now who am dying. Your faithfully devoted, Semper idem,

  P. G. Charlus.

  Then I understood Morel’s fear; the letter, of course, contained its share of literariness and pride. But the confession was true. And Morel knew better than I that the ‘almost mad side’ that Mme de Guermantes discerned in her brother-in-law was not confined, as I had previously thought, to those momentary exhibitions of superficial and ineffective rage.

  But we must go back to where we were. I am walking down the boulevards beside M. de Charlus, who has just conceived the idea that I might be some sort of intermediary between himself and Morel. Seeing that I did not respond, he continued: ‘Anyway, I don’t know why he does not still play, people don’t make music any more, on the grounds that there is a war on, but they dance, and go out to dine, and women invent things like “Amberine” for their skin. Parties fill up what may perhaps, if the Germans advance any further, be the last days of our Pompeii. And that is what will save it from frivolity. If the lava of some German Vesuvius (their naval guns are quite as terrible as a volcano) should come and surprise them at their toilet, preserving them for eternity in mid-gesture, children one day will learn from looking at pictures in their school-books showing Mme Molé about to apply a final layer of powder before going to dine with a sister-in-law, or Sosthène de Guermantes finishing painting his false eyebrows. This will provide lecture material for the Brichots of the future, for the frivolity of a period, when ten centuries have elapsed, is a subject for the most serious erudition, especially if it has been preserved intact by a volcanic eruption or by the lava-like substances thrown up by bombardment. What documents for history in the future if asphyxiating gases like the fumes emitted by Vesuvius, or complete ruin of the sort that entombed Pompeii, should preserve intact all the imprudent households that have not yet sent their paintings and statues away to Bayonne! And, anyway, has it not been somewhat like that for the last year, fragments of Pompeii every evening, with people running to their cellars, not to fetch up some old bottle of Mouton-Rothschild or Saint-Émilion, but to hide along with themselves their most valuable possessions, like the priests of Herculaneum overtaken by death in the act of transporting the sacred vessels? Attachment to an object always brings death to its owner. Paris, I grant you, was not founded by Hercules, as Herculaneum was. But how many resemblances there are between them! And the ability that we have been granted to see these things so clearly is not unique to our epoch, every period has possessed it. While I may think that tomorrow we may meet the fate of the cities of Vesuvius, they in their turn felt threatened by the fate that befell the accursed cities of the Bible. On the walls of one house in Pompeii was discovered the revealing inscription: Sodoma, Gomora.’ I do not know whether it was the name Sodom and the ideas it awoke in him, or the idea of bombardment, which made M. de Charlus for an instant raise his eyes to the heavens, but he soon brought them back to earth. ‘I admire all the heroes of this war, he said. Think, my dear fellow, the English soldiers whom at the start of the war I rather thoughtlessly regarded as mere football players presumptuous enough to measure themselves against professionals – and what professionals! – well, in purely aesthetic terms they are quite simply Greek athletes, if you see what I mean, they are Greek, dear boy, they are Plato’s young men, or better, Spartans. I have some friends who have been to Rouen where their camp is, and they have seen wonderful things, almost unimaginably wonderful. It is not Rouen any longer, it is another town. Obviously the old Rouen is still there, with the emaciated saints on the cathedral. And that is beautiful too, of course, but it is something different. And our poilus! I cannot tell you how delicious I find our poilus, the young lads from Paris, look, like that one walking along over there, with his knowing expression and his funny, wide-awake face. I often stop them and have a few minutes’ chat with them, and how intelligent and sensible they are! And the country boys, how amusing and pleasant they are, with their rolled rs and their provincial dialects! I have always spent a lot of time in the country, sleeping in farmhouses, I can talk to them. But our admiration for the French must not make us disparage our enemies, that would only diminish us. You don’t know what kind of soldier the German soldier is, you haven’t seen him as I have marching past on parade, goose-stepping down Unter den Linden.’ And returning to the ideal of manhood which he had outlined for me at Balbec, and which, over time, had taken on a more philosophical form in his mind, but also using absurd arguments which, at times, even when he had just been unusually intelligent, revealed the rather narrow outlook of a plain society gentleman, albeit an intelligent one: ‘You see, he said to me, that superb, strapping lad, the Boche soldier, is a strong and healthy individual, who thinks only of his country’s greatness. Deutschland über alles, which is not so stupid, given that we – while they were preparing themselves so manfully – we were mired in dilettantism.’ For M. de Charlus, this word probably signified something analogou
s to literature, for immediately, recollecting no doubt that I was fond of literature and had at one time intended to devote myself to it, he clapped me on the shoulder (taking the opportunity to lean on me so heavily that it hurt as much as did long ago, when I was doing my military service, the recoil of a ’76 against my shoulder-blade), and said, as if to soften the criticism: ‘Yes, we were mired in dilettantism, all of us, you too, you remember, like me you may say your mea culpa, we have been too dilettante.’ Out of surprise at the reproach, lack of any quick repartee, deference towards my interlocutor and affection for his friendly kindness, I responded as if I also, as he urged, had reason to beat my breast, which was completely stupid, as I had not the least grain of dilettantism to reproach myself for. ‘Well, he said, I must leave you’ (the group which had escorted him at a distance having finally abandoned us), ‘I must go and put myself to bed like a very old gentleman, especially as it seems that the war has changed all our habits, to use one of those foolish aphorisms that Norpois is so fond of.’ I knew, however, that by going home M. de Charlus would not thereby be leaving the company of soldiers, as he had converted his house into a military hospital, and in doing this, I believe, had yielded far less to the demands of his imagination than to those of his kind heart.