In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 6

  The day may come when dressmakers will move in society—nor should I find it at all shocking. Jupien’s niece, being an exception, cannot yet be regarded as a portent, for one swallow does not make a summer. At all events, if the very modest advancement of Jupien’s niece did scandalise some people, Morel was not among them, for on certain points his stupidity was so intense that not only did he label “rather a fool” this girl who was a thousand times cleverer than himself, and foolish perhaps only in loving him, but he actually took to be adventuresses, dressmakers’ assistants in disguise playing at being ladies, the highly reputable ladies who invited her to their houses and whose invitations she accepted without a trace of vanity. Naturally these were not Guermantes, or even people who knew the Guermantes, but rich and elegant middle-class women broad-minded enough to feel that it is no disgrace to invite a dressmaker to your house and at the same time snobbish enough to derive some satisfaction from patronising a girl whom His Highness the Baron de Charlus was in the habit, in all propriety of course, of visiting daily.

  Nothing could have pleased the Baron more than the idea of this marriage, for he felt that in this way Morel would not be taken from him. It appears that Jupien’s niece had been, when scarcely more than a child, “in trouble.” And M. de Charlus, while he sang her praises to Morel, would not have been averse to confiding this secret to his friend—who would have been furious—and thus sowing the seeds of discord. For M. de Charlus, although terribly spiteful, resembled a great many kind people who sing the praises of some man or woman to prove their own kindness, but would avoid like poison the soothing words, so rarely uttered, that would be capable of putting an end to strife. Notwithstanding this, the Baron refrained from making any insinuation, for two reasons. “If I tell him,” he said to himself, “that his lady-love is not spotless, his vanity will be hurt and he will be angry with me. Besides, how am I to know that he is not in love with her? If I say nothing, this flash in the pan will soon subside, I shall be able to control their relations as I choose, and he will love her only to the extent that I shall allow. If I tell him of his betrothed’s past transgression, who knows whether my Charlie may not still be sufficiently enamoured of her to become jealous? Then I shall by my own doing be converting a harmless and easily controlled flirtation into a serious passion, which is a difficult thing to manage.” For these reasons, M. de Charlus preserved a silence which had only the outward appearance of discretion, but was in another respect meritorious, since it is almost impossible for men of his sort to hold their tongues.

  Moreover, the girl herself was delightful, and M. de Charlus, who found that she satisfied all the aesthetic interest that he was capable of taking in women, would have liked to have hundreds of photographs of her. Not such a fool as Morel, he was delighted to hear the names of the respectable ladies who invited her to their houses, and whom his social instinct was able to place, but he took good care (wishing to retain his hold over him) not to say so to Charlie, who, a complete oaf in this respect, continued to believe that, apart from the “violin class” and the Verdurins, there existed only the Guermantes and the few almost royal houses enumerated by the Baron, all the rest being but “dregs” or “scum.” Charlie interpreted these expressions of M. de Charlus literally.

  What, you will say, M. de Charlus, awaited in vain every day of the year by so many ambassadors and duchesses, not dining with the Prince de Croy because one has to give precedence to the latter, M. de Charlus spent all the time that he denied to these great lords and ladies with a tailor’s niece! In the first place—the paramount reason—Morel was there. But even if he had not been there, I see nothing improbable in it, or else you are judging things as one of Aimé’s minions would have done. Few except waiters believe that an excessively rich man always wears dazzling new clothes and a supremely smart gentleman gives dinner parties for sixty and travels everywhere by car. They deceive themselves. Very often an excessively rich man wears constantly the same jacket; while a supremely smart gentleman is one who in a restaurant hobnobs only with the staff and, on returning home, plays cards with his valet. This does not prevent him from refusing to give precedence to Prince Murat.

  Among the reasons which made M. de Charlus look forward to the marriage of the young couple was this, that Jupien’s niece would then be in some sense an extension of Morel’s personality, and so of the Baron’s power over him and knowledge of him. It would never even have occurred to him to feel the slightest scruple about “betraying,” in the conjugal sense, the violinist’s future wife. But to have a “young couple” to guide, to feel himself the redoubtable and all-powerful protector of Morel’s wife, who, looking upon the Baron as a god, would thereby prove that Morel had inculcated this idea into her, and would thus contain in herself something of Morel—all this would add a new variety to the form of M. de Charlus’s domination and bring to light in his “creature,” Morel, a creature the more—the husband—that is to say would give the Baron something different, new, curious, to love in him. Perhaps indeed this domination would be stronger now than it had ever been. For whereas Morel by himself, naked so to speak, often resisted the Baron whom he felt certain of winning back, once he was married he would soon fear for his household, his bed and board, his future, would offer to M. de Charlus’s wishes a wider target, an easier hold. All this, and even at a pinch, on evenings when he was bored, the prospect of stirring up trouble between husband and wife (the Baron had always been fond of battle-pictures) was pleasing to him. Less pleasing, however, than the thought of the state of dependence upon himself in which the young people would live. M. de Charlus’s love for Morel acquired a delicious novelty when he said to himself: “His wife too will be mine just as much as he is; they will always behave in such a way as not to annoy me, they will obey my every whim, and thus she will be a sign (hitherto unknown to me) of what I had almost forgotten, what is so very dear to my heart—that to all the world, to everyone who sees that I protect and house them, to myself, Morel is mine.” This testimony, in the eyes of the world and in his own, pleased M. de Charlus more than anything. For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often, those who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence.

  The reader may remember that Morel had once told the Baron that his great ambition was to seduce some young girl, and this one in particular, and that to succeed in his enterprise he would promise to marry her, but, the rape accomplished, would “buzz off;” but what with the declarations of love for Jupien’s niece which Morel had poured out to him, M. de Charlus had forgotten this confession. What was more, Morel had quite possibly forgotten it himself. There was perhaps a real gap between Morel’s nature—as he had cynically admitted, perhaps even artfully exaggerated it—and the moment at which it would regain control of him. As he became better acquainted with the girl, she had appealed to him, he grew fond of her; he knew himself so little that he even perhaps imagined that he was in love with her, for ever. True, his initial desire, his criminal intention remained, but concealed beneath so many superimposed feelings that there is nothing to prove that the violinist would not have been sincere in saying that this vicious desire was not the true motive of his action. There was, moreover, a brief period during which, without his admitting it to himself precisely, this marriage appeared to him to be necessary. Morel was suffering at the time from violent cramp in the hand, and found himself obliged to contemplate the possibility of having to give up the violin. Since, in everything but his art, he was astonishingly lazy, he was faced with the necessity of finding someone to keep him; and he preferred that it should be Jupien’s niece rather than M. de Charlus, this arrangement offering him greater freedom and also a wide choice of different kinds of women, ranging from the apprentices, perpetually changing, whom he would persuade Jupien’s niece to procure for him, to the rich and beautiful ladies to whom he would
prostitute her. That his future wife might refuse to lend herself to these ploys, that she could be to such a degree perverse, never entered Morel’s calculations for a moment. However, his cramp having ceased, they receded into the background and were replaced by pure love. His violin would suffice, together with his allowance from M. de Charlus, whose demands upon him would certainly be reduced once he, Morel, was married to the girl. This marriage was the urgent thing, because of his love, and in the interest of his freedom. He asked Jupien for his niece’s hand, and Jupien consulted her. This was wholly unnecessary. The girl’s passion for the violinist streamed around her, like her hair when she let it down, as did the joy in her beaming eyes. In Morel, almost everything that was agreeable or advantageous to him awakened moral emotions and words to correspond, sometimes even melting him to tears. It was therefore sincerely—if such a word can be applied to him—that he addressed to Jupien’s niece speeches as steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are the speeches that so many young noblemen who look forward to a life of idleness address to some charming daughter of a bourgeois plutocrat) as the theories he had expounded to M. de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of virgins had been steeped in unmitigated vileness. However, there was another side to this virtuous enthusiasm for a person who afforded him pleasure and to the solemn promises that he made to her. As soon as the person ceased to cause him pleasure, or indeed if, for example, the obligation to fulfil the promises that he had made caused him displeasure, she at once became the object of an antipathy which he sought to justify in his own eyes and which, after some neurasthenic disturbance, enabled him to prove to himself, as soon as the balance of his nervous system was restored, that, even looking at the matter from a purely virtuous point of view, he was released from any obligation.

  Thus, towards the end of his stay at Balbec, he had managed somehow to lose all his money and, not daring to mention the matter to M. de Charlus, looked about for someone to whom he might appeal. He had learned from his father (who at the same time had forbidden him ever to become a “sponger”) that in such circumstances the correct thing is to write to the person whom you intend to ask for a loan saying that you have a “business matter to discuss with him,” that you would like to make a “business appointment.” This magic formula had so enchanted Morel that he would, I believe, have been glad to lose his money, simply to have the pleasure of asking for a “business” appointment. In the course of his life he had found that the formula did not have quite the magic power that he supposed. He had discovered that certain people, to whom otherwise he would never have written at all, did not reply within five minutes of receiving his letter asking to “talk business” to them. If the afternoon went by without his receiving an answer, it never occurred to him that, even on the most optimistic assumption, it was quite possible that the gentleman addressed had not yet come home, or had had other letters to write, if indeed he had not gone away, or fallen ill, or something of that sort. If, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, Morel was given an appointment for the following morning, he would accost his intended creditor with: “I was quite surprised not to get an answer, and I wondered whether there was anything wrong; but I’m glad to see you’re quite well,” and so forth. So, at Balbec, without telling me that he wished to talk “business” to him, he had asked me to introduce him to that very Bloch to whom he had been so unpleasant a week earlier in the train. Bloch had not hesitated to lend him—or rather to get M. Nissim Bernard to lend him—five thousand francs. From that moment Morel had worshipped Bloch. He asked himself with tears in his eyes how he could show his gratitude to a person who had saved his life. Finally, I undertook to ask on his behalf for a thousand francs a month from M. de Charlus, a sum which he would at once forward to Bloch who would thus find himself repaid within quite a short time. The first month, Morel, still under the impact of Bloch’s generosity, sent him the thousand francs immediately, but after this he doubtless decided that the remaining four thousand francs might be put to more satisfactory use, for he began to speak extremely ill of Bloch. The mere sight of him was enough to fill his mind with dark thoughts, and Bloch himself having forgotten the exact amount that he had lent Morel, and having asked him for 3,500 francs instead of 4,000, which would have left the violinist 500 francs to the good, the latter took the line that, in view of so preposterous a fraud, not only would he not pay another centime but his creditor might consider himself very fortunate if Morel did not bring an action against him. As he said this his eyes blazed. Not content with asserting that Bloch and M. Nissim Bernard had no cause for resentment against him, he was soon saying that they might count themselves lucky that he showed no resentment towards them. Finally, M. Nissim Bernard having apparently stated that Thibaud played as well as Morel, the latter felt that he ought to take the matter to court, such a remark being calculated to damage him professionally; then, since there was no longer any justice in France, especially against the Jews (anti-semitism having been in Morel the natural effect of a loan of 5,000 francs from a Jew), took to never going out without a loaded revolver.

  A similar splenetic reaction in the wake of keen affection was soon to occur in Morel with regard to the tailor’s niece. It is true that M. de Charlus may have been to some extent unwittingly responsible for this change, for he was in the habit of declaring, without meaning a word of it, and merely to tease them, that once they were married he would never see them again and would leave them to fend for themselves. This idea was in itself quite insufficient to detach Morel from the girl; but, lurking in his mind, it was ready when the time came to combine with other related ideas capable, once the compound was formed, of becoming a powerful disruptive agent.

  It was not very often, however, that I was fated to meet M. de Charlus and Morel. Often they had already gone into Jupien’s shop when I came away from the Duchess, for the pleasure that I found in her company was such that I was led to forget not merely the anxious expectation that preceded Albertine’s return, but even the hour of that return.

  I shall set apart from the other days on which I lingered at Mme de Guermantes’s one that was marked by a trivial incident the cruel significance of which entirely escaped me and was not brought home to me until long afterwards. On this particular evening, Mme de Guermantes had given me, knowing that I was fond of them, some branches of syringa which had been sent to her from the South. When I left her and went upstairs to our flat, Albertine had already returned, and on the staircase I ran into Andrée, who seemed to be distressed by the powerful smell of the flowers that I was bringing home.

  “What, are you back already?” I said.

  “Only a moment ago, but Albertine had some letters to write, so she sent me away.”

  “You don’t think she’s up to any mischief?”

  “Not at all, she’s writing to her aunt, I think. But you know how she dislikes strong scents, she won’t be particularly thrilled by your syringa.”

  “How stupid of me! I shall tell Françoise to put them out on the service stairs.”

  “Do you imagine Albertine won’t notice the scent of them on you? Next to tuberoses they’ve the strongest scent of any flower, I always think. Anyhow, I believe Françoise has gone out shopping.”

  “But in that case, as I haven’t got my latchkey, how am I to get in?”

  “Oh, you’ve only got to ring the bell. Albertine will let you in. Besides, Françoise may have come back by this time.”

  I said good-bye to Andrée. I had no sooner pressed the bell than Albertine came to open the door, which she had some difficulty in doing since, in the absence of Françoise, she did not know where to turn on the light. At last she managed to let me in, but the scent of the syringa put her to flight. I took them to the kitchen, so that meanwhile my mistress, leaving her letter unfinished (I had no idea why), had time to go to my room, from which she called to me, and to lie down on my bed. Once again, at the actual moment I saw nothing in all this that was not perfectly natural, at the most a little conf
used, but in any case unimportant. She had nearly been caught with Andrée, and had snatched a brief respite for herself by turning out all the lights, going to my room so that I should not see the disorder of her bed, and pretending to be writing a letter. But we shall see all this—the truth of which I never ascertained—later on.

  In general, apart from this isolated incident, everything would be quite normal when I returned from my visits to the Duchess. Since Albertine never knew whether I might not wish to go out with her before dinner, I usually found in the hall her hat, coat and umbrella, which she had left lying there in case they should be needed. As soon as I caught sight of them on opening the door, the atmosphere of the house became breathable once more. I felt that, instead of a rarefied air, it was happiness that filled it. I was rescued from my melancholy, the sight of these trifles gave me possession of Albertine, and I would rush to greet her.

  On the days when I did not go down to Mme de Guermantes, so that time should not hang too heavy for me during the hour that preceded Albertine’s return, I would take up an album of Elstir’s work, one of Bergotte’s books, or Vinteuil’s sonata. Then, just as those works of art which seem to address themselves to the eye or ear alone require that, if we are to appreciate them, our awakened intelligence shall collaborate closely with those organs, I would unconsciously summon up from within me the dreams that Albertine had inspired in me long ago before I knew her and that had been quenched by the routine of everyday life. I would cast them into the composer’s phrase or the painter’s image as into a crucible, or use them to enrich the book that I was reading. And no doubt the latter appeared all the more vivid in consequence. But Albertine herself gained just as much by being thus transported from one into the other of the two worlds to which we have access and in which we can place alternately the same object, by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter to play freely in the fluid spaces of the mind. I found myself suddenly and for an instant capable of passionate feelings for this wearisome girl. She had at that moment the appearance of a work by Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary ardour for her, seeing her in the perspective of imagination and art.