“Not quite to that extent; you are entirely mistaken,” was Robert’s answer. “It’s a bad business, and I’m sorry I ever had a finger in it. It was no affair of mine. If it were to begin over again, I should keep well clear of it. I am a soldier, and my first duty is to support the Army. If you will stay with M. Swann for a moment, I shall be back presently, I must go and talk to my aunt.”
But I saw that it was with Mlle. d’Ambresac that he went to talk, and was distressed by the thought that he had lied to me about the possibility of their engagement. My mind was set at rest when I learned that he had been introduced to her half an hour earlier by Mme. de Marsantés, who was anxious for the marriage, the Ambresacs being extremely rich.
“At last,” said M. de Charlus to Mme. de Surgis, “I find a young man with some education, who has read, who knows what is meant by Balzac. And it gives me all the more pleasure to meet him where that sort of thing has become most rare, in the house of one of my peers, one of ourselves,” he added, laying stress upon the words. It was all very well for the Guermantes to profess to regard all men as equal; on the great occasions when they found themselves among people who were ‘born,’ especially if they were not quite so well born as themselves, whom they were anxious and able to flatter, they did not hesitate to trot out old family memories.
“At one time,” the Baron went on, “the word aristocrat meant the best people, in intellect, in heart. Now, here is the first person I find among pur-selves who has ever heard of Victurnien d’Esgrignon. I am wrong in saying the first.
There are also a Polignac and a Montesquieu,” added M. de Charlus, who knew that this twofold association must inevitably thrill the Marquise. “However, your sons have every reason to be learned, their maternal grandfather had a famous collection of eighteenth century stuff. I will shew you mine if you will do me the pleasure of coming to luncheon with me one day,” he said to the young Victurnien. “I can shew you an interesting edition of the Cabinet des Antiques with corrections in Balzac’s own hand. I shall be charmed to bring the two Victurniens face to face.”
I could not bring myself to leave Swann. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body becomes a mere retort in which we study chemical reactions. His face was mottled with tiny spots of Prussian blue, which seemed not to belong to the world of living things, and emitted the sort of odour which, at school, after the ‘experiments,’ makes it so unpleasant to have to remain in a ‘science’ classroom. I asked him whether he had not had a long conversation with the Prince de Guermantes and if he would tell me what it had been about. “Yes,” he said, “but go for a moment first with M. de Charlus and Mme. de Surgis, I shall wait for you here.”
Indeed, M. de Charlus, having suggested to Mme. de Surgis that they should leave this room which was too hot, and go and sit for a little in another, had invited not the two sons to accompany their mother, but myself. In this way he made himself appear, after he had successfully hooked them, to have lost all interest in the two young men. He was moreover paying me an inexpensive compliment, Mme. de Surgis being in distinctly bad odour.
Unfortunately, no sooner had we sat down in an alcove from which there was no way of escape than Mme. de Saint-Euverte, a butt for the Baron’s jibes, came past. She, perhaps to mask or else openly to shew her contempt for the ill will which she inspired in M. de Charlus, and above all to shew that she was on intimate terms with a woman who was talking so familiarly to him, gave a disdainfully friendly greeting to the famous beauty, who acknowledged it, peeping out of the corner of her eye at M. de Charlus with a mocking smile.
But the alcove was so narrow that Mme. de Saint-Euverte, when she tried to continue, behind our backs, her canvass of her guests for the morrow, found herself a prisoner, and had some difficulty in escaping, a precious moment which M. de Charlus, anxious that his insolent wit should shine before the mother of the two young men, took good care not to let slip. A silly question which I had put to him, without malice aforethought, gave him the opportunity for a hymn of triumph of which the poor Saint-Euverte, almost immobilised behind us, could not have lost a word.
“Would you believe it, this impertinent young man,” he said, indicating me to Mme. de Surgis, “asked me just now, without any sign of that modesty which makes us keep such expeditions private, if I was going to Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s, which is to say, I suppose, if I was suffering from the colic. I should endeavour, in any case, to relieve myself in some more comfortable place than the house of a person who, if my memory serves me, was celebrating her centenary when I first began to go about town, though not, of course, to her house. And yet who could be more interesting to listen to?
What a host of historic memories, seen and lived through in the days of the First Empire and the Restoration, and secret history too, which could certainly have nothing of the ‘saint’ about it, but must be decidedly ‘verdant’ if we are to judge by the amount of kick still left in the old trot’s shanks. What would prevent me from questioning her about those passionate times is the acuteness of my olfactory organ. The proximity of the lady is enough.
I say to myself all at once: oh, good lord, some one has broken the lid of my cesspool, when it is simply the Marquise opening her mouth to emit some invitation. And you can understand that if I had the misfortune to go to her house, the cesspool would be magnified into a formidable sewage-cart. She bears a mystic name, though, which has always made me think with jubilation, although she has long since passed the date of her jubilee, of that stupid line of poetry called deliquescent: ‘Ah, green, how green my soul was on that day….’ But I require a cleaner sort of verdure.
They tell me that the indefatigable old streetwalker gives ‘garden-parties,’ I should describe them as ‘invitations to explore the sewers.’ Are you going to wallow there?” he asked Mme. de Surgis, who this time was annoyed. Wishing to pretend for the Baron’s benefit that she was not going, and knowing that she would give days of her life rather than miss the Saint-Euverte party, she got out of it by taking a middle course, that is to say uncertainty. This uncertainty took so clumsily amateurish, so sordidly material a form, that M. de Charlus, with no fear of offending Mme. de Surgis, whom nevertheless he was anxious to please, began to laugh to shew her that ‘it cut no ice with him.’
“I always admire people who make plans,” she said; “I often change mine at the last moment. There is a question of a summer frock which may alter everything. I shall act upon the inspiration of the moment.”
For my part, I was furious at the abominable little speech that M. de Charlus had just made. I would have liked to shower blessings upon the giver of garden-parties. Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their tormentors. Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who had succeeded in escaping from the alcove to which we were barring the entry, brushed against the Baron inadvertently as she passed him, and, by a reflex action of snobbishness which wiped out all her anger, perhaps even in the hope of securing an opening, at which this could not be the first attempt, exclaimed: “Oh! I beg your pardon, Monsieur de Charlus, I hope I did not hurt you,” as though she were kneeling before her lord and master.
The latter did not deign to reply save by a broad ironical smile, and conceded only a “Good evening,” which, uttered as though he were only now made aware of the Marquise’s presence after she had greeted him, was an insult the more. Lastly, with a supreme want of spirit which pained me for her sake, Mme. de Saint-Euverte came up to me and, drawing me aside, said in my ear:
“Tell me, what have I done to offend M. de Charlus?
They say that he doesn’t consider me smart enough for him,” she said, laughing from ear to ear. I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody, really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh so heartily at
