What a shock for M. de Charlus, if he had found his way into one of these enemy tents, by means of some piece of scandal as though by one of those service stairs where obscene drawings are scribbled outside the back doors of flats by unpaid tradesmen or dismissed servants. But, just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of the people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same time the sole preoccupation of others.
And so M. de Charlus lived in a state of deception like the fish which thinks that the water in which it is swimming extends beyond the glass wall of its aquarium which mirrors it, while it does not see close beside it in the shadow the human visitor who is amusing himself by watching its movements, or the all-powerful keeper who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, postponed for the present in the case of the Baron (for whom the keeper, in Paris, will be Mme. Verdurin), will extract it without compunction from the place in which it was happily living to cast it into another.
Moreover, the races of mankind, in so far as they are not merely collections of individuals, may furnish us with examples more vast, but identical in each of their parts, of this profound, obstinate and disconcerting blindness. Up to the present, if it was responsible for M. de Charlus’s discoursing to the little clan remarks of a wasted subtlety or of an audacity which made his listeners smile at him in secret, it had not yet caused him, nor was it to cause him at Balbec any serious inconvenience. A trace of albumen, of sugar, of cardiac arythmia, does not prevent life from remaining normal for the man who is not even conscious of it, when only the physician sees in it a prophecy of catastrophes in store.
At present the fondness—whether Platonic or not—that M. de Charlus felt for Morel merely led the Baron to say spontaneously in Morel’s absence that he thought him very good looking, supposing that this would be taken in all innocence, and thereby acting like a clever man who when summoned to make a statement before a Court of Law will not be afraid to enter into details which are apparently to his disadvantage but for that very reason are more natural and less vulgar than the conventional protestations of a stage culprit.
With the same freedom, always between Saint-Martin du Châne and Doncières-Ouest—or conversely on the return journey—M. de Charlus would readily speak of men who had, it appeared, very strange morals, and would even add: “After all, I say strange, I don’t know why, for there’s nothing so very strange about that,” to prove to himself how thoroughly he was at his ease with his audience. And so indeed he was, provided that it was he who retained the initiative, and that he knew his gallery to be mute and smiling, disarmed by credulity or good manners.
When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel’s beauty, as though it had no connexion with an inclination—called a vice—he would refer to that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it. Sometimes indeed he did not hesitate to call it by its name. As after examining the fine binding of his volume of Balzac I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comédie Humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted to the same topic:
“Either one thing or the other, a tiny miniature like the Curé de Tours and the Femme abandonnée, or one of the great frescoes like the series of Illusions perdues. What! You’ve never read Illusions perdues?
It’s wonderful. The scene where Carlos Herrera asks the name of the château he is driving past, and it turns out to be Rastignac, the home of the young man he used to love. And then the abbé falls into a reverie which Swann once called, and very aptly, the Tristesse d’Olympia of paederasty. And the death of Lucien! I forgot who the man of taste was who, when he was asked what event in his life had most distressed him, replied: ‘The death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et Misères.’” “I know that Balzac is all the rage this year, as pessimism was last,” Brichot interrupted. “But, at the risk of distressing the hearts that are smitten with the Balzacian fever, without laying any claim, damme, to being a policeman of letters, or drawing up a list of offences against the laws of grammar, I must confess that the copious improviser whose alarming lucubrations you appear to me singularly to overrate, has always struck me as being an insufficiently meticulous scribe.
I have read these Illusions perdues of which you are telling us, Baron, flagellating myself to attain to the fervour of an initiate, and I confess in all simplicity of heart that those serial instalments of bombastic balderdash, written in double Dutch—and in triple Dutch: Esther heureuse, Où mènent les mauvais chemins, A combien l’amour revient aux vieillards, have always had the effect on me of the Mystères de Rocambole, exalted by an inexplicable preference to the precarious position of a masterpiece.” “You say that because you know nothing of life,” said the Baron, doubly irritated, for he felt that Brichot would not understand either his aesthetic reasons or the other kind. “I quite realise,” replied Brichot, “that, to speak like Master François Rabelais, you mean that I am moult sorbonagre, sorbonicole et sorboniforme. And yet, just as much as any of the comrades, I like a book to give an impression of sincerity and real life, I am not one of those clerks….”
“The quart d’heure de Rabelais,” the Doctor broke in, with an air no longer of uncertainty but of assurance as to his own wit. “… who take a vow of literature following the rule of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, yielding obedience to M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Grand Master of common form, according to the strict rule of the humanists. M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand’s mistake….” “With fried potatoes?” put in Dr. Cottard. “He is the patron saint of the brotherhood,” continued Brichot, ignoring the wit of the Doctor, who, on the other hand, alarmed by the don’s phrase, glanced anxiously at M. de Charlus. Brichot had seemed wanting in tact to Cottard, whose pun had brought a delicate smile to the lips of Princess Sherbatoff. “With the Professor, the mordant irony of the complete sceptic never forfeits its rights,” she said kindly, to shew that the scientist’s witticism had not passed unperceived by herself. “The sage is of necessity sceptical,” replied the Doctor.
“It’s not my fault. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates. He was quite right, excess in anything is a mistake. But I am dumbfoundered when I think that those words have sufficed to keep Socrates’s name alive all this time. What is there in his philosophy, very little when all is said. When one reflects that Charcot and others have done work a thousand times more remarkable, work which moreover is at least founded upon something, upon the suppression of the pupillary reflex as a syndrome of general paralysis, and that they are almost forgotten. After all, Socrates was nothing out of the common. They were people who had nothing better to do, and spent their time strolling about and splitting hairs.
Like Jesus Christ: ‘Love one another!’ it’s all very pretty.” “My dear,” Mme. Cottard implored. “Naturally my wife protests, women are all neurotic.” “But, my dear Doctor, I am not neurotic,” murmured Mme. Cottard. “What, she is not neurotic! When her son is ill, she exhibits phenomena of insomnia. Still, I quite admit that Socrates, and all the rest of them, are necessary for a superior culture, to acquire the talent of exposition. I always quote his gnothi seauton to my pupils at the beginning of the course. Père Bouchard, when he heard of it, congratulated me.” “I am not one of those who hold to form for form’s sake, any more than I should treasure in poetry the rhyme millionaire,” replied Brichot.
“But all the same the Comédie Humaine–which is far from human—is more than the antithesis of those works in which the art exceeds the matter, as that worthy hack Ovid says. And it is permissible to choose a middle course, which leads to the presbytery of Meudon or the hermitage of Ferney, equidistant from the Valley of Wolves, in which René superbly performed the duties of a merciless pontificate, and from les Jardies, where Honoré de Balzac, browbeaten by the bailiffs, never ceased voiding upon paper to please a Polish woman, like a zealous apostle of balderdash.”
“Chateaubriand is far more alive now than you say, and Balzac is, after all, a great writer,” replied M. de Charlus, still too much impregnated with Swann’s tastes not to be irritated by Brichot, “and Balzac was acquainted with even those passions which the rest of the world ignores, or studies only to castigate them. Without referring again to the immortal Illusions perdues; Sarrazine, La Fille aux yeux d’or, Une passion dans le désert, even the distinctly enigmatic Fausse Maîtresse can be adduced in support of my argument.
When I spoke of this ‘unnatural’ aspect of Balzac to Swann, he said to me:
‘You are of the same opinion
