However, in spite of these ridiculous social affectations, M. de Charlus was extremely intelligent, and it is probable that if some remote marriage had established a connexion between his family and that of Balzac, he would have felt (no less than Balzac himself, for that matter) a satisfaction which he would have been unable to help displaying as a praiseworthy sign of condescension.
Now and again, at the station after Saint-Martin du Chêne, some young men would get into the train. M. de Charlus could not refrain from looking at them, but as he cut short and concealed the attention that he was paying them, he gave it the air of hiding a secret, more personal even than his real secret; one would have said that he knew them, allowed his acquaintance to appear in spite of himself, after he had accepted the sacrifice, before turning again to us, like children who, in consequence of a quarrel among their respective parents, have been forbidden to speak to certain of their schoolfellows, but who when they meet them cannot forego the temptation to raise their heads before lowering them again before their tutor’s menacing cane.
At the word borrowed from the Greek with which M. de Charlus in speaking of Balzac had ended his comparison of the Tristesse d’Olympio with the Splendeurs et Misères, Ski, Brichot and Cottard had glanced at one another with a smile perhaps less ironical than stamped with that satisfaction which people at a dinner-party would shew who had succeeded in making Dreyfus talk about his own case, or the Empress Eugénie about her reign. They were hoping to press him a little further upon this subject, but we were already at Doncières, where Morel joined us. In his presence, M. de Charlus kept a careful guard over his conversation and, when Ski tried to bring it back to the love of Carlos Herrera for Lucien de Rubempré, the Baron assumed the vexed, mysterious, and finally (seeing that nobody was listening to him) severe and judicial air of a father who hears people saying something indecent in front of his daughter.
Ski having shewn some determination to pursue the subject, M. de Charlus, his eyes starting out of his head, raised his voice and said, in a significant tone, looking at Albertine, who as a matter of fact could not hear what we were saying, being engaged in conversation with Mme. Cottard and Princess Sherbatoff, and with the suggestion of a double meaning of a person who wishes to teach ill-bred people a lesson: “I think it is high time we began to talk of subjects that are likely to interest this young lady.” But I quite realised that, to him, the young lady was not Albertine but Morel; he proved, as it happened, later on, the accuracy of my interpretation by the expressions that he employed when he begged that there might be no more of such conversation in front of Morel. “You know,” he said to me, speaking of the violinist, “that he is not at all what you might suppose, he is a very respectable youth who has always behaved himself, he is very serious.”
And one gathered from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet ‘respectable,’ of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl. Then Brichot, to change the conversation, asked me whether I intended to remain much longer at Incarville. I had pointed out to him more than once, but in vain, that I was staying not at Incarville but at Balbec, he always repeated the mistake, for it was by the name of Incarville or Balbec-Incarville that he described this section of the coast. There are people like that, who speak of the same things as ourselves but call them by a slightly different name. A certain lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain used invariably to ask me, when she meant to refer to the Duchesse de Guermantes, whether I had seen Zénaïde lately, or Oriane-Zénaïde, the effect of which was that at first I did not understand her. Probably there had been a time when, some relative of Mme. de Guermantes being named Oriane, she herself, to avoid confusion, had been known as Oriane-Zénaïde.
Perhaps, too, there had originally been a station only at Incarville, from which one went in a carriage to Balbec. “Why, what have you been talking about?” said Albertine, astonished at the solemn, paternal tone which M. de Charlus had suddenly adopted. “About Balzac,” the Baron hastily replied, “and you are wearing this evening the very same clothes as the Princesse de Cadignan, not her first gown, which she wears at the dinnerparty, but the second.” This coincidence was due to the fact that, in choosing Albertine’s clothes, I sought inspiration in the taste that she had acquired thanks to Elstir, who greatly appreciated a sobriety which might have been called British, had it not been tempered with a gentler, more flowing grace that was purely French.
As a rule the garments that he chose offered to the eye a harmonious combination of grey tones like the dress of Diane de Cadignan. M. de Charlus was almost the only person capable of appreciating Albertine’s clothes at their true value; at a glance, his eye detected what constituted their rarity, justified their price; he would never have said the name of one stuff instead of another, and could always tell who had made them. Only he preferred—in women—a little more brightness and colour than Elstir would allow.
And so this evening she cast a glance at me half smiling, half troubled, wrinkling her little pink cat’s nose. Indeed, meeting over her skirt of grey crêpe de chine, her jacket of grey cheviot gave the impression that Albertine was dressed entirely in grey. But, making a sign to me to help her, because her puffed sleeves needed to be smoothed down or pulled up, for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took it off, and as her sleeves were of a Scottish plaid in soft colours, pink, pale blue, dull green, pigeon’s breast, the effect was as though in a grey sky there had suddenly appeared a rainbow. And she asked herself whether this would find favour with M. de Charlus.
“Ah!” he exclaimed in delight, “now we have a ray, a prism of colour. I offer you my sincerest compliments.” “But it is this gentleman who has earned them,” Albertine replied politely, pointing to myself, for she liked to shew what she had received from me. “It is only women who do not know how to dress that are afraid of colours,” went on M. de Charlus. “A dress may be brilliant without vulgarity and quiet without being dull.
Besides, you have not the same reasons as Mme. de Cadignan for wishing to appear detached from life, for that was the idea which she wished to instil into d’Arthez by her grey gown.” Albertine, who was interested in this mute language of clothes, questioned M. de Charlus about the Princesse de Cadignan. “Ohl It is a charming tale,” said the Baron in a dreamy tone. “I know the little garden in which Diane de Cadignan used to stroll with M. d’Espard.
It belongs to one of my cousins.” “All this talk about his cousin’s garden,” Brichot murmured to Cottard, “may, like his pedigree, be of some importance to this worthy Baron. But what interest can it have for us who are not privileged to walk in it, do not know the lady, and possess no titles of nobility?” For Brichot had no suspicion that one might be interested in a gown and in a garden as works of art, and that it was in the pages of Balzac that M, de Charlus saw, in his mind’s eye, the garden paths of Mme. de Cadignan.
The Baron went on:
“But you know her,” he said to me, speaking of this cousin, and, by way of flattering me, addressing himself to me as to a person who, exiled amid the little clan, was to M. de Charlus, if not a citizen of his world, at any rate a visitor to it. “Anyhow you must have seen her at Mme. de Villeparisis’s.” “Is that the Marquise de Villeparisis who owns the chateau at Baucreux?” asked Brichot with a captivated air.
“Yes, do you know her?” inquired M. de Charlus dryly. “No, not at all,” replied Brichot, “but our colleague Norpois spends part of his holidays every year at Baucreux. I have had occasion to write to him there.” I told Morel, thinking to interest him, that M. de Norpois was a friend of my father. But not a movement of his features shewed that he had heard me, so little did he think of my parents, so far short did they fall in his estimation of what my great-uncle had been, who had employed Morel’s father as his valet, and, as a matter of fact, being,
