“Yes, I will do that for you, first of all because I owe you a great debt of gratitude. By not accepting what, long ago, I had offered you, you rendered me, to your own loss, an immense service, you left me my liberty. It is true that I have abdicated it in another fashion,” he added in a melancholy tone beneath which was visible a desire to take me into his confidence;
“that is what I continue to regard as the important fact, a whole combination of circumstances which you failed to turn to your own account, possibly because fate warned you at that precise minute not to cross my Path. For always man proposes and God disposes. Who knows whether if, on the day when we came away together from Mme. de Villeparisis’s, you had accepted, perhaps many things that have since happened would never have occurred?”
In some embarrassment, I turned the conversation, seizing hold of the name of Mme. de Villeparisis, and sought to find out from him, so admirably qualified in every respect, for what reasons Mme. de Villeparisis seemed to be held aloof by the aristocratic world. Not only did he not give me the solution of this little social problem, he did not even appear to me to be aware of its existence. I then realised that the position of Mme. de Villeparisis, if it was in later years to appear great to posterity, and even in the Marquise’s lifetime to the ignorant rich, had appeared no less great at the opposite extremity of society, that which touched Mme. de Villeparisis, that of the Guermantes. She was their aunt; they saw first and foremost birth, connexions by marriage, the opportunity of impressing some sister-in-law with the importance of their own family. They regarded this less from the social than from the family point of view. Now this was more brilliant in the case of Mme. de Villeparisis than I had supposed. I had been impressed when I heard that the title Villeparisis was falsely assumed. But there are other examples of great ladies who have made degrading marriages and preserved a predominant position. M. de Charlus began by informing me that Mme. de Villeparisis was a niece of the famous Duchesse de—–, the most celebrated member of the great aristocracy during the July Monarchy, albeit she had refused to associate with the Citizen King and his family. I had so longed to hear stories about this Duchess!
And Mme. de Villeparisis, the kind Mme. de Villeparisis, with those cheeks that to me had been the cheeks of an ordinary woman, Mme. de Villeparisis who sent me so many presents and whom I could so easily have seen every day, Mme. de Villeparisis was her niece brought up by her, in her home, at the Hôtel de—–. “She asked the Duc de Doudeauville,” M. de Charlus told me, “speaking of the three sisters, ‘Which of the sisters do you prefer?’ And when Doudeauville said:
‘Madame de Villeparisis,’ the Duchesse de——replied ‘Pig!’ For the Duchess was extremely witty,” said M. de Charlus, giving the word the importance and the special pronunciation in use among the Guermantes. That he should have thought the expression so ‘witty’ did not, however, surprise me, for I had on many other occasions remarked the centrifugal, objective tendency which leads men to abdicate, when they are relishing the wit of others, the severity with which they would criticise their own, and to observe, to record faithfully, what they would have scorned to create.
“But what on earth is he doing, that is my greatcoat he is bringing,” he said, on seeing that Brichot had made so long a search to no better result. “I would have done better to go for it myself. However, you can put it on now. Are you aware that it is highly compromising, my dear boy, it is like drinking out of the same glass, I shall be able to read your thoughts. No, not like that, come, let me do it,” and as he put me into his greatcoat, he pressed it down on my shoulders, fastened it round my throat, and brushed my chin with his hand, making the apology: “At his age, he doesn’t know how to put on a coat, one has to titivate him, I have missed my vocation, Brichot, I was born to be a nursery-maid.” I wanted to go home, but as M. de Charlus had expressed his intention of going in search of Morel, Brichot detained us both. Moreover, the certainty that when I went home I should find Albertine there, a certainty as absolute as that which I had felt in the afternoon that Albertine would return home from the Trocadéro, made me at this moment as little impatient to see her as I had been then when I was sitting at the piano, after Françoise had sent me her telephone message. And it was this calm that enabled me, whenever, in the course of this conversation, I attempted to rise, to obey Brichot’s injunctions who was afraid that my departure might prevent Charlus from remaining with him until the moment when Mme. Verdurin was to come and fetch us. “Come,” he said to the Baron, “stay a little here with us, you shall give him the accolade presently,” Brichot added, fastening upon myself his almost sightless eyes to which the many operations that he had undergone had restored some degree of life, but which had not all the same the mobility necessary to the sidelong expression of malice. “The accolade, how absurd!” cried the Baron, in a shrill and rapturous tone. “My boy, I tell you, he imagines he is at a prize-giving, he is dreaming of his young pupils. I ask myself whether he don’t sleep with them.” “You wish to meet Mlle. Vinteuil,” said Brichot, who had overheard the last words of our conversation. “I promise to let you know if she comes, I shall hear of it from Mme. Verdurin,” for he doubtless foresaw that the Baron was in peril of an immediate exclusion from the little clan. “I see, so you think that I have less claim than yourself upon Mme. Verdurin,” said M. de Charlus, “to be informed of the coming of these terribly disreputable persons. You know that they are quite notorious. Mme. Verdurin is wrong to allow them to come here, they are all very well for the fast set. They are friends with a terrible band of women. They meet in the most appalling places.”
At each of these words, my suffering was increased by the addition of a fresh suffering, changing in form. “Certainly not, I don’t suppose that I have any better claim than yourself upon Mme. Verdurin,” Brichot protested, punctuating his words, for he was afraid that he might have aroused the Baron’s suspicions. And as he saw that I was determined to go, seeking to detain me with the bait of the promised entertainment: “There is one thing which the Baron seems to me not to have taken into account when he speaks of the reputation of these two ladies, namely that a person’s reputation may be at the same time appalling and undeserved. Thus for instance, in the more notorious group which I shall call parallel, it is certain that the errors of justice are many and that history has registered convictions for sodomy against illustrious men who were wholly innocent of the charge. The recent discovery of Michelangelo’s passionate love for a woman is a fresh fact which should entitle the friend of Leo X to the benefit of a posthumous retrial. The Michelangelo case seems to me clearly indicated to excite the snobs and mobilise the Villette, when another case in which anarchism reared its head and became the fashionable sin of our worthy dilettantes, but which must not even be mentioned now for fear of stirring up quarrels, shall have run its course.” From the moment when Brichot began to speak of masculine reputations, M. de Charlus betrayed on every one of his features that special sort of impatience which one sees on the face of a medical or military expert when society people who know nothing about the subject begin to talk nonsense about points of therapeutics or strategy. “You know absolutely nothing about the matter,” he said at length to Brichot. “Quote me a single reputation that is undeserved. Mention names. Oh yes, I know the whole story,” was his brutal retort to a timid interruption by Brichot, “the people who tried it once long ago out of curiosity, or out of affection for a dead friend, and the man who, afraid he has gone too far, if you speak to him of the beauty of a man, replies that that is Chinese to him, that he can no more distinguish between a beautiful man and an ugly one than between the engines of two motorcars, mechanics not being in his line. That’s all stuff and nonsense.
Mind you, I don’t mean to say that a bad (or what is conventionally so called) and yet undeserved reputation is absolutely impossible. It is so exceptional, so rare, that for practical purposes it does not exist. At the same time I, who have a certain curiosity in ferreting things out, have known cases which were not mythical. Yes, in the course of my life, I have established (scientifically speaking, of
