Aberrations are like passions which a morbid strain has overlaid, yet, in the craziest of them love can still be recognised. M. de Charlus’ insistence that the chains which bound his feet and hands should be of attested strength, his demand to be tried at the bar of justice and, from what Jupien told me, for ferocious accessories there was great difficulty in obtaining even from sailors (the punishment they used to inflict having been abolished even where the discipline is strictest, on ship-board), at the base of all this there was M. de Charlus’ constant dream of virility proved, if need be, by brutal acts and all the illumination the reflections of which within himself though to us invisible, he projected on judicial and feudal tortures which embellished an imagination coloured by the Middle Ages. This sentiment was in his mind each time he said to Jupien: “There won’t be any alarm this evening anyhow, for I can already see myself reduced to ashes by the fire of Heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom,” and he affected to be frightened of the Gothas not because he really had the smallest fear of them but to have a pretext the moment the sirens sounded of dashing into the shelter of the Métropolitain, where he hoped to get a thrill from midnight frictions associated in his mind with vague dreams of prostrations and subterranean dungeons in the Middle Ages. Finally his desire to be chained and beaten revealed, with all its ugliness, a dream as poetic as the desire of others to go to Venice or to keep dancing girls. And M. de Charlus held so much to the illusion of reality which this dream gave him that Jupien was compelled to sell the wooden bed which was in room No. 43, and replace it by one of iron which went better with the chains.
At last the maroon sounded as I arrived home. The noise of approaching firemen was announced by a small boy and I met Françoise coming up from the cellar with the butler. She had thought me dead. She told me that Saint-Loup had excused himself for coming in to see if he had not let his croix de guerre fall when calling that morning. He had only just noticed he had lost it and having to rejoin his regiment the next day had wanted at all costs to see if it was not at my house. He and Françoise had searched everywhere without success. Françoise believed he must have lost it before coming to see me, for, she said, she could almost have sworn he did not have it on when she saw him; in this she was mistaken, which shows the value of witnesses and of recollections.
I felt immediately by the unenthusiastic way they spoke of him that Saint-Loup had not produced a good impression on Françoise and the butler. Saint-Loup’s efforts to court danger were the exact opposite of those made by the butler’s son and Françoise’s nephew to get themselves exempted, but judging from their own standpoint, Françoise and the butler could not believe that. They were convinced that rich people are always protected. For that matter had they even known the truth about Robert’s heroic bravery, they would not have been moved by it. He never talked of “Boches”, he praised the bravery of the Germans, he had not attributed our failure to secure victory from the first day, to treason. That was what they wanted to hear and that was what they would have considered a mark of courage. So, while they continued searching for the croix de guerre, I, who had not much doubt as to where that cross had been lost, found them cold on the subject of Robert. Though Saint-Loup had been amusing himself in equivocal fashion that evening, it was only while awaiting news of Morel; he had been seized with longing to see him again, and had made use of all his connections to discover the corps Morel was in, supposing him to have joined up, but, so far, he had received only contradictory answers.
I advised Françoise and the butler to go to bed but the latter was never in any hurry to leave Françoise since, thanks to the war, he had found a still more efficacious way of tormenting her than telling her about the expulsion of the nuns and the Dreyfus affair. That evening and whenever I was near them during the time I spent in Paris, I heard the butler say to poor, frightened Françoise:
“They’re not in a hurry, of course; they’re waiting for the ripe pear, the day that they take Paris they’ll have no mercy.” “My God! Blessed Virgin Mary!” cried Françoise, “isn’t it enough for them to have conquered poor Belgium.
She suffered enough at the time of her ‘invahition’.” “Belgium, Françoise. Why! What they did to Belgium is nothing to what they’ll do here.” The war having thrown upon the people’s conversation-market a number of new expressions which they only knew visually through reading the papers without being able to pronounce them, the butler added, “You’ll see, Françoise they are preparing a new attack of a greater enverjure than ever before.” In protest, if not out of pity for Françoise or from strategic common-sense, at least for grammar’s sake, I told them that the right way to pronounce the word was envergure, but I only succeeded in making Françoise repeat the terrible word every time I entered the kitchen. The butler, much as he enjoyed frightening his fellow-servant, was equally pleased to show his master, though he was only a former gardener of Combray and now a butler, that he was a good Frenchman of the order of St. André dès-Champs and possessed the privilege, since the declaration of the rights of man, to pronounce enverjure, with complete independence and not to accept orders on a matter which had nothing to do with his service and, in regard to which, in consequence of the Revolution, no one had any right to correct him, since he was my equal.
I had, therefore, the irritation of hearing Françoise talk about an operation of great enverjure with an insistence which was intended to prove to me that that pronunciation was, in fact, not that of ignorance but of maturely-considered determination. The butler indiscriminately applied a suspicious “they” to the Government and the papers: “They talk of the losses of the Boches, they don’t talk of ours which, it appears, are ten times greater. They tell us that they’re at the last gasp, that they’ve got nothing to eat. I believe they’ve got a hundred times more to eat than we have. It’s all very well but they’ve no right to humbug us like that. If they had nothing to eat they wouldn’t be able to fight like the other day when they killed a hundred thousand youngsters less than twenty years old.” He thus continually exaggerated the triumphs of the Germans as he did formerly those of the Radicals, and told tales of their atrocities so as to make the victories of the enemy still more painful to Françoise who kept on exclaiming: “Sainted Mother of Angels! Sainted Mother of God!”
Sometimes he tried being unpleasant to her in another way by saying:
“For that matter, we’re no better than they are. What we’re doing in Greece is no nicer than what they did in Belgium. You’ll see, we shall have the whole world against us and we shall have to fight the lot,” while, actually, the exact contrary was the truth. On days when news was good he revenged himself on Françoise by assuring her the war would last thirty-five years and that if, by chance, a possible peace came, it would not last more than a few months and would be succeeded by battles in comparison with which those of to-day were child’s play and that after them nothing would be left of France.
The victory of the Allies if not close at hand, seemed at any rate assured, and unfortunately it must be admitted that this displeased the butler. For, having identified the world-war and the rest of it with his campaign against Françoise (whom he liked, all the same, just as one likes a person whom one daily enrages by defeating him at dominoes) victory was represented to him in terms of the first conversation he would have with her thereafter when he would be irritated by hearing her say: “Well, it’s finished at last, and they’ll have to give us a great deal more than we gave them in ‘71.” Really, he always believed this must happen in the end for an unconscious patriotism made him think, like all Frenchmen, who were victims of an illusion similar to my own ever since I had been ill, that victory like my recovery was coming to-morrow. He took the upper hand of Françoise by announcing that though victory might come about, her heart would bleed from it, because a revolution would swiftly follow and then invasion. “Ah! That bloody old war, the Boches will be the ones to recover quick from it! Why, Françoise! They’ve already made hundreds of millions out of it.
But don’t you imagine they’re going to give us a penny of it. They may put that in the papers,” he added for prudence sake and to be on the safe side, “to keep people quiet just as they’ve been saying for three years that the war would be finished the next day. I
