ordinary face as does the sea when on a morning of storm one finds instead of its customary smiling surface a thousand serpents writhing in spray and foam, “do you mean to pretend that you did not receive my message — almost a declaration — that you were to remember me? What was there in the way of decoration round the cover of the book that I sent you?” “Some very pretty twined garlands with tooled ornaments,” I told him. “Ah!” he replied, with an air of scorn, “these young Frenchmen know little of the treasures of our land. What would be said of a young Berliner who had never heard of the Walküre? Besides, you must have eyes to see and see not, since you yourself told me that you had stood for two hours in front of that particular treasure. I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do about styles; don’t protest that you know about styles,” he cried in a shrill scream of rage, “you can’t even tell me what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a Directory chauffeuse as a Louis XIV bergère. One of these days you’ll be mistaking Mme. de Villeparisis’s knees for the seat of the rear, and a fine mess you’ll make of things then. It’s precisely the same; you didn’t even recognise on the binding of Bergotte’s book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there be any clearer way of saying to you: ‘Forget me not!’?” I looked at M. de Charlus. Undoubtedly his magnificent head, though repellent, yet far surpassed that of any of his relatives; you would have called him an Apollo grown old; but an olive-hued, bilious juice seemed ready to start from the corners of his evil mouth; as for intellect, one could not deny that his, over a vast compass, had taken in many things which must always remain unknown to his brother Guermantes. But whatever the fine words with which he coloured all his hatreds, one felt that, even if there was now an offended pride, now a disappointment in love, or a rancour, or sadism, a love of teasing, a fixed obsession, this man was capable of doing murder, and of proving by force of logic that he had been right in doin^ it and was still superior by a hundred cubits in moral stature to his brother, his sister-in-law, or any of the rest. “Just as, in Velazquez’s Lances,” he went on, “the victor advances towards him who is the humbler in rank, as is the duty of every noble nature, since I was everything and you were nothing, it was I who took the first steps towards you. You have made an idiotic reply to what it is not for me to describe as an act of greatness. But I have not allowed myself to be discouraged. Our religion inculcates patience. The patience I have shewn towards you will be counted, I hope, to my credit, and also my having only smiled at what might be denounced as impertinence, were it within your power to offer any impertinence to me who surpass you in stature by so many cubits; but after all, Sir, all this is now neither here nor there. I have subjected you to the test which the one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test of excessive friendliness, and which he rightly declares to be the most terrible of all, the only one that can separate the good grain from the tares. I could scarcely reproach you for having undergone it without success, for those who emerge from it triumphant are very few. But at least, and this is the conclusion which I am entitled to draw from the last words that we shall exchange on this earth, at least I intend to hear nothing more of your calumnious fabrications.” So far, I had never dreamed that M. de Charlus’s rage could have been caused by an unflattering remark which had been repeated to him; I searched my memory; I had not spoken about him to anyone. Some evil-doer had invented the whole thing. I protested to-M. de Charlus that I had said absolutely nothing about him. “I don’t think I can have annoyed you by saying to Mme. de Guermantes that I was a friend of yours.” He gave a disdainful smile, made his voice climb to the supreme pitch of its highest register, and there, without strain, attacking the shrillest and most insolent note: “Oh! Sir,” he said, returning by the most gradual stages to a natural intonation, and seeming to revel as he went in the oddities of this descending scale, “I think that you are doing yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were friends. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in anyone who could readily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo chaire, but really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more and more winning and brought to hover over his lips what was actually a charming smile, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were frlends! As for your having boasted that you had been presented to me, had talked to me, knew me slightly, had obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of coming one day under my protection, I find it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done so. The extreme difference in age that there is between us enables me to recognise without absurdity that that presentation, those talks, that vague prospect of future relations were for you, it is not for me to say an honour, but still, when all is said and done, an advantage as to which I consider that your folly lay not in divulging it but in not having had the sense to keep it. I will go so far as to say,” he went on, passing abruptly for a moment from his arrogant wrath to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I expected him to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered the proposal I made to you here in Paris it seemed to me so unheard-of an act on your part, coming from you who had struck me as well brought up and of a good bourgeois family,” (on this adjective alone his voice sounded a little whistle of impertinence) “that I was foolish enough to imagine all the excuses that never really happen, letters miscarrying, addresses copied down wrong. I can see that on my part it was great foolishness, but Saint Bonaventure preferred to believe that an ox could fly rather than that his brother was capable of lying. Anyhow, that is all finished now, the idea did not attract you, there is no more to be said. It seems to me only that you might have brought yourself,” (and there was a genuine sound of weeping in his voice) “were it only out of consideration for my age, to write to me. I had conceived and planned for you certain infinitely seductive things, which I had taken good care not to tell you. You have preferred to refuse without knowing what they were; that is your affair. But, as I tell you, one can always write. In your place, and indeed in my own, I should have done so. I like my place, for that reason, better than yours — I say ‘for that reason’ because I believe that we are all equal, and I have more fellow-feeling for an intelligent labourer than for many of our dukes. But I can say that I prefer my place to yours, because what you have done, in the whole course of my life, which is beginning now to be a pretty long one, I am conscious that I have never done.” His head was turned away from the light, and I could not see if his eyes were dropping tears as I might have supposed from his voice. “I told you that I had taken a hundred steps towards you; the only effect of that has been to make you retire two hundred from me. Now it is for me to withdraw, and we shall know one another no longer. I shall retain not your name but your story, so that at moments when I might be tempted to believe that men have good hearts, good manners, or simply the intelligence not to allow an unparalleled opportunity to escape them, I may remember that that is ranking them too highly. No, that you should have said that you knew me, when it was true — for henceforward it ceases to be true — I regard that as only natural, and I take it as an act of homage, that is to say something pleasant. Unfortunately, elsewhere and in other circumstances, you have uttered remarks of a very different nature.” “Sir, I swear to you that I have said nothing that could insult you.” “And who says that I am insulted?” he cried with fury, flinging himself into an erect posture on the seat on which hitherto he had been reclining motionless, while, as the pale frothing serpents stiffened in his face, his voice became alternately shrill and grave, like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The force with which he habitually spoke, which used to make strangers turn round in the street, was multiplied an hundredfold, as is a