I passed again with him through the big green drawing-room. I told him, speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. “Ain’t it?” he replied. “It’s a good thing to be fond of something. The woodwork is Bagard. What is rather charming, d’you see, is that it was made to match the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. You observe, it repeats the same decorative design. There used to be only two places where you could see this, the Louvre and M. d’Hinnisdal’s house. But naturally, as soon as I had decided to come and live in this street, there cropped up an old family house of the Chimays which nobody had ever seen before because it came here expressly for me. On the whole, it’s good. It might perhaps be better, but after all it’s not bad. Some pretty things, ain’t there? These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland and the King of England, by Mignard. But why am I telling you all this? You must know it as well as I do, you were waiting in this room. No? Ah, then they must have put you in the blue drawing-room,” he said with an air that might have been either impertinence, on the score of my want of interest, or personal superiority, in not having taken the trouble to ask where I had been kept waiting. “Look now, in this cabinet I have all the hats worn by Mlle. Elisabeth, by the Princesse de Lamballe, and by the Queen. They don’t interest you, one would think you couldn’t see. Perhaps you are suffering from an affection of the optic nerve. If you like this kind of beauty better, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear: Beethoven 348has come to join him.” And indeed one could hear the first chords of the third part of the Pastoral Symphony, “Joy after the Storm”, performed somewhere not far away, on the first landing no doubt, by a band of musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be playing that, and who the musicians were. “Ah, well, one doesn’t know. One never does know. They are unseen music. Pretty, ain’t it?” he said to me in a slightly impertinent tone, which, nevertheless, suggested somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “But you care about as much for it as a fish does for little apples. You want to go home, regardless of any want of respect for Beethoven or for me. You are uttering your own judgment and condemnation,” he added, with an affectionate and mournful air, when the moment had come for me to go. “You will excuse my not accompanying you home, as good manners ordain that I should,” he said to me. “Since I have decided not to see you again, spending five minutes more in your company would make very little difference to me. But I am tired, and I have a great deal to do.” And then, seeing that it was a fine night: “Very well, yes, I will come in the carriage, there is a superb moon which I shall go on to admire from the Bois after I have taken you home. What, you don’t know how to shave; even on a night when you’ve been dining out, you have still a few hairs here,” he said, taking my chin between two fingers, so to speak magnetised, which after a moment’s resistance ran up to my ears, like the fingers of a barber. “Ah! It would be pleasant to look at the ‘blue light of the moon’ in the Bois with some one like yourself,” he said to me with a sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, then, in a sadder tone: 349“For you are nice, all the same; you could be nicer than anyone,” he went on, laying his hand in a fatherly way on my shoulder. “Originally, I must say that I found you quite insignificant.” I ought to have reflected that he must find me so still. I had only to recall the rage with which he had spoken to me, barely half-an-hour before. In spite of this I had the impression that he was, for the moment, sincere, that his kindness of heart was prevailing over what I regarded as an almost delirious condition of susceptibility and pride. The carriage was waiting beside us, and still he prolonged the conversation. “Come along,” he said abruptly, “jump in, in five minutes we shall be at your door. And I shall bid you a good night which will cut short our relations, and for all time. It is better, since we must part for ever, that we should do so, as in music, on a perfect chord.” Despite these solemn affirmations that we should never see one another again, I could have sworn that M. de Charlus, annoyed at having forgotten himself earlier in the evening and afraid of having hurt my feelings, would not have been displeased to see me once again. Nor was I mistaken, for, a moment later: “There, now,” he said, “if I hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all. In memory of your grandmother, I have had bound for you a curious edition of Mme. de Sévigné. That is what is going to prevent this from being our last meeting. One must console oneself with the reflexion that complicated affairs are rarely settled in a day. Just look how long they took over the Congress of Vienna.” “But I could call for it without disturbing you,” I said obligingly. “Will you hold your tongue, you little fool,” he replied with anger, “and not give yourself the grotesque appearance of 350regarding as a small matter the honour of being probably (I do not say certainly, for it will perhaps be one of my servants who hands you the volumes) received by me.” Then, regaining possession of himself: “I do not wish to part from you on these words. No dissonance, before the eternal silence of the dominant.” It was for his own nerves that he seemed to dread an immediate return home after harsh words of dissension. “You would not care to come to the Bois?” he addressed me in a tone not so much interrogative as affirmative, and that not, as it seemed to me, because he did not wish to make me the offer but because he was afraid that his self-esteem might meet with a refusal. “Oh, very well,” he went on, still postponing our separation, “it is the moment when, as Whistler says, the bourgeois go to bed” (perhaps he wished now to capture me by my self-esteem) “and the right time to begin to look at things. But you don’t even know who Whistler was!” I changed the conversation and asked him whether the Princesse d’Iéna was an intelligent person. M. de Charlus stopped me, and, adopting the most contemptuous tone that I had yet heard him use, “Oh! There, Sir,” he informed me, “you are alluding to an order of nomenclature with which I have no concern. There is perhaps an aristocracy among the Tahitians, but I must confess that I know nothing about it. The name which you have just mentioned, strangely enough, did sound in my ears only a few days ago. Some one asked me whether I would condescend to allow them to present to me the young Duc de Guastalla. The request astonished me, for the Duc de Guastalla
