I did not stop to reflect, and I spoke light-heartedly and at random.
“You’re going from here with my nephew Palamède?” she asked me.
Thinking that it might produce a highly favourable impression on Mme. de Villeparisis if she learned that I was on intimate terms with a nephew whom she esteemed so greatly, “He has asked me to go home with him,” I answered blithely. “I am so glad. Besides, we are greater friends than you think, and I’ve quite made up my mind that we’re going to be better friends still.”
>From being vexed, Mme. de Villeparisis seemed to have grown anxious. “Don’t wait for him,” she said to me, with a preoccupied air. “He is talking to M. de Faffenheim. He’s certain to have forgotten what he said to you. You’d much better go, now, quickly, while his back is turned.”
The first emotion shewn by Mme. de Villeparisis would have suggested, but for the circumstances, offended modesty. Her insistence, her opposition might well, if one had studied her face alone, have appeared to be dictated by virtue. I was not, myself, in any hurry to join Robert and his mistress. But Mme. de Villeparisis seemed to make such a point of my going that, thinking perhaps that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew, I bade her good-bye. Next to her M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One would have said that the notion omnipresent in all his members, of his vast riches gave him a particular high density, as though they had been melted in a crucible into a single human ingot to form this man whose value was so immense. At the moment of my saying good-bye to him he rose politely from his seat, and I could feel the dead weight of thirty millions which his old-fashioned French breeding set in motion, raised, until it stood before me. I seemed to be looking at that statue of Olympian Zeus which Phidias is said to have cast in solid gold. Such was the power that good breeding had over M. de Guermantes over the body of M. de Guermantes at least, for it had not an equal mastery over the ducal mind. M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but did not unbend to other people’s.
As I went downstairs I heard behind me a voice calling out to me:
“So this is how you wait for me, is it?”
It was M. de Charlus.
“You don’t mind if we go a little way on foot?” he asked dryly, when we were in the courtyard. “We can walk until I find a cab that suits me.”
“You wished to speak to me about something, Sir?”
“Oh yes, as a matter of fact there were some things I wished to say to you, but I am not so sure now whether I shall. As far as you are concerned, I am sure that they might be the starting-point which would lead you to inestimable benefits. But I can see also that they would bring into my existence, at an age when one begins to value tranquillity, a great loss of time, great inconvenience. I ask myself whether you are worth all the pains that I should have to take with you, and I have not the pleasure of knowing you well enough to be able to say. Perhaps also to you yourself what I could do for you does not appear sufficiently attractive for me to give, myself so much trouble, for I repeat quite frankly that for me it can only be trouble.”
I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This summary end to the discussion did not seem to be to his liking.
“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly. “There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”
“I would not for anything in the world, Sir, be a cause of anxiety to you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you may be sure that everything which comes to me from you will be a very great pleasure to me. I am deeply touched that you should be so kind as to take notice of me in this way and try to help me.”
Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he thanked me for this speech, slipping his arm through mine with that intermittent familiarity which had already struck me at Balbec, and was in such contrast to the coldness of his tone.
“With the want of consideration common at your age,” he told me, “you are liable to say things at times which would open an unbridgeable gulf between us. What you have said just now, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing that touches me, and makes me want to do a great deal for you.”
As he walked arm in arm with me and uttered these words, which, albeit tinged with contempt, were so affectionate, M. de Charlus now fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity which had struck me the first morning, when I saw him outside the casino at Balbec, and indeed many years before that, through the pink hawthorns, standing beside Mme. Swann, whom I supposed then to be his mistress, in the park at Tansonville; now let it stray around him and examine the cabs which at this time of the day were passing in considerable numbers on the way to their stables, looking so determinedly at them that several stopped, the drivers supposing that he wished to engage them. But M. de Charlus immediately dismissed them.
“They’re not what I want,” he explained to me, “it’s all a question of the colour of their lamps, and the direction they’re going in. I hope, Sir,” he went on, “that you will not in any way misinterpret the purely disinterested and charitable nature of the proposal which I am going to make to you.”
I was struck by the similarity of his diction to Swann’s, closer now than at Balbec.
“You have enough intelligence, I suppose, not to imagine that it is from want of society, from any fear of solitude and boredom that I have recourse to you. I do not, as a rule, care to talk about myself, but you may possibly have heard — it was alluded to in a leading article in The Times, which made a considerable impression — that the Emperor of Austria, who has always honoured me with his friendship, and is good enough to insist on keeping up terms of cousinship with me, declared the other day in an interview which was made public that if the Comte de Chambord had had by his side a man as thoroughly conversant with the undercurrents of European politics as myself he would be King of France to-day. I have often thought, Sir, that there was in me, thanks not to my own humble talents but to circumstances which you may one day have occasion to learn, a sort of secret record of incalculable value, of which I have not felt myself at liberty to make use, personally, but which would be a priceless acquisition to a young man to whom I would hand over in a few months what it has taken me more than thirty years to collect, what I am perhaps alone in possessing. I do not speak of the intellectual enjoyment which you would find in learning certain secrets which a Michelet of our day would give years of his life to know, and in the light of which certain events would assume for him an entirely different aspect. And I do not speak only of events that have already occurred, but of the chain of circumstances.” (This was a favourite expression with M. de Charlus, and often, when he used it, he joined his hands as if in prayer, but with his fingers stiffened, as though to illustrate by their complexity the said circumstances, which he did not specify, and the chain that linked them.) “I could give you an explanation that no one has dreamed of, not only of the past but of the future.” M. de Charlus broke off to question me about Bloch, whom he had heard discussed, though without appearing to be listening, in his aunt’s drawing-room. And with that ironical accent he so skilfully detached what he was saying that he seemed to be thinking of something else altogether and to be speaking mechanically, simply out of politeness. He asked if my friend was young, good looking and so forth. Bloch, if he had heard him would have been more puzzled even than with M. de Norpois, but for very different reasons, to know whether M. de Charlus was for or against Drey, fus. “It is not a bad idea, if you wish to learn about life,” went on M. de Charlus when he had finished questioning me, “to include among your friends an occasional foreigner.”