In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (52 page)

"How are you? Let me introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes,"
Mme. de Villeparisis greeted me, while the stranger without looking at
me, muttering a vague "Charmed!" which he followed with a "H'm, h'm,
h'm" to give his affability an air of having been forced, and doubling
back his little finger, forefinger and thumb, held out to me his
middle and ring fingers, the latter bare of any ring, which I clasped
through his suede glove; then, without lifting his eyes to my face, he
turned towards Mme. de Villeparisis.

"Good gracious; I shall be forgetting my own name next!" she
exclaimed. "Here am I calling you Baron de Guermantes. Let me
introduce the Baron de Charlus. After all, it's not a very serious
mistake," she went on, "for you're a thorough Guermantes whatever else
you are."

By this time my grandmother had reappeared, and we all set out
together. Saint–Loup's uncle declined to honour me not only with a
word, with so much as a look, even, in my direction. If he stared
strangers out of countenance (and during this short excursion he two
or three times hurled his terrible and searching scrutiny like a
sounding lead at insignificant people of obviously humble extraction
who happened to pass), to make up for that he never for a moment, if I
was to judge by myself, looked at the people whom he did know, just as
a detective on special duty might except his personal friends from his
professional vigilance. Leaving them—my grandmother, Mme. de
Villeparisis and him—to talk to one another, I fell behind with
Saint–Loup.

"Tell me, am I right in thinking I heard Mme. de Villeparisis say just
now to your uncle that he was a Guermantes?"

"Of course he is; Palamède de Guermantes."

"Not the same Guermantes who have a place near Combray, and claim
descent from Geneviève de Brabant?"

"Most certainly: my uncle, who is the very last word in heraldry and
all that sort of thing, would tell you that our 'cry,' our war–cry,
that is to say, which was changed afterwards to 'Passavant' was
originally 'Combraysis,'" he said, smiling so as not to appear to be
priding himself on this prerogative of a 'cry,' which only the
semi–royal houses, the great chiefs of feudal bands enjoyed. "It's his
brother who has the place now."

And so she was indeed related, and quite closely, to the Guermantes,
this Mme. de Villeparisis who had so long been for me the lady who had
given me a duck filled with chocolates, when I was little, more remote
then from the Guermantes way than if she had been shut up somewhere on
the Méséglise, less brilliant, less highly placed by me than was the
Combray optician, and who now suddenly went through one of those
fantastic rises in value, parallel to the depreciations, no less
unforeseen, of other objects in our possession, which—rise and fall
alike—introduce in our youth and in those periods of our life in
which a trace of youth persists changes as numerous as the
Metamorphoses of Ovid.

"Haven't they got, down there, the busts of all the old lords of
Guermantes?"

"Yes; and a lovely sight they are!" Saint–Loup was ironical. "Between
you and me, I look on all that sort of thing as rather a joke. But
they have got at Guermantes, what is a little more interesting, and,
that is quite a touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière. It's as fine
as Whistler or Velasquez," went on Saint–Loup, who in his neophyte
zeal was not always very exact about degrees of greatness. "There are
also some moving pictures by Gustave Moreau. My aunt is the niece of
your friend Mme. de Villeparisis; she was brought up by her, and
married her cousin, who was a nephew, too, of my aunt Villeparisis,
the present Duc de Guermantes."

"Then who is this uncle?"

"He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Properly speaking, when my
great–uncle died, my uncle Palamède ought to have taken the title of
Prince des Laumes, which his brother used before he became Duc de
Guermantes, for in that family they change their names as you'd change
your shirt. But my uncle has peculiar ideas about all that sort of
thing. And as he feels that people are rather apt to overdo the
Italian Prince and Grandee of Spain business nowadays, though he had
half–a–dozen titles of 'Prince' to choose from, he has remained Baron
de Charlus, as a protest, and with an apparent simplicity which really
covers a good deal of pride. 'In these days,' he says, 'everybody is
Prince something–or–other; one really must have a title that will
distinguish one; I shall call myself Prince when I wish to travel
incognito.' According to him there is no older title than the Charlus
barony; to prove to you that it is earlier than the Montmorency title,
though they used to claim, quite wrongly, to be the premier barons of
France when they were only premier in the He de France, where their
fief was, my uncle will explain to you for hours on end and enjoy
doing it, because, although he's a most intelligent man, really
gifted, he regards that sort of thing as quite a live topic of
conversation," Saint–Loup smiled again. "But as I am not like him, you
mustn't ask me to talk pedigrees; I know nothing more deadly, more
perishing; really, life is not long enough."

I now recognised in the hard look which had made me turn round that
morning outside the Casino the same that I had seen fixed on me at
Tansonville, at the moment when Mme. Swann called Gilberte away.

"But, I say, all those mistresses that, you told me, your uncle M. de
Charlus had had, wasn't Mme. Swann one of them?"

"Good lord, no! That is to say, my uncle's a great friend of Swann,
and has always stood up for him. But no one has ever suggested that he
was his wife's lover. You would make a great sensation in Paris
society if people thought you believed that."

I dared not reply that it would have caused an even greater sensation
in Combray society if people had thought that I did not believe it.

My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus. No doubt he attached
an extreme importance to all questions of birth and social position,
and my grandmother had remarked this, but without any trace of that
severity which as a rule embodies a secret envy and the annoyance of
seeing some one else enjoy an advantage which one would like but
cannot oneself possess. As on the other hand my grandmother, content
with her lot and never for a moment regretting that she did not move
in a more brilliant sphere, employed only her intellect in observing
the eccentricities of M. de Charlus, she spoke of Saint–Loup's uncle
with that detached, smiling, almost affectionate kindness with which
we reward the object of our disinterested study for the pleasure that
it has given us, all the more that this time the object was a person
with regard to whom she found that his if not legitimate, at any rate
picturesque pretensions shewed him in vivid contrast to the people
whom she generally had occasion to see. But it was especially in
consideration of his intelligence and sensibility, qualities which it
was easy to see that M. de Charlus, unlike so many of the people in
society whom Saint–Loup derided, possessed in a marked degree, that my
grandmother had so readily forgiven him his aristocratic prejudice.
And yet this had not been sacrificed by the uncle, as it was by the
nephew, to higher qualities. Rather, M. de Charlus had reconciled it
with them. Possessing, by virtue of his descent from the Ducs de
Nemours and Princes de Lamballe, documents, furniture, tapestries,
portraits painted for his ancestors by Raphael, Velasquez, Boucher,
justified in saying that he was visiting a museum and a matchless
library when he was merely turning over his family relics at home, he
placed in the rank from which his nephew had degraded it the whole
heritage of the aristocracy. Perhaps also, being less metaphysical
than Saint–Loup, less satisfied with words, more of a realist in his
study of men, he did not care to neglect a factor that was essential
to his prestige in their eyes and, if it gave certain disinterested
pleasures to his imagination, could often be a powerfully effective
aid to his utilitarian activities. No agreement can ever be reached
between men of his sort and those who obey the ideal within them which
urges them to strip themselves bare of such advantages so that they
may seek only to realise that ideal, similar in that respect to the
painters, the writers who renounce their virtuosity, the artistic
peoples who modernise themselves, warrior peoples who take the
initiative in a move for universal disarmament, absolute governments
which turn democratic and repeal their harsh laws, though as often as
not the sequel fails to reward their noble effort; for the men lose
their talent, the nations their secular predominance; 'pacificism'
often multiplies wars and indulgence criminality. If Saint–Loup's
efforts towards sincerity and emancipation were only to be commended
as most noble, to judge by their visible result, one could still be
thankful that they had failed to bear fruit in M. de Charlus, who had
transferred to his own home much of the admirable panelling from the
Guermantes house, instead of substituting, like his nephew, a 'modern
style' of decoration, employing Lebourg or Guillaumin. It was none the
less true that M. de Charlus's ideal was highly artificial, and, if
the epithet can be applied to the word ideal, as much social as
artistic. In certain women of great beauty and rare culture whose
ancestresses, two centuries earlier, had shared in all the glory and
grace of the old order, he found a distinction which made him take
pleasure only in their society, and no doubt the admiration for them
which he had protested was sincere, but countless reminiscences;
historical and artistic, called forth by their names, entered into and
formed a great part of it, just as suggestions of classical antiquity
are one of the reasons for the pleasure which a booklover finds in
reading an Ode of Horace that is perhaps inferior to poems of our own
day which would leave the same booklover cold. Any of these women by
the side of a pretty commoner was for him what are, hanging beside a
contemporary canvas representing a procession or a wedding, those old
pictures the history of which we know, from the Pope or King who
ordered them, through the hands of people whose acquisition of them,
by gift, purchase, conquest or inheritance, recalls to us some event
or at least some alliance of historic interest, and consequently some
knowledge that we ourselves have acquired, gives it a fresh utility,
increases our sense of the richness of the possessions of our memory
or of our erudition. M. de Charlus might be thankful that a prejudice
similar to his own, by preventing these several great ladies from
mixing with women whose blood was less pure, presented them for his
veneration unspoiled, in their unaltered nobility, like an
eighteenth–century house–front supported on its flat columns of pink
marble, in which the passage of time has wrought no change.

M. de Charlus praised the true 'nobility' of mind and heart which
characterised these women, playing upon the word in a double sense by
which he himself was taken in, and in which lay the falsehood of this
bastard conception, of this medley of aristocracy, generosity and art,
but also its seductiveness, dangerous to people like my grandmother,
to whom the less refined but more innocent prejudice of a nobleman who
cared only about quarterings and took no thought for anything besides
would have appeared too silly for words, whereas she was defenceless
as soon as a thing presented itself under the externals of a mental
superiority, so much so, indeed, that she regarded Princes as enviable
above all other men because they were able to have a Labruyère, a
Fénelon as their tutors. Outside the Grand Hotel the three Guermantes
left us; they were going to luncheon with the Princesse de Luxembourg.
While my grandmother was saying good–bye to Mme. de Villeparisis and
Saint–Loup to my grandmother, M. de Charlus who, so far, had not
uttered a word to me, drew back a little way from the group and, when
he reached my side, said: "I shall be taking tea this evening after
dinner in my aunt Villeparisis's room; I hope that you will give me
the pleasure of seeing you there, and your grandmother." With which he
rejoined the Marquise.

Although it was Sunday there were no more carriages waiting outside
the hotel now than at the beginning of the season. The solicitor's
wife, in particular, had decided that it was not worth the expense of
hiring one every time simply because she was not going to the
Cambremers', and contented herself with staying in her room.

"Is Mme. Blandais not well?" her husband was asked. "We haven't seen
her all day."

"She has a slight headache; it's the heat, there's thunder coming. The
least thing upsets her; but I expect you will see her this evening;
I've told her she ought to come down. It can't do her any harm."

I had supposed that in thus inviting us to take tea with his aunt,
whom I never doubted that he would have warned that we were coming, M.
de Charlus wished to make amends for the impoliteness which he had
shewn me during our walk that morning. But when, on our entering Mme.
de Villeparisis's room, I attempted to greet her nephew, even although
I walked right round him, while in shrill accents he was telling a
somewhat spiteful story about one of his relatives, I did not succeed
in catching his eye; I decided to say "Good evening" to him, and
fairly loud, to warn him of my presence; but I realised that he had
observed it, for before ever a word had passed my lips, just as I
began to bow to him, I saw his two fingers stretched out for me to
shake without his having turned to look at me or paused in his story.
He had evidently seen me, without letting it appear that he had, and I
noticed then that his eyes, which were never fixed on the person to
whom he was speaking, strayed perpetually in all directions, like
those of certain animals when they are frightened, or those of street
hawkers who, while they are bawling their patter and displaying their
illicit merchandise, keep a sharp look–out, though without turning
their heads, on the different points of the horizon from any of which
may appear, suddenly, the police. At the same time I was a little
surprised to find that Mme. de Villeparisis, while glad to see us, did
not seem to have been expecting us, and I was still more surprised to
hear M. de Charlus say to my grandmother: "Ah! that was a capital idea
of yours to come and pay us a visit; charming of them, is it not, my
dear aunt?" No doubt he had noticed his aunt's surprise at our entry
and thought, as a man accustomed to set the tone, to strike the right
note, that it would be enough to transform that surprise into joy were
he to shew that he himself felt it, that it was indeed the feeling
which our arrival there ought to have prompted. In which he calculated
wisely; for Mme. de Villeparisis, who had a high opinion of her nephew
and knew how difficult it was to please him, appeared suddenly to have
found new attractions in my grandmother and continued to make much of
her. But I failed to understand how M. de Charlus could, in the space
of a few hours, have forgotten the invitation—so curt but apparently
so intentional, so premeditated—which he had addressed to me that
same morning, or why he called a 'capital idea' on my grandmother's
part an idea that had been entirely his own. With a scruple of
accuracy which I retained until I had reached the age at which I
realised that it is not by asking him questions that one learns the
truth of what another man has had in his mind, and that the risk of a
misunderstanding which will probably pass unobserved is less than that
which may come from a purblind insistence: "But, sir," I reminded him,
"you remember, surely, that it was you who asked me if we would come
in this evening?" Not a sound, not a movement betrayed that M. de
Charlus had so much as heard my question. Seeing which I repeated it,
like a diplomat, or like young men after a misunderstanding who
endeavour, with untiring and unrewarded zeal, to obtain an explanation
which their adversary is determined not to give them. Still M. de
Charlus answered me not a word. I seemed to see hovering upon his lips
the smile of those who from a great height pass judgment on the
characters and breeding of their inferiors.