Title:      Cities of the Plain
            (Sodom et Gomorrhe)
            [Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language:   English
Date first posted:          March 2003
Date most recently updated: March 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Cities of the Plain
            (Sodom et Gomorrhe)
            [Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff





CONTENTS

Part I

Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of
Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.

CHAPTER ONE M. de Charlus in Society--A physician--Typical physiognomy
of Mme.  de Vaugoubert--Mme. d'Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain and
the merriment of the Grand Duke Vladimir--Mmes.  d'Amoncourt, de
Citri, de Saint-Euverte, etc.--Curious conversation between Swann and
the Prince de Guermantes--Albertine on the telephone--My social life
in the interval before my second and final visit to Balbec--Arrival at
Balbec.

The Heart's Intermissions

CHAPTER TWO The mysteries of Albertine--The girls whom she sees
reflected in the glass--The other woman--The lift-boy--Madame de
Cambremer.

Part II

CHAPTER TWO (continued) The pleasures of M. Nissim Bernard
(continued)--Outline of the strange character of Morel--M. de Charlus
dines with the Verdurins.

CHAPTER THREE The sorrows of M. de Charlus--His sham duel--The
stations on the "Transatlantic"--Weary of Albertine, I decide to break
with her.

CHAPTER FOUR Sudden revulsion in favour of Albertine--Agony at
sunrise--I set off at once with Albertine for Paris,



TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION

To

Richard and Myrtle Kurt
and Their Creator

Pisa, 1927




PART I

Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants
of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.

_La femme aura Gomorrhe et l'homme aura
Sodome_. Alfred de Vigny.


The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on the
evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was to give her party) to
pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just described, I had
kept watch for their return and had made, in the course of my vigil, a
discovery which, albeit concerning M. de Charlus in particular, was in
itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I
could give it the prominence and treat it with the fulness that it
demanded, postponed giving any account of it. I had, as I have said,
left the marvellous point of vantage, so snugly contrived for me at
the top of the house, commanding the broken and irregular slopes
leading up to the Hôtel de Bréquigny, and gaily decorated in the
Italian manner by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frécourt's
stables. I had felt it to be more convenient, when I thought that the
Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself on the
staircase. I regretted somewhat the abandonment of my watch-tower. But
at that time of day, namely the hour immediately following luncheon, I
had less cause for regret, for I should not then have seen, as in the
morning, the foptmen of the Bréquigny-Tresmes household, converted by
distance into minute figures in a picture, make their leisurely ascent
of the abrupt precipice, feather-brush in hand, behind the large,
transparent flakes of mica which stood out so charmingly upon its
ruddy bastions. Failing the geologist's field of contemplation, I had
at least that of the botanist, and was peering through the shutters of
the staircase window at the Duchess's little tree and at the precious
plant, exposed in the courtyard with that insistence with which
mothers 'bring out' their marriageable offspring, and asking myself
whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to
visit the offered and neglected pistil.  My curiosity emboldening me
by degrees, I went down to the ground-floor window, which also stood
open with its shutters ajar. I could hear distinctly, as he got ready
to go out, Jupien who could not detect me behind my blind, where I
stood perfectly still until the moment when I drew quickly aside in
order not to be seen by M. de Charlus, who, on his way to call upon
Mme. de Villeparisis, was slowly crossing the courtyard, a pursy
figure, aged by the strong light, his hair visibly grey. Nothing short
of an indisposition of Mme. de Villeparisis (consequent on the illness
of the Marquis de Fierbois, with whom he personally was at daggers
drawn) could have made M. de Charlus pay a call, perhaps for the first
time in his life, at that hour of the day. For with that eccentricity
of the Guermantes, who, instead of conforming to the ways of society,
used to modify them to suit their own personal habits (habits not,
they thought, social, and deserving in consequence the abasement
before them of that thing of no value, Society--thus it was that Mme.
de Marsantes had no regular 'day,' but was at home to her friends
every morning between ten o'clock and noon), the Baron, reserving
those hours for reading, hunting for old curiosities and so forth,
paid calls only between four and six in the afternoon.  At six o'clock
he went to the Jockey Club, or took a stroll in the Bois. A moment
later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien. It was
nearly time for him to start for the office, from which he would
return only for dinner, and not even then always during the last week,
his niece and her apprentices having gone to the country to finish a
dress there for a customer. Then, realising that no one could see me,
I decided not to let myself be disturbed again, for fear of missing,
should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond the
possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse
risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far as ambassador to
the virgin who had so long been waiting for him to appear. I knew that
this expectancy was no more passive than in the male flower, whose
stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily
receive their offering; similarly the female flower that stood here,
if the insect came, would coquettishly arch her styles; and, to be
more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like
a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way. The laws of
the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by other laws,
increasingly exalted. If the visit of an insect, that is to say, the
transportation of the seed of one flower is generally necessary for
the fertilisation of another, that is because autofecundation, the
fertilisation of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of
intermarriages in the same family, to degeneracy and sterility,
whereas the crossing effected by the insects gives to the subsequent
generations of the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears.
This invigoration may, however, prove excessive, the species develop
out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin protects us against
disease, as the thyroid gland regulates our adiposity, as defeat comes
to punish pride, fatigue, indulgence, and as sleep in turn depends
upon fatigue, so an exceptional act of autofecundation comes at a
given point to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the curb,
brings back within normal limits the flower that has exaggerated its
transgression of them. My reflexions had followed a tendency which I
shall describe in due course, and I had already drawn from the visible
stratagems of flowers a conclusion that bore upon a whole unconscious
element of literary work, when I saw M. de Charlus coming away from
the Marquise. Perhaps he had learned from his elderly relative
herself, or merely from a servant, the great improvement, or rather
her complete recovery from what had been nothing more than a slight
indisposition. At this moment, when he did not suspect that anyone was
watching him, his eyelids lowered as a screen against the sun, M. de
Charlus had relaxed that tension in his face, deadened that artificial
vitality, which the animation of his talk and the force of his will
kept in evidence there as a rule. Pale as marble, his nose stood out
firmly, his fine features no longer received from an expression
deliberately assumed a different meaning which altered the beauty of
their modelling; nothing more now than a Guermantes, he seemed already
carved in stone, he Pala-mède the Fifteenth, in their chapel at
Combray. These general features of a whole family took on, however, in
the face of M. de Charlus a fineness more spiritualised, above all
more gentle. I regretted for his sake that he should habitually
adulterate with so many acts of violence, offensive oddities,
tale-bearings, with such harshness, susceptibility and arrogance, that
he should conceal beneath a false brutality the amenity, the kindness
which, at the moment of his emerging from Mme. de Villeparisis's, I
could see displayed so innocently upon his face. Blinking his eyes in
the sunlight, he seemed almost to be smiling, I found in his face seen
thus in repose and, so to speak, in its natural state something so
affectionate, so disarmed, that I could not help thinking how angry M.
de Charlus would have been could he have known that he was being
watched; for what was suggested to me by the sight of this man who was
so insistent, who prided himself so upon his virility, to whom all
other men seemed odiously effeminate, what he made me suddenly think
of, so far had he momentarily assumed her features, expression, smile,
was a woman.

I was about to change my position again, so that he should not catch
sight of me; I had neither the time nor the need to do so. What did I
see?  Face to face, in that courtyard where certainly they had never
met before (M. de Charlus coming to the Hôtel de Guermantes only in
the afternoon, during the time when Jupien was at his office), the
Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-shut eyes, was studying
with unusual attention the ex-tailor poised on the threshold of his
shop, while the latter, fastened suddenly to the ground before M. de
Charlus, taking root in it like a plant, was contemplating with a look
of amazement the plump form of the middle-aged Baron. But, more
astounding still, M. de Charlus's attitude having changed, Jupien's,
as though in obedience to the laws of an occult art, at once brought
itself into harmony with it. The Baron, who was now seeking to conceal
the impression that had been made on him, and yet, in spite of his
affectation of indifference, seemed unable to move away without
regret, went, came, looked vaguely into the distance in the way which,
he felt, most enhanced the beauty of his eyes, assumed a complacent,
careless, fatuous air. Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble,
honest expression which I had always associated with him, had--in
perfect symmetry with the Baron--thrown up his head, given a becoming
tilt to his body, placed his hand with a grotesque impertinence on his
hip, stuck out his behind, posed himself with the coquetry that the
orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee. I
had not supposed that he could appear so repellent. But I was equally
unaware that he was capable of improvising his part in this sort of
dumb charade, which (albeit he found himself for the first time in the
presence of M. de Charlus) seemed to have been long and carefully
rehearsed; one does not arrive spontaneously at that pitch of
perfection except when one meets in a foreign country a compatriot
with whom an understanding then grows up of itself, both parties
speaking the same language, even though they have never seen one
another before.

This scene was not, however, positively comic, it was stamped with a
strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which
steadily increased. M. de Charlus might indeed assume a detached air,
indifferently let his eyelids droop; every now and then he raised
them, and at such moments turned on Jupien an attentive gaze. But
(doubtless because he felt that such a scene could not be prolonged
indefinitely in this place, whether for reasons which we shall learn
later on, or possibly from that feeling of the brevity of all things
which makes us determine that every blow must strike home, and renders
so moving the spectacle of every kind of love), each time that M. de
Charlus looked at Jupien, he took care that his glance should be
accompanied by a spoken word, which made it infinitely unlike the
glances we usually direct at a person whom we do or do not know; he
stared at Jupien with the peculiar fixity of the person who is about
to say to us: "Excuse my taking the liberty, but you have a long white
thread hanging down your back," or else: "Surely I can't be mistaken,
you come from Zurich too; I'm certain I must have seen you there often
in the curiosity shop." Thus, every other minute, the same question
seemed to be being intensely put to Jupien in the stare of M.  de
Charlus, like those questioning phrases of Beethoven indefinitely
repeated at regular intervals, and intended--with an exaggerated
lavish-ness of preparation--to introduce a new theme, a change of
tone, a 'reentry.' On the other hand, the beauty of the reciprocal
glances of M. de Charlus and Jupien arose precisely from the fact that
they did not, for the moment at least, seem to be intended to lead to
anything further. This beauty, it was the first time that I had seen
the Baron and Jupien display it. In the eyes of both of them, it was
the sky not of Zurich but of some Oriental city, the name of which I
had not yet divined, that I saw reflected.  Whatever the point might
be that held M. de Charlus and the ex-tailor thus arrested, their pact
seemed concluded and these superfluous glances to be but ritual
preliminaries, like the parties that people give before a marriage
which has been definitely 'arranged.' Nearer still to nature--and the
multiplicity of these analogies is itself all the more natural in that
the same man, if we examine him for a few minutes, appears in turn as
a man, a man-bird or man-insect, and so forth--one would have called
them a pair of birds, the male and the female, the male seeking to
make advances, the female--Jupien--no longer giving any sign of
response to these overtures, but regarding her new friend without
surprise, with an inattentive fixity of gaze, which she doubtless felt
to be more disturbing and the only effective method, once the male had
taken the first steps, and had fallen back upon preening his feathers.
At length Jupien's indifference seemed to suffice him no longer; from
this certainty of having conquered, to making himself be pursued and
desired was but the next stage, and Jupien, deciding to go off to his
work, passed through the carriage gate. It was only, however, after
turning his head two or three times that he escaped into the street
towards which the Baron, trembling lest he should lose the trail
(boldly humming a tune, not forgetting to fling a 'Good day' to the
porter, who, half-tipsy himself and engaged in treating a few friends
in his back kitchen, did not even hear him), hurried briskly to
overtake him. At the same instant, just as M. de Charlus disappeared
through the gate humming like a great bumble-bee, another, a real bee
this time, came into the courtyard. For all I knew this might be the
one so long awaited by the orchid, which was coming to bring it that
rare pollen without which it must die a virgin. But I was distracted
from following the gyrations of the insect for, a few minutes later,
engaging my attention afresh, Jupien (perhaps to pick up a parcel
which he did take away with him eventually and so, presumably, in the
emotion aroused by the apparition of M. de Charlus, had forgotten,
perhaps simply for a more natural reason) returned, followed by the
Baron. The latter, deciding to cut short the preliminaries, asked the
tailor for a light, but at once observed: "I ask you for a light, but
I find that I have left my cigars at home." The laws of hospitality
prevailed over those of coquetry. "Come inside, you shall have
everything you require," said the tailor, on whose features disdain
now gave place to joy. The door of the shop closed behind them and I
could hear no more. I had lost sight of the bee. I did not know
whether he was the insect that the orchid needed, but I had no longer
any doubt, in the case of an extremely rare insect and a captive
flower, of the miraculous possibility of their conjunction when M. de
Charlus (this is simply a comparison of providential hazards, whatever
they may be, without the slightest scientific claim to establish a
relation between certain laws and what is sometimes, most ineptly,
termed homosexuality), who for years past had never come to the house
except at hours when Jupien was not there, by the mere accident of
Mme. de Villeparisis's illness had encountered the tailor, and with
him the good fortune reserved for men of the type of the Baron by one
of those fellow-creatures who may indeed be, as we shall see,
infinitely younger than Jupien and better looking, the man predestined
to exist in order that they may have their share of sensual pleasure
on this earth; the man who cares only for elderly gentlemen.

All that I have just said, however, I was not to understand until
several minutes had elapsed; so much is reality encumbered by those
properties of invisibility until a chance occurrence has divested it
of them. Anyhow, for the moment I was greatly annoyed at not being
able to hear any more of the conversation between the ex-tailor and
the Baron. I then bethought myself of the vacant shop, separated from
Jupien's only by a partition that was extremely slender. I had, in
order to get to it, merely to go up to our flat, pass through the
kitchen, go down by the service stair to the cellars, make my way
through them across the breadth of the courtyard above, and on coming
to the right place underground, where the joiner had, a few months
ago, still been storing his timber and where Jupien intended to keep
his coal, climb the flight of steps which led to the interior of the
shop.  Thus the whole of my journey would be made under cover, I
should not be seen by anyone. This was the most prudent method. It was
not the one that I adopted, but, keeping close to the walls, I made a
circuit in the open air of the courtyard, trying not to let myself be
seen. If I was not, I owe it more, I am sure, to chance than to my own
sagacity. And for the fact that I took so imprudent a course, when the
way through the cellar was so safe, I can see three possible reasons,
assuming that I had any reason at all.  First of all, my impatience.
Secondly, perhaps, a dim memory of the scene at Montjouvain, when I
stood concealed outside Mlle. Vinteuil's window.  Certainly, the
affairs of this sort of which I have been a spectator have always been
presented in a setting of the most imprudent and least probable
character, as if such revelations were to be the reward of an action
full of risk, though in part clandestine. Lastly, I hardly dare, so
childish does it appear, to confess the third reason, which was, I am
quite sure, unconsciously decisive. Since, in order to follow--and see
controverted--the military principles enunciated by Saint-Loup, I had
followed in close detail the course of the Boer war, I had been led on
from that to read again old accounts of explorations, narratives of
travel. These stories had excited me, and I applied them to the events
of my daily life to stimulate my courage. When attacks of illness had
compelled me to remain for several days and nights on end not only
without sleep but without lying down, without tasting food or drink,
at the moment when my pain and exhaustion became so intense that I
felt that I should never escape from them, I would think of some
traveller cast on the beach, poisoned by noxious herbs, shivering with
fever in clothes drenched by the salt water, who nevertheless in a day
or two felt stronger, rose and went blindly upon his way, in search of
possible inhabitants who might, when he came to them, prove cannibals.
His example acted on me as a tonic, restored my hope, and I felt
ashamed of my momentary discouragement. Thinking of the Boers who,
with British armies facing them, were not afraid to expose themselves
at the moment when they had to cross, in order to reach a covered
position, a tract of open country: "It would be a fine thing," I
thought to myself, "if I were to shew less courage when the theatre of
operations is simply the human heart, and when the only steel that I,
who engaged in more than one duel without fear at the time of the
Dreyfus case, have to fear is that of the eyes of the neighbours who
have other things to do besides looking into the courtyard,"

But when I was inside the shop, taking care not to let any plank in
the floor make the slightest creak, as I found that the least sound in
Jupien's shop could be heard from the other, I thought to myself how
rash Jupien and M. de Charlus had been, and how wonderfully fortune
had favoured them.

I did not dare move. The Guermantes groom, taking advantage no doubt
of his master's absence, had, as it happened, transferred to the shop
in which I now stood a ladder which hitherto had been kept in the
coach-house, and if I had climbed this I could have opened the
ventilator above and heard as well as if I had been in Jupien's shop
itself. But I was afraid of making a noise. Besides, it was
unnecessary. I had not even cause to regret my not having arrived in
the shop until several minutes had elapsed.  For from what I heard at
first in Jupien's shop, which was only a series of inarticulate
sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that
these sounds were so violent that, if one set had not always been
taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought
that one person was strangling another within a few feet of me, and
that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking
a bath to wash away the traces of the crime. I concluded from this
later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely
pleasure, especially when there is added to it--failing the fear of an
eventual parturition, which could not be present in this case, despite
the hardly convincing example in the _Golden Legend_--an immediate
afterthought of cleanliness.  Finally, after about half an hour
(during which time I had climbed on tip-toe up my ladder so as to peep
through the ventilator which I did not open), a conversation began.
Jupien refused with insistence the money that M. de Charlus was
pressing upon him.

"Why do you have your chin shaved like that," he inquired of the Baron
in a cajoling tone. "It's so becoming, a nice beard." "Ugh! It's
disgusting," the Baron replied. Meanwhile he still lingered upon the
threshold and plied Jupien with questions about the neighbourhood.
"You don't know anything about the man who sells chestnuts at the
corner, not the one on the left, he's a horror, but the other way, a
great, dark fellow? And the chemist opposite, he has a charming
cyclist who delivers his parcels." These questions must have ruffled
Jupien, for, drawing himself up with the scorn of a great courtesan
who has been forsaken, he replied: "I can see you are completely
heartless." Uttered in a pained, frigid, affected tone, this reproach
must have made its sting felt by M. de Charlus, who, to counteract the
bad impression made by his curiosity, addressed to Jupien, in too low
a tone for me to be able to make out his words, a request the granting
of which would doubtless necessitate their prolonging-their sojourn in
the shop, and which moved the tailor sufficiently to make-him forget
his annoyance, for he studied the Baron's face, plump and flushed
beneath his grey hair, with the supremely blissful air of a person
whose self-esteem has just been profoundly flattered, and, deciding to
grant M. de Charlus the favour that he had just asked of him, after
various remarks lacking in refinement such as: "Aren't you naughty!"
said to the Baron with a smiling, emotional, superior and grateful
air: "All right, you big baby, come along!"

"If I hark back to the question of the tram conductor," M. de Charlus
went on imperturbably, "it is because, apart from anything else, he
might offer me some entertainment on my homeward journey. For it falls
to my lot, now and then, like the Caliph who used to roam the streets
of Bagdad in the guise of a common merchant, to condescend to follow
some curious little person whose profile may have taken my fancy." I
made at this point the same observation that I had made on Bergotte.
If he should ever have to plead before a bench, he would employ not
the sentences calculated to convince his judges, but such Bergottesque
sentences as his peculiar literary temperament suggested to him and
made him find pleasure in using. Similarly M. de Charlus, in
conversing with the tailor, made use of the same language that he
would have used to fashionable people of his own set, even
exaggerating its eccentricities, whether because the shyness which he
was striving to overcome drove him to an excess of pride or, by
preventing him from mastering himself (for we are always less at our
ease in the company of some one who is not of our station), forced him
to unveil, to lay bare his true nature, which was, in fact, arrogant
and a trifle mad, as Mme. de Guermantes had remarked. "So as not to
lose the trail," he went on, "I spring like a little usher, like a
young and good-looking doctor, into the same car as the little person
herself, of whom we speak in the feminine gender only so as to conform
with the rules of grammar (as we say, in speaking of a Prince, 'Is His
Highness enjoying her usual health'). If she changes her car, I take,
with possibly the germs of the plague, that incredible thing called a
'transfer,' a number, and one which, albeit it is presented to _me_,
is not always number one! I change 'carriages' in this way as many as
three or four times, I end up sometimes at eleven o'clock at night at
the Orleans station and have to come home.  Still, if it were only the
Orleans station! Once, I must tell you, not having managed to get into
conversation sooner, I went all the way to Orleans itself, in one of
those frightful compartments where one has, to rest one's eyes upon,
between triangles of what is known as 'string-work,' photographs of
the principal architectural features of the line. There was only one
vacant seat; I had in front of me, as an historic edifice, a 'view' of
the Cathedral of Orleans, quite the ugliest in France, and as tiring a
thing to have to stare at in that way against my will as if somebody
had forced me to focus its towers in the lens of one of those optical
penholders which give one ophthalmia. I got out of the train at Les
Aubrais together with my young person, for whom alas his family (when
I had imagined him to possess every defect except that of having a
family) were waiting on the platform! My sole consolation, as I waited
for a train to take me back to Paris, was the house of Diane de
Poitiers. She may indeed have charmed one of my royal ancestors, I
should have preferred a more living beauty.  That is why, as an
antidote to the boredom of returning home by myself, I should rather
like to make friends with a sleeping-car attendant or the conductor of
an omnibus. Now, don't be shocked," the Baron wound up, "it is all a
question of class. With what you call 'young gentlemen,' for instance,
I feel no desire actually to have them, but I am never satisfied until
I have touched them, I don't mean physically, but touched a responsive
chord. As soon as, instead of leaving my letters unanswered, a young
man starts writing to me incessantly, when he is morally at my
disposal, I grow calm again, or at least I should grow calm were I not
immediately caught by the attraction of another. Rather curious, ain't
it?--Speaking of 'young gentlemen,' those that come to the house here,
do you know any of them?" "No, baby. Oh, yes, I do, a dark one, very
tall, with an eye-.  glass, who keeps smiling and turning round." "I
don't know who' you mean." Jupien filled in the portrait, but M. de
Charlus could not succeed in identifying its subject, not knowing that
the ex-tailor was one of those persons, more common than is generally
supposed, who never remember the colour of the hair of people they do
not know well. But to me, who was aware of this infirmity in Jupien
and substituted 'fair' for 'dark,' the portrait appeared to be an
exact description of the Duc de Châtellerault.  "To return to young
men not of the lower orders," the Baron went on, "at the present
moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an
intelligent little cit who shews with regard to myself a prodigious
want of civility. He has absolutely no idea of the prodigious
personage that I am, and of the microscopic animalcule that he is in
comparison. After all, what does it matter, the little ass may bray
his head off before my august bishop's mantle." "Bishop!" cried
Jupien, who had understood nothing of M. de Charlus's concluding
remarks, but was completely taken aback by the word bishop. "But that
sort of thing doesn't go with religion," he said. "I have three Popes
in my family," replied M. de Charlus, "and enjoy the right to mantle
in gules by virtue of a cardinalatial title, the niece of the
Cardinal, my great-uncle, having conveyed to my grandfather the title
of Duke which was substituted for it. I see, though, that metaphor
leaves you deaf and French history cold. Besides," he added, less
perhaps by way of conclusion than as a warning, "this attraction that
I feel towards the young people who avoid me, from fear of course, for
only their natural respect stops their mouths from crying out to me
that they love me, requires in them an outstanding social position.
And again, their feint of indifference may produce, in spite of that,
the directly opposite effect.  Fatuously prolonged, it sickens me. To
take an example from a class with which you are more familiar, when
they were doing up my Hôtel, so as not to create jealousies among all
the duchesses who were vying with one another for the honour of being
able to say that they had given me a lodging, I went for a few days to
an 'hotel,' as they call inns nowadays.  One of the bedroom valets I
knew, I pointed out to him an interesting little page who used to open
and shut the front door, and who remained refractory to my proposals.
Finally, losing my temper, in order to prove to him that my intentions
were pure, I made him an offer of a ridiculously high sum simply to
come upstairs and talk to me for five minutes in my room. I waited for
him in vain. I then took such a dislike to him that I used to go out
by the service door so as not to see his villainous little mug at the
other. I learned afterwards that he had never had any of my notes,
which had been intercepted, the first by the bedroom valet, who was
jealous, the next by the day porter, who was virtuous, the third by
the night porter, who was in love with the little page, and used to
couch with him at the hour when Dian rose. But my disgust persisted
none the less, and were they to bring me the page, simply like a dish
of venison on a silver platter, I should thrust him away with a
retching stomach. But there's the unfortunate part of it, we have
spoken of serious matters, and now all is over between us, there can
be no more question of what I hoped to secure. But you could render me
great services, act as my agent; why no, the mere thought of such a
thing restores my vigour, and I can see that all is by no means over."

>From the beginning of this scene a revolution, in my unsealed eyes,
had occurred in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had
been touched by a magician's wand. Until then, because I had not
understood, I had not seen. The vice (we use the word for convenience
only), the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the
manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they
were unaware of his presence.  Our goodness, our meanness, our name,
our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry
them hidden within us. Even Ulysses did not at once recognise Athena.
But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another, as quickly
like to like, and so too had M. de Charlus been to Jupien. Until that
moment I had been, in the presence of M. de Charlus, in the position
of an absent-minded man who, standing before a pregnant woman whose
distended outline he has failed to remark, persists, while she
smilingly reiterates: "Yes, I am a little tired just now," in asking
her indiscreetly: "Why, what is the matter with you?" But let some one
say to him: "She is expecting a child," suddenly he catches sight of
her abdomen and ceases to see anything else. It is the explanation
that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional
sense.

Those of my readers who do not care to refer, for examples of this
law, to the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance, whom for long
years they had never suspected, until the day when, upon the smooth
surface of the individual just like everyone else, there suddenly
appeared, traced in an ink hitherto invisible, the characters that
compose the word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only, in order to
convince themselves that the world which surrounds them appears to
them at first naked, bare of a thousand ornaments which it offers to
the eyes of others better informed, to remind themselves how many
times in the course of their lives they have found themselves on the
point of making a blunder. Nothing upon the blank, undocumented face
of this man or that could have led them to suppose that he was
precisely the brother, or the intended husband, or the lover of a
woman of whom they were just going to remark: "What a cow!" But then,
fortunately, a word whispered to them by some one standing near
arrests the fatal expression on their lips. At once there appear, like
a _Mené, Tekel, Upharsin_, the words: "He is engaged to," or, "he is
the brother of," or "he is the lover of the woman whom we ought not to
describe, in his hearing, as a cow." And this one new conception will
bring about an entire regrouping, thrusting some back, others forward,
of the fractional conceptions, henceforward a complete whole, which we
possessed of the rest of the family. In M. de Charlus another creature
might indeed have coupled itself with him which made him as different
from other men as the horse makes the centaur, this creature might
indeed have incorporated itself in the Baron, I had never caught a
glimpse of it. Now the abstraction had become materialised, the
creature at last discerned had lost its power of remaining invisible,
and the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so
complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but,
in retrospect, the very ups and downs of his relations with myself,
everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became
intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which
presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters
scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if these letters be
rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never
afterwards forget.

I now understood, moreover, how, earlier in the day, when I had seen
him coming away from Mme. de Villeparisis's, I had managed to arrive
at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!
He belonged to that race of beings, less paradoxical than they appear,
whose ideal is manly simply because their temperament is feminine and
who in their life resemble in appearance only the rest of men; there
where each of us carries, inscribed in those eyes through which he
beholds everything in the universe, a human outline engraved on the
surface of the pupil, for them it is that not of a nymph but of a
youth. Race upon which a curse weighs and which must live amid
falsehood and perjury, because it knows the world to regard as a
punishable and a scandalous, as an inadmissible thing, its desire,
that which constitutes for every human creature the greatest happiness
in life; which must deny its God, since even Christians, when at the
bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and
in His Name defend themselves, as from a calumny, from the charge of
what to them is life itself; sons without a mother, to whom they are
obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close
her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which
their charm, frequently recognised, inspires and their hearts, often
generous, would gladly feel; but can we describe as friendship those
relations which flourish only by virtue of a lie and from which the
first outburst of confidence and sincerity in which they might be
tempted to indulge would make them be expelled with disgust, unless
they are dealing with an impartial, that is to say a sympathetic mind,
which however in that case, misled with regard to them by a
conventional psychology, will suppose to spring from the vice
confessed the very affection that is most alien to it, just as certain
judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and
treason in Jews for reasons derived from original sin and racial
predestination. And lastly--according at least to the first-» theory
which I sketched in outline at the time and which we shall see
subjected to some modification in the sequel, a theory by which this
would have angered them above all things, had not the paradox been
hidden from their eyes by the very illusion that made them see and
live--lovers from whom is always precluded the possibility of that
love the hope of which gives them the strength to endure so many risks
and so much loneliness, since they fall in love with precisely that
type of man who has nothing feminine about him, who is not an invert
and consequently cannot love them in return; with the result that
their desire would be for ever insatiable did not their money procure
for them real men, and their imagination end by making them take for
real men the inverts to whom they had prostituted themselves. Their
honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the
discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the
poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every
theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging,
unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill
like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a
place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster
when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round
Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their
fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as
they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them,
accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in
themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling
their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by
association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry,
asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of
beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the
Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their
race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated
pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most
directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning
their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also
brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that
strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having
finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel,
with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes
beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with
which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the
opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps
upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society
of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much
so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of
which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the
fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to
injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to
excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of
appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in
recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim
that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no
abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before
Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed
to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every
example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so
peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be
accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which
exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith,
vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality
of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and
less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity
of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic,
glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to
know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or
conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of
his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose
carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his
daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence,
in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse;
all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part
in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does
not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable
tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life
the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a
certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding
has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on
leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the
hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part,
suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and
unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its
adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in
the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great
extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other
race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of
something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness
or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until
the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until
then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes
from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten
them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change
the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social
constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which
their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with
regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way
that to themselves it does not appear a vice.  But certain among them,
more practical, busier men who have not the time to go and drive their
own bargains, or to dispense with the simplification of life and that
saving of time which may result from cooperation, have formed two
societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons
similar to themselves.

This is noticeable in those who are poor and have come up from the
country, without friends, with nothing but their ambition to be some
day a celebrated doctor or barrister, with a mind still barren of
opinions, a person unadorned with manners, which they intend, as soon
as possible, to decorate, just as they would buy furniture for their
little attic in the Latin quarter, copying whatever they had observed
in those who had already 'arrived' in the useful and serious
profession in which they also intend to establish themselves and to
become famous; in these their special taste, unconsciously inherited
like a weakness for drawing, for music, a weakness of vision, is
perhaps the only living and despotic originality--which on certain
evenings compels them to miss some meeting, advantageous to their
career, with people whose ways, in other respect, of speaking,
thinking, dressing, parting their hair, they have adopted. In their
quarter, where otherwise they mix only with their brother students,
their teachers or some fellow-provincial who has succeeded and can
help them on, they have speedily discovered other young men whom the
same peculiar taste attracts to them, as in a small town one sees an
intimacy grow up between the assistant master and the lawyer, who are
both interested in chamber music or mediaeval ivories; applying to the
object of their distraction the same utilitarian instinct, the same
professional spirit which guides them in their career, they meet these
young men at gatherings to which no profane outsider is admitted any
more than to those that bring together collectors of old snuff-boxes,
Japanese prints or rare flowers, and at which, what with the pleasure
of gaining information, the practical value of making exchanges and
the fear of competition, there prevail simultaneously, as in a
saleroom of postage stamps, the close cooperation of the specialists
and the fierce rivalries of the collectors. No one moreover in the
café where they have their table knows what the gathering is, whether
it is that of an angling club, of an editorial staff, or of the 'Sons
of the Indre,' so correct is their attire, so cold and reserved their
manner, so modestly do they refrain from anything more than the most
covert glances at the young men of fashion, the young 'lions' who, a
few feet away, are making a great clamour about their mistresses, and
among whom those who are admiring them without venturing to raise
their eyes will learn only twenty years later, when they themselves
are on the eve of admission to the Academy, and the others are
middle-aged gentlemen in club windows, that the most seductive among
them, now a stout and grizzled Charlus, was in reality akin to
themselves, but differently, in another world, beneath other external
symbols, with foreign labels, the strangeness of which led them into
error. But these groups are at varying stages of advancement; and,
just as the 'Union of the Left' differs from the 'Socialist
Federation' or some Mendelssohnian musical club from the Schola
Cantorum, on certain evenings, at another table, there are extremists
who allow a bracelet to slip down from beneath a cuff, sometimes a
necklace to gleam in the gap of a collar, who by their persistent
stares, their cooings, their laughter, their mutual caresses, oblige a
band of students to depart in hot haste, and are served with a
civility beneath which indignation boils by a waiter who, as on the
evenings when he has to serve Dreyfusards, would find pleasure in
summoning the police did he not find profit in pocketing their
gratuities.

It is with these professional organisations that the mind contrasts
the taste of the solitaries, and in one respect without straining the
points of difference, since it is doing no more than copy the
solitaries themselves who imagine that nothing differs more widely
from organised vice than what appears to them to be a misunderstood
love, but with some strain nevertheless, for these different classes
correspond, no less than to diverse physiological types, to successive
stages in a pathological or merely social evolution. And it is, in
fact, very rarely that, one day or another, it is not in some such
organisation that the solitaries come to merge themselves, sometimes
from simple weariness, or for convenience (just as the people who have
been most strongly opposed to such innovations end by having the
telephone installed, inviting the Iénas to their parties, or dealing
with Potin). They meet there, for that matter, with none too friendly
a reception as a rule, for, in their relatively pure lives, their want
of experience, the saturation in dreams to which they have been
reduced, have branded more strongly upon them those special marks of
effeminacy which the professionals have sought to efface. And it must
be admitted that, among certain of these newcomers, the woman is not
only inwardly united to the man but hideously visible, agitated as one
sees them by a hysterical spasm, by a shrill laugh which convulses
their knees and hands, looking no more like the common run of men than
those monkeys with melancholy, shadowed eyes and prehensile feet who
dress up in dinner-jackets and black bow ties; so that these new
recruits are judged by others, less chaste for all that themselves, to
be compromising associates, and their admission is hedged with
difficulties; they are accepted, nevertheless, and they benefit then
by those facilities by which commerce, great undertakings have
transformed the lives of individuals, and have brought within their
reach commodities hitherto too costly to acquire and indeed hard to
find, which now submerge them beneath the plethora of what by
themselves they had never succeeded in discovering amid the densest
crowds. But, even with these innumerable outlets, the burden of social
constraint is still too heavy for some, recruited principally among
those who have not made a practice of self-control, and who still take
to be rarer than it actually is their way of love. Let us leave out of
consideration for the moment those who, the exceptional character of
their inclinations making them regard themselves as superior to the
other sex, look down upon women, make homosexuality the privilege of
great genius and of glorious epochs of history, and, when they seek to
communicate their taste to others, approach not so much those who seem
to them to be predisposed towards it (as the morphino-maniac does with
his morphia) as those who seem to them to be worthy of it, from
apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection
to military service, Saint-Simonism, vegetarianism or anarchy. Here is
one who, should we intrude upon him in the morning, still in bed, will
present to our gaze an admirable female head, so general is its
expression and typical of the sex as a whole; his very hair affirms
this, so feminine is its ripple; unbrushed, it falls so naturally in
long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young woman, the
girl, the Galatea barely awakened to life, in the unconscious mass of
this male body in which she is imprisoned, has contrived so
ingeniously by herself, without instruction from anyone, to make use
of the narrowest apertures in her prison wall to find what was
necessary to her existence. No doubt the young man who sports this
delicious head does not say: "I am a woman." Even if--for any of the
countless possible reasons--he lives with a woman, he can deny to her
that he is himself one, can swear to her that he has never had
intercourse with men. But let her look at him as we have just revealed
him, lying back in bed, in pyjamas, his arms bare, his throat and neck
bare also beneath the darkness of his hair. The pyjama jacket becomes
a woman's shift, the head that of a pretty Spanish girl. The mistress
is astounded by these confidences offered to her gaze, truer than any
spoken confidence could be, or indeed any action, which his actions,
indeed, if they have not already done so, cannot fail later on to
confirm, for every creature follows the line of his own pleasure, and
if this creature is not too vicious he will seek it in a sex
complementary to his own. And for the invert vice begins, not when he
forms relations (for there are all sorts of reasons that may enjoin
these), but when he takes his pleasure with women. The young man whom
we have been attempting to portray was so evidently a woman that the
women who looked upon him with longing were doomed (failing a special
taste on their part) to the same disappointment as those who in
Shakespeare's comedies are taken in by a girl in disguise who passes
as a youth. The deception is mutual, the invert is himself aware of
it, he guesses the disillusionment which, once the mask is removed,
the woman will experience, and feels to what an extent this mistake as
to sex is a source of poetical imaginings. Besides, even from his
exacting mistress, in vain does he keep back the admission (if she,
that is to say, be not herself a denizen of Gomorrah): "I am a woman!"
when all the time with what stratagems, what agility, what obstinacy
as of a climbing plant the unconscious but visible woman in him seeks
the masculine organ. We have only to look at that head of curling hair
on the white pillow to understand that if, in the evening, this young
man slips through his guardians' fingers, in spite of anything that
they, or he himself can do to restrain him, it will not be to go in
pursuit of women. His mistress may chastise him, may lock him up; next
day, the man-woman will have found some way of attaching himself to a
man, as the convolvulus throws out its tendrils wherever it finds a
convenient post or rake. Why, when we admire in the face of this
person a delicacy that touches our hearts, a gracefulness, a
spontaneous affability such as men do not possess, should we be
dismayed to learn that this young man runs after boxers? They are
different aspects of an identical reality. And indeed, what repels us
is the most touching thing of all, more touching than any refinement
of delicacy, for it represents an admirable though unconscious effort
on the part of nature: the recognition of his sex by itself, in spite
of the sexual deception, becomes apparent, the uncon-fessed attempt to
escape from itself towards what an initial error on the part of
society has segregated from it. Some, those no doubt who have been
most timid in childhood, are scarcely concerned with the material kind
of the pleasure they receive, provided that they can associate it with
a masculine face. Whereas others, whose sensuality is doubtless more
violent, imperiously restrict their material pleasure within certain
definite limitations.  These live perhaps less exclusively beneath the
sway of Saturn's outrider, since for them women are not entirely
barred, as for the former sort, in whose eyes women would have no
existence apart from conversation, flirtation, loves not of the heart
but of the head. But the second sort seek out those women who love
other women; who can procure for them a young man, enhance the
pleasure which they feel on finding themselves in his company; better
still, they can, in the same fashion, enjoy with such women the same
pleasure as with a man. Whence it arises that jealousy is kindled in
those who love the first sort only by the pleasure which they may be
enjoying with a man, which alone seems to their lovers a betrayal,
since these do not participate in the love of women, have practised it
only as a habit, and, so as to reserve for themselves the possibility
of eventual marriage, representing to themselves so little the
pleasure that it is capable of giving that they cannot be distressed
by the thought that he whom they love is enjoying that pleasure;
whereas the other sort often inspire jealousy by their love-affairs
with women. For, in the relations which they have with her, they play,
for the woman who loves her own sex, the part of another woman, and
she offers them at the same time more or less what they find in other
men, so that the jealous friend suffers from the feeling that he whom
he loves is riveted to her who is to him almost a man, and at the same
time feels his beloved almost escape him because, to these women, he
is something which the lover himself cannot conceive, a sort of woman.
We need not pause here to consider those young fools who by a sort of
arrested development, to tease their friends or to shock their
families, proceed with a kind of frenzy to choose clothes that
resemble women's dress, to redden their lips and blacken their
eyelashes; we may leave them out of account, for they are those whom
we shall find later on, when they have suffered the all too cruel
penalty of their affectation, spending what remains of their lifetime
in vain attempts to repair by a sternly protestant demeanour the wrong
that they did to themselves when they were carried away by the same
demon that urges young women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain to live in
a scandalous fashion, to set every convention at defiance, to scoff at
the entreaties of their relatives, until the day when they set
themselves with perseverance but without success to reascend the slope
down which it had seemed to them that it would be so amusing to glide,
down which they had found it so amusing, or rather had not been able
to stop themselves from gliding. Finally, let us leave to a later
volume the men who have sealed a pact with Gomorrah. We shall deal
with them when M. de Charlus comes to know them. Let us leave out for
the present all those, of one sort or another, who will appear each in
his turn, and, to conclude this first sketch of the subject, let us
say a word only of those whom we began to mention just now, the
solitary class. Supposing their vice to be more exceptional than it
is, they have retired into solitude from the day on which they
discovered it, after having carried it within themselves for a long
time without knowing it, for a longer time only than certain other
men. For no one can tell at first that he is an invert or a poet or a
snob or a scoundrel. The boy who has been reading erotic poetry or
looking at indecent pictures, if he then presses his body against a
schoolfellow's, imagines himself only to be communing with him in an
identical desire for a woman.  How should he suppose that he is not
like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels
on reading Mme. de Lafayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott, at a
time when he is still too little capable of observing himself to take
into account what he has added from his own store to the picture, and
that if the sentiment be the same the object differs, that what he
desires is Rob Roy, and not Diana Vernon? With many, by a defensive
prudence on the part of the instinct that precedes the clearer vision
of the intellect, the mirror and walls of their bedroom vanish beneath
a cloud of coloured prints of actresses; they compose poetry such as:

  I love but Chloe in the world,
  For Chloe is divine;
  Her golden hair is sweetly curled,
  For her my heart doth pine.

Must we on that account attribute to the opening phase of such lives a
taste which we shall never find in them later on, like those flaxen
ringlets on the heads of children which are destined to change to the
darkest brown? Who can tell whether the photographs of women are not a
first sign of hypocrisy, a first sign also of horror at other inverts?
But the solitary kind are precisely those to whom hypocrisy is
painful. Possibly even the example of the Jews, of a different type of
colony, is not strong enough to account for the frail hold that their
upbringing has upon them, or for the artfulness with which they find
their way back (perhaps not to anything so sheerly terrible as the
suicide to which maniacs, whatever precautions one may take with them,
return, and, pulled out of the river into which they have flung
themselves, take poison, procure revolvers, and so forth; but) to a
life of which the men of the other race not only do not understand,
cannot imagine, abominate the essential pleasures but would be filled
with horror by the thought of its frequent danger and everlasting
shame.  Perhaps, to form a picture of these, we ought to think, if not
of the wild animals that never become domesticated, of the lion-cubs
said to be tame but lions still at heart, then at least of the Negroes
whom the comfortable existence of the white man renders desperately
unhappy and who prefer the risks of a life of savagery and its
incomprehensible joys. When the day has dawned on which they have
discovered themselves to be incapable at once of lying to others and
of lying to themselves, they go away to live in the country, shunning
the society of their own kind (whom they believe to be few in number)
from horror of the monstrosity or fear of the temptation, and that of
the rest of humanity from shame. Never having arrived at true
maturity, plunged in a constant melancholy, now and again, some Sunday
evening when there is no moon, they go for a solitary walk as far as a
crossroads where, although not a word has been said, there has come to
meet them one of their boyhood's friends who is living in a house in
the neighbourhood. And they begin again the pastimes of long ago, on
the grass, in the night, neither uttering a word. During the week,
they meet in their respective houses, talk of no matter what, without
any allusion to what has occurred between them, exactly as though they
had done nothing and were not to do anything again, save, in their
relations, a trace of coldness, of irony, of irritability and rancour,
at times of hatred. Then the neighbour sets out on a strenuous
expedition on horseback, and, on a mule, climbs mountain peaks, sleeps
in the snow; his friend, who identifies his own vice with a weakness
of temperament, the cabined and timid life, realises that vice can no
longer exist in his friend now emancipated, so many thousands of feet
above sea-level. And, sure enough, the other takes a wife. And yet the
abandoned one is not cured (in spite of the cases in which, as we
shall see, inversion is curable). He insists upon going down himself
every morning to the kitchen to receive the milk from the hands of the
dairyman's boy, and on the evenings when desire is too strong for him
will go out of his way to set a drunkard on the right road or to
"adjust the dress" of a blind man. No doubt the life of certain
inverts appears at times to change, their vice (as it is called) is no
longer apparent in their habits; but nothing is ever lost; a missing
jewel turns up again; when the quantity of a sick man's urine
decreases, it is because he is perspiring more freely, but the
excretion must invariably occur. One day this homosexual hears of the
death of a young cousin, and from his inconsolable grief we learned
that it was to this love, chaste possibly and aimed rather at
retaining esteem than at obtaining possession, that his desires have
passed by a sort of virescence, as, in a budget, without any
alteration in the total, certain expenditure is carried under another
head. As is the case with invalids in whom a sudden attack of
urticaria makes their chronic ailments temporarily disappear, this
pure love for a young relative seems, in the invert, to have
momentarily replaced, by metastasis, habits that will, one day or
another, return to fill the place of the vicarious, cured malady.

Meanwhile the married neighbour of our recluse has returned; before
the beauty of the young bride and the demonstrative affection of her,
husband, on the day when their friend is obliged to invite them to
dinner, he feels ashamed of the past. Already in an interesting
condition, she must return home early, leaving her husband behind; he,
when the time has come for him to go home also, asks his host to
accompany him for part of the way; at first, no suspicion enters his
mind, but at the crossroads he finds himself thrown down on the grass,
with not a word said, by the mountaineer who is shortly to become a
father. And their meetings begin again, and continue until the day
when there comes to live not far off a cousin of the young woman, with
whom her husband is now constantly to be seen. And he, if the
twice-abandoned friend calls in the evening and endeavours to approach
him, is furious, and repulses him with indignation that the other has
not had the tact to foresee the disgust which he must henceforward
inspire. Once, however, there appears a stranger, sent to him by his
faithless friend; but being busy at the time, the abandoned one cannot
see him, and only afterwards learns with what object his visitor came.

Then the solitary languishes alone. He has no other diversion than to
go to the neighbouring watering-place to ask for some information or
other from a certain railwayman there. But the latter has obtained
promotion, has been transferred to the other end of the country; the
solitary will no longer be able to go and ask him the times of the
trains or the price of a first class ticket, and, before retiring to
dream, Griselda-like, in his tower, loiters upon the beach, a strange
Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free, a sterile Medusa that
must perish upon the sand, or else he stands idly, until his train
starts, upon the platform, casting over the crowd of passengers a gaze
that will seem indifferent, contemptuous or distracted to those of
another race, but, like the luminous glow with which certain insects
bedeck themselves in order to attract others of their species, or like
the nectar which certain flowers offer to attract the insects that
will fertilise them, would not deceive the almost undiscoverable
sharer of a pleasure too singular, too hard to place, which is offered
him, the colleague with whom our specialist could converse in the
half-forgotten tongue; in which last, at the most, some seedy loafer
upon the platform will put up a show of interest, but for pecuniary
gam alone, like those people who, at the Collège de France, in the
room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience,
attend his course but only because the room itself is heated. Medusa!
Orchid! When I followed my instinct only, the medusa used to revolt me
at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard it, like Michelet, from the
standpoint of natural history, and aesthetic, I saw an exquisite wheel
of azure flame. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their
petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea? Like so many
creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which
would produce vanilla but, because in its structure the male organ is
divided by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the
humming-birds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the
other, or man fertilises them by artificial means, M. de Charlus (and
here the word fertilise must be understood in a moral sense, since in
the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile,
but it is no small matter that a person may encounter the sole
pleasure which he is capable of enjoying, and that every 'creature
here below' can impart to some other 'his music, or his fragrance or
his flame'), M. de Charlus was one of those men who may be called
exceptional, because however many they may be, the satisfaction, so
easy in others, of their sexual requirements depends upon the
coincidence of too many conditions, and of conditions too difficult to
ensure. For men like M. de Charlus (leaving out of account the
compromises which will appear in the course of this story and which
the reader may already have foreseen, enforced by the need of pleasure
which resigns itself to partial acceptations), mutual love, apart from
the difficulties, so great as to be almost insurmountable, which it
meets in the ordinary man, adds to these others so exceptional that
what is always extremely rare for everyone becomes in their case well
nigh impossible, and, if there should befall them an encounter which
is really fortunate, or which nature makes appear so to them, their
good fortune, far more than that of the normal lover, has about it
something extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary. The feud of
the Capulets and Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles
of every sort which must have been surmounted, the special
eliminations which nature has had to submit to the hazards, already
far from common, which result in love, before a retired tailor, who
was intending to set off soberly for his office, can stand quivering
in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty; this Romeo and this Juliet
may believe with good reason that their love is not the caprice of a
moment but a true predestination, prepared by the harmonies of their
temperaments, and not only by their own personal temperaments but by
those of their ancestors, by their most distant strains of heredity,
so much so that the fellow creature who is conjoined with them has
belonged to them from before their birth, has attracted them by a
force comparable to that which governs the worlds on which we passed
our former lives. M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see
whether the bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long
been waiting to receive, and had no chance of receiving save by an
accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle. But
this was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same
order and no less marvellous.  As soon as I had considered their
meeting from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me
instinct with beauty. The most extraordinary devices that nature has
invented to compel insects to ensure the fertilisation of flowers
which without their intervention could not be fertilised because the
male flower is too far away from the female--or when, if it is the
wind that must provide for the transportation of the pollen, she makes
that pollen so much more simply detachable from the male, so much more
easily arrested in its flight by the female flower, by eliminating the
secretion of nectar which is no longer of any use since there is no
insect to be attracted, and, that the flower may be kept free for the
pollen which it needs, which can fructify only in itself, makes it
secrete a liquid which renders it immune to all other pollens--seemed
to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of
inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who
is growing old: men who are attracted not by all other men, but--by a
phenomenon of correspondence and harmony similar to those that precede
the fertilisation of heterostyle trimorphous flowers like the _lythrum
salicoria_--only by men considerably older than themselves. Of this
subvariety Jupien had just furnished me with an example less striking
however than certain others, which every collector of a human herbary,
every moral botanist can observe in spite of their rarity, and which
will present to the eye a delicate youth who is waiting for the
advances of a robust and paunchy quinquagenarian, remaining as
indifferent to those of other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers
of the short-styled _primula veris_ so long as they are fertilised
only by other _primu-lae veris_ of short style also, whereas they
welcome with joy the pollen of the _primula veris_ with the long
styles. As for M. de Charlus's part in the transaction, I noticed
afterwards that there were for him various kinds of conjunction, some
of which, by their multiplicity, their almost invisible speed and
above all the absence of contact between the two actors, recalled
still more forcibly those flowers that in a garden are fertilised by
the pollen of a neighbouring flower which they may never touch. There
were in fact certain persons whom it was sufficient for him to make
come to his house, hold for an hour or two under the domination of his
talk, for his desire, quickened by some earlier encounter, to be
assuaged. By a simple use of words the conjunction was effected, as
simply as it can be among the infusoria.  Sometimes, as had doubtless
been the case with me on the evening on which I had been summoned by
him after the Guermantes dinner-party, the relief was effected by a
violent ejaculation which the Baron made in his visitor's face, just
as certain flowers, furnished with a hidden spring, sprinkle from
within the unconsciously collaborating and disconcerted insect. M. de
Charlus, from vanquished turning victor, feeling himself purged of his
uneasiness and calmed, would send away the visitor who had at once
ceased to appear to him desirable. Finally, inasmuch as inversion
itself springs from the fact that the invert is too closely akin to
woman to be capable of having any effective relations with her, it
comes under a higher law which ordains that so many hermaphrodite
flowers shall remain unfertile, that is to say the law of the
sterility of autofecundation. It is true that inverts, in their search
for a male person, will often be found to put up with other inverts as
effeminate as themselves. But it is enough that they do not belong to
the female sex, of which they have in them an embryo which they can
put to no useful purpose, such as we find in so many hermaphrodite
flowers, and even in certain hermaphrodite animals, such as the snail,
which cannot be fertilised by themselves, but can by other
hermaphrodites.  In this respect the race of inverts, who eagerly
connect themselves with Oriental antiquity or the Golden Age in
Greece, might be traced back farther still, to those experimental
epochs in which there existed neither dioecious plants nor monosexual
animals, to that initial hermaph-roditism of which certain rudiments
of male organs in the anatomy of the woman and of female organs in
that of the man seem still to preserve the trace. I found the
pantomime, incomprehensible to me at first, of Jupien and M. de
Charlus as curious as those seductive gestures addressed, Darwin tells
us, to insects not only by the flowers called composite which erect
the florets of their capitals so as to be seen from a greater
distance, such as a certain heterostyle which turns back its stamens
and bends them to open the way for the insect, or offers him an
ablution, or, to take an immediate instance, the nectar-fragrance and
vivid hue of the corollae that were at that moment attracting insects
to our courtyard. From this day onwards M. de Charlus was to alter the
time of his visits to Mme. de Villeparisis, not that he could not see
Jupien elsewhere and with greater convenience, but because to him just
as much as to me the afternoon sunshine and the blossoming plant were,
no doubt, linked together in memory. Apart from this, he did not
confine himself to recommending the Jupiens to Mme. de Villeparisis,
to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to a whole brilliant list of patrons,
who were all the more assiduous in their attentions to the young
seamstress when they saw that the few ladies who had held out, or had
merely delayed their submission, were subjected to the direst
reprisals by the Baron, whether in order that they might serve as an
example, or because they had aroused his wrath and had stood out
against his attempted domination; he made Jupien's position more and
more lucrative, until he definitely engaged him as his secretary and
established him in the state in which we shall see him later on. "Ah,
now! There is a happy man, if you like, that Jupien," said Françoise,
who had a tendency to minimise or exaggerate people's generosity
according as it was bestowed on herself or on others. Not that, in
this instance, she had any need to exaggerate, nor for that matter did
she feel any jealousy, being genuinely fond of Jupien. "Oh, he's such
a good man, the Baron," she went on, "such a well-behaved, religious,
proper sort of man. If I had a daughter to marry and was one of the
rich myself, I would give her to the Baron with my eyes shut." "But,
Françoise," my mother observed gently, "she'd be well supplied with
husbands, that daughter of yours. Don't forget you've already promised
her to Jupien." "Ah! Lordy, now," replied Françoise, "there's another
of them that would make a woman happy. It doesn't matter whether
you're rich or poor, it makes no difference to your nature. The Baron
and Jupien, they're just the same sort of person."

However, I greatly exaggerated at the time, on the strength of this
first revelation, the elective character of so carefully selected a
combination.  Admittedly, every man of the kind of M. de Charlus is an
extraordinary creature since, if he does not make concessions to the
possibilities of life, he seeks out essentially the love of a man of
the other race, that is to say a man who is a lover of women (and
incapable consequently of loving him); in contradiction of what I had
imagined in the courtyard, where I had seen Jupien turning towards M.
de Charlus like the orchid making overtures to the bee, these
exceptional creatures whom we commiserate are a vast crowd, as we
shall see in the course of this work, for a reason which will be
disclosed only at the end of it, and commiserate themselves for being
too many rather than too few. For the two angels who were posted at
the gates of Sodom to learn whether its inhabitants (according to
Genesis) had indeed done all the things the report of which had
ascended to the Eternal Throne must have been, and of this one can
only be glad, exceedingly ill chosen by the Lord, Who ought not to
have entrusted the task to any but a Sodomite. Such an one the
excuses: "Father of six children--I keep two mistresses," and so forth
could never have persuaded benevolently to lower his flaming sword and
to mitigate the punishment; he would have answered: "Yes, and your
wife lives in a torment of jealousy.  But even when these women have
not been chosen by you from Gomorrah, you spend your nights with a
watcher of flocks upon Hebron." And he would at once have made him
retrace his steps to the city which the rain of fire and brimstone was
to destroy. On the contrary, they allowed to escape all the
shame-faced Sodomites, even if these, on catching sight of a boy,
turned their heads, like Lot's wife, though without being on that
account changed like her into pillars of salt. With the result that
they engendered a numerous posterity with whom this gesture has
continued to be habitual, like that of the dissolute women who, while
apparently studying a row of shoes displayed in a shop window, turn
their heads to keep track of a passing student. These descendants of
the Sodomites, so numerous that we may apply to them that other verse
of Genesis: "If a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy
seed also be numbered," have established themselves throughout the
entire world; they have had access to every profession and pass so
easily into the most exclusive clubs that, whenever a Sodomite fails
to secure election, the blackballs are, for the most part, cast by
other Sodomites, who are anxious to penalise sodomy, having inherited
the falsehood that enabled their ancestors to escape from the accursed
city. It is possible that they may return there one day. Certainly
they form in every land an Oriental colony, cultured, musical,
malicious, which has certain charming qualities and intolerable
defects. We shall study them with greater thoroughness in the course
of the following pages; but I have thought it as well to utter here a
provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as
people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist
movement and to rebuild Sodom.  For, no sooner had they arrived there
than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the
appearance of belonging to it, would take wives, keep mistresses in
other cities where they would find, incidentally, every diversion that
appealed to them. They would repair to Sodom only on days of supreme
necessity, when their own town was empty, at those seasons when hunger
drives the wolf from the woods; in other words, everything would go on
very much as it does to-day in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or
Paris.

Anyhow, on the day in question, before paying my call on the Duchess,
I did not look so far ahead, and I was distressed to find that I had,
by my engrossment in the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, missed perhaps an
opportunity of witnessing the fertilisation of the blossom by the bee.




CHAPTER ONE

M. de Charlus in Society.--A physician.--Typical physiognomy of Mme.
de Vaugoubert.--Mme. d'Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain and the
merriment of the Grand Duke Vladimir.--Mmes.  d'Amoncourt, de Citri,
de Saint-Euverte, etc.--Curious conversation between Swann and the
Prince de Guermantes.--Albertine on the telephone.--My social life in
the interval before my second and final visit to Balbec. Arrival at
Balbec.


As I was in no haste to arrive at this party at the Guermantes', to
which I was not certain that I had been invited, I remained sauntering
out of doors; but the summer day seemed to be in no greater haste than
myself to stir.  Albeit it was after nine o'clock, it was still the
light of day that on the Place de la Concorde was giving the Luxor
obelisk the appearance of being made of pink nougat. Then it diluted
the tint and changed the surface to a metallic substance, so that the
obelisk not only became more precious but seemed to have grown more
slender and almost flexible. You imagined that you might have twisted
it in your fingers, had perhaps already slightly distorted its
outline. The moon was now in the sky like a section of orange
delicately peeled although slightly bruised. But presently she was to
be fashioned of the most enduring gold. Sheltering alone behind her, a
poor little star was to serve as sole companion to the lonely moon,
while she, keeping her friend protected, but bolder and striding
ahead, would brandish like an irresistible weapon, like an Oriental
symbol, her broad and marvellous crescent of gold.

Outside the mansion of the Princesse de Guermantes, I met the Duc de
Châtellerault; I no longer remembered that half an hour earlier I had
still been persecuted by the fear--which, for that matter, was
speedily to grip me again--that I might be entering the house
uninvited. We grow uneasy, and it is sometimes long after the hour of
danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we
remember our uneasiness. I greeted the young Duke and made my way into
the house. But here I must first of all record a trifling incident,
which will enable us to understand something that was presently to
occur.

There was one person who, on that evening as on the previous evenings,
had been thinking a great deal about the Duc de Châtellerault, without
however suspecting who he was: this was the usher (styled at that time
the _aboyeur_) of Mme. de Guermantes. M. de Châtellerault, so far from
being one of the Princess's intimate friends, albeit he was one of her
cousins, had been invited to her house for the first time. His
parents, who had not been on speaking terms with her for the last ten
years, had been reconciled to her within the last fortnight, and,
obliged to be out of Paris that evening, had requested their son to
fill their place. Now, a few days earlier, the Princess's usher had
met in the Champs-Elysées a young man whom he had found charming but
whose identity he had been unable to establish.  Not that the young
man had not shewn himself as obliging as he had been generous. All the
favours that the usher had supposed that he would have to bestow upon
so young a gentleman, he had on the contrary received.  But M. de
Châtellerault was as reticent as he was rash; he was all the more
determined not to disclose his incognito since he did not know with
what sort of person he was dealing; his fear would have been far
greater, although quite unfounded, if he had known. He had confined
himself to posing as an Englishman, and to all the passionate
questions with which he was plied by the usher, desirous to meet again
a person to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and so ample a
gratuity, the Duke had merely replied, from one end of the Avenue
Gabriel to the other: "I do not speak French."

Albeit, in spite of everything--remembering his cousin Gilbert's
maternal ancestry--the Duc de Guermantes pretended to find a touch of
Courvoisier in the drawing-room of the Princesse de
Guermantes-Bavière, the general estimate of that lady's initiative
spirit and intellectual superiority was based upon an innovation that
was to be found nowhere else in her set.  After dinner, however
important the party that was to follow, the chairs, at the Princesse
de Guermantes's, were arranged in such a way as to form little groups,
in which people might have to turn their backs upon one another. The
Princess then displayed her social sense by going to sit down, as
though by preference, in one of these. Not that she was afraid to pick
out and attract to herself a member of another group. If, for
instance, she had remarked to M. Détaille, who naturally agreed with
her, on the beauty of Mme. de Villemur's neck, of which that lady's
position in another group made her present a back view, the Princess
did not hesitate to raise her voice: "Madame de Villemur, M. Détaille,
with his wonderful painter's eye, has just been admiring your neck."
Mme. de Villemur interpreted this as a direct invitation to join in
the conversation; with the agility of a practiced horsewoman, she made
her chair rotate slowly through three quadrants of a circle, and,
without in the least disturbing her neighbours, came to rest almost
facing the Princess. "You don't know M. Détaille?" exclaimed their
hostess, for whom her guest's nimble and modest tergiversation was not
sufficient. "I do not know him, but I know his work," replied Mme. de
Villemur, with a respectful, engaging air, and a promptitude which
many of the onlookers envied her, addressing the while to the
celebrated painter whom this invocation had not been sufficient to
introduce to her in a formal manner, an imperceptible bow. "Come,
Monsieur Détaille," said the Princess, "let me introduce you to Mme.
de Villemur." That lady thereupon shewed as great ingenuity in making
room for the creator of the _Dream_ as she had shewn a moment earlier
in wheeling round to face him.  And the Princess drew forward a chair
for herself; she had indeed invoked Mme. de Villemur only to have an
excuse for quitting the first group, in which she had spent the
statutory ten minutes, and bestowing a similar allowance of her time
upon the second. In three quarters of an hour, all the groups had
received a visit from her, which seemed to have been determined in
each instance by impulse and predilection, but had the paramount
object of making it apparent how naturally "a great lady knows how to
entertain." But now the guests for the party were beginning to arrive,
and the lady of the house was seated not far from the door--erect and
proud in her semi-regal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own
incandescence--between two unattractive Royalties and the Spanish
Ambassadress.

I stood waiting behind a number of guests who had arrived before me.
Facing me was the Princess, whose beauty is probably not the only
thing, where there were so many beauties, that reminds me of this
party. But the face of my hostess was so perfect; stamped like so
beautiful a medal, that it has retained a commemorative force in my
mind. The Princess was in the habit of saying to her guests when she
met them a day or two before one of her parties: "You will come, won't
you?" as though she felt a great desire to talk to them. But as, on
the contrary, she had nothing to talk to them about, when they entered
her presence she contented herself, without rising, with breaking off
for an instant her vapid conversation with the two Royalties and the
Ambassadress and thanking them with: "How good of you to have come,"
not that she thought that the guest had shewn his goodness by coming,
but to enhance her own; then, at once dropping him back into the
stream, she would add: "You will find M. de Guermantes by the garden
door," so that the guest proceeded on his way and ceased to bother
her. To some indeed she said nothing, contenting herself with shewing
them her admirable onyx eyes, as though they had come merely to visit
an exhibition of precious stones.

The person immediately in front of me was the Duc de Châtellerault.

Having to respond to all the smiles, all the greetings waved to him
from inside the drawing-room, he had not noticed the usher. But from
the first moment the usher had recognised him. The identity of this
stranger, which he had so ardently desired to learn, in another minute
he would know.  When he asked his 'Englishman' of the other evening
what name he was to announce, the usher was not merely stirred, he
considered that he was being indiscreet, indelicate. He felt that he
was about to reveal to the whole world (which would, however, suspect
nothing) a secret which it was criminal of him to force like this and
to proclaim in public. Upon hearing the guest's reply: "Le duc de
Châtellerault," he felt such a burst of pride that he remained for a
moment speechless. The Duke looked at him, recognised him, saw himself
ruined, while the servant, who had recovered his composure and was
sufficiently versed in heraldry to complete for himself an appellation
that was too modest, shouted with a professional vehemence softened by
an emotional tenderness: "Son Altesse Monseigneur le duc de
Châtellerault!" But it was now my turn to be announced. Absorbed in
contemplation of my hostess, who had not yet seen me, I had not
thought of the function--terrible to me, although not in the same
sense as to M. de Châtellerault--of this usher garbed in black like a
headsman, surrounded by a group of lackeys in the most cheerful
livery, lusty fellows ready to seize hold of an intruder and cast him
out of doors. The usher asked me my name, I told him it as
mechanically as the condemned man allows himself to be strapped to the
block. At once he lifted his head majestically and, before I could beg
him to announce me in a lowered tone so as to spare my own feelings if
I were not invited and those of the Princesse de Guermantes if I were,
shouted the disturbing syllables with a force capable of bringing down
the roof.

The famous Huxley (whose grandson occupies an unassailable position in
the English literary world of to-day) relates that one of his patients
dared not continue to go into society because often, on the actual
chair that was pointed out to her with a courteous gesture, she saw an
old gentleman already seated. She could be quite certain that either
the gesture of invitation or the old gentleman's presence was a
hallucination, for her hostess would not have offered her a chair that
was already occupied. And when Huxley, to cure her, forced her to
reappear in society, she felt a moment of painful hesitation when she
asked herself whether the friendly sign that was being made to her was
the real thing, or, in obedience to a non-existent vision, she was
about to sit down in public upon the knees of a gentleman in flesh and
blood. Her brief uncertainty was agonising. Less so perhaps than mine.
>From the moment at which I had taken in the sound of my name, like the
rumble that warns us of a possible cataclysm, I was bound, to plead my
own good faith in either event, and as though I were not tormented by
any doubt, to advance towards the Princess with a resolute air.

She caught sight of me when I was still a few feet away and (to leave
me in no doubt that I was the victim of a conspiracy), instead of
remaining seated, as she had done for her other guests, rose and came
towards me. A moment later, I was able to heave the sigh of relief of
Huxley's patient, when, having made up her mind to sit down on the
chair, she found it vacant and realised that it was the old gentleman
that was a hallucination.  The Princess had just held out her hand to
me with a smile. She remained standing for some moments with the kind
of charm enshrined in the verse of Malherbe which ends:

  "To do them honour all the angels rise."

She apologised because the Duchess had not yet come, as though I must
be bored there without her. In order to give me this greeting, she
wheeled round me, holding me by the hand, in a graceful revolution by
the whirl of which I felt myself carried off my feet. I almost
expected that she would next offer me, like the leader of a cotillon,
an ivory-headed cane or a watch-bracelet.  She did not, however, give
me anything of the sort, and as though, instead of dancing the boston,
she had been listening to a sacred quartet by Beethoven the sublime
strains of which she was afraid of interrupting, she cut short the
conversation there and then, or rather did not begin it, and, still
radiant at having seen me come in, merely informed me where the Prince
was to be found.

I moved away from her and did not venture to approach her again,
feeling that she had absolutely nothing to say to me and that, in her
vast kindness, this woman marvellously tall and handsome, noble as
were so many great ladies who stepped so proudly upon the scaffold,
could only, short of offering me a draught of honeydew, repeat what
she had already said to me twice: "You will find the Prince in the
garden." Now, to go in search of the Prince was to feel my doubts
revive in a fresh form.

In any case I should have to find somebody to introduce me. One could
hear, above all the din of conversation, the interminable chatter of
M. de Charlus, talking to H. E. the Duke of Sidonia, whose
acquaintance he had just made. Members of the same profession find one
another out, and so it is with a common vice. M. de Charlus and M. de
Sidonia had each of them immediately detected the other's vice, which
was in both cases that of soliloquising in society, to the extent of
not being able to stand any interruption.  Having decided at once
that, in the words of a famous sonnet, there was 'no help,' they had
made up their minds not to be silent but each to go on talking without
any regard to what the other might say. This had resulted in the
confused babble produced in Molière's comedies by a number of people
saying different things simultaneously. The Baron, with his deafening
voice, was moreover certain of keeping the upper hand, of drowning the
feeble voice of M. de Sidonia; without however discouraging him, for,
whenever M. de Charlus paused for a moment to breathe, the interval
was filled by the murmurs of the Grandee of Spain who had
imperturbably continued his discourse. I could easily have asked M. de
Charlus to introduce me to the Prince de Guermantes, but I feared (and
with good reason) that he might be cross with me. I had treated him in
the most ungrateful fashion by letting his offer pass unheeded for the
second time and by never giving him a sign of my existence since the
evening when he had so affectionately escorted me home. And yet I
could not plead the excuse of having anticipated the scene which I had
just witnessed, that very afternoon, enacted by himself and Jupien. I
suspected nothing of the sort. It is true that shortly before this,
when my parents reproached me with my laziness and with not having
taken the trouble to write a line to M. de Charlus, I had violently
reproached them with wishing me to accept a degrading proposal.  But
anger alone, and the desire to hit upon the expression that would be
most offensive to them had dictated this mendacious retort. In
reality, I had imagined nothing sensual, nothing sentimental even,
underlying the Baron's offers. I had said this to my parents with
entire irresponsibility.  But sometimes the future is latent in us
without our knowledge, and our words which we suppose to be false
forecast an imminent reality.

M. de Charlus would doubtless have forgiven me my want of gratitude.
But what made him furious was that my presence this evening at the
Princesse de Guermantes's, as for some time past at her cousin's,
seemed to be a defiance of his solemn declaration: "There is no
admission to those houses save through me." A grave fault, a crime
that was perhaps inexpiable, I had not followed the conventional path.
M. de Charlus knew well that the thunderbolts which he hurled at those
who did not comply with his orders, or to whom he had taken a dislike,
were beginning to be regarded by many people, however furiously he
might brandish them, as mere pasteboard, and had no longer the force
to banish anybody from anywhere. But he believed perhaps that his
diminished power, still considerable, remained intact in the eyes of
novices like myself. And so I did not consider it well advised to ask
a favour of him at a party at which the mere fact of my presence
seemed an ironical denial of his pretentions.

I was buttonholed at that moment by a man of a distinctly common type,
Professor E----. He had been surprised to see me at the Guermantes'. I
was no less surprised to see him there, for nobody had ever seen
before or was ever to see again a person of his sort at one of the
Princess's parties. He had just succeeded in curing the Prince, after
the last rites had been administered, of a septic pneumonia, and the
special gratitude that Mme. de Guermantes felt towards him was the
reason for her thus departing from custom and inviting him to her
house. As he knew absolutely nobody in the rooms, and could not wander
about there indefinitely by himself, like a minister of death, having
recognised me, he had discovered, for the first time in his life, that
he had an infinite number of things to say to me, which enabled him to
assume an air of composure, and this was one of the reasons for his
advancing upon me. There was also another. He attached great
importance to his never being mistaken in his diagnoses. Now his
correspondence was so numerous that he could not always bear in mind,
when he had seen a patient once only, whether the disease had really
followed the course that he had traced for it. The reader may perhaps
remember that, immediately after my grandmother's stroke, I had taken
her to see him, on the afternoon when he was having all his
decorations stitched to his coat. After so long an interval, he no
longer remembered the formal announcement which had been sent to him
at the time. "Your grandmother is dead, isn't she?" he said to me in a
voice in which a semi-certainty calmed a slight apprehension. "Ah!
Indeed! Well, from the moment I saw her my prognosis was extremely
grave, I remember it quite well."

It was thus that Professor E-----learned or recalled the death of my
grandmother, and (I must say this to his credit, which is that of the
medical profession as a whole), without displaying, without perhaps
feeling, any satisfaction. The mistakes made by doctors are
innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to
treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome. "Wine? In moderation, it
can do you no harm, it is always a tonic.... Sexual enjoyment? After
all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it,
you understand. Excess in anything is wrong." At once, what a
temptation to the patient to renounce those two life-givers, water and
chastity. If, on the other hand, he has any trouble with his heart,
albumen, and so forth, it never lasts for long. Disorders that are
grave but purely functional are at once ascribed to an imaginary
cancer.  It is useless to continue visits which are powerless to
eradicate an incurable malady. Let the patient, left to his own
devices, thereupon subject himself to an implacable regime, and in
time recover, or merely survive, and the doctor, to whom he touches
his hat in the Avenue de l'Opéra, when he supposed him to have long
been lying in Père Lachaise, will interpret the gesture as an act of
insolent defiance. An innocent stroll, taken beneath his nose and
venerable beard, would arouse no greater wrath in the Assize Judge
who, two years earlier, had sentenced the rascal, now passing him with
apparent impunity, to death. Doctors (we do not here include them all,
of course, and make a mental reservation of certain admirable
exceptions), are in general more displeased, more irritated by the
quashing of their sentence than pleased by its execution. This
explains why Professor E----, despite the intellectual satisfaction
that he doubtless felt at finding that he had not been mistaken, was
able to speak to me only with regret of the blow that had fallen upon
us. He was in no hurry to cut short the conversation, which kept him
in countenance and gave him a reason for remaining.  He spoke to me of
the great heat through which we were passing, but, albeit he was a
well-read man and capable of expressing himself in good French, said
to me: "You are none the worse for this hyperthermia?" The fact is
that medicine has made some slight advance in knowledge since
Molière's days, but none in its vocabulary. My companion went on: "The
great thing is to avoid the sudations that are caused by weather like
this, especially in superheated rooms. You can remedy them, when you
go home and feel thirsty, by the application of heat" (by which he
apparently meant hot drinks).

Owing to the circumstances of my grandmother's death, the subject
interested me, and I had recently read in a book by a great specialist
that perspiration was injurious to the kidneys, by making moisture
pass through the skin when its proper outlet was elsewhere. I thought
with regret of those dog-days at the time of my grandmother's death,
and was inclined to blame them for it. I did not mention this to Dr.
E----, but of his own accord he said to me: "The advantage of this
very hot weather in which perspiration is abundant is that the kidney
is correspondingly relieved." Medicine is not an exact science.

Keeping me engaged in talk, Professor E-----asked only not to be
forced to leave me. But I had just seen, making a series of sweeping
bows to right and left of the Princesse de Guermantes, stepping back a
pace first, the Marquis de Vaugoubert. M. de Norpois had recently
introduced me to him and I hoped that I might find in him a person
capable of introducing me to our host. The proportions of this work do
not permit me to explain here in consequence of what incidents in his
youth M. de Vaugoubert was one of the few men (possibly the only man)
in society who happened to be in what is called at Sodom the
"confidence" of M. de Charlus. But, if our Minister to the Court of
King Theodosius had certain defects in common with the Baron, they
were only a very pale reflexion. It was merely in an infinitely
softened, sentimental and simple form that he displayed those
alternations of affection and hatred through which the desire to
attract, and then the fear--equally imaginary--of being, if not
scorned, at any rate unmasked, made the Baron pass. Made ridiculous by
a chastity, a 'pla-tonicism' (to which as a man of keen ambition he
had, from the moment of passing his examination, sacrificed all
pleasure), above all by his intellectual nullity, these alternations
M. de Vaugoubert did, nevertheless, display.  But whereas in M. de
Charlus the immoderate praises were proclaimed with a positive burst
of eloquence, and seasoned with the subtlest, the most mordant banter
which marked a man for ever, by M. de Vaugoubert, on the other hand,
the affection was expressed with the banality of a man of the lowest
intelligence, and of a public official, the grievances (worked up
generally into a complete indictment, as with the Baron) by a
malevolence which, though relentless, was at the same time spiritless,
and was all the more startling inasmuch as it was invariably a direct
contradiction of what the Minister had said six months earlier and
might soon perhaps be saying again: a regularity of change which gave
an almost astronomic poetry to the various phases of M. de
Vaugoubert's life, albeit apart from this nobody was ever less
suggestive of a star.

The greeting that he gave me had nothing in common with that which I
should have received from M. de Charlus. To this greeting M. de
Vaugou-bert, apart from the thousand mannerisms which he supposed to
be indicative of good breeding and diplomacy, imparted a cavalier,
brisk, smiling air, which should make him seem on the one hand to be
rejoicing at being alive--at a time when he was inwardly chewing the
mortification of a career with no prospect of advancement and with the
threat of enforced retirement--and on the other hand young, virile and
charming, when he could see and no longer ventured to go and examine
in the glass the lines gathering upon a face which he would have
wished to keep full of seduction.  Not that he would have hoped for
effective conquests, the mere thought of which filled him with terror
on account of what people would say, scandals, blackmail. Having
passed from an almost infantile corruption to an absolute continence
dating from the day on which his thoughts had turned to the Quai
d'Orsay and he had begun to plan a great career for himself, he had
the air of a caged animal, casting in every direction glances
expressive of fear, appetite and stupidity. This last was so dense
that he did not reflect that the street-arabs of his adolescence were
boys no longer, and when a newsvendor bawled in his face: "_La
Presse_!" even more than with longing he shuddered with terror,
imagining himself recognised and denounced.

But in default of the pleasures sacrificed to the ingratitude of the
Quai d'Orsay, M. de Vaugoubert--and it was for this that he was
anxious still to attract--was liable to sudden stirrings of the heart.
Heaven knows with how many letters he would overwhelm the Ministry
(what personal ruses he would employ, the drafts that he made upon the
credit of Mme. de Vaugoubert, who, on account of her corpulence, her
exalted birth, her masculine air, and above all the mediocrity of her
husband, was reputed to be endowed with eminent capacities and to be
herself for all practical purposes the Minister), to introduce without
any valid reason a young man destitute of all merit into the staff of
the Legation. It is true that a few months, a few years later, the
insignificant attaché had only to appear, without the least trace of
any hostile intention, to have shown signs of coldness towards his
chief for the latter, supposing himself scorned or betrayed, to devote
the same hysterical ardour to punishing him with which he had showered
favours upon him in the past. He would move heaven and earth to have
him recalled and the Director of Political Affairs would receive a
letter daily: "Why don't you hurry up and rid me of that lascar. Give
him a dressing down in his own interest. What he needs is a slice of
humble pie." The post of attaché at the court of King Theodosius was
on this account far from enjoyable. But in all other respects, thanks
to his perfect common sense as a man of the world, M. de Vaugoubert
was one of the best representatives of the French Government abroad.
When a man who was reckoned a superior person, a Jacobin, with an
expert knowledge of all subjects, replaced him later on, it was not
long before war broke out between France and the country over which
that monarch reigned.

M. de Vaugoubert, like M. de Charlus, did not care to be the first to
give a greeting. Each of them preferred to 'respond,' being constantly
afraid of the gossip which the person to whom otherwise they might
have offered their hand might have heard about them since their last
meeting. In my case, M. de Vaugoubert had no need to ask himself this
question, I had as a matter of fact gone up of my own accord to greet
him, if only because of the difference in our ages. He replied with an
air of wonder and delight, his eyes continuing to stray as though
there had been a patch of clover on either side of me upon which he
was forbidden to graze. I felt that it would be more becoming to ask
him to introduce me to Mme. de Vaugoubert, before effecting that
introduction to the Prince which I decided not to mention to him until
afterwards. The idea of making me acquainted with his wife seemed to
fill him with joy, for his own sake as well as for hers, and he led me
at a solemn pace towards the Marquise. Arriving in front of her, and
indicating me with his hand and eyes, with every conceivable mark of
consideration, he nevertheless remained silent and withdrew after a
few moments, in a sidelong fashion, leaving me alone with his wife.
She had at once given me her hand, but without knowing to whom this
token of friendship was addressed, for I realised that M. de
Vaugoubert had forgotten my name, perhaps even had failed to recognise
me, and being unwilling, from politeness, to confess his ignorance had
made the introduction consist in a mere dumb show. And so I was no
further advanced; how was I to get myself introduced to my host by a
woman who did not know my name? Worse still, I found myself obliged to
remain for some moments talking to Mme. de Vaugoubert. And this
annoyed me for two reasons. I had no wish to remain all night at this
party, for I had arranged with Albertine (I had given her a box for
_Phèdre_) that she was to pay me a visit shortly before midnight.
Certainly I was not in the least in love with her; I was yielding, in
making her come this evening, to a wholly sensual desire, albeit we
were at that torrid period of the year when sensuality, evaporating,
visits more readily the organ of taste, seeks above all things
coolness. More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade,
for a cold bath, or even to gaze at that peeled and juicy moon which
was quenching the thirst of heaven. I counted however upon ridding
myself, in Albertine's company--which, moreover, reminded me of the
coolness of the sea--of the regret that I should not fail to feel for
many charming faces (for it was a party quite as much for girls as for
married women that the Princess was giving. On the other hand, the
face of the imposing Mme. de Vaugoubert, Bourbonian and morose, was in
no way attractive).

People said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in
their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the
wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this saying than was
supposed.  Mme. de Vaugoubert was really a man. Whether she had always
been one, or had grown to be as I saw her, matters little, for in
either case we have to deal with one of the most touching miracles of
nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human
kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis--if
the future Mme. de Vaugoubert had always been so clumsily
manlike--nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the
girl the deceiving aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for
women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of
discovering a bride who figures in his eyes as a market porter.  In
the alternative case, if the woman has not originally these masculine
characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband,
and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain
flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to
attract. Her regret that she is not loved, that she is not a man,
virilises her. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now
considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples
end by resembling each other, at times even by an exchange of
qualities? A former German Chancellor, Prince von Bùlow, married an
Italian. In the course of time, on the Pincio, it was remarked how
much the Teutonic husband had absorbed of Italian delicacy, and the
Italian Princess of German coarseness. To turn aside to a point
without the province of the laws which we are now tracing, everyone
knows an eminent French diplomat, whose origin was at first suggested
only by his name, one of the most illustrious in the East. As he
matured, as he grew old, there was revealed in him the Oriental whom
no one had ever suspected, and now when we see him we regret the
absence of the fez that would complete the picture.

To revert to habits completely unknown to the ambassador whose
profile, coarsened by heredity, we have just recalled, Mme. de
Vaugoubert realised the acquired or predestined type, the immortal
example of which is the Princess Palatine, never out of a riding
habit, who, having borrowed from her husband more than his virility,
championing the defects of the men who do not care for women, reports
in her familiar correspondence the mutual relations of all the great
noblemen of the court of Louis XIV. One of the reasons which enhance
still farther the masculine air of women like Mme. de Vaugoubert is
that the neglect which they receive from their husbands, the shame
that they feel at such neglect, destroy in them by degrees everything
that is womanly. They end by acquiring both the good and the bad
qualities which their husbands lack. The more frivolous, effeminate,
indiscreet their husbands are, the more they grow into the effigy,
devoid of charm, of the virtues which their husbands ought to
practise.

Traces of abasement, boredom, indignation, marred the regular features
of Mme. de Vaugoubert. Alas, I felt that she was regarding me with
interest and curiosity as one of those young men who appealed to M. de
Vaugoubert, and one of whom she herself would so much have liked to
be, now that her husband, growing old, shewed a preference for youth.
She was gazing at me with the close attention shewn by provincial
ladies who from an illustrated catalogue copy the tailor-made dress so
becoming to the charming person in the picture (actually, the same
person on every page, but deceptively multiplied into different
creatures, thanks to the differences of pose and the variety of
attire). The instinctive attraction which urged Mme. de Vaugoubert
towards me was so strong that she went the length of seizing my arm,
so that I might take her to get a glass of orangeade. But I released
myself, alleging that I must presently be going, and had not yet been
introduced to our host.

This distance between me and the garden door where he stood talking to
a group of people was not very great. But it alarmed me more than if,
in order to cross it, I should have to expose myself to a continuous
hail of fire.

A number of women from whom I felt that I might be able to secure an
introduction were in the garden, where, while feigning an ecstatic
admiration, they were at a loss for an occupation. Parties of this
sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the
following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were
not invited. A real author, devoid of the foolish self-esteem of so
many literary people, if, when he reads an article by a critic who has
always expressed the greatest admiration for his works, he sees the
names of various inferior writers mentioned, but not his own, has no
time to stop and consider what might be to him a matter for
astonishment: his books are calling him. But a society woman has
nothing to do and, on seeing in the _Figaro_: "Last night the Prince
and Princesse de Guermantes gave a large party," etc., exclaims:
"What! Only three days ago I talked to Marie-Gilbert for an hour, and
she never said a word about it!" and racks her brains to discover how
she can have offended the Guermantes. It must be said that, so far as
the Princess's parties were concerned, the astonishment was sometimes
as great among those who were invited as among those who were not. For
they would burst forth at the moment when one least expected them, and
summoned in people whose existence Mme. de Guermantes had forgotten
for years.  And almost all the people in society are so insignificant
that others of their sort adopt, in judging them, only the measure of
their social success, cherish them if they are invited, if they are
omitted detest them. As to the latter, if it was the fact that the
Princess often, even when they were her friends, did not invite them,
that was often due to her fear of annoying 'Palamede,' who had
excommunicated them. And so I might be certain that she had not spoken
of me to M. de Charlus, for otherwise I should not have found myself
there. He meanwhile was posted between the house and the garden, by
the side of the German Ambassador, leaning upon the balustrade of the
great staircase which led from the garden to the house, so that the
other guests, in spite of the three or four feminine admirers who were
grouped round the Baron and almost concealed him, were obliged to
greet him as they passed. He responded by naming each of them in turn.
And one heard an incessant: "Good evening, Monsieur du Hazay, good
evening, Madame de la Tour du Pin-Verclause, good evening, Madame de
la Tour du Pin-Gouvernet, good evening, Philibert, good evening, my
dear Ambassadress," and so on. This created a continuous barking
sound, interspersed with benevolent suggestions or inquiries (to the
answers to which he paid no attention), which M. de Charlus addressed
to them in a tone softened, artificial to shew his indifference, and
benign: "Take care the child doesn't catch cold, it is always rather
damp in the gardens. Good evening, Madame de Brantes. Good evening,
Madame de Mecklembourg.  Have you brought your daughter? Is she
wearing that delicious pink frock?  Good evening, Saint-Geran."
Certainly there was an element of pride in this attitude, for M. de
Charlus was aware that he was a Guermantes, and that he occupied a
supreme place at this party. But there was more in it than pride, and
the very word _fête_ suggested, to the man with aesthetic gifts, the
luxurious, curious sense that it might bear if this party were being
given not by people in contemporary society but in a painting by
Carpaccio or Veronese. It is indeed highly probable that the German
Prince that M. de Charlus was must rather have been picturing to
himself the reception that occurs in _Tannhäuser_, and himself as the
Margrave, standing at the entrance to the Warburg with a kind word of
condescension for each of his guests, while their procession into the
castle or the park is greeted by the long phrase, a hundred times
renewed, of the famous March.

I must, however, make up my mind. I could distinguish beneath the
trees various women with whom I was more or less closely acquainted,
but they seemed transformed because they were at the Princess's and
not at her cousin's, and because I saw them seated not in front of
Dresden china plates but beneath the boughs of a chestnut. The
refinement of their setting mattered nothing. Had it been infinitely
less refined than at Oriane's, I should have felt the same uneasiness.
When the electric light in our drawing-room fails, and we are obliged
to replace it with oil lamps, everything seems altered. I was recalled
from my uncertainty by Mme. de Souvré.  "Good evening," she said as
she approached me. "Have you seen the Duchesse de Guermantes lately?"
She excelled in giving to speeches of this sort an intonation which
proved that she was not uttering them from sheer silliness, like
people who, not knowing what to talk about, come up to you a thousand
times over to mention some bond of common acquaintance, often
extremely slight. She had on the contrary a fine conducting wire in
her glance which signified: "Don't suppose for a moment that I haven't
recognised you. You are the young man I met at the Duchesse de
Guermantes. I remember quite well." Unfortunately, this protection,
extended over me by this phrase, stupid in appearance but delicate in
intention, was extremely fragile, and vanished as soon as I tried to
make use of it. Madame de Souvré had the art, if called upon to convey
a request to some influential person, of appearing at the same time,
in the petitioner's eyes, to be recommending him, and in those of the
influential person not to be recommending the petitioner, so that her
ambiguous gesture opened a credit balance of gratitude to her with the
latter without placing her in any way in debt to the former.
Encouraged by this lady's civilities to ask her to introduce me to M.
de Guermantes, I found that she took advantage of a moment when our
host was not looking in our direction, laid a motherly hand on my
shoulder, and, smiling at the averted face of the Prince who was
unable to see her, thrust me towards him with a gesture of feigned
protection, but deliberately ineffective, which left me stranded
almost at my starting point. Such is the cowardice of people in
society.

That of a lady who came to greet me, addressing me by my name, was
greater still. I tried to recall her own name as I talked to her; I
remembered quite well having met her at dinner, I could remember
things that she had said. But my attention, concentrated upon the
inward region in which these memories of her lingered, was unable to
discover her name there. It was there, nevertheless. My thoughts began
playing a sort of game with it to grasp its outlines, its initial
letter, and so finally to bring the whole name to light. It was labour
in vain, I could more or less estimate its mass, its weight, but as
for its forms, confronting them with the shadowy captive lurking in
the inward night, I said to myself: "It is not that." Certainly my
mind would have been capable of creating the most difficult names.
Unfortunately, it had not to create but to reproduce. All action by
the mind is easy, if it is not subjected to the test of reality. Here,
I was forced to own myself beaten. Finally, in a flash, the name came
back to me as a whole: 'Madame d'Arpajon.' I am wrong in saying that
it came, for it did not, I think, appear to me by a spontaneous
propulsion. I do not think either that the many slight memories which
associated me with the lady, and to which I did not cease to appeal
for help (by such exhortations as: "Come now, it is the lady who is a
friend of Mme. de Souvré, who feels for Victor Hugo so artless an
admiration, mingled with so much alarm and horror,")--I do not believe
that all these memories, hovering between me and her name, served in
any way to bring it to light. In that great game of hide and seek
which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name, there
is not any series of gradual approximations. We see nothing, then
suddenly the name appears in its exact form and very different from
what we thought we could make out. It is not the name that has come to
us. No, I believe rather that, as we go on living, we pass our time in
keeping away from the zone in which a name is distinct, and it was by
an exercise of my will and attention which increased the acuteness of
my inward vision that all of a sudden I had pierced the semi-darkness
and seen daylight.  In any case, if there are transitions between
oblivion and memory, then, these transitions are unconscious. For the
intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the real
name, are themselves false, and bring us nowhere nearer to it. They
are not even, properly speaking, names at all, but often mere
consonants which are nol to be found in the recaptured name. And yet,
this operation of the mind passing from a blank to reality is so
mysterious, that it is possible after all that these false consonants
are really handles, awkwardly held out to enable us to seize hold of
the correct name. "All this," the reader will remark, "tells us
nothing as to the lady's failure to oblige; but since you have made so
long a digression, allow me, gentle author, to waste another moment of
your time in telling you that it is a pity that, young as you were (or
as your hero was, if he be not yourself), you had already so feeble a
memory that you could not recall the name of a lady whom you knew
quite well." It is indeed a pity, gentle reader. And sadder than you
think when one feels the time approaching when names and words will
vanish from the clear zone of consciousness, and when one must for
ever cease to name to oneself the people whom one has known most
intimately. It is indeed a pity that one should require this effort,
when one is still young, to recapture names which one knows quite
well. But if this infirmity occurred only in the case of names barely
known, quite naturally forgotten, names which one would not take the
trouble to remember, the infirmity would not be without its
advantages. "And what are they, may I ask?" Well, Sir, that the malady
alone makes us remark and apprehend, and allows us to dissect the
mechanism of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who, night
after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to
live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever
dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute
observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little
insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in
throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is
not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory. "In
a word, did Mme. d'Arpajon introduce you to the Prince?" No, but be
quiet and let me go on with my story.

Mme. d'Arpajon was even more cowardly than Mme. de Souvré, but there
was more excuse for her cowardice. She knew that she had always had
very little influence in society. This influence, such as it was, had
been reduced still farther by her connexion with the Duc de
Guermantes; his desertion of her dealt it the final blow. The
resentment which she felt at my request that she should introduce me
to the Prince produced a silence which, she was artless enough to
suppose, conveyed the impression that she had not heard what I said.
She was not even aware that she was knitting her brows with anger.
Perhaps, on the other hand, she was aware of it, did not bother about
the inconsistency, and made use of it for the lesson which she was
thus able to teach me without undue rudeness; I mean a silent lesson,
but none the less eloquent for that.

Apart from this, Mme. d'Arpajon was extremely annoyed; many eyes were
raised in the direction of a renaissance balcony at the corner of
which, instead of one of those monumental statues which were so often
used as ornaments at that period, there leaned, no less sculptural
than they, the magnificent Marquise de