In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [200]
But this obsession with virility did not prevent his having also the most delicate sensibilities. When Mme de Villeparisis asked him to describe to my grandmother some country house in which Mme de Sévigné had stayed, adding that she could not help feeling that there was something rather “literary” about that lady’s distress at being parted from “that tiresome Mme de Grignan”:
“On the contrary,” he retorted, “I can think of nothing more genuine. Besides, it was a time in which feelings of that sort were thoroughly understood. The inhabitant of La Fontaine’s Monomotapa, running round to see his friend who had appeared to him in a dream looking rather sad, the pigeon finding that the greatest of evils is the absence of the other pigeon, seem to you perhaps, my dear aunt, as exaggerated as Mme de Sévigné’s impatience for the moment when she will be alone with her daughter. It’s so beautiful, what she says when she leaves her: ‘This parting gives a pain to my soul which I feel like an ache in my body. In absence one is liberal with the hours. One anticipates a time for which one is longing.’ ”
My grandmother was delighted to hear the Letters thus spoken of, exactly as she would have spoken of them herself. She was astonished that a man could understand them so well. She found in M. de Charlus a delicacy, a sensibility that were quite feminine. We said to each other afterwards, when we were by ourselves and discussed him together, that he must have come under the strong influence of a woman—his mother, or in later life his daughter if he had any children. “A mistress,” I thought to myself, remembering the influence which Saint-Loup’s seemed to have had over him and which enabled me to realise the degree to which men can be refined by the women with whom they live.
“Once she was with her daughter, she had probably nothing to say to her,” put in Mme de Villeparisis.
“Most certainly she had: if it was only what she calls ‘things so slight that nobody else would notice them but you and I.’ And anyhow she was with her. And La Bruyère. tells us that that is everything: ‘To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.’ He is right: that is the only true happiness,” added M. de Charlus in a mournful voice, “and alas, life is so ill arranged that one very rarely experiences it. Mme de Sévigné was after all less to be pitied than most of us. She spent a great part of her life with the person whom she loved.”
“You forget that it wasn’t ‘love’ in her case, since it was her daughter.”
“But what matters in life is not whom or what one loves,” he went on, in a judicial, peremptory, almost cutting tone, “it is the fact of loving. What Mme de Sévigné felt for her daughter has a far better claim to rank with the passion that Racine described in Andromaque or Phèdre than the commonplace relations young Sévigné had with his mistresses. It’s the same with a mystic’s love for his God. The hard and fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our complete ignorance of life.”
“You like Andromaque and Phèdre that much?” Saint-Loup asked his uncle in a faintly contemptuous tone.
“There is more truth in a single tragedy of Racine than in all the dramatic works of Monsieur Victor Hugo,” replied M. de Charlus.
“Society people really are appalling,” Saint-Loup murmured in my ear. “Say what you like, to prefer Racine to Victor is a bit thick!” He was genuinely distressed by his uncle’s words, but the satisfaction of saying “say what you like” and better still “a bit thick” consoled him.
In these reflexions upon the sadness of having to live apart from those one loves (which were to lead my grandmother to say to me that Mme de Villeparisis’s nephew understood certain things a great deal better than his aunt, and moreover had something about him that set him far above the average clubman) M. de Charlus not only revealed a refinement of feeling such as men rarely show; his voice itself, like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has not been