In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [152]
to have at a much later date and which the reader will follow in detail in due course. A few days before this visit to Mme de Villeparisis, I had myself received a visitor whom I little expected, namely Charles Morel, the son, whom I did not know, of my great-uncle’s old valet. This great-uncle (he in whose house I had met the lady in pink) had died the year before. His servant had more than once expressed his intention of coming to see me; I had no idea of the object of his visit, but should have been glad to see him, for I had learned from Françoise that he had a genuine veneration for my uncle’s memory and made a pilgrimage regularly to the cemetery in which he was buried. But, being obliged for reasons of health to retire to his home in the country, where he expected to remain for some time, he had delegated the duty to his son. I was surprised to see a handsome young man of eighteen come into my room, dressed expensively rather than with taste, but looking, all the same, like anything but the son of a valet. He made a point, moreover, from the start, of emphasising his aloofness from the domestic class from which he sprang, by informing me with a complacent smile that he had won a first prize at the Conservatoire. The object of his visit to me was as follows: his father on going through the effects of my uncle Adolphe, had set aside some which he felt it unseemly to send to my parents but which he considered to be of a nature to interest a young man of my age. These were photographs of the famous actresses, the notorious courtesans whom my uncle had known, the last fading pictures of that gay life of a man about town which he kept separated by a watertight compartment from his family life. While the young Morel was showing them to me, I noticed that he affected to speak to me as to an equal. He derived from saying “you” to me as often and “sir” as seldom as possible the pleasure of one whose father had never ventured, when addressing my parents, upon anything but the third person. Almost all the photographs bore an inscription such as: “To my best friend.” One actress, less grateful and more circumspect than the rest, had written: “To the best of friends,” which enabled her (so I have been assured) to say afterwards that my uncle was in no sense and had never been her best friend but was merely the friend who had done the most small services for her, the friend she made use of, a good, kind man, in other words an old fool. In vain might young Morel seek to divest himself of his lowly origin, one felt that the shade of my uncle Adolphe, venerable and gigantic in the eyes of the old servant, had never ceased to hover, almost a sacred vision, over the childhood and youth of the son. While I was turning over the photographs Charles Morel examined my room. And as I was looking for somewhere to put them, “How is it,” he asked me (in a tone in which the reproach had no need to be emphasised, so implicit was it in the words themselves), “that I don’t see a single photograph of your uncle in your room?” I felt the blood rise to my cheeks and stammered: “Why, I don’t believe I have one.” “What, you haven’t a single photograph of your uncle Adolphe, who was so fond of you! I’ll send you one of the governor’s—he’s got stacks of them—and I hope you’ll put it in the place of honour above that chest of drawers, which incidentally came to you from your uncle.” It is true that, as I had not even a photograph of my father or mother in my room, there was nothing so very shocking in there not being one of my uncle Adolphe. But it was easy enough to see that for old Morel, who had trained his son in the same way of thinking, my uncle was the important person in the family, from whom my parents derived only a dim reflected glory. I was in higher favour, because my uncle used constantly to say to his valet that I was going to turn out a sort of Racine, or Vaulabelle, and Morel regarded me almost as an adopted son, as a favourite child of my uncle. I soon discovered that Morel’s son was extremely “go-getting.” Thus at this first meeting he