In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [319]
When all was said, the stories I had heard at Mme de Guermantes’s, very different in this respect from what I had felt in the case of the hawthorns, or when I tasted a madeleine, remained alien to me. Entering me for a moment and possessing me only physically, it was as though, being of a social, not an individual nature, they were impatient to escape. I writhed in my seat in the carriage like the priestess of an oracle. I looked forward to another dinner-party at which I might myself become a sort of Prince of X . . . , of Mme de Guermantes, and repeat them. In the meantime they made my lips quiver as I stammered them to myself, and I tried in vain to bring back and concentrate a mind that was carried away by a centrifugal force. And so it was with a feverish impatience not to have to bear the whole weight of them any longer by myself in a carriage where indeed I made up for the lack of conversation by soliloquising aloud, that I rang the bell at M. de Charlus’s door, and it was in long monologues with myself, in which I rehearsed everything that I was going to tell him and gave scarcely a thought to what he might have to say to me, that I spent the whole of the time during which I was kept waiting in a drawing-room into which a footman showed me and which I was incidentally too excited to inspect. I felt so urgent a need for M. de Charlus to listen to the stories I was burning to tell him that I was bitterly disappointed to think that the master of the house was perhaps in bed, and that I might have to go home to work off by myself my verbal intoxication. I had just noticed, in fact, that I had been twenty-five minutes—that they had perhaps forgotten about me—in this room of which, despite this long wait, I could at the most have said that it was immense, greenish in colour, and contained a large number of portraits. The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing, and in this case the absence of any description of external surroundings is tantamount to a description of an internal state. I was about to leave the room to try to get hold of someone, and, if I found no one, to make my way back to the hall and have myself let out, when, just as I had risen from my chair and taken a few steps across the mosaic parquet of the floor, a manservant came in with a troubled expression and said to me: “Monsieur le Baron has been engaged all evening, sir. There are still several people waiting to see him. I shall do everything I possibly can to get him to receive you; I have already telephoned up twice to the secretary.”
“No; please don’t bother. I had an appointment with M. le Baron, but it’s now very late, and if he’s busy this evening I can come back another day.”
“Oh no, sir, you mustn’t go away,” cried the servant. “M. le Baron might be vexed. I will try again.”
I was reminded of the things I had heard about M. de Charlus’s servants and their devotion to their master. One could not quite say of him as of the Prince de Conti that he sought to give pleasure as much to the valet as to the minister, but he had shown such skill in making of the least thing that he asked of them a sort of personal favour that at night, when his body-servants were assembled round him at a respectful distance, and after running his eye over them he said: “Coignet, the candlestick!” or “Ducret, the nightshirt!” it was with an envious murmur that the rest used to withdraw, jealous of him who had been singled out by his master’s favour. Two of them, indeed, who could not abide one another, used each to try to snatch the favour from his rival by going on the most flimsy pretext with a message to the Baron, if he had gone upstairs earlier than usual, in the hope of being