In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [320]
I waited ten minutes more, and then, after requesting me not to stay too long as M. le Baron was tired and had had to send away several most important people who had made appointments with him many days before, they admitted me to his presence. These histrionic trappings with which M. de Charlus surrounded himself seemed to me a great deal less impressive than the simplicity of his brother Guermantes, but already the door stood open, and I could see the Baron, in a Chinese dressing-gown, with his throat bare, lying on a settee. My eye was caught at the same moment by a tall hat, its nap flashing like a mirror, which had been left on a chair with a cape, as though the Baron had but recently come in. The valet withdrew. I supposed that M. de Charlus would rise to greet me. Without moving a muscle he fastened on me a pair of implacable eyes. I went towards him and said good evening; he did not hold out his hand, made no reply, did not ask me to take a chair. After a moment’s silence I asked him, as one would ask an ill-mannered doctor, whether it was necessary for me to remain standing. I said this with no ill intent, but my words seemed only to intensify the cold fury on M. de Charlus’s face. I was not aware, moreover, that at home, in the country, at the Château de Charlus, he was in the habit after dinner (so much did he love to play the king) of sprawling in an armchair in the smoking-room, letting his guests remain standing round him. He would ask for a light from one, offer a cigar to another and then, after a few minutes’ interval, would say: “But Argencourt, why don’t you sit down? Take a chair, my dear fellow,” and so forth, having made a point of keeping them standing simply to remind them that it was from him that they must receive permission to be seated. “Put yourself in the Louis XIV seat,” he answered me with an imperious air, as though rather to force me to move further away from him than to invite me to be seated. I took an armchair which was comparatively near. “Ah! so that is what you call a Louis XIV seat! I can see you are a well-educated young man,” he exclaimed in derision. I was so taken aback that I did not move, either to leave the house, as I ought to have done, or to change my seat, as he wished. “Sir,” he next said to me, weighing each of his words, to the more insulting of which he prefixed a double yoke of consonants, “the interview which I have condescended to grant you, at the request of a person who desires to remain nameless, will mark the final point in our relations. I make no secret of the fact that I had hoped for better things! I should perhaps be straining the meaning of the words a little—which one ought not to do, even with people who are ignorant of their value, simply out of the respect due to oneself—were I to tell you that I had felt a certain liking for you. I think, however, that benevolence, in its most effectively patronising sense, would exceed neither what I felt nor what I was proposing to display. I had, immediately on my return to Paris, given you to understand, while you were still at Balbec, that you could count upon me.” I who remembered with what a torrent of abuse M. de Charlus had parted from me at Balbec made an instinctive gesture of denial. “What!” he shouted angrily, and indeed his face, convulsed and white, differed as much from his ordinary face as does the sea when, on a stormy morning, one sees instead of its customary smiling surface a myriad writhing snakes of spray and foam, “do you mean to pretend that you did not receive my message—almost a declaration—that you were to remember me? What was there in the way