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“So it’s impossible for you to tell me?” I asked, racking my brains in a last fruitless effort to discover to whom I could have spoken about M. de Charlus.

“Did you not hear me say that I had given a promise of secrecy to my informant?” he said in a snarling voice. “I see that with your fondness for abject utterances you combine one for futile persistence. You ought at least to have the intelligence to profit from a final interview with me, and not go on talking for the sake of talking drivel.”

“Monsieur,” I replied, moving away from him, “you insult me. I am disarmed, because you are several times my age, we are not equally matched. Moreover, I cannot convince you. I have already sworn to you that I have said nothing.”

“So I’m lying!” he screamed in a terrifying tone, and with a bound forward that brought him within a yard of me.

“Someone has misinformed you.”

Then in a gentle, affectionate, melancholy voice, as in those symphonies which are played without a break between the different movements, in which a graceful scherzo, amiable and idyllic, follows the thunder-peals of the opening part, “It is quite possible,” he said. “Generally speaking, a remark repeated at second hand is rarely true. It is your fault if, not having profited by the opportunities of seeing me which I had held out to you, you have not furnished me, by those frank and open words of daily intercourse which create confidence, with the unique and sovereign remedy against a remark which made you out a traitor. Either way, true or false, the allegation has done its work. I can never rid myself of the impression it made on me. I cannot even say that he who chasteneth well loveth well, for I have chastened you well enough but I no longer love you.”

While saying this he had forced me to sit down and had rung the bell. A different footman appeared. “Bring something to drink and order the brougham.” I said that I was not thirsty, that it was very late, and that in any case I had a carriage waiting. “They have probably paid him and sent him away,” he told me, “you needn’t worry about that. I’m ordering a carriage to take you home . . . If you’re anxious about the time . . . I could have given you a room here . . .” I said that my mother would be worried. “Ah! of course, yes. Well, true or false, the remark has done its work. My affection, a trifle premature, had flowered too soon, and, like those apple-trees of which you spoke so poetically at Balbec, it has been unable to withstand the first frost.”

If M. de Charlus’s affection for me had not been destroyed, he could hardly have acted differently, since, while assuring me that we had fallen out, he made me sit down and drink, asked me to stay the night, and was now going to send me home. He had indeed an air of dreading the moment at which he must part from me and find himself alone, that sort of slightly anxious fear which his sister-in-law and cousin Guermantes had appeared to me to be feeling when she had tried to force me to stay a little longer, with something of the same momentary fondness for me, of the same effort to prolong the passing minute.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “I have not the gift to cause what has once been destroyed to blossom again. My affection for you is quite dead. Nothing can revive it. I believe that it is not unworthy of me to confess that I regret it. I always feel myself to be a little like Victor Hugo’s Boaz: ‘I am widowed and alone, and darkness gathers over me.’ ”

I walked back through the big green drawing-room with him. I told him, speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. “Isn’t it?” he replied. “It’s a good thing to be fond of something. The panelling is by Bagard. What is rather charming, d’you see, is that it was made to match the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. You observe, it repeats the same decorative design. There used to be only two places where you could see this, the Louvre and M. d’Hinnisdal’s house. But naturally, as soon as I had decided to come and live in this street, there cropped up an old family house