In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [325]
of the Chimays which nobody had ever seen before because it came here expressly for me. On the whole it’s quite good. It might perhaps be better, but after all it’s not bad. Some pretty things, are there not? These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland and the King of England, by Mignard. But why am I telling you all this? You must know it as well as I do, since you were waiting in this room. No? Ah, then they must have put you in the blue drawing-room,” he said with an air that might have been either rudeness, on the score of my lack of curiosity, or personal superiority, in not having taken the trouble to ask where I had been kept waiting. “Look, in this cabinet I have all the hats worn by Madame Elisabeth, by the Princesse de Lamballe, and by Marie-Antoinette. They don’t interest you; it’s as though you couldn’t see. Perhaps you are suffering from an affection of the optic nerve. If you like this kind of beauty better, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear: Beethoven has come to join him.” And indeed one could hear the first chords of the last movement of the Pastoral Symphony, “Joy after the Storm,” performed somewhere not far away, on the first floor no doubt, by a band of musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be playing that, and who the musicians were. “Ah, well, one doesn’t know. One never does know. It’s invisible music. Pretty, isn’t it?” he said to me in a slightly insolent tone, which nevertheless suggested somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “But you don’t care two hoots about it. You want to go home, even if it means showing disrespect for Beethoven and for me. You are pronouncing judgment on yourself,” he added, with an affectionate and mournful air, when the moment had come for me to go. “You will excuse my not accompanying you home, as good manners ordain that I should. Since I have decided not to see you again, spending five minutes more in your company would make very little difference to me. But I am tired, and I have a great deal to do.” However, seeing that it was a fine night: “Ah, well, perhaps I will come in the carriage after all,” he said. “There’s a superb moon which I shall go on to admire from the Bois after I have taken you home. What, you don’t know how to shave!—even on a night when you’ve been dining out, you have still a few hairs here,” he said, taking my chin between two fingers which seemed as it were magnetised, and after a moment’s resistance ran up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. “Ah! how pleasant it would be to look at the ‘blue light of the moon’ in the Bois with someone like yourself,” he said to me with a sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, and then, sadly: “For you’re nice, really; you could be nicer than anyone,” he went on, laying his hand in a fatherly way on my shoulder. “Originally, I must confess that I found you quite insignificant.” I ought to have reflected that he must find me so still. I had only to recall the rage with which he had spoken to me, barely half an hour before. In spite of this I had the impression that he was, for the moment, sincere, that his kindness of heart was prevailing over what I regarded as an almost frenzied condition of susceptibility and pride. The carriage was waiting beside us, and still he prolonged the conversation. “Come along,” he said abruptly, “jump in, in five minutes we shall be at your door. And I shall bid you a good-night which will cut short our relations, for all time. It is better, since we must part for ever, that we should do so, as in music, on a common chord.” Despite these solemn affirmations that we should never see one another again, I could have sworn that M. de Charlus, annoyed at having forgotten himself earlier in the evening and afraid of having hurt my feelings, would not have been displeased to see me once again. Nor was I mistaken, for, a moment later: “There, now,” he said, “if I hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all. In memory of your grandmother, I have had a rare edition