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By Root 1426 0

he could not see Jupien elsewhere and with greater convenience, but because to him just as much as to me the afternoon sunshine and the blossoming plant were no doubt linked with his memories. Moreover he did not content himself with recommending the Jupiens to Mme de Villeparisis, to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to a whole brilliant clientele who were all the more assiduous in their patronage of the young seamstress when they saw that the few ladies who had resisted, or had merely delayed their submission, were subjected to the direst reprisals by the Baron, whether in order that they might serve as examples or because they had aroused his wrath and had stood out against his attempted domination. He made Jupien’s position more and more lucrative, until he finally engaged him as his secretary and established him in the state in which we shall see him later on. “Ah, now! There’s a happy man, that Jupien,” said Françoise, who had a tendency to minimise or exaggerate people’s generosity according as it was bestowed on herself or on others. Not that, in this instance, she had any need to exaggerate, nor for that matter did she feel any jealousy, being genuinely fond of Jupien. “Oh, he’s such a good man, the Baron,” she went on, “so gentlemanly, so devout, so proper! If I had a daughter to marry and was one of the rich myself, I’d give her to the Baron with my eyes shut.” “But, Françoise,” my mother observed gently, “she’d be well supplied with husbands, that daughter of yours. Don’t forget you’ve already promised her to Jupien.” “Ah, yes!” replied Françoise, “there’s another of them that would make a woman very happy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, it makes no difference to your nature. The Baron and Jupien, they’re just the same sort of person.”

However, I greatly exaggerated at the time, on the strength of this first revelation, the elective character of so carefully selected a combination. Admittedly, every man of M. de Charlus’s kind is an extraordinary creature since, if he does not make concessions to the possibilities of life, he seeks out essentially the love of a man of the other race, that is to say a man who is a lover of women (and incapable consequently of loving him); contrary to what I had imagined in the courtyard, where I had seen Jupien hovering round M. de Charlus like the orchid making overtures to the bumble-bee, these exceptional creatures with whom we commiserate are a vast crowd, as we shall see in the course of this book, for a reason which will be disclosed only at the end of it, and commiserate with themselves for being too many rather than too few. For the two angels who were posted at the gates of Sodom to learn whether its inhabitants (according to Genesis) had indeed done all the things the report of which had ascended to the Eternal Throne must have been, and of this one can only be glad, exceedingly ill chosen by the Lord, who ought to have entrusted the task only to a Sodomite. Such a one would never have been persuaded by such excuses as “A father of six, I’ve got two mistresses,” to lower his flaming sword benevolently and mitigate the punishment. He would have answered: “Yes, and your wife lives in a torment of jealousy. But even when you haven’t chosen these women from Gomorrah, you spend your nights with a watcher of flocks from Hebron.” And he would at once have made him retrace his steps to the city which the rain of fire and brimstone was to destroy. On the contrary, all the shameless Sodomites were allowed to escape, even if, on catching sight of a boy, they turned their heads like Lot’s wife, though without being on that account changed like her into pillars of salt. With the result that they engendered a numerous progeny with whom this gesture has remained habitual, like that of the dissolute women who, while apparently studying a row of shoes displayed in a shop window, turn their heads to keep track of a passing student. These descendants of the Sodomites, so numerous that we may apply to them that other verse of Genesis: “If a man can number the dust of the earth,