• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1450 0

is to lecture them, to make them feel important, to make them regard you as a reactionary: “I have no wish to blaspheme against the Gods of Youth,” he said, with that furtive glance at myself which an orator turns upon a member of his audience when he mentions him by name, “I have no wish to be damned as a heretic and renegade in the Mallarméan chapel in which our new friend, like all the young men of his age, must have served the esoteric mass, at least as an acolyte, and have shown himself deliquescent or Rosicrucian. But really, we have seen more than enough of these intellectuals worshipping art with a capital A, who, when they can no longer intoxicate themselves upon Zola, inject themselves with Verlaine. Having become etheromaniacs out of Baudelairean devotion, they would no longer be capable of the virile effort which the country may one day or another demand of them, anaesthetised as they are by the great literary neurosis in the heated, enervating atmosphere, heavy with unwholesome vapours, of a symbolism of the opium den.”

Incapable of feigning the slightest admiration for Brichot’s inept and motley tirade, I turned to Ski and assured him that he was entirely mistaken as to the family to which M. de Charlus belonged; he replied that he was certain of his facts, and added that I myself had said that his real name was Gandin, Le Gandin. “I told you,” was my answer, “that Mme de Cambremer was the sister of an engineer called M. Legrandin. I never said a word to you about M. de Charlus. There is about as much connexion between him and Mme de Cambremer as between the Great Condé and Racine.”

“Ah! I thought there was,” said Ski lightly, with no more apology for his mistake than he had made a few hours earlier for the mistake that had nearly made his party miss the train.

“Do you intend to remain long on this coast?” Mme Verdurin asked M. de Charlus, in whom she foresaw an addition to the faithful and trembled lest he should be returning too soon to Paris.

“Goodness me, one never knows,” replied M. de Charlus in a nasal drawl. “I should like to stay until the end of September.”

“You are quite right,” said Mme Verdurin; “that’s when we get splendid storms at sea.”

“To tell you the truth, that is not what would influence me. I have for some time past unduly neglected the Archangel Michael, my patron saint, and I should like to make amends to him by staying for his feast, on the 29th of September, at the Abbey on the Mount.”

“You take an interest in all that sort of thing?” asked Mme Verdurin, who might perhaps have succeeded in hushing the voice of her outraged anti-clericalism had she not been afraid that so long an expedition might make the violinist and the Baron “defect” for forty-eight hours.

“You are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness,” M. de Charlus replied insolently. “I have told you that Saint Michael is one of my glorious patrons.” Then, smiling with a benevolent ecstasy, his eyes gazing into the distance, his voice reinforced by an exaltation which seemed now to be not merely aesthetic but religious: “It is so beautiful at the Offertory when Michael stands erect by the altar, in a white robe, swinging a golden censer heaped so high with perfumes that the fragrance of them mounts up to God.”

“We might go there in a party,” suggested Mme Verdurin, notwithstanding her horror of the clergy.

“At that moment, when the Offertory begins,” went on M. de Charlus who, for other reasons but in the same manner as good speakers in Parliament, never replied to an interruption and would pretend not to have heard it, “it would be wonderful to see our young friend Palestrinising and even performing an aria by Bach. The worthy Abbot, too, would be wild with joy, and it is the greatest homage, at least the greatest public homage, that I can pay to my patron saint. What an edification for the faithful! We must mention it presently to the young Angelico of music, himself a warrior like Saint Michael.”

Saniette, summoned to make a fourth, declared that he did not know how to play whist. And Cottard, seeing that