In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [224]
I was astonished to hear from the valet how relatively early it was. I felt none the less rested. It is light sleeps that have a long duration, because, being an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, preserving a somewhat faded but constant impression of the former, they require infinitely more time to make us feel rested than a deep sleep, which may be short. I felt entirely relaxed for another reason. If remembering that we have tired ourselves is enough to make us feel our tiredness, saying to oneself “I’ve rested” is enough to create rest. Now I had been dreaming that M. de Charlus was a hundred and ten years old, and had just boxed the ears of his own mother, Mme Verdurin, because she had paid five billion francs for a bunch of violets; I was thus assured of having slept profoundly, had dreamed back to front what had been in my thoughts overnight and all the possibilities of life at the moment; this was enough to make me feel entirely rested.
I should greatly have astonished my mother, who could not understand M. de Charlus’s assiduity in visiting the Verdurins, had I told her who (on the very day on which Albertine’s toque had been ordered, without a word about it to her, in order that it might come as a surprise) M. de Charlus had brought to dine in a private room at the Grand Hotel, Balbec. His guest was none other than the footman of a lady who was a cousin of the Cambremers. This footman was very smartly dressed, and, as he crossed the hall with the Baron, “looked the man of fashion,” as Saint-Loup would have said, in the eyes of the visitors. Indeed, the young page-boys, the Levites who were swarming down the temple steps at that moment because it was the time when they came on duty, paid no attention to the two newcomers, one of whom, M. de Charlus, kept his eyes lowered to show that he was paying little if any to them. He appeared to be trying to carve his way through their midst. “Thrive then, dear hope of a sacred nation,” he said, recalling a passage from Racine, and applying to it a wholly different meaning. “Pardon?” asked the footman, who was not well up in the classics. M. de Charlus made no reply, for he took a certain pride in never answering questions and in walking straight ahead as though there were no other visitors in the hotel and no one else existed in the world except himself, Baron de Charlus. But, having continued to quote the speech of Josabeth: “Come, then, my daughters,” he felt a revulsion and did not, like her, add: “Bid them approach,” for these young people had not yet reached the age at which sex is completely developed and which appealed to M. de Charlus.
Moreover, if he had written to Mme de Chevregny’s footman, because he had had no doubt of his docility, he had expected someone more virile. On seeing him, he found him more effeminate than he would have liked. He told him that he had been expecting someone else, for he knew by sight another of Mme de Chevregny’s footmen, whom he had noticed upon the box of her carriage. This was an extremely rustic type of peasant, the very opposite of the present footman, who, regarding his mincing ways as a mark of his superiority and never doubting that it was these man-of-fashion airs that had captivated M. de Charlus, could not even guess whom the Baron meant. “But there’s nobody else except one you can’t have had your eye on—he’s hideous, just like a great peasant.” And at the thought that it was perhaps this lout whom the Baron had seen, he felt wounded in his self-esteem. The Baron guessed this, and, widening his quest, “But I haven’t made a vow to know only Mme de Chevregny’s people,” he said. “Surely there