In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [255]
“We felt we simply must come and keep you company, Monsieur,” Mme Cottard said kindly to the Baron, “and not leave you alone like this in your little corner. It is a great pleasure to us.”
“I am greatly honoured,” the Baron intoned, bowing coldly.
“I was so pleased to hear that you have definitely chosen this neighbourhood to set up your taber . . .”
She was going to say “tabernacle” but it occurred to her that the word was Hebraic and discourteous to a Jew who might see some innuendo in it. And so she pulled herself up in order to choose another of the expressions that were familiar to her, that is to say a ceremonious expression: “to set up, I should say, your penates.” (It is true that these deities do not appertain to the Christian religion either, but to one which has been dead for so long that it no longer claims any devotees whose feelings one need be afraid of hurting.) “We, unfortunately, what with term beginning, and the Doctor’s hospital duties, can never take up residence for very long in one place.” And glancing down at a cardboard box: “You see too how we poor women are less fortunate than the sterner sex; even to go such a short distance as to our friends the Verdurins’, we are obliged to take a whole heap of impedimenta.”
I meanwhile was examining the Baron’s volume of Balzac. It was not a paper-covered copy, picked up on a bookstall, like the volume of Bergotte which he had lent me at our first meeting. It was a book from his own library, and as such bore the device: “I belong to the Baron de Charlus,” for which was substituted at times, to show the studious tastes of the Guermantes: “In proeliis non semper,” or yet another motto: “Non sine labore.” But we shall see these presently replaced by others, in an attempt to please Morel.
Mme Cottard, after a moment or two, hit upon a subject which she felt to be of more personal interest to the Baron. “I don’t know whether you agree with me, Monsieur,” she said to him presently, “but I am very broad-minded, and in my opinion there is a great deal of good in all religions as long as people practise them sincerely. I am not one of the people who get hydrophobia at the sight of a . . . Protestant.”
“I was taught that mine is the true religion,” replied M. de Charlus.
“He’s a fanatic,” thought Mme Cottard. “Swann, until towards the end, was more tolerant; it’s true that he was a convert.”
Now the Baron, on the contrary, was not only a Christian, as we know, but endued with a mediaeval piety. For him, as for sculptors of the thirteenth century, the Christian Church was, in the living sense of the word, peopled with a swarm of beings whom he believed to be entirely real: prophets, apostles, angels, holy personages of every sort, surrounding the incarnate Word, his mother and her spouse, the Eternal Father, all the martyrs and doctors of the Church, as they may be seen in high relief thronging the porches or lining the naves of cathedrals. Out of all these M. de Charlus had chosen as his patrons and intercessors the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, with whom he discoursed regularly so that they might convey his prayers to the Eternal Father before whose throne they stand. And so Mme Cottars’s mistake amused me greatly.
To leave the religious sphere, let us note that the Doctor, who had come to Paris with the meagre equipment of a peasant mother’s advice, and had then been absorbed in the almost purely material studies to which those who seek to advance in a medical career are obliged to devote themselves for a great many years, had never