In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [260]
who was flattered, and was moreover a charming man, promised to do so and kept his promise. The Baron was deeply touched by all the kindness and courtesy which this important personage (who, for his own part, was exclusively and passionately a lover of women) showed him, all the facilities that he procured for him to see Morel in those official premises from which outsiders are excluded, all the opportunities which the celebrated artist secured for the young virtuoso to perform, to get himself known, by naming him in preference to others of equal talent for private recitals which were likely to make a special stir. But M. de Charlus never suspected that he owed the maestro all the more gratitude in that the latter, doubly deserving, or alternatively guilty twice over, was fully aware of the relations between the young violinist and his noble patron. He abetted them, certainly not out of any sympathy for them since he was incapable of understanding any other love than the love of women, which had inspired the whole of his music, but from moral indifference, a kindness and readiness to oblige characteristic of his profession, social affability, and snobbery. He had so little doubt as to the character of those relations that, at his first dinner at La Raspelière, he had inquired of Ski, speaking of M. de Charlus and Morel as he might have spoken of a man and his mistress: “Have they been long together?” But, too much the man of the world to let the parties concerned see that he knew, prepared, should any gossip arise among Morel’s fellow-students, to rebuke them and to reassure Morel by saying to him in a fatherly tone: “One hears that sort of thing about everybody nowadays,” he continued to overwhelm the Baron with civilities which the latter thought charming, but quite natural, being incapable of suspecting the eminent maestro of so much vice or of so much virtue. For nobody was ever base enough to repeat to M. de Charlus the things that were said behind his back, and the jokes about Morel. And yet this simple situation is enough to show that even that thing which is universally decried, which no one would dream of defending—gossip—has itself, whether it is aimed at ourselves and thus becomes especially disagreeable to us, or whether it tells us something about a third person of which we were unaware, a certain psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view which it has of what it imagines things to be and which is actually no more than their outward appearance. It turns this appearance inside out with the magic dexterity of an idealist philosopher and rapidly presents to our gaze an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric. Could M. de Charlus ever have imagined these words spoken by a certain tender relative: “How on earth can you suppose that Mémé is in love with me? You forget that I’m a woman!” And yet she was genuinely, deeply attached to M. de Charlus. Why then need we be surprised that in the case of the Verdurins, on whose affection and goodwill he had no reason to rely, the remarks which they made behind his back (and they did not, as we shall see, confine themselves to remarks) should have been so different from what he imagined them to be, that is to say no more than a reflexion of the remarks that he heard when he was present? These latter alone decorated with affectionate inscriptions the little ideal bower to which M. de Charlus retired at times to dream, when he introduced his imagination for a moment into the idea that the Verdurins had of him. Its atmosphere was so congenial, so cordial, the repose it offered so comforting, that when M. de Charlus, before going to sleep, had withdrawn to it for a momentary relaxation from his worries, he never emerged from it without a smile. But, for each one of us, a bower of this sort is double: opposite the one which we imagine to be unique, there is the other which is normally invisible to us, the real one, symmetrical with the one we know, but very different, whose decoration, in which we should recognise nothing