In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [263]
“Chateaubriand is far more alive than you say, and Balzac is, after all, a great writer,” replied M. de Charlus, still too much impregnated with Swann’s tastes not to be irritated by Brichot, “and Balzac was acquainted even with those passions which the rest of the world ignores, or studies only to castigate them. Without referring again to the immortal Illusions perdues, stories like Sarrazine, La Fille aux yeux d’or, Une passion dans le désert, even the distinctly enigmatic Fausse Maîtresse, can be adduced in support of my argument. When I spoke of this ‘extra-natural’ aspect of Balzac to Swann, he said to me: ‘You are of the same opinion as Taine.’ I never had the honour of knowing Monsieur Taine,” M. de Charlus continued (with that irritating habit of inserting an otiose “Monsieur” to which people in society are addicted, as though they imagine that by styling a great writer “Monsieur” they are doing him an honour, perhaps keeping him at his proper distance, and making it quite clear that they do not know him personally), “I never knew Monsieur Taine, but I felt myself greatly honoured by being of the same opinion as he.”
Nevertheless, in spite of these ridiculous social affectations, M. de Charlus was extremely intelligent, and it is probable that if some remote marriage had established a connexion between his family and that of Balzac, he would have felt (no less than Balzac himself, for that matter) a satisfaction on which he would yet have been unable to resist preening himself as on a praiseworthy sign of condescension.
Occasionally, at the station after Saint-Martin-du-Chêne, some young men would get into the train. M. de Charlus could not refrain from looking at them, but as he cut short and concealed the attention that he paid them, he gave the impression of hiding a secret that was even more personal than the real one; it was as though he knew them, and betrayed the knowledge in spite of himself, after having accepted the sacrifice, before turning again to us, like children who, in consequence of a quarrel between parents, have been forbidden to speak to certain of their schoolfellows, but who when they meet them cannot forbear to raise their heads before lowering them again beneath the menacing gaze of their tutor.
At the word borrowed from the Greek with which M. de Charlus, in speaking of Balzac, had followed his allusion to Tristesse d’Olympio in connexion with Splendeurs et Misères, Ski, Brichot and Cottard had glanced at one another with a smile perhaps not so much ironical as tinged with that satisfaction which people at a dinner-party would show who had succeeded in making Dreyfus talk about his own case, or the Empress Eugénie about her reign. They were hoping to press him a little further upon this subject, but we were already at Doncières, where Morel joined us. In his presence, M. de Charlus kept a careful guard over his conversation and, when Ski tried to bring it back to the love of Carlos Herrera for Lucien de Rubempré, the Baron assumed the vexed, mysterious, and finally (seeing that nobody was listening to him) severe and judicial air of a father who hears a man saying something indecent in front of his daughter. Ski having shown some determination to pursue the subject, M. de Charlus, his eyes starting out of his head, raised his voice and with a meaningful glance at Albertine—who in fact could not hear what we were saying, being engaged in conversation with Mme Cottard and Princess Sherbatoff—and the hint of a double meaning of someone who wishes to teach