In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [269]
to him, including his name. Reflecting that Morel’s Christian name was Charles, which resembled Charlus, and that the house where they usually met was called les Charmes, he sought to persuade Morel that, a pretty name that is agreeable to pronounce being half the battle in establishing an artistic reputation, the virtuoso ought without hesitation to take the name Charmel, a discreet allusion to the scene of their assignations. Morel shrugged his shoulders. As a conclusive argument, M. de Charlus was unfortunately inspired to add that he had a valet of that name. He succeeded only in arousing the furious indignation of the young man. “There was a time when my ancestors were proud of the tire of chamberlain or butler to the King,” said the Baron. “There was also a time,” replied Morel haughtily, “when my ancestors cut off your ancestors’ heads.” M. de Charlus would have been greatly surprised had he been capable of realising that, having resigned himself, failing “Charmel,” to adopting Morel and conferring on him one of the titles of the Guermantes family which were at his disposal—but which circumstances, as we shall see, did not permit him to offer the violinist—he would have met with a refusal on the latter’s part on the grounds of the artistic reputation attached to the name Morel, and of the things that would be said about him at his classes. So far above the Faubourg Saint-Germain did he place the Rue Bergère and its Conservatoire! M. de Charlus was obliged to content himself with having symbolical rings made for Morel, bearing the antique device: PLVS VLTRA CAR’LVS. Certainly, in the face of an adversary of a sort with which he was unfamiliar, M. de Charlus ought to have changed his tactics. But which of us is capable of that? Moreover, if M. de Charlus made blunders, Morel was not guiltless of them either. Far more than the actual circumstance which brought about the rupture between them, what was destined, temporarily at least (but the temporary turned out to be permanent), to be his downfall with M. de Charlus was that his nature included not only the baseness which made him obsequious in the face of harshness and respond with insolence to kindness. Running parallel with this innate baseness, there was in him a complicated neurasthenia of ill breeding, which, springing up on every occasion when he was in the wrong or was becoming a nuisance, meant that at the very moment when he needed all his niceness, all his gentleness, all his gaiety to disarm the Baron, he became sombre and aggressive, tried to provoke discussions on matters where he knew that the other did not agree with him, and maintained his own hostile attitude with a weakness of argument and a peremptory violence which enhanced that weakness. For, very soon running short of arguments, he invented fresh ones as he went along, in which he displayed the full extent of his ignorance and stupidity. These were barely noticeable when he was in a friendly mood and sought only to please. On the other hand, nothing else was visible in his black moods, when, from being inoffensive, they became odious. Whereupon M. de Charlus felt that he could endure no more and that his only hope lay in a brighter morrow, while Morel, forgetting that the Baron was keeping him in the lap of luxury, would give an ironical smile of condescending pity, and say: “I’ve never taken anything from anybody. Which means that there’s nobody to whom I owe a single word of thanks.”
In the meantime, as though he were dealing with a man of the world, M. de Charlus continued to give vent to his rage, whether genuine or feigned, but in either case ineffective. It was not always so, however. Thus one day (which in fact came after this initial period) when the Baron was returning with Charlie and myself from a lunch-party at the Verdurins’ expecting to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with the violinist at Doncières, the latter’s dismissal of him, as soon as we left the train, with: “No, I’ve an engagement,” caused M. de Charlus so keen a disappointment that, although he tried to put a