In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [271]
At this name all his gaiety vanished; his face tensed.
“What! he can’t leave me alone even here. I’m nothing but a slave. Old boy, be a sport. I’m not going to open his letter. Tell him you couldn’t find me.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to open it? I suspect it’s something serious.”
“Not on your life. You’ve no idea what lies, what infernal tricks that old scoundrel gets up to. It’s a dodge to make me go and see him. Well, I’m not going. I want to spend the evening in peace.”
“But isn’t there going to be a duel tomorrow?” I asked him, having assumed that he was in the know.
“A duel?” he repeated with an air of stupefaction, “I never heard a word about it. Anyhow, I don’t give a damn—the dirty old beast can go and get himself done in if he likes. But wait a minute, this is interesting, I’d better look at his letter after all. You can tell him you left it here for me, in case I should come in.”
While Morel was speaking, I looked with amazement at the beautiful books which M. de Charlus had given him and which littered his room. The violinist having refused to accept those labelled: “I belong to the Baron” etc., a device which he felt to be insulting to himself, as a mark of vassalage, the Baron, with the sentimental ingenuity in which his ill-starred love abounded, had substituted others, borrowed from his ancestors, but ordered from the binder according to the circumstances of a melancholy friendship. Sometimes they were terse and confident, as Spes mea or Exspectata non eludet; sometimes merely resigned, as J’attendrai. Others were gallant: Mesmes plaisir du mestre, or counselled chastity, such as that borrowed from the family of Simiane, sprinkled with azure towers and fleurs-de-lis, and given a fresh meaning: Sustentant lilia turres. Others, finally, were despairing, and made an appointment in heaven with him who had spurned the donor upon earth: Manet ultima coelo; and (finding the grapes which he had failed to reach too sour, pretending not to have sought what he had not secured) M. de Charlus said in yet another: Non mortale quod opto. But I had no time to examine them all.
If M. de Charlus, in dashing this letter down upon paper, had seemed to be carried away by the daemon that was inspiring his flying pen, as soon as Morel had broken the seal (a leopard between two roses gules, with the motto: Atavis et armis) he began to read the letter as feverishly as M. de Charlus had written it, and over those pages covered at breakneck speed his eye ran no less swiftly than the Baron’s pen. “Good God!” he exclaimed, “this is the last straw! But where am I to find him? Heaven only knows where he is now.” I suggested that if he made haste he might still find him perhaps at a tavern where he had ordered beer as a restorative. “I don’t know whether I shall be coming back,” he said to his landlady, and added to himself, “it will depend on how things turn out.” A few minutes later we reached the café. I noticed M. de Charlus’s expression at the moment when he caught sight of me. It was as though, seeing that I had not returned unaccompanied, he could breathe again, had been restored to life. Being in a mood not to be deprived of Morel’s company that evening, he had pretended to have been informed that two officers of the regiment had spoken ill of him in connexion with the violinist and that he was going to send his seconds to call upon them. Morel had foreseen the scandal—his life in the regiment made impossible—and had come at once. In doing which he had not been altogether wrong. For to make his lie more plausible, M. de Charlus had already written to two friends (one was Cottard) asking them to be his seconds. And if the violinist had not appeared, we may be certain that, mad as he was (and in order to change his sorrow into rage), M. de Charlus would have sent them with a challenge to some officer or other with whom it would have been a relief to him to fight. In the meantime M. de Charlus, remembering that he came of a race that was of purer blood than the House of France, told himself that it was really very good of him