In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [31]
Mme d’Arpajon was even more cowardly than Mme de Souvré, but there was more excuse for her cowardice. She knew that she had always had very little influence in society. This influence, such as it was, had been reduced still further by her liaison with the Duc de Guermantes; his desertion of her dealt it the final blow. The ill-humour aroused in her by my request that she should introduce me to the Prince produced a silence which she was ingenuous enough to imagine a convincing pretence of not having heard what I said. She was not even aware that her anger made her frown. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was aware of it, did not bother about the inconsistency, and made use of it for the lesson in tact which she was thus able to teach me without undue rudeness; I mean a silent lesson, but none the less eloquent for that.
Apart from this, Mme d’Arpajon was extremely nettled, for many eyes were raised in the direction of a Renaissance balcony at the corner of which, instead of one of those monumental statues which were so often used as ornaments at that period, there leaned, no less sculptural than they, the magnificent Duchesse de Surgis-le-Duc, who had recently succeeded Mme d’Arpajon in the affections of Basin de Guermantes. Beneath the flimsy white tulle which protected her from the cool night air, one saw the supple form of a winged victory.
I had no one else to turn to but M. de Charlus, who had withdrawn to a room downstairs which opened on to the garden. I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artful simplicity of his evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor’s eye could have picked out, had the air of a “Harmony in Black and White” by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was wearing, suspended from a broad ribbon over his shirt-front, the cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the religious Order of Malta. At that moment the Baron’s game was interrupted by Mme de Gallardon, escorting her nephew, the Vicomte de Courvoisier, a young man with a pretty face and an impertinent air. “Cousin,” said Mme de Gallardon, “allow me to introduce my nephew Adalbert. Adalbert, you remember the famous Uncle Palamède of whom you have heard so much.” “Good evening, Madame de Gallardon,” M. de Charlus replied. And he added, without so much as a glance at the young man: “Good evening, sir,” with a truculent air and in a tone so violently discourteous that everyone was stunned. Perhaps M. de Charlus, knowing that Mme de Gallardon had her doubts as to his morals and had once been unable to resist the temptation to hint at them, was determined to nip in the bud any scandal that she might embroider upon a friendly reception of her nephew, and at the same time make a resounding profession of indifference with regard to young men in general; perhaps he did not consider that the said Adalbert had responded to his aunt’s words with a sufficiently respectful air; perhaps, desirous of making his mark later with so attractive a cousin, he wished to give himself the advantage of a pre-emptive attack, like those sovereigns who, before engaging upon diplomatic action, reinforce it with an act of war.
It was not so difficult as I supposed to secure M. de Charlus’s consent to my request that he should introduce me to the Prince de Guermantes. For one thing, in the course of the last twenty years this Don Quixote had tilted against so many windmills (often relatives who he claimed had behaved badly to him), he had so frequently banned people as being “impossible to