In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [312]
“I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, and I really must apologise for keeping you waiting in this nasty cab,” he said, in order to fill the vacuum in his anxious mind with words, and oblivious of the fact that the nasty cab must on the contrary seem perfectly nice to a bus conductor. “I hope you will give me the pleasure of spending an evening, a comfortable evening with me. Are you never free except in the evenings?”
“Only on Sundays.”
“Ah! you’re free on Sunday afternoons? Excellent. That makes everything much simpler. Do you like music? Do you ever go to concerts?”
“Yes, I often goes.”
“Ah! very good indeed. You see how nicely we’re getting on already? I really am delighted to know you. We might go to a Colonne concert. I often have the use of my cousin de Guermantes’s box, or my cousin Philippe de Coburg’s” (he did not dare say the King of Bulgaria for fear of seeming to be “showing off,” but although the bus conductor had no idea what the Baron was talking about and had never heard of the Coburgs, this princely name seemed already too showy to M. de Charlus, who in order not to give the impression of over-rating what he was offering, modestly proceeded to disparage it). “Yes, my cousin Philippe de Coburg—you don’t know him?” and at once, as a rich man might say to a third-class traveller: “One’s so much more comfortable than in first-class,” he went on: “All the more reason for envying you, really, because he’s a bit of a fool, poor fellow. Or rather, it’s not so much that he’s a fool, but he’s irritating—all the Coburgs are. But in any case I envy you: that open-air life must be so agreeable, seeing so many different people, and in a charming spot, surrounded by trees—for I believe my friend Jupien told me that the terminus of your line was at La Muette. I’ve often wanted to live out there. There’s nowhere more beautiful in the whole of Paris. So it’s agreed, then: we’ll go to a Colonne concert. We can have the box closed. Not that I shouldn’t be extremely flattered to be seen with you, but we’d be more peaceful . . . Society is so boring, isn’t it? Of course I don’t mean my cousin Guermantes who is charming and so beautiful.”
Just as shy scholars who are afraid of being accused of pedantry abbreviate an erudite allusion and only succeed in appearing more long-winded by becoming totally obscure, so the Baron, in seeking to belittle the splendour of the names he cited, made his discourse completely unintelligible to the bus conductor. The latter, failing to understand its terms, tried to interpret it according to its tone, and as the tone was that of someone who is apologising, he was beginning to fear that he might not receive the sum that Jupien had led him to expect.
“When you go to concerts on Sunday, do you go to the Colonne ones too?”
“Pardon?”
“What concert-hall do you go to on Sundays?” the Baron repeated, slightly irritated.
“Sometimes to Concordia, sometimes to the Apéritif Concert, or to the Concert Mayol. But I prefer to stretch me legs a bit. It ain’t much fun having to stay sitting down all day long.”
“I don’t like Mayol. He has an effeminate manner that I find horribly unpleasant. On the whole I detest all men of that type.”
Since Mayol was popular, the conductor understood what the Baron said, but was even more puzzled as to why he had wanted to see him, since it could not be for something he hated.
“We might go to a museum together,” the Baron went on. “Have you ever been to a museum?”
“I only know the Louvre and the Waxworks Museum.”
I returned to the Princess, bringing back her letter. In her disappointment, she burst out at me angrily, but apologised at once.
“You’re going to hate me,” she said. “I hardly dare ask you to go back a third time.”
I stopped the cab a little