In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [313]
“Well, you could send me a message when you go out for a meal at noon,” said the conductor.
If he used this expression, which applied less accurately to the life of M. de Charlus, who did not “go out for a meal at noon,” than to that of omnibus employees and others, this was doubtless not from lack of intelligence but from contempt for local colour. In the tradition of the old masters, he treated the character of M. de Charlus as a Veronese or a Racine those of the husband at the marriage feast in Cana or Orestes, whom they depict as though this legendary Jew and this legendary Greek had belonged, the one to the luxury-loving patriciate of Venice, the other to the court of Louis XIV. M. de Charlus was content to overlook the inaccuracy, and replied: “No, it would be simpler if you would arrange it with Jupien. I’ll speak to him about it. Good-night, it’s been delightful,” he added, unable to relinquish either his worldly courtesy or his aristocratic hauteur. Perhaps he was even more formally polite at such moments than he was in society; for when one steps outside one’s habitual sphere, shyness renders one incapable of invention, and it is the memory of one’s habits that one calls upon for practically everything; hence it is upon the actions whereby one hoped to emancipate oneself from one’s habits that the latter are most forcibly brought to bear, almost in the manner of those toxic states which intensify when the toxin is withdrawn.
Jupien got out with the conductor.
“Well then, what did I tell you?”
“Ah, I wouldn’t mind a few evenings like that! I quite like hearing someone chatting away like that, steady like, a chap who doesn’t get worked up. He isn’t a priest?”
“No, not at all.”
“He looks like a photographer I went to one time to get my picture taken. It’s not him?”
“No, not him either.”
“Come off it,” said the conductor, who thought that Jupien was trying to deceive him and feared, since M. de Charlus had remained rather vague about future assignations, that he might “stand him up,” “come off it, you can’t tell me it isn’t the photographer. I recognised him all right. He lives at 3, Rue de l’Echelle, and he’s got a little black dog called Love, I think—so you see I know.”
“You’re talking rubbish,” said Jupien. “I don’t say there isn’t a photographer who has a little black dog, but I do say he’s not the man I introduced you to.”
“All right, all right, you can say what you like, but I’m sticking to my own opinion.”
“You can stick to it as long as you like for all I care. I’ll call round tomorrow about the rendezvous.”
Jupien returned to the cab, but the Baron, restive, had already got out of it.
“He’s nice, most agreeable and well-mannered. But what’s his hair like? He isn’t bald, I hope? I didn’t dare ask him to take his cap off. I was as nervous as a kitten.”
“What a big baby you are!”
“Anyway we can discuss it, but the next time I should prefer to see him performing his professional functions. For instance I could take the corner seat beside him in his tram. And if it was possible by doubling the price, I should even like to see him do some rather cruel things—for example, pretend not to see the old ladies signalling to the tram and then having to go home on foot.”
“You vicious thing! But that, dearie, would not be very easy, because there’s also the driver, you see. He wants to be well thought of at work.”
As I emerged from the cul-de-sac, I remembered the evening at the Princesse de Guermantes’s (the evening which I interrupted in the middle of describing it with this anticipatory digression, but to which I shall return) when M. de Charlus denied being in love with the Comtesse Molé, and I thought to myself that if we could read the thoughts of the people we know we would often be astonished to find