In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [56]
“You see, I wasn’t exaggerating,” Robert said in my ear. “Just look at my uncle’s attentiveness to Mme de Surgis. Though I must say it does surprise me. If Oriane knew, she would be furious. Really, there are enough women in the world without his having to go and pounce on her,” he went on. Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages. Besides, while completely mistaken about his uncle, whom he supposed to be devoted to women, Robert, in his rancour, spoke too lightly of M. de Charlus. One is not always somebody’s nephew with impunity. It is often through him that a hereditary habit is transmitted sooner or later. We might indeed arrange a whole gallery of portraits, named like the German comedy Uncle and Nephew, in which we should see the uncle watching jealously, albeit unconsciously, for his nephew to end by becoming like himself. I might even add that this gallery would be incomplete were we not to include in it uncles who are not blood relations, being the uncles only of their nephews’ wives. For the Messieurs de Charlus of this world are so convinced that they themselves are the only good husbands, and what is more the only ones of whom a wife would not be jealous, that generally, out of affection for their niece, they make her marry another Charlus. Which tangles the skein of family likenesses. And, to affection for the niece is added at times affection for her betrothed as well. Such marriages are not uncommon, and are often what is called happy.
“What were we talking about? Oh yes, that big, fair girl, Mme Putbus’s maid. She goes with women too, but I don’t suppose you mind that. I tell you frankly, I’ve never seen such a gorgeous creature.” “I imagine her as being rather Giorgionesque?” “Wildly Giorgionesque! Oh, if I only had a little time in Paris, what wonderful things there are to be done! And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know, I’ve finished with all that.”
I soon discovered, to my surprise, that he had equally finished with literature, whereas it was merely with regard to literary men that he had struck me as being disillusioned at our last meeting. (“They’re practically all a pack of scoundrels,” he had said to me, a remark that was to be explained by his justified resentment towards certain of Rachel’s friends. For they had persuaded her that she would never have any talent if she allowed Robert, “scion of an alien race,” to acquire an influence over her, and with her used to make fun of him, to his face, at the dinners he gave for them.) But in reality Robert’s love of Letters was in no sense profound, did not spring from his true nature, was only a by-product of his love of Rachel, and had faded with the latter at the same time as his loathing for voluptuaries and his religious respect for the virtue of women.
“There’s something rather strange about those two young men. Look at that curious passion for gambling, Marquise,” said M. de Charlus, drawing Mme de Surgis’s attention to her two sons, as though he were completely unaware of their identity. “They must be a pair of orientals, they have certain characteristic features, they’re perhaps Turks,” he went on, so as to give further support to his feigned innocence and at the same time to exhibit a vague antipathy, which, when in due course it gave place to affability, would prove that the latter was addressed to the young men solely in their capacity as sons of Mme de Surgis, having begun only when the Baron discovered who they were. Perhaps, too, M. de Charlus, whose insolence was a natural gift which he