In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [6]
But when I was inside the shop, taking care not to let the wooden floor make the slightest creak, as I realised that the least sound in Jupien’s shop could be heard from mine, I thought to myself how rash Jupien and M. de Charlus had been, and how luck had favoured them.
I did not dare move. The Guermantes groom, taking advantage no doubt of his master’s absence, had, as it happened, transferred to the shop in which I now stood a ladder which hitherto had been kept in the coach-house, and if I had climbed this I could have opened the fanlight above and heard as well as if I had been in Jupien’s shop itself. But I was afraid of making a noise. Besides, it was unnecessary. I had not even cause to regret my not having arrived in the shop until several minutes had elapsed. For from what I heard at first in Jupien’s quarters, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another’s throat within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime. I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as noisy as pain, namely pleasure, especially when there is added to it—in the absence of the fear of pregnancy which could not be the case here, despite the hardly convincing example in the Golden Legend—an immediate concern about cleanliness. Finally, after about half an hour (during which time I had stealthily hoisted myself up my ladder so as to peep through the fanlight which I did not open), the Baron emerged and a conversation began. Jupien refused with insistence the money that M. de Charlus was trying to press upon him.
Then M. de Charlus took one step outside the shop. “Why do you have your chin shaved like that,” asked the other in a caressing tone. “It’s so becoming, a nice beard.” “Ugh! It’s disgusting,” the Baron replied.
Meanwhile he still lingered on the threshold and plied Jupien with questions about the neighbourhood. “You don’t know anything about the man who sells chestnuts round the corner, not the one on the left, he’s a horror, but on the other side, a big dark fellow? And the chemist opposite, he has a very nice cyclist who delivers his medicines.” These questions must have ruffled Jupien, for, drawing himself up with the indignation of a courtesan who has been betrayed, he replied: “I can see you’re a regular flirt.” Uttered in a pained, frigid, affected tone, this reproach must have had its effect on M. de Charlus, who, to counteract the bad impression his curiosity had produced, addressed to Jupien, in too low a tone for me to be able to make out his words, a request the granting of which would doubtless necessitate their prolonging their sojourn in the shop, and which moved the tailor sufficiently to make him forget his annoyance, for he studied the Baron’s face, plump and flushed beneath his grey hair, with the supremely blissful air of a person whose self-esteem has just been profoundly flattered, and, deciding to grant M. de Charlus the favour that he had just asked of him, after various remarks lacking in refinement such as “What a big bum you have!”, said to the Baron with an air at once smiling, moved, superior and grateful: “All right, you big baby, come along!”
“If I hark back to the question of the tram conductor,” M. de Charlus tenaciously pursued, “it is because, apart from anything else, it might provide some interest for my homeward journey. For it happens to me at times, like the Caliph who used to roam the streets of Baghdad in the guise of a common merchant, to condescend to follow some curious little person whose profile may have taken my fancy.” At this point I was struck by the same observation as had