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By Root 1461 0

when she chose him for her lover. For all the women friends of the Duchesse de Guermantes were to rally round her, and so Mme de Surgis must descend for the second time that slope up which she had so laboriously toiled. “Well!” M. de Charlus was saying to her in an effort to prolong the conversation, “you must lay my tribute at the feet of the beautiful portrait. How is it? What has become of it?” “Why,” replied Mme de Surgis, “you know I haven’t got it now; my husband wasn’t pleased with it.” “Not pleased! With one of the greatest works of art of our time, equal to Nattier’s Duchesse de Châteauroux, and, moreover, perpetuating no less majestic and heart-shattering a goddess. Oh, that little blue collar! I swear, Vermeer himself never painted a fabric more consummately—but we must not say it too loud or Swann will fall upon us to avenge his favourite painter, the Master of Delft.” The Marquise, turning round, addressed a smile and held out her hand to Swann, who had risen to greet her. But almost without concealment, because his advanced years had deprived him either of the will, from indifference to the opinion of others, or the physical power, from the intensity of his desire and the weakening of the controls that help to disguise it, as soon as Swann, on taking the Marquise’s hand, had seen her bosom at close range and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, drugged by her perfume, quivered like the wings of a butterfly about to alight upon a half-glimpsed flower. Abruptly he shook off the intoxication that had seized him, and Mme de Surgis herself, although embarrassed, stifled a deep sigh, so contagious can desire prove at times. “The painter was offended,” she said to M. de Charlus, “and took it back. I have heard that it is now at Diane de Saint-Euverte’s.” “I decline to believe,” said the Baron, “that a great picture can have such bad taste.”*

“He is talking to her about her portrait. I could talk to her about that portrait just as well as Charlus,” said Swann, affecting a drawling, raffish tone as he followed the retreating couple with his eyes. “And I should certainly enjoy talking about it more than Charlus,” he added.

I asked him whether the things that were said about M. de Charlus were true, in doing which I was lying twice over, for if I had no proof that anybody ever had said anything, I had on the other hand been perfectly aware since that afternoon that what I was hinting at was true. Swann shrugged his shoulders, as though I had suggested something quite absurd.

“It’s quite true that he’s a charming friend. But I need hardly add that his friendship is purely platonic. He is more sentimental than other men, that’s all; on the other hand, as he never goes very far with women, that has given a sort of plausibility to the idiotic rumours to which you refer. Charlus is perhaps greatly attached to his men friends, but you may be quite certain that the attachment is only in his head and in his heart. However, now we may perhaps be left in peace for a moment. Well, the Prince de Guermantes went on to say: ‘I don’t mind telling you that this idea of a possible illegality in the conduct of the trial was extremely painful to me, because I have always, as you know, worshipped the Army. I discussed the matter again with the General, and, alas, there could be no room for doubt. I need hardly tell you that, all this time, the idea that an innocent man might be undergoing the most infamous punishment had never even crossed my mind. But tormented by this idea of illegality, I began to study what I had always declined to read, and then the possibility, this time not only of illegality but of the prisoner’s innocence, began to haunt me. I did not feel that I could talk about it to the Princess. Heaven knows that she has become just as French as myself. From the day of our marriage, I took such pride in showing her our country in all its beauty, and what to me is its greatest splendour, its Army, that it would have been too painful for