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By Root 1393 0

and inspired others, who had not yet begun to doubt him, with their first. For the most dangerous of all concealments is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His constant awareness of it prevents him from imagining how generally unknown it is, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will begin to detect an admission in words which he believes to be innocent. In any case there was no real need to try to hush it up, for there is no vice that does not find ready tolerance in the best society, and one has seen a country house turned upside down in order that two sisters might sleep in adjoining rooms as soon as their hostess learned that theirs was a more than sisterly affection. But what revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess’s love was a particular incident on which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of a bus conductor whom he found prodigiously intimidating.* However, to finish with the Princess’s love, I shall say briefly what the trifle was that opened my eyes. I was, on the day in question, alone with her in her carriage. As we were passing a post office she stopped the coachman. She had come out without a footman. She half drew a letter from her muff and was preparing to step down from the carriage to put it into the box. I tried to stop her, she made a show of resistance, and we both realised that our instinctive movements had been, hers compromising, in appearing to be protecting a secret, mine indiscreet, in thwarting that protection. She was the first to recover. Suddenly turning very red, she gave me the letter. I no longer dared not to take it, but, as I slipped it into the box, I could not help seeing that it was addressed to M. de Charlus.

To return to this first evening at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, I went to bid her good night, for her cousins, who had promised to take me home, were in a hurry to be gone. M. de Guermantes wished, however, to say good-bye to his brother, Mme de Surgis having found time to mention to the Duke as she left that M. de Charlus had been charming to her and to her sons. This great kindness on his brother’s part, the first moreover that he had ever shown in that line, touched Basin deeply and aroused in him old family feelings which were never dormant for long. As we were saying good-bye to the Princess he insisted, without actually thanking M. de Charlus, on expressing his fondness for him, either because he genuinely had difficulty in containing it or in order that the Baron might remember that actions of the sort he had performed that evening did not escape the eyes of a brother, just as, with the object of creating salutary associations of memory for the future, we give a lump of sugar to a dog that has done its trick. “Well, little brother!” said the Duke, stopping M. de Charlus and taking him tenderly by the arm, “so we walk past our elders without so much as a word? I never see you now, Mémé, and you can’t think how I miss you. I was turning over some old letters the other day and came upon some from poor Mamma, which are all so full of tenderness for you.”

“Thank you, Basin,” M. de Charlus replied in a broken voice, for he could never speak of their mother without emotion.

“You must let me fix up a cottage for you at Guermantes,” the Duke went on.

“It’s nice to see the two brothers so affectionate towards each other,” the Princess said to Oriane.

“Yes, indeed! I don’t suppose you could find many brothers like them. I shall invite you with him,” the Duchess promised me. “You’ve not quarrelled with him? . . . But what can they be talking about?” she added in an anxious tone, for she could catch only an occasional word of what they were saying. She had always felt a certain jealousy of the pleasure that M. de Guermantes found in talking to his brother of a past from which he was inclined to keep his