seriously, but simply in order not to thwart the expectation of a good-natured laugh, M. de Charlus would jokingly denounce sexual depravity in the company of the little clan, as he might have mimicked an English accent or imitated Mounet-Sully,9 without waiting to be asked, simply to do his bit with good grace, by displaying an amateur talent in society; so that when he now threatened Brichot that he would report to the Sorbonne that he was in the habit of walking about with young men, it was in exactly the same way as the circumcised scribe keeps referring in and out of season to the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” and the “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” that is to say without the least trace of hypocrisy, but with more than a hint of play-acting. It was not only the change in the words themselves, so different from those that he allowed himself to use in the past, that seemed to require some explanation, there was also the change that had occurred in his intonation and his gestures, which now singularly resembled what M. de Charlus used most fiercely to castigate; he would now utter involuntarily almost the same little squeaks (involuntary in his case and all the more deep-rooted) as are uttered voluntarily by those inverts who hail one another as “my dear!”—as though this deliberate “camping,” against which M. de Charlus had for so long set his face, were after all merely a brilliant and faithful imitation of the manner that men of the Charlus type, whatever they may say, are compelled to adopt when they have reached a certain stage in their malady, just as sufferers from general paralysis or locomotor ataxia inevitably end by displaying certain symptoms. As a matter of fact—and this is what this purely unconscious “camping” revealed—the difference between the stern, black-clad Charlus with his hair en brosse whom I had known, and the painted and bejewelled young men, was no more than the purely apparent difference that exists between an excited person who talks fast and keeps fidgeting all the time, and a neurotic who talks slowly, preserves a perpetual phlegm, but is tainted with the same neurasthenia in the eyes of the physician who knows that each of the two is devoured by the same anxieties and marred by the same defects. At the same time one could tell that M. de Charlus had aged from wholly different signs, such as the extraordinary frequency in his conversation of certain expressions that had taken root in it and used now to crop up at every moment (for instance: “the concatenation of circumstances”) and upon which the Baron’s speech leaned in sentence after sentence as upon a necessary prop.
“Is Charlie already here?” Brichot asked M. de Charlus as we were about to ring the door-bell.
“Ah! I really don’t know,” said the Baron, raising his arms and half-shutting his eyes with the air of a person who does not wish to be accused of indiscretion, all the more so as he had probably been reproached by Morel for things which he had said and which the other, as cowardly as he was vain, and as ready to disown M. de Charlus as he was to boast of his friendship, had considered serious although they were quite trivial. “You know, I’ve no idea what he does.”
If the conversations of two people bound by a tie of intimacy are full of lies, these crop up no less spontaneously in the conversations that a third person holds with a lover about the person with whom the latter is in love, whatever the sex of that person.
“Have you seem him lately?” I asked M. de Charlus, in order to appear at the same time not to be afraid of mentioning Morel to him and not to believe that they were actually living together.
“He came in, as it happened, for five minutes this morning while I was still half asleep, and sat down on the side of my bed, as though he wanted to ravish me.”
I guessed at once that M. de Charlus had seen Charlie within the last hour, for if one asks a woman when she last saw the man whom one knows to be—and whom she may perhaps suppose that one suspects of being—her lover, if she has just had tea with him she replies: “I saw