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By Root 1806 0

I mean: I have for instance invited my sister-in-law Oriane; it is not certain that she will come, but it is on the other hand certain that, if she does come, she will understand absolutely nothing. But one doesn’t ask her to understand, which is beyond her capacity, but to talk, a task for which she is admirably suited, and which she never fails to perform. The result? Tomorrow as ever is, instead of the silence of the milliner and the grocer, an animated conversation at the Mortemarts’ with Oriane telling everyone that she has heard the most marvellous music, that a certain Morel, and so forth, and indescribable rage among the people not invited, who will say: Palamède obviously thought we were not worth asking; but in any case, who are these people in whose house it happened?’—a counterblast quite as useful as Oriane’s praises, because Morel’s name keeps cropping up all the time and is finally engraved in the memory like a lesson one has read over a dozen times. All this forms a concatenation of circumstances which may be of value to the artist, and to the hostess, may serve as a sort of megaphone for an event which will thus be made audible to a wide public. It really is worth the trouble; you shall see what progress Charlie has made. And what is more, we’ve discovered a new talent in him, my dear fellow: he writes like an angel. Like an angel, I tell you.”

M. de Charlus omitted to say that for some time past he had been employing Morel, like those great noblemen of the seventeenth century who scorned to sign and even to write their own lampoons, to compose certain vilely calumnious little paragraphs at the expense of Comtesse Mole. Their effrontery being apparent even to those who merely glanced at them, how much more cruel were they to the young woman herself, who found in them, so slyly introduced that nobody but herself saw the point, certain passages from her own letters, quoted verbatim but twisted in a way that made them as deadly as the cruellest revenge. They killed the young woman. But there is published every day in Paris, Balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper, more terrible than its printed rivals. We shall see later on that this oral press reduced to nothing the power of a Charlus who had fallen out of fashion, and exalted far above him a Morel who was not worth the millionth part of his former patron. But at least this intellectual fashion is naive and genuinely believes in the nullity of a gifted Charlus and in the incontestable authority of a crass Morel. The Baron was not so innocent in his implacable vindictiveness. Whence, no doubt, that bitter venom on his tongue the irruption of which seemed to dye his cheeks with jaundice when he was in a rage.

“Since you know Bergotte,”10 M. de Charlus went on, “I thought that you might perhaps, by refreshing his memory with regard to the stripling’s writings, as it were collaborate with me, help me to create a concatenation of circumstances capable of fostering a twofold talent, that of a musician and a writer, which might one day acquire the prestige of that of Berlioz. As you know, the illustrious have often other things to think about, they are smothered in flattery, they take little interest except in themselves. But Bergotte, who is genuinely unpretentious and obliging, promised me that he would arrange for the Gaulois, or some such paper, to publish these little articles, a blend of the humorist and the musician, which are really very nicely done, and I should be so pleased if Charlie could combine with his violin this extra little hobby. I know I’m prone to exaggeration where he is concerned, like all the old sugar-mammies of the Conservatoire. What, my dear fellow, didn’t you know that? You’ve clearly never noticed my gullible side. I pace up and down for hours on end outside the examination hall. I’m as happy as a queen. As for Charlie’s prose, Bergotte assured me that it was really very good indeed.”

M. de Charlus, who had long been acquainted with Bergotte through Swann, had indeed gone to see him to ask him to find an opening on some