In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [155]
“Good evening, Madame de Montesquiou. It was marvellous, wasn’t it? I didn’t see Helene. Tell her that any policy of general abstention, even the most noble, that is to say hers, must allow exceptions, if they are dazzling enough, as has been the case tonight. To show that one is rare is good, but to subordinate one’s rarity, which is only negative, to what is precious is better still. In your sister’s case—and I value more than anyone her systematic absence from places where what is in store for her is not worthy of her—here tonight, on the contrary, her presence at so memorable an occasion as this would have been a precedence, and would have given your sister, already so prestigious, an additional prestige.”
Then he turned to a third lady.
I was greatly astonished to see there, as friendly and flattering towards M. de Charlus as he had been curt with him in the past, insisting on being introduced to Charlie and telling him that he hoped he would come and see him, M. d’Argencourt, that terrible scourge of the species of men to which M. de Charlus belonged. At the moment he was living in the thick of them. It was certainly not because he had become one of them himself. But for some time past he had more or less deserted his wife for a young society woman whom he adored. Being intelligent herself, she made him share her taste for intelligent people, and was most anxious to have M. de Charlus to her house. But above all M. d’Argencourt, extremely jealous and somewhat impotent, feeling that he was failing to satisfy his conquest and anxious to keep her amused, could do so without risk to himself only by surrounding her with innocuous men, whom he thus cast in the role of guardians of his seraglio. The latter found that he had become quite pleasant and declared that he was a great deal more intelligent than they had supposed, a discovery that delighted him and his mistress.
The remainder of M. de Charlus’s guests drifted away fairly rapidly. Several of them said: “I don’t want to go to the sacristy” (the little room in which the Baron, with Charlie by his side, was receiving congratulations), “but I must let Palamède see me so that he knows that I stayed to the end.” Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mme Verdurin. Some pretended not to recognise her and deliberately said good-night to Mme Cottard, appealing to me for confirmation with a “That is Mme Verdurin, isn’t it?” Mme d’Arpajon asked me in our hostess’s hearing: “Tell me, has there ever been a Monsieur Verdurin?” The duchesses who still lingered, finding none of the oddities they had expected in this place which they had hoped to find more different from what they were used to, made the best of a bad job by going into fits of laughter in front of Elstir’s paintings; for everything else, which they found more in keeping than they had expected with what they were already familiar with, they gave the credit to M. de Charlus, saying: “How clever Palamède is at arranging things! If he were to stage a pantomime in a shed or a bathroom, it would still be perfectly ravishing.” The most noble ladies were those who showed most fervour in congratulating M. de Charlus upon the success of a party of the secret motive for which some of them were not unaware, without however being embarrassed by the knowledge, this class of society—remembering perhaps certain epochs in history when their own families had already arrived in full consciousness at a similar effrontery—carrying their contempt for scruples almost as far as their respect for etiquette. Several of them engaged Charlie on the spot for different evenings on which he was to come and play them Vinteuil’s septet, but it never occurred to any of them to invite