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By Root 1893 0

moment for tender words and embraces. Do admit, Brichot, that they played like gods, Morel especially. Did you notice the moment when that lock of hair came loose? Ah, my dear fellow, then you saw nothing at all. There was an F sharp which was enough to make Enesco, Capet and Thibaud die of jealousy. Calm though I am, I don’t mind telling you that at the sound of it I had such a lump in the throat I could scarcely control my tears. The whole room sat breathless. Brichot, my dear fellow,” cried the Baron, gripping the other’s arm and shaking it violently, “it was sublime. Only young Charlie preserved a stony immobility, you couldn’t even see him breathe, he looked like one of those objects of the inanimate world of which Theodore Rousseau speaks, which make us think but do not think themselves. And then all of a sudden,” cried M. de Charlus with a grandiloquent gesture as though miming a coup de théâtre, “then, the Forelock! And meanwhile, the graceful little quadrille of the allegro vivace. You know, that lock was a revelatory sign even for the most obtuse. The Princess of Taormina, deaf until then, for there are none so deaf as those that have ears and hear not, the Princess of Taormina, confronted by the message of the miraculous forelock, suddenly realised that it was music they were playing and not poker. Oh, that was indeed a solemn moment.”

“Forgive me for interrupting you, Monsieur,” I said to M. de Charlus, to bring him to the subject in which I was interested, “you told me that the composer’s daughter was to be present. I should have been most interested to meet her. Are you certain she was expected?”

“Oh, that I couldn’t say.”

M. de Charlus thus complied, perhaps involuntarily, with that universal rule by which one withholds information from a jealous lover, whether with the absurd intention of proving oneself a “good pal”—as a point of honour, and even if one hates her—to the woman who has excited his jealousy, or out of malice towards her because one guesses that jealousy would only intensify his love, or from that need to be disagreeable to other people which consists in telling the truth to the rest of the world but concealing it from the jealous, ignorance increasing their torment, or so at least they suppose—and in order to cause people pain one is guided by what they themselves believe, wrongly perhaps, to be most painful.

“You know,” he went on, “in this house they’re a trifle prone to exaggerate. They’re charming people, but still they do like to entice celebrities of one sort or another. But you’re not looking well, and you’ll catch cold in this damp room,” he said, pushing a chair towards me. “Since you haven’t been well, you must take care of yourself. Let me go and fetch your coat. No, don’t go for it yourself, you’ll lose your way and catch cold. How careless people are; you might be an infant in arms, you want an old nanny like me to look after you.” “Don’t worry, Baron, I’ll go,” said Brichot, and went off at once: not being precisely aware perhaps of the very warm affection that M. de Charlus had for me and of the charming lapses into simplicity and devotedness that alternated with his frenzied outbursts of arrogance and persecution mania, he was afraid lest the Baron, whom Mme Verdurin had entrusted like a prisoner to his vigilance, might simply be seeking, under the pretext of asking for my overcoat, to return to Morel, and thus upset the Mistress’s plan.

Meanwhile Ski had sat down, uninvited, at the piano, and assuming—with a playful knitting of his brows, a distant gaze and a slight twist of his lips—what he imagined to be an artistic air, was insisting that Morel should play something by Bizet. “What, you don’t like it, that boyish side to Bizet’s music? Why, my dearr fellow,” he said, with that rolling of the r which was one of his peculiarities, “it’s rravishing.” Morel, who did not like Bizet, said so in exaggerated terms and (as he had the reputation in the little clan of being, though it seems incredible, a wit) Ski, pretending to take the violinist’s diatribes as paradoxes, burst