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By Root 1821 0

out laughing. His laugh was not, like M. Verdurin’s, the choking fit of a smoker. Ski first of all assumed a subtle air, then let out, as though in spite of himself, a single note of laughter, like the first clang from a belfry, followed by a silence in which the subtle look seemed to be judiciously examining the comic quality of what was said; then a second peal of laughter shook the air, followed presently by a merry angelus.

I expressed to M. de Charlus my regret that M, Brichot should have put himself out. “Not at all, he’s delighted. He’s very fond of you, everyone’s fond of you. Somebody was saying only the other day: ‘But we never see him now, he’s cut himself off.’ Besides, he’s such a good fellow, Brichot,” M. de Charlus went on, doubtless never suspecting, in view of the frank and affectionate manner in which the Professor of Moral Philosophy conversed with him, that he had no hesitation in pulling him to pieces behind his back. “He is a man of great merit, immensely learned, and his learning hasn’t shrivelled him up, hasn’t turned him into a pedantic bookworm like so many others, who smell of ink. He has retained a breadth of outlook, a tolerance, rare in his kind. Sometimes, when one sees how well he understands life, with what a natural grace he renders everyone his due, one wonders where a humble little Sorbonne professor, a former school-master, can have picked it all up. I’m astonished at it myself.”

I was even more astonished to see the conversation of this Brichot, which the least discriminating of Mme de Guermantes’s guests would have found so dull and heavy, impressing the most critical of them all, M. de Charlus. Among the influences that had contributed towards this result were those, in other respects different, by virtue of which Swann had on the one hand so long enjoyed the company of the little clan, when he was in love with Odette, and on the other hand, after he married, seen an attraction in Mme Bontemps who, pretending to adore the Swanns, came constantly to call on the wife, revelled in the husband’s stories, and spoke of them with scorn. Like a writer who gives the palm for intelligence, not to the most intelligent man, but to the worldling who utters a bold and tolerant comment on the passion of a man for a woman, a comment which makes the writer’s blue-stocking mistress agree with him in deciding that of all the people who come to her house the least stupid is after all this old beau who is experienced in matters of love, so M. de Charlus found Brichot more intelligent than the rest of his friends, Brichot who was not merely kind to Morel, but would cull from the Greek philosophers, the Latin poets, the oriental storytellers, appropriate texts which decorated the Baron’s propensity with a strange and charming florilegium. M. de Charlus had reached the age at which a Victor Hugo chooses to surround himself mainly with Vacqueries and Meurices.18 He preferred to all others those men who tolerated his outlook upon life. “I see a great deal of him,” he went on in a measured squeak, allowing no movement save of his lips to disturb the grave, powdered mask of his face, over which his ecclesiastical eyelids were deliberately lowered. “I attend his lectures: that Latin Quarter atmosphere refreshes me: there’s a studious, thoughtful breed of young bourgeois, more intelligent, better read than were, in a different milieu, my own contemporaries. It’s another world, which you know probably better than I do: they’re young bourgeois,” he said, detaching the last word to which he prefixed a string of bs, and emphasising it from a sort of elocutionary habit, itself corresponding to a taste for fine shades of meaning that was peculiar to him, but perhaps also from inability to resist the pleasure of giving me a flick of his insolence. This did not in any way diminish the great and affectionate pity that M. de Charlus inspired in me (after Mme Verdurin had revealed her plan in my hearing); it merely amused me, and, even in circumstances when I did not feel so kindly disposed towards him, would not have offended