In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [169]
“Of course I don’t think I have more influence with Mme Verdurin than you do,” Brichot emphatically declared, afraid that he might have aroused the Baron’s suspicions. And seeing that I was anxious to leave, he sought to detain me with the bait of the promised entertainment: “There is one thing which the Baron seems to me not to have taken into account when he speaks of the reputation of these two ladies, namely that a person’s reputation may be at the same time appalling and undeserved. Thus for instance, in the more notorious of these groups which I may venture to call unofficial, it is certain that miscarriages of justice are many and that history has recorded convictions for sodomy against illustrious men who were wholly innocent of the charge. The recent discovery of Michelangelo’s passionate love for a woman is a fresh fact which should entitle the friend of Leo X to the benefit of a posthumous retrial. The Michelangelo case seems to me to be eminently calculated to excite the snobs and mobilise the underworld when another case, in which anarchy was all the rage and became the fashionable sin of our worthy dilettantes, but which must not even be mentioned now for fear of stirring up quarrels, shall have run its course.”
From the moment Brichot had begun to speak of masculine reputations, M. de Charlus had betrayed all over his features that special sort of impatience which one sees on the face of a medical or military expert when society people who know nothing about the subject begin to talk nonsense about points of therapeutics or strategy.
“You don’t know the first thing about these matters,” he finally said to Brichot. “Give me a single example of an undeserved reputation. Mention a few names … Yes, I know it all,” he retorted vehemently to a timid interruption by Brichot, “the people who tried it once long ago out of curiosity, or out of affection for a dead friend, and the person who’s afraid he has gone too far, and if you speak to him of the beauty of a man, replies that it’s all Greek to him, that he can no more distinguish between a beautiful man and an ugly one than between the engines of two motor-cars, mechanics not being in his line. That’s all stuff and nonsense. Mind you, I don’t mean to say that a bad (or what is conventionally so called) and yet undeserved reputation is absolutely impossible. But it’s so exceptional, so rare, that for practical purposes it doesn’t exist. At the same time, I who am by nature inquisitive and enjoy ferreting things out, have known cases which were not mythical. Yes, in the course of my life I have verified (I mean scientifically verified—I’m not talking hot air) two unjustified reputations. They generally arise from a similarity of names, or from certain outward signs, a profusion of rings, for instance, which persons who are not qualified to judge imagine to be characteristic of what you were mentioning, just as they think that a peasant never utters a sentence without adding jarniguié, ‘I d’ny God,’ or an Englishman ‘Goddam.’ It’s the conventionalism of the boulevard theatre.”
M. de Charlus surprised me greatly when he cited among the inverts the “friend of the actress” whom I had seen at Balbec and who was the leader of the little society of the four friends.
“But this actress, then?”
“She serves him as a cover, and besides he has relations with her, perhaps more than with men, with