In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [171]
“I’m not interested in history,” replied M. de Charlus, “this life is sufficient for me, it’s quite interesting enough, as poor Swann used to say.”
“What, you knew Swann, Baron? I didn’t know that. Tell me, was he that way inclined?” Brichot inquired with an air of misgiving.
“What a mind the man has! So you think I only know men of that sort? No, I don’t think so,” said Charlus, looking at the ground and trying to weigh the pros and cons. And deciding that, since he was dealing with Swann whose contrary tendencies had always been so notorious, a half-admission could only be harmless to him who was its object and flattering to him who let it out in an insinuation: “I don’t deny that long ago in our schooldays, once in a while,” said the Baron, as though in spite of himself and thinking aloud; then pulling himself up: “But that was centuries ago. How do you expect me to remember? You’re embarrassing me,” he concluded with a laugh.
“In any case he was never what you’d call a beauty!” said Brichot who, himself hideous, thought himself good-looking and was always ready to pronounce other men ugly.
“Hold your tongue,” said the Baron, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. In those days he had a peaches-and-cream complexion, and,” he added, finding a fresh note for each syllable, “he was as pretty as a cherub. Besides he was always charming. The women were madly in love with him.”
“But did you ever know his wife?”
“Why, it was through me that he came to know her. I had thought her charming in her boyish get-up one evening when she played Miss Sacripant; I was with some club-mates, and each of us took a woman home with him, and although all I wanted was to go to sleep, slanderous tongues alleged—it’s terrible how malicious people are—that I went to bed with Odette. In any case she took advantage of the slanders to come and bother me, and I thought I might get rid of her by introducing her to Swann. From that moment on she never let me go. She couldn’t spell the simplest word, it was I who wrote all her letters for her. And it was I who, later on, was responsible for taking her out. That, my boy, is what comes of having a good reputation, you see. Though I only half deserved it. She used to force me to get up the most dreadful orgies for her, with five or six men.”
And the lovers whom Odette had had in succession (she had been with this, that and the other man, not one of whose names had ever been guessed by poor Swann, blinded by jealousy and by love, by turns weighing up the chances and believing in oaths, more affirmative than a contradiction which the guilty woman lets slip, a contradiction far more elusive and yet far more significant, of which the jealous lover might take advantage more logically than of the information which he falsely pretends to have received, in the hope of alarming his mistress), these lovers M. de Charlus began to enumerate with as absolute a certainty as if he had been reciting the list of the Kings of France. And indeed the jealous lover, like the contemporaries of a historical event, is too close, he knows nothing, and it is for strangers that the chronicle of adultery assumes the precision of history, and prolongs itself in lists which are a matter of indifference to them and become painful only to another jealous lover, such as I was, who cannot help comparing his own case with that which he hears spoken of and wonders whether the woman he suspects cannot boast an equally illustrious list. But he can never find out; it is a sort of universal conspiracy, a “blind man’s buff” in which everyone cruelly participates, and which consists, while his mistress flits from one to another, in holding over his eyes a bandage which he is perpetually trying to tear off without success, for everyone keeps him blindfold, poor wretch, the kind out of kindness, the cruel out of cruelty, the