In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [175]
“Yes,” he said, “I’m no longer a stripling, and I’ve already seen many things change round about me. I no longer recognise either society, in which all the barriers have been broken down, in which a mob devoid of elegance or decency dance the tango even in my own family, or fashion, or politics, or the arts, or religion, or anything. But I must admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality. Good heavens, in my day, leaving aside the men who loathed women, and those who, caring only for women, did the other thing merely with an eye to profit, homosexuals were sound family men and never kept mistresses except as a cover. Had I had a daughter to give away, it’s among them that I should have looked for my son-in-law if I’d wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be unhappy. Alas! things have changed. Nowadays they’re also recruited from among the most rabid womanisers. I thought I had a certain flair, and that when I said to myself: ‘Certainly not,’ I couldn’t have been mistaken. Well, now I give up. One of my friends who is well-known for it had a coachman whom my sister-in-law Oriane found for him, a lad from Combray who had dabbled in all sorts of trades but particularly that of chasing skirts, and who, I would have sworn, was as hostile as possible to that sort of thing. He broke his mistress’s heart by deceiving her with two women whom he adored, not to mention the others, an actress and a barmaid. My cousin the Prince de Guermantes, who has the irritating mind of people who are too ready to believe anything, said to me one day: ‘But why in the world doesn’t X—sleep with his coachman? It might give pleasure to Théodore’ (which is the coachman’s name) ‘and he may even be rather hurt that his master doesn’t make advances to him.’ I couldn’t help telling Gilbert to hold his tongue; I was irritated by that would-be perspicacity which, when exercised indiscriminately, is a want of perspicacity, and also by the blatant guile of my cousin who would have liked X—to test the ground so that he himself could follow if the going was good.”
“Then the Prince de Guermantes has those tastes too?” asked Brichot with a mixture of astonishment and dismay.
“Good lord,” replied M. de Charlus, highly delighted, “it’s so notorious that I don’t think I’m being guilty of an indiscretion if I tell you that he does. Well, the following year I went to Balbec, where I heard from a sailor who used to take me out fishing occasionally that my Theodore, whose sister, I may mention, is the maid of a friend of Mme Verdurin, Baroness Putbus, used to come down to the harbour to pick up this or that sailor, with the most infernal cheek, to go for a boat-trip ‘with extras.’”
It was now my turn to inquire whether the coachman’s employer, whom I had identified as the gentleman who at Balbec used to play cards all day long with his mistress, was like the Prince de Guermantes.
“Why, of course, everyone knows. He doesn’t even make any attempt to conceal it.”
“But he had his mistress there with him.”
“Well, and what difference does that make? How innocent these children are,” he said to me in a fatherly tone, little suspecting the grief that I extracted from his words when I thought of Albertine. “She’s charming, his mistress.”
“So then his three friends are like himself?”
“Not at all,” he cried, stopping his ears as though,