• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

While we had been talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife, had taken Morel aside. Even if Mme Verdurin had decided on reflexion that it was wiser to postpone Morel’s enlightenment, she was powerless now to prevent it. There are certain desires, sometimes confined to the mouth, which, as soon as we have allowed them to grow, insist upon being gratified, whatever the consequences may be; one can no longer resist the temptation to kiss a bare shoulder at which one has been gazing for too long and on which one’s lips pounce like a snake upon a bird, or to bury one’s sweet tooth in a tempting cake; nor can one deny oneself the satisfaction of seeing the amazement, anxiety, grief or mirth to which one can move another person by some unexpected communication. So, drunk with melodrama, Mme Verdurin had ordered her husband to take Morel out of the room and at all costs to explain matters to him. The violinist had begun by deploring the departure of the Queen of Naples before he had had a chance of being presented to her. M. de Charlus had told him so often that she was the sister of the Empress Elizabeth and of the Duchesse d’Alençon that the sovereign had assumed an extraordinary importance in his eyes. But the Master explained to him that they were not there to talk about the Queen of Naples, and then went straight to the point. “Listen,” he had concluded after a long explanation, “if you like, we can go and ask my wife what she thinks. I give you my word of honour, I’ve said nothing to her about it. We’ll see what she thinks of it all. My advice may not be right, but you know how sound her judgment is, and besides, she has an immense affection for you; let’s go and submit the case to her.” And as Mme Verdurin, impatiently looking forward to the excitement that she would presently be relishing when she talked to the musician, and then, after he had gone, when she made her husband give her a full report of their conversation, went on repeating to herself: “But what in the world can they be doing? I do hope that Gustave, in keeping him all this time, has managed to give him his cue,” M. Verdurin reappeared with Morel, who seemed extremely agitated.

“He’d like to ask your advice,” M. Verdurin said to his wife, in the tone of a man who does not know whether his request will be granted. Instead of replying to M. Verdurin, it was to Morel that, in the heat of her passion, Mme Verdurin addressed herself.

“I agree entirely with my husband. I consider that you cannot put up with it any longer,” she exclaimed vehemently, discarding as a useless fiction her agreement with her husband that she was supposed to know nothing of what he had been saying to the violinist.

“How do you mean? Put up with what?” stammered M. Verdurin, endeavouring to feign astonishment and seeking, with an awkwardness that was explained by his dismay, to defend his falsehood.

“I guessed what you’d been saying to him,” replied Mme Verdurin, undisturbed by the improbability of this explanation, and caring little what the violinist might think of her veracity when he recalled this scene. “No,” Mme Verdurin continued, “I feel that you cannot possibly persist in this degrading promiscuity with a tainted person whom nobody will have in their house,” she went on, regardless of the fact that this was untrue and forgetting that she herself entertained him almost daily. “You’re the talk of the Conservatoire,” she added, feeling that this was the argument that would carry most weight. “Another month of this life and your artistic future will be shattered, whereas without Charlus you ought to be making at least a hundred thousand francs a year.”

“But I’d never heard a thing, I’m astounded, I’m very grateful to you,” Morel murmured, the tears starting to his eyes. But, being obliged at once to feign astonishment and to conceal his shame, he had turned redder and was sweating more abundantly than if he had played all Beethoven’s sonatas in succession, and tears welled from his eyes which the Bonn Master