In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [178]
“If you’ve never heard anything, you’re unique in that respect. He is a gentleman with a vile reputation and has been mixed up in some very nasty doings. I know that the police have their eye on him and that is perhaps the best thing for him if he’s not to end up like all such men, murdered by ruffians,” she went on, for as she thought of Charlus the memory of Mme de Duras recurred to her, and in the intoxication of her rage she sought to aggravate still further the wounds that she was inflicting on the unfortunate Charlie, and to avenge those that she herself had received in the course of the evening. “Anyhow, even financially he can be of no use to you; he’s completely ruined since he has become the prey of people who are blackmailing him, and who can’t even extract from him the price of the tune they call, any more than you can extract the price for yours, because everything’s mortgaged up to the hilt, town house, country house, everything.”
Morel was all the more inclined to believe this lie since M. de Charlus liked to confide in him his relations with ruffians, a race for which the son of a valet, however villainous himself, professes a feeling of horror as strong as his attachment to Bonapartist principles.
Already, in his cunning mind, a scheme had begun to take shape analogous to what was called in the eighteenth century a reversal of alliances. Resolving never to speak to M. de Charlus again, he would return on the following evening to Jupien’s niece, and see that everything was put right with her. Unfortunately for him this plan was doomed to failure, M. de Charlus having made an appointment for that same evening with Jupien, which the ex-tailor dared not fail to keep in spite of recent events. Other events, as we shall see, having occurred as regards Morel, when Jupien in tears told his tale of woe to the Baron, the latter, no less woeful, assured him that he would adopt the forsaken girl, that she could take one of the titles that were at his disposal, probably that of Mlle d’Oloron, that he would see that she received a thorough finishing and married a rich husband. Promises which filled Jupien with joy but left his niece unmoved, for she still loved Morel, who, from stupidity or cynicism, would come into the shop and tease her in Jupien’s absence. “What’s the matter with you,” he would say with a laugh, “with those big circles under your eyes? A broken heart? Dammit, time passes and things change. After all, a man has a right to try on a shoe, and all the more so a woman, and if she doesn’t fit him …”He lost his temper once only, because she cried, which he considered cowardly, unworthy of her. People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurin reception which we interrupted, and which we must take up again at the point where we left off.
“I’d never have suspected,” Morel groaned, in answer to Mme Verdurin.
“Naturally people don’t say it to your face, but that doesn’t prevent your being the talk of the Conservatoire,” Mme Verdurin went on spitefully, seeking to make it plain to Morel that it was not only M. de Charlus who was being criticised, but himself too. “I’m quite prepared to believe that you know nothing about it; all the same, people are talking freely. Ask Ski what they were saying the other day at Chevillard’s concert within a few feet of us when you came into my box. In other words, people are pointing a finger at you. Personally I don’t pay the slightest attention, but what I do feel is that it makes a man supremely ridiculous and that he becomes a public laughing-stock for the rest of his life.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” said Charlie in the tone in which one speaks to a dentist who has just caused one the most excruciating pain without one’s daring to show it, or to a too bloodthirsty second who has forced one into a duel on account of some casual remark of which he has said: “You can’t swallow that.”
“I believe that