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By Root 1709 0

neurotic, hysterical, he was genuinely impulsive but pseudo-brave—indeed, as I had always thought, and it was something that had rather endeared him to me, pseudo-cruel—and did not have the normal reactions of an outraged man of honour); or else that, in a milieu that was not his own, he felt less at ease and less courageous than he would in the Faubourg. The fact remains that, in this salon which he despised, this great nobleman (in whom superiority over commoners was no more essentially inherent than it had been in this or that ancestor of his trembling before the revolutionary tribunal) could do nothing, in the paralysis of his every limb as well as his tongue, but cast around him terror-stricken, suppliant, bewildered glances, outraged by the violence that was being done to him. In a situation so cruelly unforeseen, this great talker could do no more than stammer: “What does it all mean? What’s wrong?” His question was not even heard. And the eternal pantomime of panic terror has so little changed that this elderly gentleman to whom a disagreeable incident had occurred in a Parisian drawing-room unconsciously re-enacted the basic formal attitudes in which the Greek sculptors of the earliest times symbolised the terror of nymphs pursued by the god Pan.

The disgraced ambassador, the under-secretary placed suddenly on the retired list, the man about town who finds himself cold-shouldered, the lover who has been shown the door, examine, sometimes for months on end, the event that has shattered their hopes; they turn it over and over like a projectile fired at them they know not from whence or by whom, almost as though it were a meteorite. They long to know the constituent elements of this strange missile which has burst upon them, to learn what animosities may be detected therein. Chemists have at least the means of analysis; sick men suffering from a disease the origin of which they do not know can send for the doctor; criminal mysteries are more or less unravelled by the examining magistrate. But for the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men we rarely discover the motives. Thus M. de Charlus—to anticipate the days that followed this evening to which we shall presently return—could see in Charlie’s attitude one thing alone that was self-evident. Charlie, who had often threatened the Baron that he would tell people of the passion that he inspired in him, must have seized the opportunity to do so when he considered that he had now sufficiently “arrived” to be able to stand on his own feet. And he must, out of sheer ingratitude, have told Mme Verdurin everything. But how had she allowed herself to be taken in (for the Baron, having made up his mind to deny the story, had already persuaded himself that the sentiments of which he would be accused were imaginary)? Friends of Mme Verdurin’s, themselves perhaps with a passion for Charlie, must have prepared the ground. Accordingly, during the next few days M. de Charlus wrote ferocious letters to a number of the faithful, who were entirely innocent and concluded that he must be mad; then he went to Mme Verdurin with a long and affecting tale, which had not at all the effect that he had hoped. For in the first place Mme Verdurin simply said to him: “All you need do is pay no more attention to him, treat him with scorn, he’s a mere boy.” Now the Baron longed only for a reconciliation, and to bring this about by depriving Charlie of everything he had felt assured of, he asked Mme Verdurin not to invite him again; a request which she met with a refusal that brought her angry and sarcastic letters from M. de Charlus. Flitting from one supposition to another, the Baron never hit upon the truth, which was that the blow had not come from Morel. It is true that he could have learned this by asking him if they could have a few minutes’ talk. But he felt that this would be prejudicial to his dignity and to the interests of his love. He had been insulted; he awaited an explanation. In any case, almost invariably, attached to the idea of a talk which might clear up a misunderstanding, there