• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Seeing how late it was, and fearing that Albertine might be growing impatient, I asked Brichot, as we left the Verdurins’ party, to be so kind as to drop me home first, and my carriage would then take him on. He commended me for going straight home like this (unaware that a girl was waiting for me in the house) and for ending the evening so early and so wisely, when in fact all I had done was postpone its real beginning. Then he spoke to me about M. de Charlus. The latter would doubtless have been amazed had he heard the Professor, who was so amiable to him, the Professor who always assured him: “I never repeat anything,” speaking of him and of his life without the slightest reticence. And Brichot’s indignant amazement would perhaps have been no less sincere if M. de Charlus had said to him: “I’m told you’ve been speaking ill of me.” Brichot did indeed have an affection for M. de Charlus, and if he had had to call to mind some conversation that had turned upon him, would have been far more likely to remember the friendly feelings he had had for the Baron, while saying the same things about him as everyone else, than those things themselves. He would not have thought that he was lying if he had said: “I who speak of you with such friendliness,” since he did feel friendly when he was speaking about M. de Charlus. The Baron had for Brichot the charm which he demanded above all else from the world of society—that of offering him real specimens of what he had long supposed to be an invention of the poets. Brichot, who had often expounded the second Eclogue of Virgil without really knowing whether its fiction had any basis in reality, belatedly found, in conversing with Charlus, some of the pleasure which he knew that his masters, M. Mérimée and M. Renan, and his colleague M. Maspéro, had felt when travelling in Spain, Palestine and Egypt on recognising in the landscapes and the present inhabitants of Spain, Palestine and Egypt the settings and the selfsame actors of the ancient scenes which they themselves had expounded in their books.

“Be it said without offence to that knight of noble lineage,” Brichot declared to me in the carriage that was taking us home, “he is quite simply prodigious when he illustrates his satanic catechism with a dash of Bedlamite verve and the obsessiveness, I was going to say the candour, of a blanc d’Espagne21 or an émigré. I can assure you, if I dare express myself like Mgr d’Hulst, I am by no means bored on the days when I receive a visit from that feudal lord who, seeking to defend Adonis against our age of miscreants, has followed the instincts of his race, and, in all sodomist innocence, has gone crusading.”

I listened to Brichot, and I was not alone with him. As, for that matter, I had never ceased to feel since I left home that evening, I felt myself, in however obscure a fashion, tied fast to the girl who was at that moment in her bedroom. Even when I was talking to someone or other at the Verdurins’, I had somehow felt that she was by my side, I had that vague impression of her that we have of our own limbs, and if I happened to think of her it was as we think, with annoyance at being bound to it in complete subjection, of our own body.

“And what a fund of scandal,” Brichot went on, “enough to supply all the appendixes of the Causeries du Lundi, is the conversation of that apostle! Just imagine, I learned from him that the treatise on ethics which I had always admired as the most splendid moral edifice of our age was inspired in our venerable colleague X by a young telegraph messenger. Needless to say, my eminent friend omitted to give us the name of this ephebe in the course of his demonstrations. In this he showed more circumspection, or, if you prefer, less gratitude, than Phidias, who inscribed the name of the athlete whom he loved upon the ring of his Olympian Zeus. The Baron had not heard this last story. Needless to say, it appealed to his orthodoxy. You can readily imagine that whenever I have to discuss with my colleague a candidate’s thesis, I find in his dialectic, which