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By Root 1946 0

few months before my visit to Tansonville I had gone to inquire after M. de Charlus, in whom certain cardiac symptoms had been causing great anxiety, and having mentioned to Jupien, whom I found alone, some love-letters addressed to Robert and signed Bobette which Mme de Saint-Loup had discovered, I was stupefied to learn from the Baron’s former factotum that the person who used the signature Bobette was none other than the violinist-journalist who had played so important a part in M. de Charlus’s life!36 Jupien could not speak of him without indignation: “The boy was free to do whatever he liked. But if there was one direction in which he ought never to have looked, that was in the direction of the Baron’s nephew. All the more so as the Baron loved his nephew like his own son. He has tried to break up the marriage—it’s really shameful. And he must have gone about it with the most devilish cunning, for no one was ever more opposed to that sort of thing by nature than the Marquis de Saint-Loup. You’ve only to think of the follies he committed for the sake of his mistresses! No, however despicably—there’s no other word for it—he deserted the Baron, that was his business. But to take up with the nephew! There are some things that just aren’t done.”

Jupien was sincere in his indignation; among so-called immoral people, moral indignation is quite as violent as among other people, only its object is slightly different. What is more, people whose own hearts are not directly involved always regard unfortunate entanglements, disastrous marriages, as though one were free to choose whom one loves, and do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom one is in love that the “folly” a man commits by marrying his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence.

I gathered that Robert and his wife had been on the brink of a separation (though Gilberte had not yet discovered the precise nature of the trouble) and that it was Mme de Marsantes, a loving, ambitious and philosophical mother, who had arranged and enforced their reconciliation. She belonged to a world in which perennial inbreeding and the impoverishment of patrimonies constantly bring out, in the realm of the passions as in that of pecuniary interest, inherited vices and compromises. It was with the same energy that in the past she had patronised Mme Swann, encouraged the marriage of Jupien’s niece and arranged that of her own son to Gilberte, exercising thus on her own behalf, with a pained resignation, the same atavistic wisdom which she deployed for the benefit of the entire Faubourg. And perhaps what had made her at a certain moment expedite Robert’s marriage to Gilberte—which had certainly caused her less trouble and fewer tears than making him break with Rachel—had been the fear of his forming with another harlot—or perhaps with the same one, for Robert took a long time to forget Rachel—a fresh attachment which might have been his salvation. Now I understood what Robert had meant when he said to me at the Princesse de Guermantes’s: “It’s a pity your Balbec girlfriend hasn’t the fortune that my mother insists upon. I believe she and I would have got on very well together.” He had meant that she belonged to Gomorrah as he belonged to Sodom, or perhaps, if he did not yet belong, that he had ceased to enjoy women whom he could not love in a certain fashion and together with other women. Gilberte, too, might have been able to enlighten me as to Albertine. If therefore, apart from rare moments of recollection, I had not lost all my curiosity as to the life of my dead mistress, I could have questioned not only Gilberte but her husband about her. And on the whole it was the same thing that had given both Robert and myself a desire to marry Albertine —to wit, the knowledge that she was a lover of women. But the causes of our desire, as for that matter its objects, were the reverse of each other. In my case, it was the