In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [86]
The young man realised his mistake and tried to re pair it by saying that he loathed the sight of a copper and by daringly inquiring of the Baron: “How about a date?”—but it was too late, the charm was dispelled. One had a distinct feeling of sham, as with the books of authors who force themselves to write slang. It was in vain that the young man described in detail all the “filthy things” that he did with his wife; M. de Charlus merely reflected that these “filthy things” amounted to very little. And in this he was not simply being insincere. Nothing is more limited than pleasure and vice. In that sense one may say truly, altering slightly the meaning of the phrase, that we revolve always in the same vicious circle.
If M. de Charlus was believed to be not a baron but a prince, there was, conversely, general regret in the establishment for the death of someone of whom the gigolos said: “I don’t know his name, but it seems that he is a baron,” and who was none other than the Prince de Foix (the father of Saint-Loup’s friend). Supposed by his wife to spend a lot of time at his club, in reality he would sit for hours at Jupien’s, retailing fashionable gossip to an audience from the underworld. Like his son, he was tall and good-looking. M. de Charlus, no doubt because he had always known him in society, remained strangely ignorant that the Prince shared his own tastes, to such a degree that he was even said to have had designs at one time upon his own son, Saint-Loup’s friend, then still at school. This was probably untrue: on the contrary, excellently informed about activities whose existence many do not suspect, he watched with care over the company kept by his son. One day a man—and a man not of exalted origin—followed the young Prince de Foix as far as his father’s house, where he threw a note in at the window, which the father picked up. But the follower, though genealogically this was not the case, from another point of view belonged to the same world as M. de Foix the father. He therefore had no difficulty in finding among those who shared their common secrets an intermediary who silenced M. de Foix by proving to him that it was his son who had himself provoked this rash act of an elderly man. And this was quite possible. For the Prince de Foix had succeeded in preserving his son from the external influence of bad company but not from heredity. The young Prince de Foix, however, remained, like his father, in this respect unknown to his social equals, although in a different world his behaviour was wild in the extreme.
“How simple he is! You would never say he was a baron,” said some of the frequenters of the establishment when M. de Charlus had left, after being escorted to the street door by Jupien, to whom he did not fail to complain of the young man’s virtuousness. From the air of annoyance of Jupien, whose duty it was to have trained the young man in advance, it was clear that the fictitious murderer would presently get a terrific dressing-down. “The truth is exactly the opposite of what you told me,” added the Baron, so that Jupien might profit by the lesson for another time. “He seems most good-natured, he expresses sentiments of respect for his family.” “Still, he’s on bad terms with his father,” Jupien objected. “It’s true they live together, but they work in different bars.” Obviously this was not much of a crime compared with murder, but Jupien had been caught unprepared with an answer. The Baron said no more, for, if he wanted others to prepare his pleasures for him, he wanted to give himself the illusion that they were unprepared. “He is a real crook, he said all that to mislead you, you are too gullible,” Jupien went on, in an attempt to exculpate himself