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3. Guermantes Way "And who says that I am offended?" he furiously screamed, raising himself into an erect posture on the sofa on which hitherto he had been reclining motionless, while, as the pallid, frothing snakes twisted and stiffened in his face, his voice became alternately shrill and solemn like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The force with which he habitually spoke, which made strangers turn round in the street, was multiplied a hundredfold, as is a musical forte if, instead of being played on the piano, it is played by an orchestra, and changed into a fortissimo as well. M. de Charlus roared.) "Do you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You are evidently not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagined that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?" While he was speaking, my desire to persuade M. de Charlus that I had never spoken or heard anyone else speak ill of him had given place to a wild rage, provoked by the words which, to my mind, were dictated to him solely by his colossal pride. [ . . .] This fury (at the moment when M. de Charlus ceased to shout, in order to refer to his august toes, with a majesty that was accompanied by a grimace, a vomit of disgust at his obscure blasphemers), this fury could contain itself no longer. I felt a compulsive desire to strike something, and, a lingering trace of discernment making me respect the person of a man so much older than myself, and even, in view of their dignity as works of art, the pieces of German porcelain that were grouped around him, I seized the Baron's new silk hat, flung it to the ground, trampled it, picked it up again, began blindly pulling it to pieces, wrenched off the brim, tore the crown in two, heedless of the continuing vociferations of M. de Charlus, and, crossing the room in order to leave, opened the door. To my intense astonishment, two footmen were standing one on either side of it, who moved slowly away, so as to appear only to have been casually passing in the course of their duty. [ . . .] My anger had not calmed that of M. de Charlus, and my departure from the room seemed to cause him acute distress; he called me back, shouted to his servants to stop me, and finally, forgetting that a moment earlier, when he spoke of his "august toes," he had thought to make me a witness to his own deification, came running after me at full speed, overtook me in the hall, and stood barring the door. "Come, now," he said, "don't be childish; come back for a minute; he that loveth well chasteneth well, and if I have chastened you well it is because I love you well." My anger had subsided; I let the word "chasten" pass and followed the Baron who, summoning a footmen, ordered him without a trace of self-consciousness to clear away the remains of the shattered hat, which was replaced by another. "If you will tell me, Monsieur, who it is that has treacherously maligned me," I said to M. de Charlus, "I will stay here to learn his name and to confute the impostor." [. . .] "Did you not hear me say that I had given a promise of secrecy to my informant?" he said in a snarling voice. "I see that with your fondness for abject utterances you combine one for futile persistence. You ought at least to have the intelligence to profit from a final interview with me, and not go on talking for the sake of talking drivel." "Monsieur," I replied, moving away from him, "you insult me. I am disarmed, because you are several times my age, we are not equally matched. Moreover, I cannot convince you. I have already sworn to you that I have said nothing." "So I'm lying!" he screamed in a terrifying tone, and with a bound forward that brought him within a yard of me. "Someone has misinformed you." Then in a gentle, affectionate, melancholy voice, as in those symphonies which are played without break between the different movements, in which a graceful scherzo, amiable and idyllic, follows the thunder-peals of the opening pages, "It is quite possible," he said. "Generally speaking, a remark repeated at second hand is rarely true. [. . .] Either way, true or false, the allegation has done its work. I can never rid myself of the impression it made on me. I cannot even say that he who chasteneth well loveth well, for I have chastened you well enough but I no longer love you." [. . .]I walked back through the big green drawing-room with him. I told him, speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. "Isn't it" he replied. "It's a good thing to be fond of something. The panelling is by Bagard. What is rather charming, don't you see, is that it was made to match the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. You observe, it repeats the same decorative design. [. . .] Some pretty things, are there not? These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland and the King of England, by Mignard. [. . .] Look in this cabinet I have all the hats worn by Madame Elisabeth, by the Princesse de Lamballe, and by the Queen. They don't interest you; it's as though you couldn't see. Perhaps you are suffering from an affection of the optic nerve. If you like this kind of beauty better, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear: Beethoven has come to join him." And indeed one could hear the first chords of the last movement of the Pastoral Symphony, "Joy after the Storm," performed somewhere not far away, on the first floor no doubt, by a band of musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be playing that, and who the musicians were. "Ah, well, one doesn't know. One never does know. It's invisible music. Pretty isn't it?" --- Marcel Proust The Guermantes Way |