“But I am in no hurry,” I replied; “besides, I must wait for M. de Charlus; I am going with him.”
Mme. de Villeparisis overheard these last words. They appeared to vex her. Had the matter in question not been one which could not possibly give rise to such a sentiment, it might have struck me that what seemed to be at that moment alarmed in Mme. de Villeparisis was her modesty. But this hypothesis never even entered my mind. I was delighted with Mme. de Guermantes, with Saint-Loup, with Mme. de Marsantes, with M. de Charlus, with Mme. de Villeparisis; I did not stop to reflect, and I spoke lightheartedly and at random.
“You’re going from here with my nephew Palamède?” she asked me.
Thinking that it might produce a highly favourable impression on Mme. de Villeparisis if she learned that I was on intimate terms with a nephew whom she esteemed so greatly, “He has asked me to go home with him,” I answered blithely. “I am so glad. Besides, we are greater friends than you think, and I’ve quite made up my mind that we’re going to be better friends still.”
From being vexed, Mme. de Villeparisis seemed to have grown anxious. “Don’t wait for him,” she said to me, with a preoccupied air. “He is talking to M. de Faffenheim. He’s certain to have forgotten what he said to you. You’d much better go, now, quickly, while his back is turned.”
The first emotion shown by Mme. de Villeparisis would have suggested, but for the circumstances, offended modesty. Her insistence, her opposition might well, if one had studied her face alone, have appeared to be dictated by virtue. I was not, myself, in any hurry to join Robert and his mistress. But Mme. de Villeparisis seemed to make such a point of my going that, thinking perhaps that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew, I bade her goodbye. Next to her M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One would have said that the notion, omnipresent in all his members, of his vast riches gave him a particular high density, as though they had been melted in a crucible into a single human ingot to form this man whose value was so immense. At the moment of my saying goodbye to him he rose politely from his seat, and I could feel the dead weight of thirty millions which his old-fashioned French breeding set in motion, raised, until it stood before me. I seemed to be looking at that statue of Olympian Zeus which Pheidias is said to have cast in solid gold. Such was the power that good breeding had over M. de Guermantes, over the body of M. de Guermantes at least, for it had not an equal mastery over the ducal mind. M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but did not unbend to other people’s.
As I went downstairs I heard behind me a voice calling out to me:
“So this is how you wait for me, is it?”
It was M. de Charlus.
“You don’t mind if we go a little way on foot?” he asked dryly, when we were in the courtyard. “We can walk until I find a cab that suits me.”
“You wished to speak to me about something, Sir?”
“Oh yes, as a matter of fact there were some things I wished to say to you, but I am not so sure now whether I shall. As far as you are concerned, I am sure that they might be the starting-point which would lead you to inestimable benefits. But I can see also that they would bring into my existence, at an age when one begins to value tranquillity, a great loss of time, great inconvenience. I ask myself whether you are worth all the pains that I should have to take with you, and I have not the pleasure of knowing you well enough to be able to say. Perhaps also to you yourself what I could do for you does not appear sufficiently attractive for me to give myself so much trouble, for I repeat quite frankly that for me it can only be trouble.”
I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This summary end to the discussion did not seem to be to his liking.
“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly. “There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”
“I would not for anything in the world, Sir, be a cause of anxiety to you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you may be sure that everything which comes to me from you will be a very great pleasure to me. I am deeply touched that you should be so kind as to take notice of me in this way and try to help me.”
Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he thanked me for this speech, slipping his arm through mine with that intermittent familiarity which had already struck me at Balbec, and was in such contrast to the coldness of his tone.
“With the want of consideration common at your age,” he told me, “you are liable to say things at times which would open an
