The predilections of Baron de Charlus
Above: "Jupien in his Hotel", Source: Remembrance of Things Past - Time Regained, Chatto & Windus, London, 1960, Vol XII, facing page 146; and the aged Baron de Charlusnow faithfully attended by Jupien: Ibid, 201.
80 A very pertinent astronomical analogy The evolution of his malady or the revolution of his vice had reached the extreme point at which the tiny original personality of the individual, the specific qualities he has inherited from his ancestors, are entirely eclipsed by the transit across them of some generic defect or malady which is their satellite. .. the look that was common to them all ..concealed every other quality from view”. 97 A delightful executioner For him “sexual gratification was inseparable from the idea of cruelty and .. the man who attracted him seemed like a kind of delightful executioner”. 185-6 Habit trumps moral responsibility For M Charlus, whatever disdain his aristocratic pride may have given him for the thought of what people would say, how was it that some feeling of personal dignity and self-respect had not forced him to refuse his sensuality seeking satisfactions for which the only imaginable excuse might seem to be complete insanity? But in him the practice of separating morality from a whole order of actions (and this is something that must also often happen to men who have public duties to perform, those of a judge for instance or a statesman and many others as well) must have been so long established that Habit, no longer asking Moral Sentiment for its opinion, had grown stronger from day to day until at last this consenting Prometheus had had himself nailed by Force to the rock of Pure Matter. |
201 Reflections upon Saint-Loup’s early demise .. or had he (Saint-Loup) really, justifying if need be by the death of his father at an early age, a presentiment of his own premature end? Such a presentiment would seem, no doubt, to be impossible. Yet death appears to be obedient to certain laws. Often for instance, one gets the impression that children of parents who have died very old or very young are almost compelled to disappear at the same age, the former protracting until their hundredth year their incurable miseries and ailments, the latter, is spite of a happy and healthy existence, swept away at the premature but inevitable date by an illness so opportune and so accidental (whatever deep roots it may have in the victim's temperament) that it appears to be merely the formality necessary for the realisation of death. And may it not be possible that accidental death too. . . is somehow recorded in advance, known only to the gods, invisible to men, but revealed by a peculiar sadness, half unconscious, half conscious " to the man who bears and forever sees within himself, as though it were some heraldic advice, a fatal date.
205 .. the scum of universal fatuousness which the war left in its wake and the halo which still adhered to military glory. For at that time if the loss of a finger could abolish centuries of prejudice and allow a man of humble birth to make a brilliant marriage into an aristocratic family, the croix de guerre, even one worn sitting in an office, sufficed for a triumphal election to the Chamber of Deputies, if not to the Academie Française. |