My Year With Proust - Day 285

I was so taken aback that I did not move, either to leave the house, as I ought to have done, or to change my seat, as he wished.  "Sir," he next said to me, weighting each of his words, to the more insulting of which he prefixed a double yoke of consonants, "the interview which I have condescended to grant you, at the request of a person who desires to remain nameless, will mark the final point in our relations.  I make no secret of the fact that I had hoped for better things!  I should perhaps be straining the meaning of the words a little - which one ought not to do, even with people who are ignorance of their value, simply out of the respect due to oneself - were I to tell you that I had felt a certain liking for you.  I think, however, that benevolence, in its most effectively patronising sense, would exceed neither what I felt nor what I was proposing to display.  I had, immediately on my return to Paris, give you to understand, while you were still at Balbec, that you could count upon me." I who remembered with what a torrent of abuse M. de Charlus had parted from me at Balbec made an instructive gesture of denial. "What!" he shouted angrily, and indeed his face, convulvsed and white, differed as much from his ordinary face as does the sea when, on a stormy morning, one sees instead of its customary smiling surface a myriad writhing snakes of spray and foam, "do you mean to pretend that you did not receive my message - almost a declaration - that you were to remember me?  What was there in the way of decoration round the cover of the book that I sent you?"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 575-576

M. de Charlus blows up at Marcel again, which Proust compares to an unexpected storm on the ocean, "a myriad writhing snakes of spray and foam."  I'm including this mainly as foreshadowing for the roll that M. de Charlus will be playing early in the next volume.  His explosion also reminds me of my character, Dr. Maudsley, in the play.  Appropriately, I found myself reading Proust when killing time in between scenes.