There was, moreover, a brief period during which, without his admitting it to himself precisely, this marriage appeared to him to be necessary. Morel was suffering at the time from violent cramp in the hand, and found himself obliged to contemplate the possibility of having to give up the violin. Since, in everything but his art, he was astonishingly lazy, he was faced with the necessity of finding someone to keep him; and he preferred that it should be Jupien's niece rather than M. de Charlus, this arrangement offering him greater freedom and also a wide choice of different kinds of women, ranging from the apprentices, perpetually changing, whom he would persuade Jupien's niece to procure for him, to the rich and beautiful ladies to whom he would prostitute her. That his future wife might refuse to lend herself to these ploys, that she could be to such a degree, perverse, never entered Morel's calculations for a moment. However, his cramp having ceased, they receded into the background and were replaced by pure love. His violin would suffice, together with his allowance from M. de Charlus, whose demands upon him would certainly be reduced once he, Morel, was married to the girl. This marriage was the urgent thing, because of his love, and in the interest of his freedom. He asked Jupien for his niece's hand, and Jupien consulted her. This was wholly unnecessary. The girl's passion for the violinist streamed around her, like her hair when she let it down, as did the joy in her beaming eyes. In Morel, almost everything that was agreeable or advantageous to him awakened moral emotions and words to correspond, sometimes even melting him to tears. It was therefore sincerely - if such a word can be applied to him - that he addressed to Jupien's niece speeches so steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are the speeches of so many young noblemen who look forward to a life of idleness address to some charming daughter of a bourgeois plutocrat) as the theories he had expounded to M. de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of virgins had been steeped in unmitigated vileness. However, there was another side to this virtuous enthusiasm for a person who afforded him pleasure and to the solemn promises that he made to her. As soon as the person ceased to cause him pleasure, or indeed, for example, the obligation to fulfill the promises that he had mad caused him displeasure, she at once became the object of antipathy which he sought to justify in his own eyes and which, after some neurasthenic disturbance, enabled him to prove to himself, as soon as the balance of his nervous system was restored, that, even looking at the matter from a purely virtuous point of view, he was released from any obligation.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 45-46
Morel is one of those actors who has been actively performing in the background throughout so much of Remembrance of Things Past, but he's only now taking on a more prominent role - and thus coming into clearer focus. Mainly up to this point he's been an object of desire for M. de Charlus, and the engine for some tragicomic scenes. Apparently, as we've seen, as we see, and as we'll see, everyone wants to sleep with him, and he seems pretty democratic in his willingness to assist their desires. At first blush, and I think at every preceding blush, Morel seems to be a fairly reprehensible character, although an oddly sentimental one. Proust notes, "In Morel, almost everything that was agreeable or advantageous to him awakened moral emotions and words to correspond, sometimes even melting him to tears." He wants to marry Jupien's niece because marriage meant freedom, although, at least allegedly, later his more mercenary goals were "replaced by pure love." To be fair, I suppose his worldview is really not that different from the female characters in the novel who are positioning themselves for an advantageous marriage, so maybe by heaping more scorn on him we're revealing our own sexism; although I wouldn't go too far down that road because I still think he's a morally bankrupt (at least morally ambiguous) character. However, as I've noted, he's hardly the only character like this in the novel. There are normally one or two characters, although less sexually adventurous, in every Dickens novel, but they are outnumbered by the more morally upright characters, usually, appropriately, from a lower social class. So why are there so many rapacious characters in Remembrance of Things Past? Well, following the Dickens example I just gave, the focus here in much more on the upper classes, and even Proust, a few posts ago, apologized for making it seem that everyone from the upper classes was depraved. [Trigger Warning: rant from unrepentant socialist coming] My theory is that it's more than possessing piles of money. Rather, I think it relates to general usefulness to society. None of these characters appear to have done anything other than leech off of society. They're all whores, with the only distinction being subtle differences in their clientele. If you do nothing but sponge off others then it would seem to me that your main concern would be about survival, and finding the next appropriate host. But enough about the Trump junta . . .
Oh, and just for future reference, this morning, in real time, I finished reading The Fugitive and started on Time Regained. I'm having mixed emotions about starting the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past.
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