"Leave me alone. I forbid you to come near me," Morel shouted at the Baron. "You know what I mean all right. I'm not the first person you've tried to pervert!"
My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus. For a thousand times less than that I had been visited with his furious rage; no one was safe from it; a king would not have intimidated him. Instead of which, an extraordinary thing happened. M. de Charlus was speechless, dumbfounded, measuring the depths of his misery without understanding its cause, unable to think of a word to say, raising his eyes to gaze at each of the company in turn, with a questioning, outraged, suppliant air, which seemed to be asking them not so much what had happened as what answer he ought to make. And yet M. de Charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity, when, seized by a rage which had been simmering for a long time, he reduced someone to despair with the most cruel words in front of a shocked society group which had never imagined that anyone could go that far. M. de Charlus, on those occasions, almost foamed at the mouth, working himself up into a veritable frenzy which left everyone trembling. But in these instances he had the initiative, he was on the attack, he said whatever came into his head (just as Bloch was free to make fun of the Jews yet blushed if the word Jew was uttered in his hearing). These people whom he hated, he hated because he thought they looked down on him. Had they been civil to him, instead of flying into a furious rage with them he would have taken them to his bosom. Perhaps what now struck him speechless was - when he saw M. and Mme Verdurin turned their eyes away from him and that no one was coming to his rescue - his present anguish and, still more, his dread of great anguish to come; or else the fact that, not having worked himself up and concocted an imaginary rage in advance, having no ready-made thunderbolt in hand, he had been seized and struck suddenly at a moment when he was unarmed (for, sensitive, neurotic, hysterical, he was genuinely impulsive but pseud-brave - indeed, as I had always thought, and it was something that had rather endeared him to me, pseudo-cruel - and did not have the normal reactions of an outraged man of honour); or else that, in a milieu that was not his won, he felt less at ease and less courageous than he would in the Faubourg. The fact remains that, in this salon which he despised, this great nobleman (in whom superiority over commoners was no more essentially inherent than it had been in this or that ancestor of his trembling before the revolutionary tribunal) could do nothing, in the paralysis of his every limb as well as his tongue, but case around him terror-stricken, suppliant, bewildered glances, outraged by the violence that was being done to him. In a situation so cruelly unforeseen, this great talker could do no more than stammer: "What does it all mean? What's wrong?" His question was not even heard. And the eternal pantomime of panic terror has so little changed that this elderly gentleman to whom a disagreeable incident had occurred in a Parisian drawing-room unconsciously re-enacted the basic formal attitudes in which the Greek sculptors of the earliest times symbolized the terror of nymphs pursued by the god Pan.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 321-322
For sometime now the specter of scandal tied to M. de Charlus's homosexuality has been lurking in the shadows, and it has finally made an appearance, and a dramatic one. In front of a crowd Morel, who, I've determined, is the most reprehensible character in Remembrance of Things Past, shouted accusations against the Baron, including, "I'm not the first person you've tried to pervert!" Beyond the creative rewriting of history by Morel, it is certainly a shocking and devastating public accusation. Marcel, who didn't like many of the other people in the crowd, was looking forward to what he was certain was sure to follow: the Baron taking instant revenge and mowing down his enemies. We're told: "My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus. For a thousand times less than that I had been visited with his furious rage; no one was safe from it; a king would not have intimidated him." But instead the unexpected occurred: the Baron suddenly grew old. "Instead of which, an extraordinary thing happened. M. de Charlus was speechless, dumbfounded, measuring the depths of his misery without understanding its cause, unable to think of a word to say, raising his eyes to gaze at each of the company in turn, with a questioning, outraged, suppliant air, which seemed to be asking them not so much what had happened as what answer he ought to make." Often we age gradually, sometimes gracefully and sometime not. Any baseball fan of a certain vintage can remember the once magnificently young and graceful Willie Mays stumbling around the outfield as a New York Met at the end of his career, a sad shadow of his former splendor. Sometimes we seem to grow old overnight. Babe Ruth had been declining for a while when he ended his unrivaled career with his sad little chapter with the Boston Braves. Still, he was not that far removed from a three homer game when he played the Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field (still the greatest baseball park of all time, as all right-thinking individuals know). The Babe stumbled climbing up the terrace in the outfield and retired a few days later. It's common in sports, although usually less apparent in other works of life. One of my great terrors is being seen as weak - and I'd much rather be hated than pitied - and so much of that will relate to when I grow old, or maybe it's more appropriate to say more old. People's perception of me is already changing, and, as I've discussed, I'm not handling it well and it won't get any better. I'm sure I'll have my classroom moment equivalent to Babe Ruth stumbling up the terrace at Crosley Field, and then I suspect I'll walk away pretty quickly. I don't know if I could face what the Baron faced: "In a situation so cruelly unforeseen, this great talker could do no more than stammer: "What does it all mean? What's wrong?" His question was not even heard"
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