Madness

Albertine is at once a creation of Marcel’s jealous obsession, rooted in childhood trauma, and a person that he has chosen to live with. Morel enjoys a similar dual existence for Charlus. This unstable duality carries the risk of resolution by madness and even death, a conclusion Marcel both acknowledges and is reluctant to accept.

Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions….There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead. (V,107)

“I beg of you, my darling girl, no more of that trick riding you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if you were to have an accident!”  Of course I did not wish her any harm. But how delighted I should have been if, with her horse, she had taken it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never come back to my house again! (V,153)

 It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing  a crime. But one has only to  compare this with the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable thing will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them–feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman. For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad….But all this  is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad. (V,236)

Many years later Marcel was to learn just how close to madness Morel had driven Charlus. This is from a letter meant to be read after his death.

This divine prudence it was that made him resist the appeals to come back and see me which I conveyed to him, and I shall have no peace in this world or hope of forgiveness in the next if I do not confess the truth to you. He was, in resisting my appeals, the instrument of divine wisdom, for I was resolved, had he come, that he should not leave my house alive. One of us two had to disappear. I had decided to kill him. (VI,168)

 

 

 

Charlus in Love IV

Charlus invites Marcel to visit him at near midnight. Charlus keeps him waiting longer than is polite. Marcel is finally shown in.

…already the door stood open, and I could see the Baron, in a Chinese dressing-gown, with his throat bare, lying on a settee….I supposed that M. de Charlus would rise to greet me. Without moving a muscle he fastened on me a pair of implacable eyes. I went towards him and said good evening; he did not hold out his hand, made no reply, did not ask me to take a chair. “…I had, immediately  on my return to Paris, given 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 instinctive gesture of denial. “What!” he shouted angrily, and indeed his face, convulsed 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 of 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?” (III,759)

Marcel replies, in all simplicity, that he remembers some pretty garlands of flowers. Charlus provides a lesson in the Queer Eye.

…I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do about styles,” he cried in a shrill scream of rage, “you don’t even know what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a Directory fireside chair as a Louis XIV bergère. One of these days you’ll be mistaking Mme de Villeparisis’s lap for the lavatory, and goodness knows what you’ll do in it. Similarly, you did not even recognise on the binding of Bergotte’s book the lintel of Myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there have been a clearer way of saying to you: ‘Forget me not.’?” (III,761)

 Marcel cannot imagine how he could have angered the Baron so. He had only said to Mme de Guermantes that they were friends.

He gave a disdainful smile, raised his voice to the supreme pitch of its highest register, and there, softly attacking the shrillest and most contumelious note, “Oh! Sir,” he said, returning by the most gradual stages to a  natural intonation, and seeming to revel as he went in the oddities of this descending scale, “I think you do yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were friends. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in one who could all too easily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo chair, but really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more and more sardonically winning until a charming smile actually began to play about his lips, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were friends! As for your having boasted that you had been presented to me, had talked to me, knew me slightly, had obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of becoming my protégé, I found it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done so.” (III,763)

Marcel again protests his innocence of offending him.

“Do you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You are evidently not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?” (III,765)

The Baron’s sadistic, erotic, outburst has overreached. Marcel has his own tantrum and demolishes Charlus’s new silk hat. Charlus is immediately in control of himself. He

…came runing after me at full speed, overtook me in the hall, and stood barring the door. “Come, now,” he said, “don’t be childish, come back for a minute; he that loveth well chasteneth well, and if I have chastened you well it is because I love you well.” (III,767)

Charlus in Love III

In the space of a short walk, Charlus’s erotic imagination is engaged by Marcel, Bloch and a cab driver. He tries to seduce Marcel with promises of secrets known only to the inner elites.

There is nothing so agreeable as to put oneself out for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste of old things, collections, gardens, are all mere ersatz, surrogates, alibis. From the depths of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonis submit to treament but we should prefer to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. (III,386)

I have often thought, Monsieur, that there was in me, thanks not to my own humble gifts but to circumstances which you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth of experience, a sort of secret dossier of inestimable value, of which I have not felt myself at liberty to make use for my own personal ends, which would be a priceless acquisition to a young man to whom I would hand over in a few months what it has taken me more than thirty years to acquire, and which I am perhaps alone in possessing….I could give you an explanation that no one has dreamed of, not only of the past but of the future. (III,389)

Charlus now questions Marcel about Bloch, whom he had heard spoken of at Mme de Villeparisis’s, wondering if  “he was young, good-looking.” There follows some talk about Dreyfus, whom Charlus does not consider a traitor simply because he is not French, but a Jew. He then launches into a remarkably violent anti-semitic outburst than can only be considered, given Charlus’s disposition toward S&M, orgasmic.

Perhaps you could ask our friend to allow me to attend some great festival in the Temple, a circumcision, or some Hebrew chants. He might perhaps hire a hall and give me some biblical entertainment, as the young ladies of Saint-Cyr performed scenes taken from the Psalms by Racine, to amuse Louis XIV. You might perhaps arrange that, and even some comic exhibitions. For instance a contest between your friend and his father, in which he would smite him as David smote Goliath. That would make quite an amusing farce. He might even, while he was about it, give his hag (or, as my old nurse would say, his ‘haggart’) of a mother a good thrashing. That would be an excellent show, and would not be unpleasing to us, eh, my young friend, since we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-European creature would be giving a well-earned punishment to an old cow. (III,390)

Charlus passes up cab after cab, not finding them quite what he was looking for.

At that moment a cab passed, zigzagging along the street. A young cabman, who had deserted his box, was driving it from inside, where he lay sprawling on the cushions, apparently half-tipsy. M. de Charlus instantly stopped him. The driver began to parley: “Which way are you going?” “Yours.”  “Well, I don’t want to get up on the box. D’you mind if I stay inside?” “No, but lower the hood…” (III,401)

 

Charlus in Love II

I do not believe I am far off if I say that the biggest villan for Proust is habit. Marcel’s long battle to understand and overcome habit in order to become a writer is a recurrent theme. Isn’t this the importance of the madeleine, of unforced memory, which breaks through the habit-induced fog of the intellect to experience the world directly, happily?

So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death–that is to  say, to all mankind. (II,398) 

Habit also may erode our morals by gradually habituating us to behavior that once would have shocked us. This is another answer to the question of the last post: how did Charlus end up chained to an iron bed and lashed with a nail-studded whip?

But in him, as in Jupien, 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 today until at last this consenting Prometheus had had himself nailed by Force to the rock of Pure Matter. (VI,214)

But the narrator tempers this harsh judgement of Charlus’s moral slide to slavery to his obsessions. Charlus knows he is acting in a bizarre play of his own creation.

Yet I have perhaps been inaccurate in speaking of the rock of Pure Matter. In this Pure Matter it is possible that a small quantum of Mind still survived. This madman knew, in spite of everything, that he was the victim of a form of madness and during his mad moments he nevertheless was playing a part, since he knew quite well that the young man who was berating him was not more wicked than the little boy who in a game of war is chosen by lot to be “the Prussian,” upon whom all the others hurl themselves in a fury of genuine patriotism and pretended hate. (VI,215)

Moreover, this “small quantum of mind” is motivated, at heart, by love, albeit Proustian love.

Even in these aberrations (and this is true also of our loves or our travels), human nature still betrays its need for belief by its insistent demand for truth….And if there is something of aberration or perversion in all our loves, perversions in the narrower sense of the word are like loves in which the germ of disease has spread vitriously to every part. Even in the maddest of them love may still be recognised…at the bottom of all this there persisted in M. de Charlus his dream of virility, to be attested if need be by acts of brutality, and all that inner radiance, invisible to us but projecting in this manner a little reflected light, with which his mediaeval imagination adorned crosses of judgement and feudal torture. (VI,215-217)

This passage pulls all the traits of Charlus’s personality together. However degrading his behavior may be, he has led himself there by his pride in his “mediaeval” family origins and in his virility, which dictates the choice of pain and even the type of instruments that inflict it. Perhaps if the war had not been against his beloved Germans, Charlus might have channeled these same traits into behavior praised by all. But the source would have been the same.

 

Charlus in Love

For Proustian characters, love is an act of the imagination. When the imagination is silenced by possession of the person desired, love disappears. Both Swann and Marcel experience this and in similar ways. Swann’s love is sparked by the imaginative leap from the resemblance of Odette to a Botticelli figure and then kept alive by his agony over the mystery of Odette’s present and past lives. Swann’s love ended with their marriage.  Marcel’s love for Albertine is ended not by her death so much as by her memory eroded by time. In both cases their obsessions with these women was prolonged by the mystery of their lesbian lives.

Charlus is no different. He pursues Charlie Morel for a longer time than Swann’s and Marcel’s loves combined. Morel is bisexual, but he keeps Charlus at a distance. Charlus, deprived of possession, grows murderous toward Charlie, who refuses to see him, fearing for his life. All this by way of trying to understand how we find Charlus in a male brothel, voluntarily chained and being beaten with a nail-studded whip.

The narrator observes that the war has provided new opportunities for Charlus. Many of his more mature partners are away in service, but Paris is a “harem” of young men from many countries and races. Charlus’s imagination is fired with new opportunities:

He found the Germans very ugly, perhaps because they were rather too near to his own blood–it was the Moroccans he was mad about and even more the Anglo-Saxons, in whom he saw living statues by Phidias. Now in him pleasure was not unaccompanied by a certain idea of cruelty of which I had not at that time learned the full force: the man whom he loved appeared to him in the guise of a delightful torturer. In taking sides against the Germans he would have seemed to himself to be acting as he did only in his hours of physical pleasure, to be acting, that is, in a manner contrary to his merciful nature, fired with passion for seductive evil and helping to crush virtuous ugliness. (VI,126)

Marcel happens on a male brothel, set up by Charlus and run by Jupien to minister to Charlus’s erotic needs. And what are those needs? What follows is an extended comic scene that explores the mystery of love, Charlus style. Marcel finds a group of young men in a small room, chatting as working men do, about the war, about beating their clients. Marcel is given a room, has his refreshment and then wanders about. He spies on Charlus as he is chained and beaten by Maurice. Jupien characterizes him thusly:

“He’s a milkman but he’s also one of the most dangerous thugs in Belleville” (and it was with a superbly salacious note in his voice that Jupien uttered the work “thug”). And as if this recommendation were not sufficient, he would try to add one or two further “citations.” “He has had several convictions for theft and burglary, he was in Fresnes for assaulting” (the same salacious note in his voice) “and practically murdering people in the street, and he’s been in a punishment battalion Africa. He killed his sergeant.” (VI,184)

 Charlus, courteous and kind when he wants, is not convinced of Maurice’s thuggery.

“I did not want to speak in front of that boy, who is very nice and does his best. But I don’t find him sufficiently brutal. He has a charming face, but when he calls me a filthy brute he might be just repeating a lesson.” “I assure  you, nobody has said a word to him,” replied Jupien, without perceiving how improbable this statement was. “And besides, he was involved in the murder of a concierge in La Villete.” “Ah! that is extremely interesting,” said the Baron with a smile. (VI,184)

Marcel notes resemblances of the young men here to Morel. He wonders if this is intentional.

A third hypothesis which occurred to me was that perhaps, in spite of appearances, there had never existed between him and Morel anything more than relations of friendship, and that M. de Charlus caused young men who resembled Morel to come to Jupien’s establishment so that he might have the illusion, while he was with them, of enjoying pleasure with Morel himself. (VI,185)

 As with Swann and Marcel, the impossibility of fully possessing the loved one fires the imagination and intensifies the love. Charlus is special in that he stage manages his imagination. But the sting of the nail-studded whip is real enough to maintain the illusion.