Marcel Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah: Cities of the Plain

Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the firefrom heaven.

La femme aura Gomorrhe et lhomme aura Sodome . Alfred de Vigny.

The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on the evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was togive her party) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just described, I had kept watch for their return and hadmade, in the course of my vigil, a discovery which, albeit concerning M. de Charlus in particular, was in itself soimportant that I have until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence and treat it with the fulness that itdemanded, postponed giving any account of it. I had, as I have said, left the marvellous point of vantage, so snuglycontrived for me at the top of the house, commanding the broken and irregular slopes leading up to the Htel de Brquigny,and gaily decorated in the Italian manner by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frcourts stables. I had felt it tobe more convenient, when I thought that the Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself on thestaircase. I regretted somewhat the abandonment of my watch-tower. But at that time of day, namely the hour immediatelyfollowing luncheon, I had less cause for regret, for I should not then have seen, as in the morning, the foptmen of theBrquigny-Tresmes household, converted by distance into minute figures in a picture, make their leisurely ascent of theabrupt precipice, feather-brush in hand, behind the large, transparent flakes of mica which stood out so charmingly upon itsruddy bastions. Failing the geologists field of contemplation, I had at least that of the botanist, and was peering throughthe shutters of the staircase window at the Duchesss little tree and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard withthat insistence with which mothers bring out their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insectwould come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. My curiosity emboldening me by degrees, Iwent down to the ground-floor window, which also stood open with its shutters ajar. I could hear distinctly, as he got readyto go out, Jupien who could not detect me behind my blind, where I stood perfectly still until the moment when I drewquickly aside in order not to be seen by M. de Charlus, who, on his way to call upon Mme. de Villeparisis, was slowlycrossing the courtyard, a pursy figure, aged by the strong light, his hair visibly grey. Nothing short of an indispositionof Mme. de Villeparisis (consequent on the illness of the Marquis de Fierbois, with whom he personally was at daggers drawn)could have made M. de Charlus pay a call, perhaps for the first time in his life, at that hour of the day. For with thateccentricity of the Guermantes, who, instead of conforming to the ways of society, used to modify them to suit their ownpersonal habits (habits not, they thought, social, and deserving in consequence the abasement before them of that thing ofno value, Society thus it was that Mme. de Marsantes had no regular day, but was at home to her friends every morningbetween ten oclock and noon), the Baron, reserving those hours for reading, hunting for old curiosities and so forth, paidcalls only between four and six in the afternoon. At six oclock he went to the Jockey Club, or took a stroll in the Bois. Amoment later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien. It was nearly time for him to start for the office, fromwhich he would return only for dinner, and not even then always during the last week, his niece and her apprentices havinggone to the country to finish a dress there for a customer. Then, realising that no one could see me, I decided not to letmyself be disturbed again, for fear of missing, should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond thepossibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far asambassador to the virgin who had so long been waiting for him to appear. I knew that this expectancy was no more passivethan in the male flower, whose stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily receive their offering;similarly the female flower that stood here, if the insect came, would coquettishly arch her styles; and, to be moreeffectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way. Thelaws of the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by other laws, increasingly exalted. If the visit of an insect, thatis to say, the transportation of the seed of one flower is generally necessary for the fertilisation of another, that isbecause autofecundation, the fertilisation of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in thesame family, to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by the insects gives to the subsequent generationsof the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears. This invigoration may, however, prove excessive, the speciesdevelop out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin protects us against disease, as the thyroid gland regulates ouradiposity, as defeat comes to punish pride, fatigue, indulgence, and as sleep in turn depends upon fatigue, so anexceptional act of autofecundation comes at a given point to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the curb, brings backwithin normal limits the flower that has exaggerated its transgression of them. My reflexions had followed a tendency whichI shall describe in due course, and I had already drawn from the visible stratagems of flowers a conclusion that bore upon awhole unconscious element of literary work, when I saw M. de Charlus coming away from the Marquise. Perhaps he had learnedfrom his elderly relative herself, or merely from a servant, the great improvement, or rather her complete recovery fromwhat had been nothing more than a slight indisposition. At this moment, when he did not suspect that anyone was watchinghim, his eyelids lowered as a screen against the sun, M. de Charlus had relaxed that tension in his face, deadened thatartificial vitality, which the animation of his talk and the force of his will kept in evidence there as a rule. Pale asmarble, his nose stood out firmly, his fine features no longer received from an expression deliberately assumed a differentmeaning which altered the beauty of their modelling; nothing more now than a Guermantes, he seemed already carved in stone,he Pala-mde the Fifteenth, in their chapel at Combray. These general features of a whole family took on, however, in theface of M. de Charlus a fineness more spiritualised, above all more gentle. I regretted for his sake that he shouldhabitually adulterate with so many acts of violence, offensive oddities, tale-bearings, with such harshness, susceptibilityand arrogance, that he should conceal beneath a false brutality the amenity, the kindness which, at the moment of hisemerging from Mme. de Villeparisiss, I could see displayed so innocently upon his face. Blinking his eyes in the sunlight,he seemed almost to be smiling, I found in his face seen thus in repose and, so to speak, in its natural state something soaffectionate, so disarmed, that I could not help thinking how angry M. de Charlus would have been could he have known thathe was being watched; for what was suggested to me by the sight of this man who was so insistent, who prided himself so uponhis virility, to whom all other men seemed odiously effeminate, what he made me suddenly think of, so far had he momentarilyassumed her features, expression, smile, was a woman.