“You don’t mind if we go a little way on foot?” he asked dryly, when we were in the courtyard. “We can walk until I find a cab that suits me.”
“You wished to speak to me about something, Sir?”
“Oh yes, as a matter of fact there were some things I wished to say to you, but I am not so sure now whether I shall. As far as you are concerned, I am sure that they might be the starting-point which would lead you to inestimable benefits. But I can see also that they would bring into my existence, at an age when one begins to value tranquillity, a great loss of time, great inconvenience. I ask myself whether you are worth all the pains that I should have to take with you, and I have not the pleasure of knowing you well enough to be able to say. Perhaps also to you yourself what I could do for you does not appear sufficiently attractive for me to give myself so much trouble, for I repeat quite frankly that for me it can only be trouble.”
I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This summary end to the discussion did not seem to be to his liking.
“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly. “There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”
“I would not for anything in the world, Sir, be a cause of anxiety to you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you may be sure that everything which comes to me from you will be a very great pleasure to me. I am deeply touched that you should be so kind as to take notice of me in this way and try to help me.”
Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he thanked me for this speech, slipping his arm through mine with that intermittent familiarity[familiarity] which had already struck me at Balbec, and was in such contrast to the coldness of his tone.
“With the want of consideration common at your age,” he told me, “you are liable to say things at times which would open an unbridgeable gulf between us. What you have said just now, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing that touches me, and makes me want to do a great deal for you.”
As he walked arm in arm with me and uttered these words, which, albeit tinged with contempt, were so affectionate, M. de Charlus now fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity which had struck me the first morning, when I saw him outside the casino at Balbec, and indeed many years before that, through the pink hawthorns, standing beside Mme. Swann, whom I supposed then to be his mistress, in the park at Tansonville; now let it stray around him and examine the cabs which at this time of the day were passing in considerable numbers on the way to their stables, looking so determinedly at them that several stopped, the drivers supposing that he wished to engage them. But M. de Charlus immediately dismissed them.
“They’re not what I want,” he explained to me, “it’s all a question of the colour of their lamps, and the direction they’re going in. I hope, Sir,” he went on, “that you will not in any way misinterpret the purely disinterested and charitable nature of the proposal which I am going to make to you.”