de Charlus spent all the time that he denied to these great lords and ladies with a tailor’s niece! In the first place—the paramount reason—Morel was there. But even if he had not been there, I see nothing improbable in it, or else you are judging things as one of Aimé’s minions would have done. Few except waiters believe that an excessively rich man always wears dazzling new clothes and a supremely smart gentleman gives dinner parties for sixty and travels everywhere by car. They deceive themselves. Very often an excessively rich man wears constantly the same jacket; while a supremely smart gentleman is one who in a restaurant hobnobs only with the staff and, on returning home, plays cards with his valet. This does not prevent him from refusing to give precedence to Prince Murat.

Among the reasons which made M. de Charlus look forward to the marriage of the young couple was this, that Jupien’s niece would then be in some sense an extension of Morel’s personality, and so of the Baron’s power over him and knowledge of him. It would never even have occurred to him to feel the slightest scruple about “betraying,” in the conjugal sense, the violinist’s future wife. But to have a “young couple” to guide, to feel himself the redoubtable and all-powerful protector of Morel’s wife, who, looking upon the Baron as a god, would thereby prove that Morel had inculcated this idea into her, and would thus contain in herself something of Morel—all this would add a new variety to the form of M. de Charlus’s domination and bring to light in his “creature,” Morel, a creature the more—the husband—that is to say would give the Baron something different, new, curious, to love in him. Perhaps indeed this domination would be stronger now than it had ever been. For whereas Morel by himself, naked so to speak, often resisted the Baron whom he felt certain of winning back, once he was married he would soon fear for his household, his bed and board, his future, would offer to M. de Charlus’s wishes a wider target, an easier hold. All this, and even at a pinch, on evenings when he was bored, the prospect of stirring up trouble between husband and wife (the Baron had always been fond of battle-pictures) was pleasing to him. Less pleasing, however, than the thought of the state of dependence upon himself in which the young people would live. M. de Charlus’s love for Morel acquired a delicious novelty when he said to himself: “His wife too will be mine just as much as he is; they will always behave in such a way as not to annoy me, they will obey my every whim, and thus she will be a sign (hitherto unknown to me) of what I had almost forgotten, what is so very dear to my heart—that to all the world, to everyone who sees that I protect and house them, to myself, Morel is mine.” This testimony, in the eyes of the world and in his own, pleased M. de Charlus more than anything. For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often, those who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence.

The reader may remember that Morel had once told the Baron that his great ambition was to seduce some young girl, and this one in particular, and that to succeed in his enterprise he would promise to marry her, but, the rape accomplished, would “buzz off;” but what with the declarations of love for Jupien’s niece which Morel had poured out to him, M. de Charlus had forgotten this confession. What was more, Morel had quite possibly forgotten it himself. There was perhaps a real gap between Morel’s nature—as he had cynically admitted, perhaps even artfully exaggerated it—and the moment at which it would regain control of him. As he became better acquainted with the girl, she had appealed to him, he grew fond of her; he knew himself so little that he even perhaps imagined that he was in love with her, for ever. True, his initial desire, his criminal intention remained, but concealed beneath so many superimposed feelings that there is nothing to prove that the violinist would not have been sincere in saying that this vicious desire was not the true motive of his action. 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.