Morel’s scheme to have the Verdurins’ coachman driven out

Morel’s scheme to have the Verdurins’ coachman driven out turns an ordinary change of transport into a covert campaign of sabotage. Seeking the coachman’s position for himself, Morel arranges a chain of deceptions that makes the young man appear unreliable and dangerous, then lets the household’s response accomplish the dismissal. The narrator recounts the episode retrospectively, stressing the gap between Morel’s concealed role and the respectable account he gives afterward.

The Position Morel Seeks

Morel’s plan is not simply to have the Verdurins replace their carriage with a motor-car. He presses for a more consequential change: the household must also replace its head coachman with Morel, who is then working as chauffeur. The carriage-to-car transition offers an opening, but Morel wants the job as well as the new vehicle. His strategy is to discredit the coachman while presenting himself as the practical replacement.

The first stage is a series of small thefts from the coachman’s equipment. Morel arranges for essential items to go missing: first the bit, then the curb, and at other times the box-seat cushion, whip, rug, martingale, sponge, or chamois-leather. The coachman manages to borrow what he needs from a neighbour, but the repeated delays mean the carriage is late. That visible failure damages his standing with M. Verdurin, while the setbacks also leave the coachman melancholy and increasingly dispirited. Morel’s method works by converting hidden interference into an apparent flaw in the employee’s performance.

The Fabricated Threat

When the missing equipment has not yet secured the position, Morel escalates the scheme. He tells the Verdurins’ servants that the coachman has threatened to ambush them and boasts that he can take on all six at once. Morel claims that he is only warning them so they can forestall the danger, while insisting that he does not wish to become involved himself. The servants agree to confront the coachman in the stables while the Verdurins and their guests are out walking.

Morel also arranges the circumstances of that walk to keep Howsler, one of the footmen, away from the stable. Howsler is the coachman’s brother and might come to his aid if left at home. Morel asks for Howsler to carry his belongings, citing a sore arm and refusing to entrust his violin to just anyone. The narrator later understands that this request served a second purpose: it removed the brother from the place where the confrontation was expected. Morel thus manipulates both the servants’ fear of a supposed threat and the family connection that could have obstructed his plan.

Turning Suspicion Against the Coachman

During the walk, Morel shifts from arranging the confrontation to shaping Mme Verdurin’s view of the coachman. In a lowered voice, he praises the coachman and his brother, then introduces the claim that the coachman has a drinking habit. Mme Verdurin reacts with alarm at the possibility that a driver might drink. Morel presses the implication further, asking whether she has noticed the number of accidents and suggesting that the coachman’s bruised face and damaged shafts testify to dangerous driving. He thereby gives her a vivid but misleading account of risk to herself and her household.

The account is designed to bring Mme Verdurin back to the house. Morel sustains the walk with a Bach air and endless variations, keeping the party away while the scheme unfolds. When Mme Verdurin returns to the stable, she sees new shafts and Howsler visibly hurt. The coachman, believing that the thefts reflect his fellow servants’ hostility and seeing no prospect of safety if he stays, asks permission to leave immediately. His own departure resolves the matter before Mme Verdurin has to dismiss him outright; the chauffeur begins work the following day.

What the Others Believe

The scheme’s success depends on the gap between what Morel has arranged and what the household can see. Mme Verdurin witnesses the results, not the full design. The coachman attributes the missing equipment to the servants’ animosity, and his request to leave settles the employment question without laying bare Morel’s part in it. Later, Mme Verdurin is so satisfied with the chauffeur that she recommends him warmly to the narrator as entirely reliable.

The narrator, who does not know what happened at the time, hires the same chauffeur by the day in Paris. He is surprised when he recognizes him as the man who had driven him and Albertine, but accepts the chauffeur’s complicated explanation that he had been summoned back to Paris and then ordered to the Verdurins’ service. The later disclosure of the plot makes the narrator’s earlier confidence significant: the false account has succeeded not only with the household but also with a new employer who has no reason to suspect it.

Retrospective Disclosure and Character

The episode is embedded in a narrative that openly marks its shifts in time. The narrator explains that the coachman’s dismissal will matter later, postpones its full relevance to the story of Albertine, and then supplies the explanation after recounting his surprise at the chauffeur’s arrival. This retrospective structure makes the reader see Morel’s apparent reliability from two angles: first as the narrator experienced it, then as the narrator understands it after learning how the position was obtained.

The account also resists reducing Morel to a single moral trait. The narrator calls him a mass of contradictions and says he was capable, on certain days, of genuine kindness. That qualification does not soften the mechanics of this particular scheme: Morel exploits the coachman’s dependence on the job, turns household employees against him with a fabricated warning, and manipulates Mme Verdurin’s fears to clear his path. Instead, the contrast helps explain the difficulty of judging him through isolated appearances. At La Raspelière, Morel can express regret at the coachman’s departure while having engineered the circumstances that made it inevitable.