Morel’s plot to have the Verdurins’ coachman attacked is a concealed effort to take the man’s position, achieved through sabotage, misinformation, and the exploitation of household loyalties. The coachman’s departure clears the way for Morel to become the Verdurins’ chauffeur; the narrator, however, initially accepts the replacement as an uncomplicated staffing change and only later understands the scheme behind it.

The position Morel sought

Morel wanted the Verdurins to replace their carriage with a motor-car and, more particularly, to replace their head coachman with him. The first change was comparatively easy because the household was generous toward its servants. Securing the coachman’s place was harder: the coachman was regarded as sensitive and prone to gloomy moods, and Morel needed to make his continued employment seem untenable without openly appearing to pursue it for himself.

The plan therefore depended on making ordinary workplace difficulties look like evidence against the coachman. Morel began by ensuring that items needed to harness the horses repeatedly went missing. The absent equipment included the bit and curb, the cushion for the coachman’s box-seat, his whip and rug, and several other pieces of tack. The coachman managed to borrow replacements from a neighbour, but these delays made him late bringing out the carriage and put him in M. Verdurin’s bad books. The manufactured inconvenience helped create the conditions for his removal.

A warning used to turn the household against him

When the missing equipment had not yet displaced the coachman, Morel escalated the scheme. He told M. Verdurin’s servants that the coachman had threatened to ambush them and claimed he could take on all six at once. Presenting himself as a reluctant messenger who wanted the servants to forestall danger, Morel helped secure their agreement to attack the coachman in the stables while M. and Mme Verdurin and their guests were out walking.

Morel’s choice of the footman Howsler to carry his belongings on that walk also served the plot. He insisted that he would not entrust his violin to just anyone, but the narrator later realized that Howsler was the coachman’s brother. Leaving him at home might have enabled him to intervene on the coachman’s behalf. During the outing, Morel spoke favorably of both brothers, then introduced the claim that the coachman drank and might be unsafe as a driver. Mme Verdurin, alarmed by the possibility that she had been driven by someone who drank, began to fear for her own safety.

The attack and the coachman’s departure

Morel reinforced his story by saying that the coachman’s bruised face showed how many accidents he had had, and that he had broken his shafts. Mme Verdurin tried to end the walk early and return to the house. Morel instead kept her away by playing a Bach air with endless variations, delaying her return until the servants’ confrontation had taken place.

Back at the house, Mme Verdurin found new shafts and Howsler streaming with blood. She was close to dismissing him and paying his wages, but the coachman asked to leave of his own accord. He did not want to accuse his fellow servants, whom he retrospectively suspected of having stolen his harness equipment, and he judged that staying could end with him being left for dead. His request settled the matter. The chauffeur began work the following day, and Mme Verdurin later recommended him to the narrator as thoroughly reliable, unaware—or at least not shown as aware—of the means by which he had obtained the post.

Delayed recognition and narrative significance

The narrator was surprised both that the coachman had been dismissed and that the successor was the same chauffeur who had driven him and Albertine. He accepted the chauffeur’s complicated account of being summoned back to Paris and then ordered to the Verdurins. The coachman’s departure prompted Morel to speak with the narrator for a few minutes and express regret at losing a worthy man, a display that further concealed his role in the affair.

The narrator explicitly postpones the full account until the later story of Albertine, marking the episode as a disclosure whose meaning arrives after its apparent outcome. What first looks like a routine change in household employment becomes a compact demonstration of Morel’s contradictory character: he can express regret and, on some days, show genuine kindness, yet here he engineers another man’s removal through deception and leaves others to carry out the violence. The episode also shows how reputation can be manufactured from staged evidence: missing equipment produces lateness, a false threat mobilizes the servants, and a story about drinking turns Mme Verdurin’s concern for her safety against the coachman.