Brideshead Revisited: Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Charles and Celia get a divorce, and Celia plans to marry a younger man named Robin. Boy Mulcaster helps Charles draw up the agreement. Boy is rather happy about the whole thing and says that it has worked out very nicely. Celia will take the children, who love Robin. Charles tells Boy that he will marry Julia as soon as the divorce is final, and Boy thinks that this is a waste of time and that Charles should enjoy his freedom.

Rex does not want to divorce Julia and hopes that Charles can talk her out of it. He doesn’t mind that she is unfaithful, but he doesn’t want the public scandal because his political career is not going well. One afternoon, Julia is invited to lunch with Brideshead’s fiancée. Afterward, Charles asks what she is like, and Julia says she is “common” and that her manner is friendly but condescending. Julia thinks her main objective in marrying Brideshead is to find a nice home for her family.

Charles’s divorce goes through swiftly and, publicly, everyone takes Celia’s side. Julia’s divorce is a lengthy process, and Rex moves out of Brideshead. He gives a ferocious speech in parliament about the possibility of war and does not yet know how the public will take it. One afternoon at Brideshead, Julia and Charles look out of the library windows at the rain, and Julia says that they will not see spring. Charles says that he left Brideshead once before and thought he would never return.

Wilcox comes in and tells them that Cordelia is on her way home and will arrive that night. Julia is delighted. She tells Charles that Cordelia went to Spain during the war there but did not return with the other nuns when the war ended. Instead, she stayed in Spain to help people who had lost their homes. Charles thinks that this is a waste of her life.

When Cordelia arrives, Charles is surprised to find that she has grown up “ugly.” He thinks her manners are coarse because of her time spent away. Charles, Julia, and Cordelia go to visit Nanny, and Cordelia tells them that she recently saw Sebastian. She says that he is ill and is being cared for by monks in Morocco. He is very religious now, she says.

Julia once said to Charles that it scared her how he had completely forgotten about Sebastian. Charles says that Sebastian was the “forerunner,” but inside he knows that he has not forgotten Sebastian; he is reminded of him constantly by Brideshead and by Julia. The next day, he asks Cordelia to tell him everything she knows about Sebastian

Cordelia says that she heard Sebastian was dying and so went to Tunis to find him. In Tunis, she found the place where he had stayed, but the owner said that they had not seen him. They were terribly worried about him and had tried to take care of him. He refused to eat and still drank heavily. Cordelia says he is still “loved wherever he goes.” She visited a nearby monastery and was told that he had been there and wanted to become a monk; he wanted to work in a leper colony. The Superior turned him away but told Cordelia that Sebastian was “holy.”

One day, the monks found Sebastian unconscious outside the monastery and took him in. Cordelia stayed with him while he was ill, and the day before she left, he told her what had happened. He and Kurt had gone to Athens and, for a while, they had been very happy together and Sebastian had stopped drinking. Kurt’s foot had healed too, and he became a better, nicer man. However, one day Kurt got into a fight and was imprisoned in Greece. He was then extradited to Germany and forced to be a soldier.

Sebastian went to Germany to find Kurt and found that he was a storm-trooper for the Nazis. However, Sebastian persuaded Kurt to run away with him. They escaped for a short time, but Kurt was recaptured and put in a concentration camp. Sebastian heard later that Kurt killed himself in the camp. Sebastian went back to Morocco and decided that he must travel somewhere away from civilization and become a missionary. Cordelia says that he is too weak to ever do this, but the monks will let him live at the monastery.

Charles asks Cordelia if she has told Julia. Cordelia says that she has but that Julia never loved Sebastian the way that she and Charles do. Cordelia predicts that Sebastian will stay with the monks for the rest of his life. Charles says that he hopes he doesn’t suffer, but Cordelia says that he suffers immensely, and that this is what makes him holy. She knows that Charles will not understand and teases him because she knows he thinks she is plain and has wasted her life. She tells him that she feels the same about him and Julia, and that she thinks they share a “thwarted passion.”

That night, as Charles watches Julia get ready for bed, he thinks that she looks sad: the way she did when he met her on board the ship. As he lies in bed, he sees a vision of a man in a hut on a snowy hillside. An avalanche builds outside the hut and, eventually, the pressure destroys the hut and sends the man tumbling down the mountain.