In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (48 page)

“Poor Saniette, I won’t have him made unhappy,” said Mme Verdurin in a tone of false pity, so as to leave no one in doubt as to her husband’s rudeness.

“I was at the Ch . . . Che . . .”

“Che, che, do try to speak distinctly,” said M. Verdurin, “I can’t understand a word you say.”

Almost without exception, the faithful burst out laughing, looking like a group of cannibals in whom the sight of a wounded white man has aroused the thirst for blood. For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike. And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, though it does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired. It is in the same fashion that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings.

“Come, now, it’s not his fault,” said Mme Verdurin.

“It’s not mine either, people ought not to dine out if they can’t speak properly.”

“I was at the
Chercheuse d’Esprit
by Favart.”

“What! It’s the
Chercheuse d’Esprit
that you call the
Chercheuse
? Why, that’s marvellous[ I might have gone on trying for a hundred years without guessing it,” cried M. Verdurin, who nevertheless would have decided immediately that you were not literary, were not artistic, were not “one of us,” if he had heard you quote the full title of certain works. For instance, one was expected to say the
Malade
, the
Bourgeois
, and anyone who added
imaginaire
or
gentilhomme
would have shown that he did not “belong,” just as in a drawing-room a person proves that he is not in society by saying “M. de Montesquiou-Fezensac” instead of “M. de Montesquiou.”

“But it isn’t so extraordinary,” said Saniette, breathless with emotion but smiling, although he was in no smiling mood.

Mme Verdurin could not contain herself: “Oh yes it is!” she exclaimed with a snigger. “You may be quite sure that nobody would ever have guessed that you meant the
Chercheuse d’Esprit
.”

M. Verdurin went on in a gentler tone, addressing both Saniette and Brichot: “It’s not a bad play, actually, the
Chercheuse d’Esprit
.”

Uttered in a serious tone, this simple remark, in which no trace of malice was to be detected, did Saniette as much good and aroused in him as much gratitude as a compliment. He was unable to utter a single word and preserved a happy silence. Brichot was more loquacious. “It’s true,” he replied to M. Verdurin, “and if it could be passed off as the work of some Sarmatian or Scandinavian author, we might put it forward as a candidate for the vacant post of masterpiece. But, be it said without any disrespect to the shade of the gentle Favart, he had not the Ibsenian temperament.” (Immediately he blushed to the roots of his hair, remembering the Norwegian philosopher, who looked unhappy because he was trying in vain to discover what vegetable the
buis
might be that Brichot had cited a little earlier in connexion with the name Bussière.) “However, now that Porel’s satrapy is filled by a functionary who is a Tolstoyan of rigorous observance, it may come to pass that we shall witness
Anna Karenina
or
Resurrection
beneath the Odéonian architrave.”

“I know the portrait of Favart to which you allude,” said M. de Charlus. “I have seen a very fine print of it at the Comtesse Molé’s.”

This name made a great impression upon Mme Verdurin. “Oh! so you go to Mme de Molé’s!” she exclaimed. She supposed that people said “the Comtesse Molé,” “Madame Molé,” simply as an abbreviation, as she heard people say “the Rohans” or in contempt, as she herself said, “Madame La Trémoïlle.” She had no doubt that the Comtesse Molé, who knew the Queen of Greece and the Princesse de Caprarola, must have as much right as anybody to the particle, and for once in a way had decided to bestow it upon so brilliant a personage, and one who had been extremely civil to herself. And so, to make it clear that she had spoken thus on purpose and did not grudge the Comtesse her “de,” she went on: “But I had no idea that you knew Madame de Molé!” as though it was doubly extraordinary, both that M. de Charlus should know the lady and that Mme Verdurin should not know that he knew her. Now society, or at least the people to whom M. de Charlus gave that name, forms a relatively homogeneous and closed whole. And whereas it is understandable that in the disparate vastness of the middle classes a barrister should say to somebody who knows one of his schoolfriends: “But how in the world do you come to know him?”, to be surprised at a Frenchman’s knowing the meaning of the word
temple
or
forest
would be hardly more extraordinary than to wonder at the accidents that might have brought together M. de Charlus and the Comtesse Molé. Moreover, even if such an acquaintance had not followed quite naturally from the laws that govern society, even if it had been fortuitous, how could there be anything strange in the fact that Mme Verdurin did not know of it, since she was meeting M. de Charlus for the first time, and his relations with Mme Molé were far from being the only thing she did not know about him, for in fact she knew nothing.

“Who was in this
Chercheuse d’Esprit
, my good Saniette?” asked M. Verdurin. Although he felt that the storm had passed, the old archivist hesitated before answering.

“There you go,” said Mme Verdurin, “you frighten him, you make fun of everything he says, and then you expect him to answer. Come along, tell us who was in it, and you shall have some galantine to take home,” said Mme Verdurin, making a cruel allusion to the penury into which Saniette had plunged himself by trying to rescue the family of a friend.

“I can remember only that it was Mme Samary who played the Zerbina,” said Saniette.

“The Zerbina? What in the world is that?” M. Verdurin shouted, as though the house were on fire.

“It’s one of the stock types in the old repertory, see
Le Capitaine Fracasse
, as who should say the Braggart, the Pedant.”

“Ah, the pedant, that’s you. The Zerbina! No, really the man’s cracked,” exclaimed M. Verdurin. (Mme Verdurin looked at her guests and laughed as though to apologise for Saniette.) “The Zerbina, he imagines that everybody will know at once what it means. You’re like M. de Longepierre, the stupidest man I know, who said to us quite familiarly the other day ‘the Banat.’ Nobody had any idea what he meant. Finally we were informed that it was a province of Serbia.”

To put an end to Saniette’s torture, which hurt me more than it hurt him, I asked Brichot if he knew what the word Balbec meant. “Balbec is probably a corruption of Dalbec,” he told me. “One would have to consult the charters of the Kings of England, suzerains of Normandy, for Balbec was a dependency of the barony of Dover, for which reason it was often styled Balbec d’Outre-Mer, Balbec-en-Terre. But the barony of Dover itself came under the bishopric of Bayeux, and, notwithstanding the rights that were temporarily enjoyed over the abbey by the Templars, from the time of Louis d’Harcourt, Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux, it was the bishops of that diocese who appointed to the benefice of Balbec. So it was explained to me by the incumbent of Douville, a bald, eloquent, fanciful man and a devotee of the table, who lives by the rule of Brillat-Savarin, and who expounded to me in somewhat sibylline terms a loose pedagogy, while he fed me upon some admirable fried potatoes.”

While Brichot smiled to show how witty it was to juxtapose such disparate matters and to employ an ironically lofty diction in treating of commonplace things, Saniette was trying to find a loophole for some witticism which would raise him from the abyss into which he had fallen. The witticism was what was known as a “more or less,” but it had changed its form, for there is an evolution in puns as in literary styles, an epidemic that disappears is replaced by another, and so forth. At one time the typical “more or less” was the “height of . . .” But this was out of date, no one used it any more, except for Cottard who might still say, on occasion, in the middle of a game of piquet: “Do you know what is the height of absentmindedness? It’s to think that the Edict of [
l’édit de
] Nantes was an Englishwoman.” These “heights” had been replaced by nicknames. In reality it was still the old “more or less,” but, as the nickname was in fashion, people did not notice. Unfortunately for Saniette, when these “more or lesses” were not his own, and as a rule were unknown to the little nucleus, he produced them so timidly that, in spite of the laugh with which he followed them up to indicate their humorous nature, nobody saw the point. And if on the other hand the joke was his own, as he had generally hit upon it in conversation with one of the faithful, and the latter had repeated it, appropriating the authorship, the joke was in that case known, but not as being Saniette’s. And so when he slipped in one of these it was recognised, but, because he was its author, he was accused of plagiarism.

“Thus,” Brichot continued, “
bec
, in Norman, is a stream; there is the Abbey of Bec, Mobec, the stream from the marsh (
mor
or
mer
meant a marsh, as in Morville, or in Bricquemar, Alvimare, Cambremer), Bricquebec, the stream from the high ground, coming from
briga
, a fortified place, as in Bricqueville, Bricquebosc, le Bric, Briand, or from
brice
, bridge, which is the same as
Brücke
in German (Innsbruck), and as the English
bridge
which ends so many place-names (Cambridge, for instance). You have moreover in Normandy many other instances of
bec
: Caudebec, Bolbec, le Robec, le Bec-Hellouin, Becquerel. It’s the Norman form of the German
Bach
, Offenbach, Anspach; Varaguebec, from the old word
varaigne
, equivalent to
warren
, means protected woods or ponds. As for
dal
,” Brichot went on, “it is a form of
Thal
, a valley: Darnetal, Rosendal, and indeed, close to Louviers, Becdal. The river that has given its name to Balbec is, by the way, charming. Seen from a
falaise
(
Fels
in German, in fact not far from here, standing on a height, you have the picturesque town of Falaise), it runs close under the spires of the church, which is actually a long way from it, and seems to be reflecting them.”

“I can well believe it,” said I, “it’s an effect that Elstir is very fond of. I’ve seen several sketches of it in his studio.”

“Elstir! You know Tiche?” cried Mme Verdurin. “But do you know that we used to be the closest friends. Thank heaven, I never see him now. No, but ask Cottard or Brichot, he used to have his place laid at my table, he came every day. Now, there’s a man of whom you can say that it did him no good to leave our little nucleus. I shall show you presently some flowers he painted for me; you’ll see the difference from the things he’s doing now, which I don’t care for at all, not at all! Why, I got him to do a portrait of Cottard, not to mention all the sketches he did of me.”

“And he gave the Professor purple hair,” said Mme Cottard, forgetting that at the time her husband had not been even a Fellow of the College. “Would you say that my husband had purple hair, Monsieur?”

“Never mind!” said Mme Verdurin, raising her chin with an air of contempt for Mme Cottard and of admiration for the man of whom she was speaking, “it was the work of a bold colourist, a fine painter. Whereas,” she added, turning again to me, “I don’t know whether you call it painting, all those outlandish great compositions, those hideous contraptions he exhibits now that he has given up coming to me. I call it daubing, it’s all so hackneyed, and besides, it lacks relief and personality. There are bits of everybody in it.”

“He has revived the grace of the eighteenth century, but in a modern form,” Saniette burst out, fortified and emboldened by my friendliness, “but I prefer Helleu.”

“There’s not the slightest connexion with Helleu,” said Mme Verdurin.

“Yes, yes, it’s hotted-up eighteenth century. He’s a steam Watteau,” and he began to laugh.
¹⁴

“Old, old as the hills. I’ve had that served up to me for years,” said M. Verdurin, to whom indeed Ski had once repeated the remark, but as his own invention. “It’s unfortunate that when once in a way you say something quite amusing and make it intelligible, it isn’t your own.”

“I’m sorry about it,” Mme Verdurin went on, “because he was really gifted, he has wasted a very remarkable painterly talent. Ah, if only he’d stayed with us! Why, he would have become the greatest landscape painter of our day. And it was a woman who dragged him down so low! Not that that surprises me, for he was an attractive enough man, but common. At bottom, he was a mediocrity. I may tell you that I felt it at once. Really, he never interested me. I was quite fond of him, that was all. For one thing, he was so dirty! Tell me now, do
you
like people who never wash?”

“What is this prettily coloured thing that we’re eating?” asked Ski.

“It’s called strawberry mousse,” said Mme Verdurin.

“But it’s ex-qui-site. You ought to open bottles of Château-Margaux, Château-Lafite, port wine.”

“I can’t tell you how he amuses me, he never drinks anything but water,” said Mme Verdurin, seeking to cloak with her delight at this flight of fancy her alarm at the thought of such extravagance.

“But not to drink,” Ski went on. “You shall fill all our glasses, and they will bring in marvellous peaches, huge nectarines; there, against the sunset, it will be as luscious as a beautiful Veronese.”

“It would cost almost as much,” M. Verdurin murmured.

“But take away those cheeses with their hideous colour,” said Ski, trying to snatch the plate from in front of his host, who defended his gruyère with all his might.

“You can see why I don’t miss Elstir,” Mme Verdurin said to me, “this one is far more gifted. Elstir is simply hard work, the man who can’t tear himself away from his painting when he feels like it. He’s the good pupil, the exam fiend. Ski, now, only follows his own fancy. You’ll see him light a cigarette in the middle of dinner.”