The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (220 page)

“And what answer did this M. Bloch make?” came in a careless tone from Mme de Guermantes, who, running short for the moment of original ideas, felt that she must copy her husband’s Teutonic pronunciation.

“Ah! I can assure you M. Bloch didn’t wait for any more, he fled.”

“Yes, I remember very well seeing you there that evening,” said Mme de Guermantes with emphasis, as though there must be something highly flattering to myself in this remembrance on her part. “It’s always so interesting at my aunt’s. At that last party, where I met you, I meant to ask you whether that old gentleman who went past us wasn’t François Coppée. You must know who everyone is,” she went on, sincerely envious of my relations with poets and poetry, and also out of amiability towards me, the wish to enhance the status, in the eyes of her other guests, of a young man so well versed in literature. I assured the Duchess that I had not observed any celebrities at Mme de Villeparisis’s party. “What!” she exclaimed unguardedly, betraying the fact that her respect for men of letters and her contempt for society were more superficial than she said, perhaps even than she thought, “what, no famous authors there! You astonish me! Why, I saw all sorts of quite impossible-looking people!”

I remembered the evening very well on account of an entirely trivial incident. Mme de Villeparisis had introduced Bloch to Mme Alphonse de Rothschild, but my friend had not caught the name and, thinking he was talking to an old English lady who was a trifle mad, had replied only in monosyllables to the garrulous conversation of the historic beauty, when Mme de Villeparisis, introducing her to someone else, had pronounced, quite distinctly this time: “The Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild.” Thereupon so many ideas of millions and of glamour, which it would have been more prudent to subdivide and separate, had suddenly and simultaneously coursed through Bloch’s arteries that he had had a sort of heart attack and brainstorm combined, and had cried aloud in the dear old lady’s presence: “If I’d only known!”—an exclamation the silliness of which kept him awake at nights for a whole week. This remark of Bloch’s was of no great interest, but I remembered it as a proof that sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

“I fancy Mme de Villeparisis is not absolutely … moral,” said the Princesse de Parme, who knew that the best people did not visit the Duchess’s aunt, and, from what the Duchess herself had just been saying, that one might speak freely about her. But, Mme de Guermantes not seeming to approve of this criticism, she hastened to add: “Though, of course, intelligence carried to that degree excuses everything.”

“You take the same view of my aunt as everyone else,” replied the Duchess, “which is, on the whole, quite mistaken. It’s just what Mémé was saying to me only yesterday.” (She blushed, her eyes clouding with a memory unknown to me. I conjectured that M. de Charlus had asked her to cancel my invitation, as he had sent Robert to ask me not to go to her house. I had the impression that the blush—equally incomprehensible to me—which had tinged the Duke’s cheeks when he made some reference to his brother could not be attributed to the same cause.) “My poor aunt—she will always have the reputation of being a lady of the old school, of sparkling wit and uncontrolled passions. And really there’s no more middle-class, solemn, drab, commonplace mind in Paris. She will go down as a patron of the arts, which means to say that she was once the mistress of a great painter, though he was never able to make her understand what a picture was; and as for her private life, so far from being a depraved woman, she was so much made for marriage, so conjugal from her cradle that, not having succeeded in keeping a husband, who incidentally was a scoundrel, she has never had a love affair which she hasn’t taken just as seriously as if it were holy matrimony, with the same irritations, the same quarrels, the same fidelity. Mind you, those relationships are often the most sincere; on the whole there are more inconsolable lovers than husbands.”

“And yet, Oriane, if you take the case of your brother-in-law Palamède whom you were speaking about just now, no mistress in the world could ever dream of being mourned as that poor Mme de Charlus has been.”

“Ah!” replied the Duchess, “Your Highness must permit me to be not altogether of her opinion. People don’t all like to be mourned in the same way, each of us has his preferences.”

“Still, he has made a regular cult of her since her death. It’s true that people sometimes do for the dead what they would not have done for the living.”

“For one thing,” retorted Mme de Guermantes in a dreamy tone which belied her facetious intent, “we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!” (M. de Guermantes gave M. de Bréauté a sly glance as though to provoke him into laughter at the Duchess’s wit.) “At the same time I frankly admit,” went on Mme de Guermantes, “that the manner in which I should like to be mourned by a man I loved would not be that adopted by my brother-in-law.”

The Duke’s face darkened. He did not like to hear his wife utter random judgments, especially about M. de Charlus. “You’re very particular. His grief set an edifying example to everyone,” he reproved her stiffly. But the Duchess had in dealing with her husband that sort of boldness which animal tamers show, or people who live with a madman and are not afraid of provoking him.

“Well, yes, if you like, I suppose it’s edifying—he goes every day to the cemetery to tell her how many people he has had to luncheon, he misses her enormously, but as he’d mourn a cousin, a grandmother, a sister. It isn’t the grief of a husband. It’s true that they were a pair of saints, which makes it all rather exceptional.” (M. de Guermantes, infuriated by his wife’s chatter, fixed on her with a terrible immobility a pair of eyes already loaded.) “I don’t wish to say anything against poor Mémé, who, by the way, couldn’t come this evening,” went on the Duchess. “I quite admit there’s no one like him, he’s kind and sweet, he has a delicacy, a warmth of heart that you don’t as a rule find in men. He has a woman’s heart, Mémé has!”

“What you say is absurd,” M. de Guermantes broke in sharply. “There’s nothing effeminate about Mémé. Nobody could be more manly than he is.”

“But I’m not suggesting for a moment that he’s the least bit effeminate. Do at least take the trouble to understand what I say,” retorted the Duchess. “He’s always like that the moment he thinks one’s getting at his brother,” she added, turning to the Princesse de Parme.

“It’s very charming, it’s a pleasure to hear him. There’s nothing so nice as two brothers who are fond of each other,” replied the Princess, as many a humbler person might have replied, for it is possible to belong to a princely family by blood and a very plebeian family by intellect.

“While we’re on the subject of your family, Oriane,” said the Princess, “I saw your nephew Saint-Loup yesterday. I believe he wants to ask you a favour.”

The Duc de Guermantes knitted his Olympian brow. When he did not care to do someone a favour, he preferred that his wife should not undertake to do so, knowing that it would come to the same thing in the end and that the people to whom she would be obliged to apply would put it down to the common account of the household, just as much as if it had been requested by the husband alone.

“Why didn’t he ask me himself?” said the Duchess, “he was here yesterday and stayed a couple of hours, and I can’t tell you how boring he was. He would be no stupider than anyone else if he had only had the sense, like many people we know, to remain a fool. It’s his veneer of knowledge that’s so terrible. He wants to have an open mind—open to all the things he doesn’t understand. The way he goes on about Morocco, it’s frightful.”

“He doesn’t want to go back there, because of Rachel,” said the Prince de Foix.

“But I thought they’d broken it off,” interrupted M. de Bréauté.

“So far from breaking it off, I found her a couple of days ago in Robert’s rooms, and they didn’t look at all like people who’d quarrelled, I can assure you,” replied the Prince de Foix, who liked to spread every rumour that could damage Robert’s chances of marrying, and who might, moreover, have been misled by one of the intermittent resumptions of a liaison that was practically at an end.

“That Rachel was speaking to me about you. I run into her occasionally in the morning in the Champs-Elysées. She’s somewhat
flighty
as you say, what you call
unbuttoned
, a kind of ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ figuratively speaking, of course.” (This speech was addressed to me by Prince Von, who liked always to appear conversant with French literature and Parisian refinements.)

“Why, that’s just what it was—Morocco!” exclaimed the Princess, flinging herself into this opening.

“What on earth can he want in Morocco?” asked M. de Guermantes sternly. “Oriane can do absolutely nothing for him there, as he knows perfectly well.”

“He thinks he invented strategy,” Mme de Guermantes pursued the theme, “and then he uses impossible words for the simplest thing, which doesn’t prevent him from making blots all over his letters. The other day he announced that he’d been given some
sublime
potatoes, and that he’d taken a
sublime
stage box.”

“He speaks Latin,” the Duke went one better.

“What! Latin?” the Princess gasped.

“On my word of honour! Your Highness can ask Oriane if I’m not telling the truth.”

“Why, yes, Ma’am; the other day he said to us straight out, without stopping to think: ‘I know of no more touching example of
sic transit gloria mundi
.’ I can repeat the phrase now to your Highness because, after endless inquiries and by appealing to
linguists
, we succeeded in reconstructing it, but Robert flung it out without pausing for breath, one could hardly make out that there was Latin in it, he was just like a character in the
Malade Imaginaire
. And it was simply to do with the death of the Empress of Austria!”

“Poor woman!” cried the Princess, “what a delicious creature she was!”

“Yes,” replied the Duchess, “a trifle mad, a trifle headstrong, but she was a thoroughly good woman, a nice, kind-hearted lunatic; the only thing I could never understand was why she never managed to get a set of false teeth that fitted her; they always came loose halfway through a sentence and she was obliged to stop short or she’d have swallowed them.”

“That Rachel was telling me that young Saint-Loup worshipped you, that he was fonder of you than he was of her,” said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as he spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin.

“But in that case she must be jealous of me and hate me,” said I.

“Not at all, she said all sorts of nice things about you. The Prince de Foix’s mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred you to her. You don’t understand? Come home with me, and I’ll explain it all to you.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, I’m going on to M. de Charlus at eleven.”

“Why, he sent round to me yesterday to ask me to dine with him this evening, but told me not to come after a quarter to eleven. But if you insist on going to him, at least come with me as far as the Théâtre-Français, you will be in the periphery,” said the Prince, who thought doubtless that this last word meant “proximity” or possibly “centre.”

But the bulging eyes in his coarse though handsome red face frightened me and I declined, saying that a friend was coming to call for me. This reply seemed to me in no way offensive. The Prince, however, apparently formed a different impression of it, for he did not say another word to me.

“I really must go and see the Queen of Naples—it must be a great grief to her,” said, or at least appeared to me to have said, the Princesse de Parme. For her words had come to me only indistinctly through the intervening screen of those addressed to me, albeit in an undertone, by Prince Von, who had doubtless been afraid of being overheard by the Prince de Foix if he spoke louder.

“Oh, dear, no!” replied the Duchess, “I don’t believe she feels any grief at all.”

“None at all! You do always fly to extremes, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, resuming his role as the cliff which, by standing up against the wave, forces it to fling even higher its crest of foam.

“Basin knows even better than I that I’m telling the truth,” replied the Duchess, “but he thinks he’s obliged to look severe because you are present, Ma’am, and he’s afraid of my shocking you.”

“Oh, please no, I beg of you,” cried the Princesse de Parme, dreading the slightest alteration on her account of these delicious evenings at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, this forbidden fruit which the Queen of Sweden herself had not yet acquired the right to taste.

“Why, it was to Basin himself, when he said to her with a duly sorrowful expression: ‘But I see the Queen is in mourning. For whom, pray? Is it a great grief to your Majesty?’ that she replied: ‘No, it’s not a deep mourning, it’s a light mourning, a very light mourning, it’s my sister.’ The truth is, she’s delighted about it, as Basin knows perfectly well. She invited us to a party that very evening, and gave me two pearls. I wish she could lose a sister every day! So far from weeping for her sister’s death, she was in fits of laughter over it. She probably says to herself, like Robert, ‘
sic transit
——’ I forget how it goes on,” she added modestly, knowing how it went on perfectly well.

In saying all this Mme de Guermantes was only indulging her wit, and in the most disingenuous way, for the Queen of Naples, like the Duchesse d’Alençon, who also died in tragic circumstances, had the warmest heart in the world and sincerely mourned her kinsfolk. Mme de Guermantes knew these noble Bavarian sisters, her cousins, too well not to be aware of this. “He is anxious not to go back to Morocco,” said the Princesse de Parme, grasping once more at the name Robert which Mme de Guermantes had held out to her, quite unintentionally, like a lifeline. “I believe you know General de Monserfeuil.”

“Very slightly,” replied the Duchess, who was an intimate friend of the officer in question. The Princess explained what it was that Saint-Loup wanted.