The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (242 page)

Mme d’Arpajon was even more cowardly than Mme de Souvré, but there was more excuse for her cowardice. She knew that she had always had very little influence in society. This influence, such as it was, had been reduced still further by her liaison with the Duc de Guermantes; his desertion of her dealt it the final blow. The ill-humour aroused in her by my request that she should introduce me to the Prince produced a silence which she was ingenuous enough to imagine a convincing pretence of not having heard what I said. She was not even aware that her anger made her frown. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was aware of it, did not bother about the inconsistency, and made use of it for the lesson in tact which she was thus able to teach me without undue rudeness; I mean a silent lesson, but none the less eloquent for that.

Apart from this, Mme d’Arpajon was extremely nettled, for many eyes were raised in the direction of a Renaissance balcony at the corner of which, instead of one of those monumental statues which were so often used as ornaments at that period, there leaned, no less sculptural than they, the magnificent Duchesse de Surgis-le-Duc, who had recently succeeded Mme d’Arpajon in the affections of Basin de Guermantes. Beneath the flimsy white tulle which protected her from the cool night air, one saw the supple form of a winged victory.

I had no one else to turn to but M. de Charlus, who had withdrawn to a room downstairs which opened on to the garden. I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artful simplicity of his evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor’s eye could have picked out, had the air of a “Harmony in Black and White” by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was wearing, suspended from a broad ribbon over his shirt-front, the cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the religious Order of Malta. At that moment the Baron’s game was interrupted by Mme de Gallardon, escorting her nephew, the Vicomte de Courvoisier, a young man with a pretty face and an impertinent air. “Cousin,” said Mme de Gallardon, “allow me to introduce my nephew Adalbert. Adalbert, you remember the famous Uncle Palamède of whom you have heard so much.” “Good evening, Madame de Gallardon,” M. de Charlus replied. And he added, without so much as a glance at the young man: “Good evening, sir,” with a truculent air and in a tone so violently discourteous that everyone was stunned. Perhaps M. de Charlus, knowing that Mme de Gallardon had her doubts as to his morals and had once been unable to resist the temptation to hint at them, was determined to nip in the bud any scandal that she might embroider upon a friendly reception of her nephew, and at the same time make a resounding profession of indifference with regard to young men in general; perhaps he did not consider that the said Adalbert had responded to his aunt’s words with a sufficiently respectful air; perhaps, desirous of making his mark later with so attractive a cousin, he wished to give himself the advantage of a pre-emptive attack, like those sovereigns who, before engaging upon diplomatic action, reinforce it with an act of war.

It was not so difficult as I supposed to secure M. de Charlus’s consent to my request that he should introduce me to the Prince de Guermantes. For one thing, in the course of the last twenty years this Don Quixote had tilted against so many windmills (often relatives who he claimed had behaved badly to him), he had so frequently banned people as being “impossible to have in the house” from being invited by various male or female Guermantes, that the latter were beginning to be afraid of quarrelling with all the people they liked, of depriving themselves throughout their lives of the society of certain newcomers they were curious about, by espousing the thunderous but unexplained grudges of a brother-in-law or cousin who expected them to abandon wife, brother, children for his sake. More intelligent than the other Guermantes, M. de Charlus realised that people were ceasing to pay attention to more than one in every two of his vetoes, and, with an eye to the future, fearing it might be he himself of whose society they deprived themselves, had begun to cut his losses, to lower, as the saying is, his sights. Furthermore, if he had the faculty of keeping up a feud with a detested person for months, for years on end—to such a one he would not have tolerated their sending an invitation, and would have fought like a street porter even against a queen, the status of the person who stood in his way ceasing to count for anything in his eyes—on the other hand, his explosions of rage were too frequent not to be somewhat fragmentary. “The imbecile, the scoundrel! We’ll put him in his place, sweep him into the gutter, where unfortunately he won’t be innocuous to the health of the town,” he would scream, even when he was alone in his own room, on reading a letter that he considered irreverent, or on recalling some remark that had been repeated to him. But a fresh outburst against a second imbecile cancelled the first, and the former victim had only to show due deference for the fit of rage that he had occasioned to be forgotten, it not having lasted long enough to establish a foundation of hatred on which to build. And so, perhaps—despite his bad temper towards me—I might have been successful when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not been so ill-inspired as to add, from a scruple of conscience, and so that he might not suppose me guilty of the indelicacy of entering the house on the off chance, counting upon him to enable me to remain there: “You are aware that I know them quite well, the Princess was very nice to me.” “Very well, if you know them, why do you need me to introduce you?” he replied in a waspish tone, and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game with the Nuncio, the German Ambassador and another personage whom I didn’t know by sight.

Then, from the depths of those gardens where in days past the Duc d’Aiguillon used to breed rare animals, there came to my ears, through the great open doors, the sound of a nose that was sniffing up all those refinements, determined to miss none of them. The sound approached, I moved at a venture in its direction, with the result that the words “Good evening” were murmured in my ear by M. de Bréauté, not like the rusty metallic sound of a knife being sharpened on a grindstone, even less like the cry of the wild boar, devastator of tilled fields, but like the voice of a possible saviour.

Less influential than Mme de Souvré, but less deeply ingrained than she with unwillingness to oblige, far more at his ease with the Prince than was Mme d’Arpajon, entertaining some illusions, perhaps, as to my position in the Guermantes set, or perhaps knowing more about it than myself, he was, however, for the first few moments difficult to pin down, for he was turning in every direction, with quivering and distended nostrils, staring inquisitively through his monocle as though confronted with five hundred masterpieces. But, having heard my request, he received it with satisfaction, led me towards the Prince and presented me to him with a lip-smacking, ceremonious, vulgar air, as though he had been handing him a plate of cakes with a word of commendation. Whereas the Duc de Guermantes’s greeting was, when he chose, friendly, instinct with good fellowship, cordial and familiar, I found that of the Prince stiff, solemn and haughty. He barely smiled at me, addressed me gravely as “Sir.” I had often heard the Duke make fun of his cousin’s hauteur. But from the first words that he addressed to me, which by their cold and serious tone formed the most complete contrast with Basin’s comradely language, I realised at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duke, who spoke to you at your first meeting with him as “man to man,” and that, of the two cousins, the one who was genuinely simple and natural was the Prince. I found in his reserve a stronger feeling if not of equality, for that would have been inconceivable to him, at least of the consideration which one may show for an inferior, such as may be found in all strongly hierarchical societies, in the Law Courts, for instance, or in a Faculty, where a public prosecutor or a dean, conscious of their high charge, conceal perhaps more genuine simplicity, and, when you come to know them better, more kindness and cordiality, beneath their traditional aloofness than the more modern brethren beneath their jocular affectation of camaraderie. “Do you intend to follow the career of your distinguished father?” he inquired with a distant but interested air. I answered the question briefly, realising that he had asked it only out of politeness, and moved away to allow him to welcome new arrivals.

I caught sight of Swann, and wanted to speak to him, but at that moment I saw that the Prince de Guermantes, instead of waiting where he was to receive the greeting of Odette’s husband, had immediately carried him off, with the force of a suction pump, to the further end of the garden, in order, some people said, “to show him the door.”

So bewildered in the midst of the glittering company that I did not learn until two days later, from the newspapers, that a Czech orchestra had been playing throughout the evening, and that fireworks had been going off in constant succession, I recovered some power of attention with the thought of going to look at the famous Hubert Robert fountain.

It could be seen from a distance, slender, motionless, rigid, set apart in a clearing surrounded by fine trees, several of which were as old as itself, only the lighter fall of its pale and quivering plume stirring in the breeze. The eighteenth century had refined the elegance of its lines, but, by fixing the style of the jet, seemed to have arrested its life; at this distance one had the impression of art rather than the sensation of water. Even the moist cloud that was perpetually gathering at its summit preserved the character of the period like those that assemble in the sky round the palaces of Versailles. But from a closer view one realised that, while it respected, like the stones of an ancient palace, the design traced for it beforehand, it was a constantly changing stream of water that, springing upwards and seeking to obey the architect’s original orders, performed them to the letter only by seeming to infringe them, its thousand separate bursts succeeding only from afar in giving the impression of a single thrust. This was in reality as often interrupted as the scattering of the fall, whereas from a distance it had appeared to me dense, inflexible, unbroken in its continuity. From a little nearer, one saw that this continuity, apparently complete, was assured, at every point in the ascent of the jet where it must otherwise have been broken, by the entering into line, by the lateral incorporation, of a parallel jet which mounted higher than the first and was itself, at a greater altitude which was however already a strain upon its endurance, relieved by a third. From close to, exhausted drops could be seen falling back from the column of water, passing their sisters on the way up, and at times, torn and scattered, caught in an eddy of the night air, disturbed by this unremitting surge, floating awhile before being drowned in the basin. They teased with their hesitations, with their journey in the opposite direction, and blurred with their soft vapour the vertical tension of the shaft that bore aloft an oblong cloud composed of countless tiny drops but seemingly painted in an unchanging golden brown which rose, unbreakable, fixed, slender and swift, to mingle with the clouds in the sky. Unfortunately, a gust of wind was enough to scatter it obliquely on the ground; at times indeed a single disobedient jet swerved and, had they not kept a respectful distance, would have drenched to their skins the incautious crowd of gazers.

One of these little accidents, which occurred only when the breeze freshened for a moment, was somewhat unpleasant. Mme d’Arpajon had been led to believe that the Duc de Guermantes, who in fact had not yet arrived, was with Mme de Surgis in one of the galleries of pink marble to which one ascended by the double colonnade, hollowed out of the wall, which rose from the brink of the fountain. Now, just as Mme d’Arpajon was making for one of these colonnades, a strong gust of warm air deflected the jet of water and inundated the fair lady so completely that, the water streaming down from her low neckline inside her dress, she was as thoroughly soaked as if she had been plunged into a bath. Whereupon, a few feet away, a rhythmical roar resounded, loud enough to be heard by a whole army, and at the same time periodically prolonged as though it were being addressed not to the army as a whole but to each unit in turn; it was the Grand Duke Vladimir, laughing whole-heartedly on seeing the immersion of Mme d’Arpajon, one of the funniest sights, as he was never tired of repeating afterwards, that he had ever seen in his life. Some charitable persons having suggested to the Muscovite that a word of sympathy from himself was perhaps called for and would give pleasure to the lady who, notwithstanding her forty years and more, mopping herself up with her scarf without appealing to anyone for help, was bravely extricating herself in spite of the water that was mischievously spilling over the edge of the basin, the Grand Duke, who had a kind heart, felt that he ought to comply, and before the last military tattoo of his laughter had altogether subsided, one heard a fresh roar, even more vociferous than the last. “Bravo, old girl!” he cried, clapping his hands as though at the theatre. Mme d’Arpajon was not at all pleased that her dexterity should be commended at the expense of her youth. And when someone remarked to her, in a voice drowned by the roar of the water, over which the princely thunder could nevertheless be heard: “I think His Imperial Highness said something to you,” “No! It was to Mme de Souvré,” was her reply.

I passed through the gardens and returned by the stair, upon which the absence of the Prince, who had vanished with Swann, swelled the crowd of guests round M. de Charlus, just as, when Louis XIV was not at Versailles, there was a more numerous attendance upon Monsieur, his brother. I was stopped on my way by the Baron, while behind me two ladies and a young man came up to greet him.

“It’s nice to see you here,” he said to me, holding out his hand. “Good evening, Madame de La Trémoïlle, good evening, my dear Herminie.” But doubtless the memory of what he had said to me as to his own supreme position in the Hôtel Guermantes made him wish to appear to be drawing, from a circumstance which displeased him but which he had been unable to prevent, a satisfaction which his lordly insolence and hysterical glee immediately invested in a cloak of exaggerated sarcasm: “It’s nice,” he went on, “but above all it’s extremely funny.” And he broke into peals of laughter which appeared to be indicative at once of his amusement and of the inadequacy of human speech to express it. Certain of the guests, meanwhile, who knew both how difficult he was of access and how prone to offensive outbursts, had been drawn towards us by curiosity and now, with an almost indecent haste, took to their heels. “Come, now, don’t be cross,” he said to me, patting me gently on the shoulder, “you know I’m fond of you. Good evening, Antioche, good evening, Louis-René. Have you been to look at the fountain?” he asked me in a tone that was more affirmative than questioning. “Very pretty, is it not? Marvellous though it is, it could be better still, naturally, if certain things were removed, and then there would be nothing like it in France. But even as it stands, it’s quite one of the best things. Bréauté will tell you that it was a mistake to put lamps round it, to try and make people forget that it was he who was responsible for that absurd idea. But on the whole he didn’t manage to spoil it too much. It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one. Not that we hadn’t a vague suspicion all along that Bréauté wasn’t quite a match for Hubert Robert.”