The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (54 page)

Swann speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of faces which of course were mostly familiar to him seemed something new now that their features—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that person who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be pursued, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged—rested in the autonomy of their lines, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone. And in these men by whom Swann now found himself surrounded there was nothing, down to the monocles which many of them wore (and which previously
would at the most have enabled Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) that, no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because he regarded General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréauté, who were talking to each other just inside the door, simply as two figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the General’s monocle, stuck between his eyelids like a shell-splinter in his vulgar, scarred and overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it dominated like the single eye of the Cyclops, appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was indecent to expose, while that which M. de Bréauté sported, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went to society functions, bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with affability and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of the ceilings, the delightfulness of the entertainment, the interestingness of the programmes and the excellence of the refreshments.

“Hallo, you here! Why, it’s ages since we’ve seen you,” the General greeted Swann and, noticing his drawn features and concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away, added: “You’re looking well, old man!” while M. de Bréauté exclaimed: “My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?” to a society novelist who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and
cheek a monocle that was his sole instrument of psychological investigation and remorseless analysis, and who now replied with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the “r”: “I am observing!”

The Marquis de Forestelle’s monocle was minute and rimless, and, by enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye in which it was embedded like a superfluous cartilage the presence of which is inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, gave to his face a melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of suffering greatly from the pangs of love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, encircled, like Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which adjusted itself constantly in relation to it, a face whose quivering red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their grimaces to keep up with the running fire of wit that sparkled in the polished disc, and saw itself preferred to the most handsome looks in the world by snobbish and depraved young women whom it set dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss. Meanwhile, behind him, M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp’s head and goggling eyes moved slowly through the festive gathering, periodically unclenching his mandibles as though in search of his orientation, had the air of carrying about upon his person only an accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole, which recalled to Swann, a fervent admirer of Giotto’s Vices and Virtues at Padua, that figure representing Injustice by whose side a leafy bough evokes the idea of the forests that enshroud his secret lair.

Swann had gone forward into the room at Mme de
Saint-Euverte’s insistence, and in order to listen to an air from
Orfeo
which was being rendered on the flute, had taken up a position in a corner from which, unfortunately, his horizon was bounded by two ladies of mature years seated side by side, the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, spent their time at parties wandering through the room each clutching her bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved two adjacent chairs by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs—Mme de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all the more glad of a companion, while Mme de Franquetot, who, on the contrary, was extremely well-connected, thought it elegant and original to show all her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure lady with whom she had childhood memories in common. Filled with melancholy irony, Swann watched them as they listened to the pianoforte intermezzo (Liszt’s “Saint Francis preaching to the birds”) which had succeeded the flute and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy flight, Mme de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes starting from her head as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were a series of trapezes from any one of which he might come crashing a hundred feet to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: “It isn’t possible, I’d never have believed that a human being could do that!”, Mme de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical education, beating time with her head, transformed for the nonce into the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and rapidity
of whose oscillations from one shoulder to the other (performed with that look of wild abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shows when he has lost control of himself and is no longer able to master his pain, saying merely “I can’t help it”) so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings caught in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged to straighten the bunch of black grapes which she had in her hair, though without any interruption of her constantly accelerated motion. On the other side (and a little way in front) of Mme de Franquetot was the Marquise de Gallardon, absorbed in her favourite subject of meditation, namely her kinship with the Guermantes family, from which she derived both publicly and in private a good deal of glory not unmingled with shame, the most brilliant ornaments of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her, perhaps because she was boring, or because she was disagreeable, or because she came of an inferior branch of the family, or very possibly for no reason at all. When she found herself seated next to someone whom she did not know, as she was at this moment next to Mme de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that her own consciousness of her Guermantes connexion could not be made externally manifest in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a vertical column by the side of some holy personage the words which he is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation, or even a call, from her young cousin the Princesse des Laumes during the six years that had elapsed since the latter’s marriage. The thought filled her with anger, but also with pride; for, by
dint of telling everyone who expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme des Laumes’s that it was because of the risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there—a degradation which her own ultra-Legitimist family would never have forgiven her—she had come to believe that this actually was the reason for her not visiting her young cousin. She remembered, it is true, that she had several times inquired of Mme des Laumes how they might contrive to meet, but she remembered it only confusedly and, besides, more than neutralised this slightly humiliating reminiscence by murmuring, “After all, it isn’t for me to take the first step; I’m twenty years older than she is.” And fortified by these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back until they seemed to part company with her bust, while her head, which lay almost horizontally upon them, was reminiscent of the “detachable” head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers. Not that she in the least resembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a squat, dumpy and masculine figure; but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she was obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite the equal of the rest of the Guermantes clan, to repeat to herself incessantly that it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride that she saw so little of them, the constant iteration had ended up by remoulding her body and giving her a sort of presence which was accepted by bourgeois ladies as a sign of breeding, and even kindled at times a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old clubmen.
Had anyone subjected Mme de Gallardon’s conversation to that form of analysis which by noting the relative frequency of its several terms enables one to discover the key to a coded text, they would at once have remarked that no expression, not even the commonest, occurred in it nearly so often as “at my cousins the Guermantes’,” “at my aunt Guermantes’s,” “Elzéar de Guermantes’s health,” “my cousin Guermantes’s box.” If anyone spoke to her of a distinguished personage, she would reply that, although she was not personally acquainted with him, she had seen him hundreds of times at her aunt Guermantes’s, but she would utter this reply in so icy a tone, in such a hollow voice, that it was clear that if she did not know the celebrity personally it was by virtue of all the stubborn and ineradicable principles against which her shoulders leaned, as against one of those ladders on which gymnastic instructors make us stretch in order to develop the expansion of our chests.

As it happened, the Princesse des Laumes, whom no one would have expected to appear at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, had just arrived there. To show that she did not wish to flaunt her superior rank in a salon to which she had come only out of condescension, she had sidled in with her arms pressed close to her sides, even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through and no one attempting to get past her, staying purposely at the back, with the air of being in her proper place, like a king who stands in the queue at the doors of a theatre where the management have not been warned of his coming; and, restricting her gaze—so as not to seem to be advertising her presence and claiming the consideration that was her due—to the study of a pattern in the carpet or her own
skirt, she stood there on the spot which had struck her as the most modest (and from which, as she very well knew, a rapturous exclamation from Mme de Saint-Euverte would extricate her as soon as her presence there was noticed), next to Mme de Cambremer, whom she did not know. She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from imitating it. This was not to say that, having for once consented to spend a few minutes in Mme de Saint-Euverte’s house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the courtesy she was doing her hostess might, so to speak, count double) to show herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called “exaggerating,” and always made a point of letting people see that she “had no desire” to indulge in displays of emotion that were not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although on the other hand such displays could not help but make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played—a piece which did not quite come within the scope of the music she was used to hearing—whether to abstain from them might not be evidence of incomprehension as regards the music and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would confine herself to straightening her shoulder-straps
or feeling in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but charming ornament, scrutinising her impassioned neighbour with cold curiosity the while, and at the next would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, against the rhythm. The pianist having finished the Liszt intermezzo and begun a prelude by Chopin, Mme de Cambremer turned to Mme de Franquetot with a fond smile of knowing satisfaction and allusion to the past. She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately—with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out—to strike at your heart.

Brought up in a provincial household with few connexions, hardly ever invited to a ball, she had revelled, in the solitude of her old manor-house, in setting the pace, now slow, now breathlessly whirling, for all those imaginary waltzing couples, in picking them off like flowers, leaving the ball-room for a moment to listen to the wind sighing among the pine-trees on the shore of the lake, and seeing all of a sudden advancing towards her, more different from anything one has ever dreamed of than earthly lovers are, a slender young man with a slightly sing-song voice, strange and out of tune, in white gloves. But nowadays
the old-fashioned beauty of this music seemed to have become a trifle stale. Having forfeited, some years back, the esteem of the connoisseurs, it had lost its distinction and its charm, and even those whose taste was frankly bad had ceased to find in it more than a moderate pleasure to which they hardly liked to confess. Mme de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She knew that her young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new family, except as regards the things of the mind, upon which, having got as far as Harmony and the Greek alphabet, she was specially enlightened) despised Chopin, and felt quite ill when she heard him played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian, who was sitting at some distance in a group of her own contemporaries, Mme de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite sensations. The Princesse des Laumes felt them too. Though without any natural gift for music, she had had lessons some fifteen years earlier from a piano-teacher of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who towards the end of her life had been reduced to penury and had returned, at seventy, to instruct the daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils. This lady was now dead. But her method, her beautiful tone, came to life now and then beneath the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had become in other respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and hardly ever opened a piano. Thus Mme des Laumes could wave her head to and fro with complete conviction, with a just appreciation of the manner in which the pianist was rendering this prelude, since she knew it by heart. The closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded already on
her lips. And she murmured “How charming it is!” with a double
ch
at the beginning of the word which was a mark of refinement and by which she felt her lips so romantically crinkled, like the petals of a beautiful, budding flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony with them, illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental gaze. Meanwhile Mme de Gallardon was saying to herself how annoying it was that she had so few opportunities of meeting the Princesse des Laumes, for she meant to teach her a lesson by not acknowledging her greeting. She did not know that her cousin was in the room. A movement of Mme Franquetot’s head disclosed the Princess. At once Mme de Gallardon dashed towards her, disturbing everybody; although determined to preserve a distant and glacial manner which should remind everyone present that she had no desire to be on friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself cheek by jowl with the Princesse Mathilde, and to whom it was not for her to make advances since she was not “of her generation,” she felt bound to modify this air of dignity and reserve by some non-committal remark which would justify her overture and force the Princess to engage in conversation; and so, when she reached her cousin, Mme de Gallardon, with a stern countenance and one hand thrust out as though she were trying to “force” a card, said to her: “How is your husband?” in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the Prince had been seriously ill. The Princess, breaking into a laugh which was characteristic of her and was intended at once to draw attention to the fact that she was making fun of someone and also to enhance her
beauty by concentrating her features around her animated lips and sparkling eyes, answered: “Why, he’s never been better in his life!” And she went on laughing.