“But Zola is not a realist, Ma’am, he’s a poet!” said Mme de Guermantes, drawing inspiration from the critical essays she had read in recent years and adapting them to her own personal genius. Agreeably buffeted hitherto, in the course of the bath of wit, a bath stirred up specially for her, which she was taking this evening and which, she considered, must be particularly good for her health, letting herself be borne up by the waves of paradox which curled and broke one after another, at this, even more enormous than the rest, the Princesse de Parme jumped for fear of being knocked over. And it was with a catch in her voice, as though she had lost her breath, that she now gasped: “Zola a poet!”
“Why, yes,” answered the Duchess with a laugh, entranced by this display of suffocation. “Your Highness must have remarked how he magnifies everything he touches. You will tell me that he only touches . . . what brings luck! But he makes it into something colossal. His is the epic dungheap! He is the Homer of the sewers! He hasn’t enough capital letters to write the mot de Cambronne.”29
Despite the extreme exhaustion which she was beginning to feel, the Princess was enchanted; never had she felt better. She would not have exchanged for an invitation to Schönbrunn, although that was the one thing that really flattered her, these divine dinner-parties at Mme de Guermantes’s, made invigorating by so liberal a dose of Attic salt.
“He writes it with a big ‘C’,” exclaimed Mme d’Arpajon.
“Surely with a big ‘M’, I think, my dear,” replied Mme de Guermantes, exchanging first with her husband a merry glance which implied: “Did you ever hear such an idiot?”
“Wait a minute, now,” Mme de Guermantes turned to me, fixing on me a tender, smiling gaze, because, as an accomplished hostess, she was anxious to display her own knowledge of the artist who interested me particularly and to give me, if need be, an opportunity to exhibit mine, “wait now,” she said, gently waving her feather fan, so conscious was she at this moment that she was exercising to the full the duties of hospitality, and, that she might be found wanting in none of them, making a sign also to the servants to help me to more of the asparagus with mousseline sauce, “wait now, I do believe that Zola has actually written an essay on Elstir, the painter whose paintings you were looking at just now—the only ones of his I care for, incidentally.”
As a matter of fact she hated Elstir’s work, but found a unique quality in anything that was in her own house. I asked M. de Guermantes if he knew the name of the gentleman in the tall hat who figured in the picture of the crowd and whom I recognised as the same person whose formal portrait the Guermantes also had and had hung beside the other, both dating more or less from the same early period in which Elstir’s personality had not yet completely emerged and he modelled himself a little on Manet.
“Oh, heavens!” he replied, “I know it’s a fellow who is quite well-known and no fool either in his own line, but I have no head for names. I have it on the tip of my tongue, Monsieur . . . Monsieur . . . oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I’ve forgotten. Swann would be able to tell you. It was he who made Mme de Guermantes buy all that stuff. She’s always too good-natured, afraid of hurting people’s feelings if she refuses to do things; between ourselves, I believe he’s landed us with a lot of daubs. What I can tell you is that the gentleman you mean has been a sort of Maecenas to M. Elstir—he launched him and has often helped him out of difficulties by commissioning pictures from him. As a compliment to this man—if you call it a compliment, it’s a matter of taste—he painted him standing about among that crowd, where with his Sunday-go-to-meeting look he creates a distinctly odd effect. He may be no end of a pundit but he’s evidently not aware of the proper time and place for a top hat. With that thing on his head, among all those bare-headed girls, he looks like a little country lawyer on the spree. But tell me, you seem quite gone on his pictures. If I’d only known, I should have had it all at my fingertips. Not that there’s much need to rack one’s brains to get to the bottom of M. Elstir’s work, as there would be for Ingres’s Source or the Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche. What one appreciates in his work is that it’s shrewdly observed, amusing, Parisian, and then one passes on to the next thing. One doesn’t need to be an expert to look at that sort of thing. I know of course that they’re merely sketches, but still, I don’t feel myself that he puts enough work into them. Swann had the nerve to try and make us buy a Bundle of Asparagus. In fact it was in the house for several days. There was nothing else in the picture, just a bundle of asparagus exactly like the ones you’re eating now. But I must say I refused to swallow M. Elstir’s asparagus. He wanted three hundred francs for them. Three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus! A louis, that’s as much as they’re worth, even early in the season. I thought it a bit stiff. When he puts people into his pictures as well, there’s something squalid and depressing about them that I dislike. I’m surprised to see a man of refinement, a superior mind like you, admiring that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know why you should say that, Basin,” interrupted the Duchess, who did not like to hear people run down anything that her rooms contained. “I’m by no means prepared to admit that there’s no distinction in Elstir’s painting. You have to take it or leave it. But it’s not always lacking in talent. And you must admit that the ones I bought are remarkably beautiful.”
“Well, Oriane, in that style of thing I’d infinitely prefer to have the little study by M. Vibert we saw at the water-colour exhibition. There’s nothing much in it, if you like, you could hold it in the palm of your hand, but you can see the man’s got wit to the tips of his fingers: that shabby scarecrow of a missionary standing in front of the sleek prelate who is making his little dog do tricks, it’s a perfect little poem of subtlety, and even profundity.”
“I believe you know M. Elstir,” the Duchess said to me. “As a man, he’s quite pleasant.”
“He’s intelligent,” said the Duke. “You’re surprised, when you talk to him, that his paintings should be so vulgar.”
“He’s more than intelligent, he’s really quite witty,” said the Duchess in the judicious, appraising tone of a person who knew what she was talking about.
“Didn’t he once start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Princesse de Parme.
“Yes, in shrimp pink,” replied Mme de Guermantes, “but that’s not going to make his name live for posterity. It’s a ghastly thing; Basin wanted to have it destroyed.”
This last statement was one which Mme de Guermantes often made. But at other times her appreciation of the picture was different: “I don’t care for his painting, but he did once do a good portrait of me.” The first of these judgments was addressed as a rule to people who spoke to the Duchess of her portrait, the other to those who did not refer to it and whom therefore she was anxious to inform of its existence. The first was inspired in her by coquetry, the second by vanity.
“Make a portrait of you look ghastly! Why, then it can’t be a portrait, it’s a lie. I don’t know one end of a brush from the other, but I’m sure if I were to paint you, merely putting you down as I see you, I should produce a masterpiece,” said the Princesse de Parme ingenuously.
“He probably sees me as I see myself, bereft of allurements,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, with the look, at once melancholy, modest and winning, which seemed to her best calculated to make her appear different from what Elstir had portrayed.
“That portrait ought to appeal to Mme de Gallardon,” said the Duke.
“Because she knows nothing about pictures?” asked the Princesse de Parme, who knew that Mme de Guermantes had an infinite contempt for her cousin. “But she’s a very kind woman, isn’t she?”
The Duke assumed an air of profound astonishment.
“Why, Basin, don’t you see the Princess is making fun of you?” (The Princess had never dreamed of doing such a thing.) “She knows as well as you do that Gallardonette is a poisonous crone,” went on Mme de Guermantes, whose vocabulary, habitually limited to all these
old expressions, was as richly flavoured as those dishes which it is possible to come across in the delicious books of Pampille, but which have in real life become so rare, dishes in which the jellies, the butter, the gravy, the quenelles are all genuine and unalloyed, in which even the salt is brought specially from the salt-marshes of Brittany: from her accent, her choice of words, one felt that the basis of the Duchess’s conversation came directly from Guermantes. In this way, the Duchess differed profoundly from her nephew Saint-Loup, impregnated by so many new ideas and expressions; it is difficult, when one’s mind is troubled by the ideas of Kant and the yearnings of Baudelaire, to write the exquisite French of Henri IV, so that the very purity of the Duchess’s language was a sign of limitation and that, in her, both intelligence and sensibility had remained closed against innovation. Here again, Mme de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was precisely the substance of my own thoughts) and everything which, by virtue of that exclusion, it had been able to preserve, that seductive vigour of supple bodies which no exhausting reflexion, no moral anxiety or nervous disorder has deformed. Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the gait and the bearing of the girls of the little band along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and subdued by civility, by respect for intellectual values, all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, had tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, instead of having remained a pillar of virtue, might equally well have been, a good few years ago now, so much did she have the same dashing style, the most brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan. But she was incapable of understanding what I had looked for in her—the charm of her historic name—and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes. Our relations were based on a misunderstanding which could not fail to become manifest as soon as my homage, instead of being addressed to the relatively superior woman she believed herself to be, was diverted to some other woman of equal mediocrity and exuding the same unconscious charm. A misunderstanding that is entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer and a society woman, but nevertheless profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature of his imaginative faculties and has not yet resigned himself to the inevitable disappointments he is destined to find in people, as in the theatre, in travel and indeed in love.
M. de Guermantes having declared (following upon Elstir’s asparagus and those that had just been served after the chicken financière) that green asparagus grown in the open air, which, as has been so quaintly said by the charming writer who signs herself E. de Clermont-Tonnerre, “have not the impressive rigidity of their sisters,” ought to be eaten with eggs. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as they say,” replied M. de Bréauté. “In the province of Canton, in China, the greatest delicacy that can be set before one is a dish of completely rotten ortolan’s eggs.” M. de Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons which had appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, moved in none but the most aristocratic circles, but among these only such as had a certain reputation for intellect, with the result that from his presence, if it was at all regular, in a woman’s house, one could tell that she had a “salon.” He claimed to loathe society, and assured each of his duchesses in turn that it was for the sake of her wit and beauty that he came to see her. They all believed him. Whenever he resigned himself, with a heavy heart, to attending a big reception at the Princesse de Parme’s, he collected them all around him to keep up his courage, and thus appeared only to be moving in the midst of an intimate circle. So that his reputation as an intellectual might survive his social activity, applying certain maxims of the Guermantes spirit, he would set out with the ladies of fashion on long scientific expeditions at the height of the dancing season, and when a snobbish person, in other words a person not yet socially secure, began to be seen everywhere, he would be ferociously obstinate in his refusal to know that person, to allow himself to be introduced to him or her. His hatred of snobs derived from his snobbishness, but made the simple-minded (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness.
“Babal always knows everything,” exclaimed the Duchesse de Guermantes. “I think it must be charming, a country where you can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you with really rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet. I can just see myself dipping my bread and butter in them. I may say that it sometimes happens at aunt Madeleine’s” (Mme de Villeparisis’s) “that things are served in a state of putrefaction, eggs included.” Then, as Mme d’Arpajon protested, “But my dear Phili, you know it as well as I do. You can see the chicken in the egg. In fact I can’t think how they can be so well behaved as to stay in. It’s not an omelette you get there, it’s a regular hen-house, but at least it isn’t marked on the menu. You were so wise not to come to dinner there the day before yesterday, there was a brill cooked in carbolic! I assure you, it wasn’t hospitality so much as a hospital for contagious diseases. Really, Norpois carries loyalty to the pitch of heroism: he had a second helping!”
“I believe I saw you there the time she lashed out at M. Bloch” (M. de Guermantes, perhaps to give a Jewish name a more foreign sound, pronounced the “ch” in Bloch not like a “k” but as in the German “hoch”) “when he said about some poit” (poet) “or other that he was sublime. Châtellerault did his best to break M. Bloch’s shins, but the fellow didn’t understand and thought my nephew’s kicks were aimed at a young woman sitting next to him.” (At this point M. de Guermantes coloured slightly.) “He didn’t realise that he was irritating our aunt with his ‘sublimes’ chucked about all over the place like that. Anyhow, aunt Madeleine, who’s never at a loss for words, turned on him with: ‘Indeed, sir, and what epithet are you going to keep for M. de Bossuet?’ ” (M. de Guermantes thought that, when one mentioned a famous name, the use of “Monsieur” and a particle was eminently “old school.”) “It was absolutely killing.”
“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.”
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