Then, just as singers who have reached the highest note in their compass continue in a head voice, piano, he proceeded to murmur, laughing the while, as if, after all, there had been something irresistibly absurd in the sheer beauty of the painting: “It smells good, it makes your head whirl; it takes your breath away; you feel ticklish all over—and not the faintest clue to how it’s done. The man’s a sorcerer; the thing’s a conjuring-trick, a miracle,” bursting into outright laughter, “it’s almost dishonest!” And stopping, solemnly raising his head, pitching his voice on a basso profundo note which he struggled to bring into harmony, he concluded, “And it’s so sincere!”
Except at the moment when he had called it “better than the ‘Night Watch,’ ” a blasphemy which had called forth an instant protest from Mme Verdurin, who regarded the “Night Watch” as the supreme masterpiece of the universe (conjointly with the “Ninth” and the “Winged Victory”), and at the word “cack” which had made Forcheville throw a sweeping glance round the table to see whether it was “all right,” before he allowed his lips to curve in a prudish and conciliatory smile, all the guests (save Swann) had kept their fascinated and adoring eyes fixed upon the painter.
“I do so love him when he gets carried away like that!” cried Mme Verdurin the moment he had finished, enraptured that the table-talk should have proved so entertaining on the very night that Forcheville was dining with them for the first time. “Hallo, you!” she turned to her husband, “What’s the matter with you, sitting there gaping like a great animal? You know he talks well. Anybody would think it was the first time he had ever listened to you,” she added to the painter. “If you had only seen him while you were speaking; he was just drinking it all in. And tomorrow he’ll tell us everything you said, without missing out a word.”
“No, really, I’m not joking!” protested the painter, enchanted by the success of his speech. “You all look as if you thought I was pulling your legs, that it’s all eyewash. I’ll take you to see the show, and then you can say whether I’ve been exaggerating; I’ll bet you anything you like, you’ll come away even more enthusiastic than I am!”
“But we don’t suppose for a moment that you’re exaggerating. We only want you to go on with your dinner, and my husband too. Give M. Biche some more sole, can’t you see his has got cold? We’re not in any hurry; you’re dashing round as if the house was on fire. Wait a little; don’t serve the salad just yet.”
Mme Cottard, who was a modest woman and spoke but seldom, was not however lacking in self-assurance when a happy inspiration put the right word in her mouth. She felt that it would be well received, and this gave her confidence, but what she did with it was with the object not so much of shining herself as of helping her husband on in his career. And so she did not allow the word “salad,” which Mme Verdurin had just uttered, to pass unchallenged.
“It’s not a Japanese salad, is it?” she said in a loud undertone, turning towards Odette.
And then, in her joy and confusion at the aptness and daring of making so discreet and yet so unmistakable an allusion to the new and brilliantly successful play by Dumas, she broke into a charming, girlish laugh, not very loud, but so irresistible that it was some time before she could control it.
“Who is that lady? She seems devilish clever,” said Forcheville.
“No, it is not. But we’ll make one for you if you’ll all come to dinner on Friday.”
“You will think me dreadfully provincial,” said Mme Cottard to Swann, “but I haven’t yet seen this famous Francillon that everybody’s talking about. The Doctor has been (I remember now, he told me he had the great pleasure of spending the evening with you) and I must confess I didn’t think it very sensible for him to spend money on seats in order to see it again with me. Of course an evening at the Théâtre-Français is never really wasted; the acting’s so good there always; but we have some very nice friends” (Mme Cottard rarely uttered a proper name, but restricted herself to “some friends of ours” or “one of my friends,” as being more “distinguished,” speaking in an affected tone and with the self-importance of a person who need give names only when she chooses) “who often have a box, and are kind enough to take us to all the new pieces that are worth going to, and so I’m certain to see Francillon sooner or later, and then I shall know what to think. But I do feel such a fool about it, I must confess, for wherever I go I naturally find everybody talking about that wretched Japanese salad. In fact one’s beginning to get just a little tired of hearing about it,” she went on, seeing that Swann seemed less interested than she had hoped in so burning a topic. “I must admit, though, that it provides an excuse for some quite amusing, notions. I’ve got a friend, now, who is most original, though she’s a very pretty woman, very popular in society, very sought-after, and she tells me that she got her cook to make one of these Japanese salads, putting in everything that young M. Dumas says you’re to in the play. Then she asked a few friends to come and taste it. I was not among the favoured few, I’m sorry to say. But she told us all about it at her next ‘at home’; it seems it was quite horrible, she made us all laugh till we cried. But of course it’s all in the telling,” Mme Cottard added, seeing that Swann still looked grave.
And imagining that it was perhaps because he had not liked Francillon: “Well, I daresay I shall be disappointed with it, after all. I don’t suppose it’s as good as the piece Mme de Crécy worships, Serge Panine. There’s a play, if you like; really deep, makes you think! But just fancy giving a recipe for a salad on the stage of the Théâtre-Français! Now, Serge Panine! But then, it’s like everything that comes from the pen of Georges Ohnet, it’s always so well written. I wonder if you know the Maître des Forges, which I like even better than Serge Panine.”
“Forgive me,” said Swann with polite irony, “but I must confess that my want of admiration is almost equally divided between those masterpieces.”
“Really, and what don’t you like about them? Are you sure you aren’t prejudiced? Perhaps you think he’s a little too sad. Well, well, what I always say is, one should never argue about plays or novels. Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what you find detestable may be just what I like best.”
She was interrupted by Forcheville addressing Swann. While Mme Cottard was discussing Francillon, Forcheville had been expressing to Mme Verdurin his admiration for what he called the painter’s “little speech”: “Your friend has such a flow of language, such a memory!” he said to her when the painter had come to a standstill. “I’ve seldom come across anything like it. He’d make a first-rate preacher. By Jove, I wish I was like that. What with him and M. Bréchot you’ve got a couple of real characters, though as regards the gift of the gab, I’m not so sure that this one doesn’t knock a few spots off the Professor. It comes more naturally with him, it’s less studied. Although now and then he does use some words that are a bit realistic, but that’s quite the thing nowadays. Anyhow, it’s not often I’ve seen a man hold the floor as cleverly as that—‘hold the spittoon’ as we used to say in the regiment, where, by the way, we had a man he rather reminds me of. You could take anything you liked—I don’t know what—this glass, say, and he’d rattle on about it for hours; no, not this glass, that’s a silly thing to say, but something like the battle of Waterloo, or anything of that sort, he’d spin you such a yarn you simply wouldn’t believe it. Why, Swann was in the same regiment; he must have known him.”
“Do you see much of M. Swann?” asked Mme Verdurin.
“Oh dear, no!” he answered, and then, thinking that if he made himself pleasant to Swann he might find favour with Odette, he decided to take this opportunity of flattering him by speaking of his fashionable friends, but to do so as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann upon some unexpected success. “Isn’t that so, Swann? I never see anything of you, do I?—But then, where on earth is one to see him? The fellow spends all his time ensconced with th
e La Trémoïlles, the Laumes and all that lot!” The imputation would have been false at any time, and was all the more so now that for at least a year Swann scarcely went anywhere except to the Verdurins’. But the mere name of a person whom the Verdurins did not know was greeted by them with a disapproving silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression which the names of these “bores,” especially when flung at her in this tactless fashion in front of all the “faithful,” were bound to make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious solicitude. He saw then that in her determination not to take cognisance of, not to have been affected by the news which had just been imparted to her, not merely to remain dumb, but to have been deaf as well, as we pretend to be when a friend who has offended us attempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we might appear to be accepting if we heard it without protesting, or when someone utters the name of an enemy the very mention of whom in our presence is forbidden, Mme Verdurin, so that her silence should have the appearance not of consent but of the unconscious silence of inanimate objects, had suddenly emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her domed forehead was no more than an exquisite piece of sculpture in the round, which the name of those La Trémoïlles with whom Swann was always “ensconced” had failed to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrinkled in a frown, exposed to view two dark cavities that seemed modelled from life. You would have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. She was no more than a wax cast, a plaster mask, a maquette for a monument, a bust for the Palace of Industry, in front of which the public would most certainly gather and marvel to see how the sculptor, in expressing the unchallengeable dignity of the Verdurins as opposed to that of the La Trémoïlles or Laumes, whose equals (if not indeed their betters) they were, and the equals and betters of all other “bores” upon the face of the earth, had contrived to impart an almost papal majesty to the whiteness and rigidity of the stone. But the marble at last came to life and let it be understood that it didn’t do to be at all squeamish if one went to that house, since the wife was always drunk and the husband so uneducated that he called a corridor a “collidor”!
“You’d need to pay me a lot of money before I’d let any of that lot set foot inside my house,” Mme Verdurin concluded, gazing imperiously down on Swann.
She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to echo the holy simplicity of the pianist’s aunt, who at once exclaimed: “To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody to go near them. I’m sure I should be afraid; one can’t be too careful. How can people be so common as to go running after them?” But he might at least have replied, like Forcheville: “Gad, she’s a duchess; there are still plenty of people who are impressed by that sort of thing,” which would at least have permitted Mme Verdurin the retort, “And a lot of good may it do them!” Instead of which, Swann merely smiled, in a manner which intimated that he could not, of course, take such an outrageous statement seriously. M. Verdurin, who was still casting furtive glances at his wife, saw with regret and understood only too well that she was now inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who has failed to stamp out heresy; and so, in the hope of bringing Swann round to a recantation (for the courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the other side), challenged him: “Tell us frankly, now, what you think of them yourself. We shan’t repeat it to them, you may be sure.”
To which Swann answered: “Why, I’m not in the least afraid of the Duchess (if it’s the La Trémoïlles you’re speaking of). I can assure you that everyone likes going to her house. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she’s at all ‘profound’ ” (he pronounced “profound” as if it was a ridiculous word, for his speech kept the traces of certain mental habits which the recent change in his life, a rejuvenation illustrated by his passion for music, had inclined him temporarily to discard, so that at times he would actually state his views with considerable warmth) “but I’m quite sincere when I say that she’s intelligent, while her husband is positively a man of letters. They’re charming people.”
Whereupon Mme Verdurin, realising that this one infidel would prevent her “little nucleus” from achieving complete unanimity, was unable to restrain herself, in her fury at the obstinacy of this wretch who could not see what anguish his words were causing her, from screaming at him from the depths of her tortured heart: “You may think so if you wish, but at least you needn’t say so to us.”
“It all depends on what you call intelligence.” Forcheville felt that it was his turn to be brilliant. “Come now, Swann, tell us what you mean by intelligence.”
“There,” cried Odette, “that’s the sort of big subject I’m always asking him to talk to me about, and he never will.”
“Oh, but …” protested Swann.
“Oh, but nonsense!” said Odette.
“A water-butt?” asked the doctor.
“In your opinion,” pursued Forcheville, “does intelligence mean the gift of the gab—you know, glib society talk?”
“Finish your sweet, so that they can take your plate away,” said Mme Verdurin sourly to Saniette, who was lost in thought and had stopped eating. And then, perhaps a little ashamed of her rudeness, “It doesn’t matter, you can take your time about it. I only reminded you because of the others, you know; it keeps the servants back.”
“There is,” began Brichot, hammering out each syllable, “a rather curious definition of intelligence by that gentle old anarchist Fénelon …”
“Just listen to this!” Mme Verdurin rallied Forcheville and the doctor. “He’s going to give us Fénelon’s definition of intelligence. Most interesting. It’s not often you get a chance of hearing that!”
But Brichot was keeping Fénelon’s definition until Swann had given his. Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant dialectical contest which Mme Verdurin was rejoicing at being able to offer to Forcheville.
“You see, it’s just the same as with me!” said Odette peevishly. “I’m not at all sorry to see that I’m not the only one he doesn’t find quite up to his level.”
“Are these de La Trémouailles whom Mme Verdurin has shown us to be so undesirable,” inquired Brichot, articulating vigorously, “descended from the couple whom that worthy old snob Mme de Sévigné said she was delighted to know because it was so good for her peasants? True, the Marquise had another reason, which in her case probably came first, for she was a thorough journalist at heart, and always on the look-out for ‘copy.’ And in the journal which she used to send regularly to her daughter, it was Mme de La Trémouaille, kept well-informed through all her grand connections, who supplied the foreign politics.”
“No, no, I don’t think they’re the same family,” hazarded Mme Verdurin.
Saniette, who ever since he had surrendered his untouched plate to the butler had been plunged once more in silent meditation, emerged finally to tell them, with a nervous laugh, the story of a dinner he had once had with the Duc de La Trémoïlle, from which it transpired that the Duke did not know that George Sand was the pseudonym of a woman. Swann, who was fond of Saniette, felt bound to supply him with a few facts illustrative of the Duke’s culture proving that such ignorance on his part was literally impossible; but suddenly he stopped short, realising that Saniette needed no proof, but knew already that the story was untrue for the simple reason that he had just invented it. The worthy man suffered acutely from the Verdurins’ always finding him so boring; and as he was conscious of having been more than ordinarily dull this evening, he had made up his mind that he would succeed in being amusing at least once before the end of dinner. He capitulated so quickly, looked so wretched at the sight of his castle in ruins, and replied in so craven a tone to Swann, appealing to him not to persist in a refutation which was now superfluous—“All right; all right; anyhow, even if I’m mistaken it’s not a crime, I hope”—that Swann longed to be able to console him by insisting that t
he story was indubitably true and exquisitely funny. The doctor, who had been listening, had an idea that it was the right moment to interject “Se non é vero,” but he was not quite certain of the words, and was afraid of getting them wrong.
After dinner, Forcheville went up to the doctor.
“She can’t have been at all bad looking, Mme Verdurin; and besides, she’s a woman you can really talk to, which is the main thing. Of course she’s getting a bit broad in the beam. But Mme de Crécy! There’s a little woman who knows what’s what, all right. Upon my word and soul, you can see at a glance she’s got her wits about her, that girl. We’re speaking of Mme de Crécy,” he explained, as M. Verdurin joined them, his pipe in his mouth. “I should say that, as a specimen of the female form …”
“I’d rather have it in my bed than a slap with a wet fish,” the words came tumbling from Cottard, who had for some time been waiting in vain for Forcheville to pause for breath so that he might get in this hoary old joke for which there might not be another cue if the conversation should take a different turn and which he now produced with that excessive spontaneity and confidence that seeks to cover up the coldness and the anxiety inseparable from a prepared recitation. Forcheville knew and saw the joke, and was thoroughly amused. As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of his merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by a convention that was different from his wife’s but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man shaking with laughter than he would begin at once to cough, as though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of pipe-smoke. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity. Thus he and Mme Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story, was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre each representing Comedy in a different way.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 35