Whereupon Mme de Gallardon drew herself up and, putting on an even chillier expression, though still apparently concerned about the Prince’s health, said to her cousin:
“Oriane,” (at once Mme des Laumes looked with amused astonishment towards an invisible third person, whom she seemed to call to witness that she had never authorised Mme de Gallardon to use her Christian name) “I should be so pleased if you would look in for a moment tomorrow evening, to hear a clarinet quintet by Mozart. I should like to have your opinion of it.”
She seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to be asking a favour, and to want the Princess’s opinion of the Mozart quintet just as though it had been a dish invented by a new cook, whose talent it was most important that an epicure should come to judge.
“But I know that quintet quite well. I can tell you now—that I adore it.”
“You know my husband isn’t at all well—his liver … He would so much like to see you,” Mme de Gallardon went on, making it now a charitable obligation for the Princess to appear at her party.
The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their houses. Every day she would write to express her regret at having been kept away—by the sudden arrival of her husband’s mother, by an invitation from her brother-in-law, by the Opera, by some excursion to the country—from some party to which she would never have dreamed of going. In this way she gave many people the satisfaction of feeling that she was on intimate terms with them, that she would gladly have come to their houses, and that she had been prevented from doing so only by some princely obstacle which they were flattered to find competing with their own humble entertainment. And then, as she belonged to that witty Guermantes set in which there survived something of the mental briskness, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments, which goes back to Mérimée and has found its final expression in the plays of Meilhac and Halévy, she adapted it even for the purposes of her social relations, transposed it into the form of politeness which she favoured and which endeavoured to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to the plain truth. She would never develop at any length to a hostess the expression of her anxiety to be present at her party; she thought it more amiable to put to her a few little facts on which it would depend whether or not it was possible for her to come.
“Listen, and I’ll explain,” she said to Mme de Gallardon. “Tomorrow evening I must go to a friend of mine who has been pestering me to fix a day for ages. If she takes us to the theatre afterwards, with the best will in the world there’ll be no possibility of my coming to you; but if we just stay in the house, since I know there won’t be anyone else there, I shall be able to slip away.”
“Tell me, have you seen your friend M. Swann?”
“No! my beloved Charles! I never knew he was here. I must catch his eye.”
“It’s odd that he should come to old Saint-Euverte’s,” Mme de Gallardon went on. “Oh, I know he’s very clever,” meaning by that “very cunning,” “but that makes no difference—the idea of a Jew in the house of a sister and sister-in-law of two Archbishops!”
“I’m ashamed to confess that I’m not in the least shocked,” said the Princesse des Laumes.
“I know he’s a convert and all that, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say that the converted ones remain more attached to their religion than the practising ones, that it’s all just a pretence; is that true, d’you think?”
“I can throw no light at all on the matter.”
The pianist, who was to play two pieces by Chopin, after finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a Polonaise. But once Mme de Gallardon had informed her cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in turn without Mme des Laumes paying him the slightest attention. She belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence in any room in which she might find herself of another member of her set, even though she had nothing in particular to say to him, monopolised her attention to the exclusion of everything else. From that moment, in the hope that Swann would catch sight of her, the Princess spent her whole time (like a tame white mouse when a lump of sugar is put down before its nose and then taken away) turning her face, which was filled with countless signs of complicity, none of them with the least relevance to the sentiment underlying Chopin’s music, in the direction where Swann was standing and, if he moved, diverting accordingly the course of her magnetic smile.
“Oriane, don’t be angry with me,” resumed Mme de Gallardon, who could never restrain herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions, and the hope that she might one day dazzle the world, to the immediate, obscure and private satisfaction of saying something disagreeable, “people do say about your M. Swann that he’s the sort of man one can’t have in one’s house; is that true?”
“Why, you of all people ought to know that it’s true,” replied the Princesse des Laumes, “since you must have asked him a hundred times, and he’s never been to your house once.”
And leaving her cousin mortified, she burst out laughing again, scandalising everyone who was trying to listen to the music, but attracting the attention of Mme de Saint-Euverte, who had stayed, out of politeness, near the piano, and now caught sight of the Princess for the first time. Mme de Saint-Euverte was all the more delighted to see Mme des Laumes as she imagined her to be still at Guermantes, looking after her sick father-in-law.
“My dear Princess, you here?”
“Yes, I tucked myself away in a corner, and I’ve been hearing such lovely things.”
“What, you’ve been here for quite a time?”
“Oh, yes, a very long time which seemed very short, long only because I couldn’t see you.”
Mme de Saint-Euverte offered her own chair to the Princess, who declined it, saying:
“Oh, please, no! Why should you? I don’t mind in the least where I sit.” And deliberately picking out, the better to display the simplicity of a really great lady, a low seat without a back: “There now, that pouf, that’s all I need. It will make me keep my back straight. Oh! good heavens, I’m making a noise again; they’ll be telling you to have me chucked out.”
Meanwhile, the pianist having redoubled his speed, the musical excitement was at its height, a servant was handing refreshments round on a salver, and was making the spoons rattle, and, as happened every week, Mme de Saint-Euverte was making unavailing signs to him to go away. A recent bride, who had been told that a young woman ought never to appear bored, was smiling vigorously, trying to catch her hostess’s eye so as to flash her a look of gratitude for having “thought of her” in connexion with so delightful an entertainment. However, although she remained calmer than Mme de Franquetot, it was not without some uneasiness that she followed the flying fingers, the object of her concern being not the pianist but the piano, on which a lighted candle, jumping at each fortissimo, threatened, if not to set its shade on fire, at least to spill wax upon the rosewood. At last she could contain herself no longer, and, running up the two steps of the platform on which the piano stood, flung herself on the candle to adjust its sconce. But scarcely had her hand come within reach of it when, on a final chord, the piece came to an end and the pianist rose to his feet. Nevertheless the bold initiative shown by this young woman and the brief promiscuity between her and the instrumentalist which resulted from it, produced a generally favourable impression.
“Did you see what that girl did just now, Princess?” asked General de Froberville, who had come up to Mme des Laumes as her hostess left her for a moment. “Odd, wasn’t it? Is she one of the performers?”
“No, she’s a little Mme de Cambremer,” replied the Princess without thinking, and then added hurriedly: “I’m only repeating what I’ve heard—I haven’t the faintest notion who she is; someone be
hind me said that they were neighbours of Mme de Saint-Euverte in the country, but I don’t believe anyone knows them, really. They must be ‘country cousins’! By the way, I don’t know whether you’re particularly familiar with the brilliant society which we see before us, because I’ve no idea who all these astonishing people can be. What do you suppose they do with themselves when they’re not at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s parties? She must have ordered them along with the musicians and the chairs and the food. ‘Universal providers,’ you know. You must admit they’re rather splendid, General. But can she really have the heart to hire the same ‘supers’ every week? It isn’t possible!”
“Oh, but Cambremer is quite a good name—old, too,” protested the General.
“I see no objection to its being old,” the Princess answered dryly, “but whatever else it is it’s not euphonious,” she went on, isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affectation to which the Guermantes set were addicted.
“You think not, eh! She’s a regular little peach, though,” said the General, whose eyes never strayed from Mme de Cambremer. “Don’t you agree with me, Princess?”
“She thrusts herself forward too much. I think, in so young a woman, that’s not very nice—for I don’t suppose she’s my generation,” replied Mme des Laumes (this expression being common, it appeared, to Gallardon and Guermantes). And then, seeing that M. de Froberville was still gazing at Mme de Cambremer, she added, half out of malice towards the latter, half out of amiability towards the General: “Not very nice … for her husband! I’m sorry I don’t know her, since you’ve set your heart on her—I might have introduced you to her,” said the Princess, who, if she had known the young woman, would probably have done nothing of the sort. “And now I must say good night, because one of my friends is having a birthday party, and I must go and wish her many happy returns,” she explained in a tone of modest sincerity, reducing the fashionable gathering to which she was going to the simple proportions of a ceremony which would be boring in the extreme but which it was obligatory and touching to attend. “Besides, I must pick up Basin who while I’ve been here has gone to see those friends of his—you know them too I believe—who are called after a bridge—oh, yes, the Iénas.”
“It was a victory before it was a bridge, Princess,” said the General. “I mean to say, to an old soldier like me,” he went on, wiping his monocle and replacing it, as though he were laying a fresh dressing on the raw wound beneath, while the Princess instinctively looked away, “that Empire nobility, well of course it’s not the same thing, but, after all, taking it for what it is, it’s very fine of its kind—they were people who really did fight like heroes.”
“But I have the deepest respect for heroes,” the Princess assented with a faint trace of irony. “If I don’t go with Basin to see this Princess d’Iéna, it isn’t at all because of that, it’s simply because I don’t know them. Basin knows them, and is deeply attached to them. Oh, no, it’s not what you think, it’s not a flirtation. I’ve no reason to object. Besides, what good has it ever done when I have objected,” she added in a melancholy voice, for the whole world knew that, ever since the day when the Prince des Laumes had married his ravishing cousin, he had been consistently unfaithful to her. “Anyhow, it isn’t that at all. They’re people he has known for a long time, he takes advantage of them, and that suits me down to the ground. In any case, what he’s told me about their house is quite enough. Can you imagine it, all their furniture is ‘Empire’!”
“But, my dear Princess, that’s only natural; it belonged to their grandparents.”
“I don’t say it didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less ugly. I quite understand that people can’t always have nice things, but at least they needn’t have things that are merely grotesque. I’m sorry, but I can think of nothing more pretentious and bourgeois than that hideous style—cabinets with swans’ heads, like baths!”
“But I believe, all the same, that they’ve got some fine things; why, they must have that famous mosaic table on which the Treaty of …”
“Oh, I don’t deny they may have things that are interesting enough from the historic point of view. But things like that can’t ever be beautiful … because they’re simply horrible! I’ve got things like that myself, that came to Basin from the Montesquious. Only, they’re up in the attics at Guermantes, where nobody ever sees them. But in any case that’s not the point, I would rush round to see them with Basin, I’d even go to see them among all their sphinxes and brasses if I knew them, but—I don’t know them! D’you know, I was always taught when I was a little girl that it wasn’t polite to call on people one didn’t know.” She assumed a tone of childish gravity. “And so I’m just doing what I was taught to do. Can’t you see those good people, with a totally strange woman bursting into their house? Why, I might get a most hostile reception.”
And she coquettishly enhanced the charm of the smile which that supposition had brought to her lips, by giving to her blue eyes, which were fixed on the General, a gentle, dreamy expression.
“My dear Princess, you know that they’d be simply wild with joy.”
“No, why?” she inquired with the utmost vivacity, either to give the impression of being unaware that it would be because she was one of the first ladies in France, or in order to have the pleasure of hearing the General tell her so. “Why? How can you tell? Perhaps they might find it extremely disagreeable. I don’t know, but if they’re anything like me, I find it quite boring enough to see the people I do know, and I’m sure if I had to see people I didn’t know as well, even if they had ‘fought like heroes,’ I should go stark mad. Besides, except when it’s an old friend like you, whom one knows quite apart from that, I’m not sure that heroism takes one very far in society. It’s often quite boring enough to have to give a dinner-party, but if one had to offer one’s arm to Spartacus to go into dinner … Really, no, it would never be Vercingetorix I should send for to make a fourteenth. I feel sure I should keep him for grand receptions. And as I never give any …”
“Ah! Princess, it’s easy to see you’re not a Guermantes for nothing. You have your share of it, all right, the wit of the Guermantes!”
“But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes in the plural. I never could make out why. Do you really know any others who have it?” she rallied him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features concentrated, yoked to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such observations—even if the Princess had to make them herself—as were in praise of her wit or of her beauty. “Look, there’s Swann talking to your Cambremer; over there, beside old mother Saint-Euverte, don’t you see him? Ask him to introduce you. But hurry up, he seems to be just going!”
“Did you notice how dreadfully ill he’s looking?” asked the General.
“My precious Charles? Ah, he’s coming at last. I was beginning to think he didn’t want to see me!”
Swann was extremely fond of the Princesse des Laumes, and the sight of her reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, and all that country which he so dearly loved and had ceased to visit in order not to be separated from Odette. Slipping into the manner, half-artistic, half-amorous, with which he could always manage to amuse the Princess—a manner which came to him quite naturally whenever he dipped for a moment into the old social atmosphere—and wishing also to express in words, for his own satisfaction, the longing that he felt for the country:
“Ah!” he began in a declamatory tone, so as to be audible at once to Mme de Saint-Euverte, to whom he was speaking, and to Mme des Laumes, for whom he was speaking, “Behold our charming Princess! Look, she has come up on purpose from Guermantes to hear Saint Francis preach to the birds, and has only just had time, like a dear little titmouse, to go and pick a few little hips and haws and put them in her hair; there are even some drops of dew upon them still, a little of the hoar-frost which must be makin
g the Duchess shiver. It’s very pretty indeed, my dear Princess.”
“What! The Princess came up on purpose from Guermantes? But that’s too wonderful! I never knew; I’m quite overcome,” Mme de Saint-Euverte protested with quaint simplicity, being but little accustomed to Swann’s form of wit. And then, examining the Princess’s headdress, “Why, you’re quite right; it is copied from … what shall I say, not chestnuts, no—oh, it’s a delightful idea, but how can the Princess have known what was going to be on my programme? The musicians didn’t tell me, even.”
Swann, who was accustomed, when he was with a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in terms of gallantry, to pay her delicate compliments which most society people were incapable of understanding, did not condescend to explain to Mme de Saint-Euverte that he had been speaking metaphorically. As for the Princess, she was in fits of laughter, both because Swann’s wit was highly appreciated by her set, and because she could never hear a compliment addressed to herself without finding it exquisitely subtle and irresistibly amusing.
“Well, I’m delighted, Charles, if my little hips and haws meet with your approval. But tell me, why did you pay your respects to that Cambremer person, are you also her neighbour in the country?”
Mme de Saint-Euverte, seeing that the Princess seemed quite happy talking to Swann, had drifted away.
“But you are yourself, Princess!”
“I! Why, they must have ‘countries’ everywhere, those people! Don’t I wish I had!”
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