He repeated the name “Aimé” all the time, with the result that when he had anyone to dinner the guest would remark “I can see you’re quite at home in this place,” and would feel himself obliged to keep on saying “Aimé” also, from that tendency, combining elements of timidity, vulgarity and silliness, which many people have, to believe that it is smart and witty to imitate slavishly the people in whose company they happen to be. The president repeated the name incessantly, but with a smile, for he wanted to exhibit at one and the same time his good relations with the head waiter and his own superior station. And the head waiter, whenever he caught the sound of his own name, smiled too, as though touched and at the same time proud, showing that he was conscious of the honour and could appreciate the joke.
Intimidating as I always found these meals, in that vast restaurant, generally full, of the Grand Hotel, they became even more so when there arrived for a few days the proprietor (or he may have been the general manager, appointed by a board of directors) not only of this palace but of seven or eight more besides, situated at all the four corners of France, in each of which, shuttling from one to the other, he would spend a week now and again. Then, just after dinner had begun, there appeared every evening at the entrance to the dining-room this small man with the white hair and a red nose, astonishingly neat and impassive, who was known, it appeared, as well in London as at Monte Carlo, as one of the leading hoteliers in Europe. Once when I had gone out for a moment at the beginning of dinner, as I came in again I passed close by him, and he bowed to me, no doubt to acknowledge that he was my host, but with a coldness in which I could not distinguish whether it was attributable to the reserve of a man who could never forget what he was, or to his contempt for a customer of so little importance. To those, on the other hand, whose importance was considerable, the general manager would bow with quite as much coldness but more deeply, lowering his eyelids with a sort of bashful respect, as though he had found himself confronted, at a funeral, with the father of the deceased or with the Blessed Sacrament. Except for these icy and infrequent salutations, he made not the slightest movement, as if to show that his glittering eyes, which appeared to be starting out of his head, saw everything, controlled everything, ensured for the “Dinner at the Grand Hotel” perfection in every detail as well as an overall harmony. He felt, evidently, that he was more than the producer, more than the conductor, nothing less than the generalissimo. Having decided that a contemplation raised to the maximum degree of intensity would suffice to assure him that everything was in readiness, that no mistake had been made which could lead to disaster, and enable him at last to assume his responsibilities, he abstained not merely from any gesture but even from moving his eyes, which, petrified by the intensity of their gaze, took in and directed operations as a whole. I felt that even the movements of my spoon did not escape him, and were he to vanish after the soup, for the whole of dinner, the inspection he had held would have taken away my appetite. His own was exceedingly good, as one could see at luncheon, which he took like an ordinary guest of the hotel at the same hour as everyone else in the public dining-room. His table had this peculiarity only, that by his side, while he was eating, the other manager, the resident one, remained standing all the time making conversation. For, being subordinate to the general manager, he was anxious to please a man of whom he lived in constant fear. My own fear of him diminished during these luncheons, for being then lost in the crowd of visitors he would exercise the discretion of a general sitting in a restaurant where there are also private soldiers, in not seeming to take any notice of them. Nevertheless when the porter, from the midst of his cluster of bell-hops, announced to me: “He leaves tomorrow morning for Dinard. Then he’s going down to Biarritz, and after that to Cannes,” I began to breathe more freely.
My life in the hotel was rendered not only gloomy because I had made no friends there but uncomfortable because Françoise had made many. It might be thought that they would have made things easier for us in various respects. Quite the contrary. The proletariat, if they succeeded only with great difficulty in being treated as people she knew by Françoise, and could not succeed at all unless they fulfilled certain exacting conditions of politeness towards her, were, on the other hand, once they had reached that point, the only people who mattered to her. Her time-honoured code taught her that she was in no way beholden to the friends of her employers, that she might, if she was busy, shut the door without ceremony in the face of a lady who had come to call on my grandmother. But towards her own acquaintance, that is to say the select handful of the lower orders whom she admitted to her fastidious friendship, her actions were regulated by the most subtle and most stringent of protocols. Thus Françoise, having made the acquaintance of the man in the coffee-shop and of a young lady’s-maid who did dressmaking for a Belgian lady, no longer went upstairs immediately after lunch to get my grandmother’s things ready, but came an hour later, because the coffee-man had wanted to make her a cup of coffee or a tisane in his shop, or the maid had invited her to go and watch her sew, and to refuse either of them would have been impossible, one of those things that were not done. Moreover, particular regard was due to the little sewing-maid, who was an orphan and had been brought up by strangers to whom she still went occasionally for a few days’ holiday. Her situation aroused Françoise’s pity, and also her benevolent contempt. She who had a family, a little house that had come to her from her parents, with a field in which her brother kept a few cows, could not regard so uprooted a creature as her equal. And since this girl hoped, on Assumption Day, to be allowed to pay her benefactors a visit, Françoise kept on repeating: “She does make me laugh! She says, ‘I hope to be going home for the Assumption.’ Home, says she! It isn’t just that it’s not her own place, it’s people as took her in from nowhere, and the creature says ‘home’ just as if it really was her home. Poor thing! What a misery it must be, not to know what it is to have a home.” Still, if Françoise had associated only with the ladies’-maids brought to the hotel by other visitors, who fed with her in the “service” quarters and, seeing her grand lace cap and her fine profile, took her perhaps for some lady of noble birth, whom reduced circumstances or a personal attachment had driven to serve as companion to my grandmother, if in a word Françoise had known only people who did not belong to the hotel, no great harm would have been done, since she could not have prevented them from being of some service to us, for the simple reason that in no circumstances, even without her knowledge, would it have been possible for them to be of service to us at all. But she had formed connexions also with one of the wine waiters, with a man in the kitchen, and with the head chamber-maid of our landing. And the result of this in our everyday life was that Françoise—who on the day of her arrival, when she still did not know anyone, would set all the bells jangling for the slightest thing, at hours when my grandmother and I would never have dared to ring, and if we offered some gentle admonition would answer: “Well, we’re paying enough for it, aren’t we?” as though it were she herself that would have to pay—now that she had made friends with a personage in the kitchen, which had appeared to us to augur well for our future comfort, were my grandmother or I to complain of cold feet, Françoise, even at an hour that was quite normal, dared not ring, assuring us that it would give offence because they would have to relight the boilers, or because it would interrupt the servants’ dinner and they would be annoyed. And she ended with a formula that, in spite of the dubious way in which she pronounced it, was none the less clear and put us plainly in the wrong: “The fact is …” We did not insist, for fear of bringing upon ourselves another, far more serious: “It’s a bit much …!” So that what it amounted to was that we could no longer have any hot water because Françoise had become a friend of the person who heated it.
In the end we too made a social connexion, in spite of but through my grandmother, for she and Mme de Villeparisis collided one morning in a doorway and were obliged to accost each other, not without having fir
st exchanged gestures of surprise and hesitation, performed movements of withdrawal and uncertainty, and finally broken into protestations of joy and greeting, as in certain scenes in Molière where two actors who have been delivering long soliloquies each on his own account, a few feet apart, are supposed not yet to have seen each other, and then suddenly catching sight of each other, cannot believe their eyes, break off what they are saying, and then simultaneously find their tongues again (the chorus meanwhile having kept the dialogue going) and fall into each other’s arms. Mme de Villeparisis tactfully made as if to leave my grandmother to herself after the first greetings, but my grandmother insisted on staying to talk to her until lunch-time, being anxious to discover how her friend managed to get her letters earlier than we got ours, and to get such nice grilled dishes (for Mme de Villeparisis, who took a keen interest in her food, had the poorest opinion of the hotel kitchen which served us with meals that my grandmother, still quoting Mme de Sévigné, described as “of a sumptuousness to make you die of hunger”). And the Marquise formed the habit of coming every day, while waiting to be served, to sit down for a moment at our table in the dining-room, insisting that we should not rise from our chairs or in any way put ourselves out. At the most we would occasionally linger, after finishing our lunch, to chat to her, at that sordid moment when the knives are left littering the tablecloth among crumpled napkins. For my own part, in order to preserve (so that I might be able to enjoy Balbec) the idea that I was on the uttermost promontory of the earth, I compelled myself to look further afield, to notice only the sea, to seek in it the effects described by Baudelaire and to let my gaze fall upon our table only on days when there was set on it some gigantic fish, some marine monster, which unlike the knives and forks was contemporary with the primitive epochs in which the Ocean first began to teem with life, at the time of the Cimmerians, a fish whose body with its numberless vertebrae, its blue and pink veins, had been constructed by nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome cathedral of the deep.
As a barber, seeing an officer whom he is accustomed to shave with special deference and care recognise a customer who has just entered the shop and stop for a moment to talk to him, rejoices in the thought that these are two men of the same social order, and cannot help smiling as he goes to fetch the bowl of soap, for he knows that in his establishment, to the vulgar routine of a mere barber’s-shop are being added social, not to say aristocratic pleasures, so Aimé, seeing that Mme de Villeparisis had found in us old friends, went to fetch our finger-bowls with the proudly modest and knowingly discreet smile of a hostess who knows when to leave her guests to themselves. He suggested also a pleased and loving father who watches silently over the happy pair who have plighted their troth at his hospitable board. Besides, it was enough merely to utter the name of a person of title for Aimé to appear pleased, unlike Françoise, in whose presence you could not mention Count So-and-so without her face darkening and her speech becoming dry and curt, which meant that she cherished the aristocracy not less than Aimé but more. But then Françoise had that quality which in others she condemned as the worst possible fault: she was proud. She was not of that amenable and good-natured race to which Aimé belonged. They feel and they exhibit an intense delight when you tell them a piece of news which may be more or less sensational but is at any rate new, and not to be found in the papers. Françoise would refuse to appear surprised. You might have announced in her hearing that the Archduke Rudolf—not that she had the least suspicion of his having ever existed—was not, as was generally supposed, dead, but alive and kicking, and she would have answered only “Yes,” as though she had known it all the time. It may, however, have been that if, even from our own lips, from us whom she so meekly called her masters and who had so nearly succeeded in taming her, she could not hear the name of a nobleman without having to restrain an impulse of anger, this was because the family from which she had sprung occupied in its own village a comfortable and independent position, unlikely to be disturbed in the consideration which it enjoyed save by those same nobles in whose households, meanwhile, from his boyhood, an Aimé would have been domiciled as a servant, if not actually brought up by their charity. Hence, for Françoise, Mme de Villeparisis had to make amends for being noble. But (in France, at any rate) that is precisely the talent, in fact the sole occupation of the aristocracy. Françoise, following the common tendency of servants, who pick up incessantly from the conversation of their masters with other people fragmentary observations from which they are apt to draw erroneous conclusions—as humans do with respect to the habits of animals—was constantly discovering that somebody had slighted us, a conclusion to which she was easily led not so much, perhaps, by her extravagant love for us as by the delight that she took in being disagreeable to us. But having once established, without possibility of error, the endless consideration and kindness shown to us, and shown to herself also, by Mme de Villeparisis, Françoise forgave her for being a marquise, and, as she had never ceased to admire her for being one, preferred her thenceforward to all our other friends. It must be added that no one else took the trouble to be so continually nice to us. Whenever my grandmother remarked on a book that Mme de Villeparisis was reading, or said she had been admiring the fruit which someone had just sent to our friend, within an hour the footman would come to our rooms with book or fruit. And the next time we saw her, in response to our thanks she would simply say, as though trying to find an excuse for her present in some special use to which it might be put: “It’s nothing wonderful, but the newspapers come so late here; one must have something to read,” or “It’s always wiser to have fruit one can be quite certain of, at the seaside.”
“But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you eating oysters,” she said to us one day (increasing the sense of disgust which I felt at that moment, for the living flesh of oysters revolted me even more than the viscosity of the stranded jelly-fish defiled the Balbec beach for me). “They’re quite delicious down here! Oh, let me tell my maid to fetch your letters when she goes for mine. What, your daughter writes to you every day? But what on earth can you find to say to each other?”
My grandmother was silent, but it may be assumed that her silence was due to disdain, for she used to repeat, when she wrote to Mamma, the words of Mme de Sévigné: “As soon as I have received a letter, I want another at once; I sigh for nothing else. There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel.” And I was afraid that she might apply to Mme de Villeparisis the conclusion: “I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.” She fell back upon praise of the fruit which Mme de Villeparisis had sent us the day before. And it had indeed been so fine that the manager, in spite of the jealousy aroused by our neglect of his official offerings, had said to me: “I am like you; I am sweeter for fruit than any other kind of dessert.” My grandmother told her friend that she had enjoyed them all the more because the fruit which we got in the hotel was generally horrid. “I cannot,” she went on, “say with Mme de Sévigné that if we should take a sudden fancy for bad fruit we should be obliged to order it from Paris.” “Oh yes, of course, you read Mme de Sévigné. I’ve seen you with her letters ever since the day you came.” (She forgot that she had never officially seen my grandmother in the hotel before meeting her in that doorway.) “Don’t you find it rather exaggerated, her constant anxiety about her daughter? She refers to it too often to be really sincere. She’s not very natural.” My grandmother felt that any discussion would be futile, and so as not to be obliged to speak of the things she loved to a person incapable of understanding them, concealed the Mémoires de Madame de Beausergent by laying her bag upon them.
Were she to encounter Françoise at the moment (which Françoise called “the noon”) when, wearing her fine cap and surrounded with every mark of respect, she was coming downstairs to “feed with the service,” Mme Villeparisis would stop her to ask after us. And Françoise, when transmitting to us the Marquise’s message: “She said to me, ‘You
’ll be sure and bid them good day,’ she said,” would counterfeit the voice of Mme de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be quoting textually, whereas in fact she was distorting them no less than Plato distorts the words of Socrates or St John the words of Jesus. Françoise was naturally deeply touched by these attentions. Only she did not believe my grandmother, but supposed that she must be lying in the interests of class (the rich always supporting one another) when she assured us that Mme de Villeparisis had been lovely as a young woman. It was true that of this loveliness only the faintest trace remained, from which no one—unless he happened to be a great deal more of an artist than Françoise—would have been able to reconstitute her ruined beauty. For in order to understand how beautiful an elderly woman may once have been one must not only study but translate every line of her face.
“I must remember some time to ask her whether I’m not right, after all, in thinking that there’s some connexion with the Guermantes,” said my grandmother, to my great indignation. How could I be expected to believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience, the other by the golden gate of imagination?
We had several times, in the last few days, seen driving past us in a stately equipage, tall, red-haired, handsome, with a rather prominent nose, the Princesse de Luxembourg, who was staying in the neighbourhood for a few weeks. Her carriage had stopped outside the hotel, a footman had come in and spoken to the manager, had gone back to the carriage and had reappeared with the most amazing armful of fruit (which combined a variety of seasons in a single basket, like the bay itself) with a card: “La Princesse de Luxembourg,” on which were scrawled a few words in pencil. For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could they be intended, those plums, glaucous, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent sea, those transparent grapes clustering on the shrivelled wood, like a fine day in autumn, those pears of a heavenly ultramarine? For it could not be on my grandmother’s friend that the Princess had meant to pay a call. And yet on the following evening Mme de Villeparisis sent us the bunch of grapes, cool, liquid, golden, and plums and pears which we remembered too, though the plums had changed, like the sea at our dinner-hour, to a dull purple, and in the ultramarine of the pears there floated the shapes of a few pink clouds.
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