A few days later we met Mme de Villeparisis as we came away from the symphony concert that was given every morning on the beach. Convinced that the music that I heard there (the Prelude to Lohengrin, the Overture to Tannhäuser and suchlike) expressed the loftiest of truths, I tried to raise myself in so far as I could in order to reach and grasp them, I drew from myself, in order to understand them, and put back into them all that was best and most profound in my own nature at that time. But, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the hotel, had stopped for a moment on the front, my grandmother and I, to exchange a few words with Mme de Villeparisis who told us that she had ordered some croque-monsieurs and a dish of creamed eggs for us at the hotel, I saw, in the distance, coming in our direction, the Princesse de Luxembourg, half leaning upon a parasol in such a way as to impart to her tall and wonderful form that slight inclination, to make it trace that arabesque, so dear to the women who had been beautiful under the Empire and knew how, with drooping shoulders, arched backs, concave hips and taut legs, to make their bodies float as softly as a silken scarf about the rigid armature of an invisible shaft which might be supposed to have transfixed it. She went out every morning for a stroll on the beach almost at the time when everyone else, after bathing, was coming home to lunch, and as hers was not until half past one she did not return to her villa until long after the hungry bathers had left the scorching beach a desert. Mme de Villeparisis introduced my grandmother and was about to introduce me, but had first to ask me my name, which she could not remember. She had perhaps never known it, or if she had must have forgotten years ago to whom my grandmother had married her daughter. The name appeared to make a sharp impression on Mme de Villeparisis. Meanwhile the Princesse de Luxembourg had offered us her hand and from time to time, while she chatted to the Marquise, turned to bestow a kindly glance on my grandmother and myself, with that embryonic kiss which we put into our smiles when they are addressed to a baby out with its “Nana.” Indeed, in her anxiety not to appear to be enthroned in a higher sphere than ours, she had probably miscalculated the distance, for by an error in adjustment her eyes became infused with such benevolence that I foresaw the moment when she would put out her hand and stroke us like two lovable beasts who had poked our heads out at her through the bars of our cage in the Zoo. And immediately, as it happened, this idea of caged animals and the Bois de Boulogne received striking confirmation. It was the time of day when the beach is crowded by itinerant and clamorous vendors, hawking cakes and sweets and biscuits. Not knowing quite what to do to show her affection for us, the Princess hailed the next one to come by; he had nothing left but a loaf of rye bread, of the kind one throws to the ducks. The Princess took it and said to me: “For your grandmother.” And yet it was to me that she held it out, saying with a friendly smile, “You shall give it to her yourself,” thinking that my pleasure would thus be more complete if there were no intermediary between myself and the animals. Other vendors came up, and she stuffed my pockets with everything that they had, tied up in packets, comfits, sponge-cakes, sugar-sticks. “You will eat some yourself,” she told me, “and give some to your grandmother,” and she had the vendors paid by the little negro page, dressed in red satin, who followed her everywhere and was a nine days’ wonder on the beach. Then she said good-bye to Mme de Villeparisis and held out her hand to us with the intention of treating us in the same way as she treated her friend, as people whom she knew, and of bringing herself within our reach. But this time she must have reckoned our level as not quite so low in the scale of creation, for her equality with us was indicated by the Princess to my grandmother by that tender and maternal smile which one bestows upon a little boy when one says good-bye to him as though to a grown-up person. By a miraculous stride in evolution, my grandmother was no longer a duck or an antelope, but had already become what Mme Swann would have called a “baby.” Finally, having taken leave of us all, the Princess resumed her stroll along the sunlit esplanade, curving and inflecting her splendid form, which, like a serpent coiled about a wand, twined itself round the white parasol patterned in blue which she carried unopened in her hand. She was my first Royalty—I say my first, for the Princesse Mathilde was not at all royal in her ways. The second, as we shall see in due course, was to astonish me no less by her graciousness. One aspect of the benevolence of the nobility, kindly intermediaries between commoners and kings, was revealed to me next day when Mme de Villeparisis reported: “She thought you quite charming. She is a woman of the soundest judgment, the warmest heart. Not like so many queens and highnesses. She has real merit.” And Mme de Villeparisis added in a tone of conviction, and quite thrilled to be able to say it to us: “I think she would be delighted to see you again.”
But on that previous morning, after we had parted from the Princesse de Luxembourg, Mme de Villeparisis said a thing which impressed me far more and was not prompted merely by friendly feeling.
“Are you,” she had asked me, “the son of the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry? Indeed! I’m told your father is a most charming man. He is having a splendid holiday just now.”
A few days earlier we had heard, in a letter from Mamma, that my father and his travelling-companion M. de Norpois had lost their luggage.
“It has been found, or rather it was never really lost. I can tell you what happened,” explained Mme de Villeparisis, who, without our knowing how, seemed to be far better informed than ourselves about my father’s travels. “I think your father is now planning to come home earlier, next week, in fact, as he will probably give up the idea of going to Algeciras. But he’s anxious to spend a day longer in Toledo, since he’s an admirer of a pupil of Titian—I forget the name—whose work can only be seen properly there.”
And I wondered by what strange accident, in the impartial telescope through which Mme de Villeparisis considered, from a safe distance, the minuscule, perfunctory, vague agitation of the host of people whom she knew, there had come to be inserted at the spot through which she observed my father a fragment of glass of prodigious magnifying power which made her see in such high relief and in the fullest detail everything that was agreeable about him, the contingencies that obliged him to return home, his difficulties with the customs, his admiration for El Greco, and, altering the scale of her vision, showed her this one man, so large among all the rest so small, like that Jupiter to whom Gustave Moreau, when he portrayed him by the side of a weak mortal, gave a superhuman stature.
My grandmother bade Mme de Villeparisis good-bye, so that we might stay and imbibe the fresh air for a little while longer outside the hotel, until they signalled to us through the glazed partition that our lunch was ready. There were sounds of uproar. The young mistress of the King of the Cannibal Island had been down to bathe and was now coming back to the hotel.
“Really and truly, it’s a perfect plague, it’s enough to make one decide to emigrate!” cried the president in a towering rage as he crossed her path.
Meanwhile the notary’s wife was following the bogus queen with eyes that seemed ready to start from their sockets.
“I can’t tell you how angry Mme Blandais makes me when she stares at those people like that,” said the president to the judge, “I feel I want to slap her. That’s just the way to make the wretches appear important, which is of course the very thing they want. Do ask her husband to tell her what a fool she’s making of herself. I swear I won’t go out with them again if they stop and gape at those masqueraders.”
As to the coming of the Princesse de Luxembourg, whose carriage, on the day she had left the fruit, had drawn up outside the hotel, it had not passed unobserved by the little group of wives, the notary’s, the president’s and the judge’s, who had already for some time past been extremely anxious to know whether that Mme de Villeparisis whom everyone treated with so much respect—which all these ladies were burning to hear that she did not deserve—was a genuine marquise and not an adventuress. Whenever Mme de Villeparisis passed through the hall the judge’
s wife, who scented irregularities everywhere, would lift her nose from her needlework and stare at the intruder in a way that made her friends die with laughter.
“Oh, well, you know,” she proudly explained, “I always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is properly married until she has shown me her birth certificate and her marriage lines. But never fear—just wait till I’ve finished my little investigation.”
And so day after day the ladies would come together and laughingly ask: “Any news?”
But on the evening of the Princesse de Luxembourg’s call the judge’s wife laid a finger on her lips.
“I’ve discovered something.”
“Oh, isn’t Mme Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw … But do tell us! What’s happened?”
“Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away—which only a creature like that would dare to have—came here today to call on the so-called Marquise!”
“Oh-yow-yow! Crash bang! Did you ever! Why, it must be the woman we saw—you remember, President—we said at the time we didn’t at all like the look of her, but we didn’t know that it was the ‘Marquise’ she’d come to see. A woman with a nigger-boy, you mean?”
“That’s the one.”
“You don’t say! Do you happen to know her name?”
“Yes, I made a mistake on purpose. I picked up her card. She trades under the name of the ‘Princesse de Luxembourg’! Wasn’t I right to have my doubts about her? It’s a nice thing to have to fraternise with a Baronne d’Ange like that?”10
The president quoted Mathurin Régnier’s Macette to the judge.
It must not, however, be supposed that this misunderstanding was merely temporary, like those that occur in the second act of a farce to be cleared up before the final curtain. Mme de Luxembourg, a niece of the King of England and of the Emperor of Austria, and Mme de Villeparisis, when one called to take the other for a drive, always appeared like two “old trots” of the kind one has always such difficulty in avoiding at a watering-place. Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain appear to a large section of the middle classes as crapulous paupers (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The middle classes pitch their standards in this respect too high, for the failings of these men would never prevent their being received with every mark of esteem in houses which they themselves will never enter. And so fondly do the aristocracy imagine that the middle classes know this that they affect a simplicity in speaking of themselves, a disparagement of friends of theirs who are particularly “on their beam-ends,” that compounds the misunderstanding. If, by chance, a man of the fashionable world has dealings with the petty bourgeoisie because, having more money than he knows what to do with, he finds himself elected chairman of all sorts of important financial concerns, his business associates who at last see a nobleman worthy to be ranked with the professional classes, would take their oaths that such a man would not consort with the Marquis ruined by gambling whom the said business associates assume to be all the more destitute of friends the more friendly he makes himself. And they cannot get over their surprise when the duke who is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the colossal undertaking arranges a marriage for his son with the daughter of that very marquis, who may be a gambler but who bears the oldest name in France, just as a sovereign would sooner see his son marry the daughter of a dethroned king than that of a president still in office. In other words, the two worlds have as fanciful a view of one another as the inhabitants of the resort situated at one end of Balbec Bay have of the resort at the other end: from Rivebelle you can just see Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse; but even that is deceptive, for you imagine that you are seen from Marcouville, where, as a matter of fact, the splendours of Rivebelle are almost wholly invisible.
The Balbec doctor, called in to cope with a sudden feverish attack, gave the opinion that I ought not to stay out all day on the beach in the blazing sun during the hot weather, and wrote out various prescriptions for me. My grandmother took these with a show of respect in which I could at once discern her firm resolve to ignore them all, but did pay attention to the advice on the question of hygiene, and accepted an offer from Mme de Villeparisis to take us for drives in her carriage. After this I would spend the mornings going to and fro between my own room and my grandmother’s. Hers did not look out directly on the sea, as mine did, but was open on three of its four sides—on to a strip of the esplanade, a courtyard, and a view of the country inland—and was furnished differently from mine, with armchairs embroidered with metallic filigree and pink flowers from which the cool and pleasant odour that greeted one on entering seemed to emanate. And at that hour when the sun’s rays, drawn from different exposures and, as it were, from different hours of the day, broke the angles of the wall, projected on to the chest of drawers, side by side with a reflection of the beach, a festal altar as variegated as a bank of field-flowers, hung on the fourth wall the folded, quivering, warm wings of a radiance ready at any moment to resume its flight, warmed like a bath a square of provincial carpet before the window overlooking the courtyard which the sun festooned and patterned like a climbing vine, and added to the charm and complexity of the room’s furniture by seeming to pluck and scatter the petals of the silken flowers on the chairs and to make their silver threads stand out from the fabric, this room in which I lingered for a moment before going to get ready for our drive suggested a prism in which the colours of the light that shone outside were broken up, a hive in which the sweet juices of the day which I was about to taste were distilled, scattered, intoxicating and visible, a garden of hope which dissolved in a quivering haze of silver threads and rose petals. But before all this I had drawn back my own curtains, impatient to know what Sea it was that was playing that morning by the shore, like a Nereid. For none of those Seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. The next day there would be another, which sometimes resembled its predecessor. But I never saw the same one twice.
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparency of a vaporous emerald through which I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile attenuated by an invisible haze which was no more than a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, was rendered more striking, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, sitting with Mme de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should glimpse, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her soft palpitation.
Mme de Villeparisis used to order her carriage early, so that we should have time to reach Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, or the rocks of Quetteholme, or some other goal which, for a somewhat lumbering vehicle, was far enough off to require the whole day. In my joy at the thought of the long drive we were going to take I would hum some tune that I had heard recently as I strolled up and down until Mme de Villeparisis was ready. If it was Sunday, hers would not be the only carriage drawn up outside the hotel; several hired cabs would be waiting there, not only for the people who had been invited to Féterne by Mme de Cambremer, but for those who, rather than stay at home all day like children in disgrace, declared that Sunday was always quite impossible at Balbec and set off immediately after lunch to hide themselves in some neighbouring watering-place or to visit one of the “sights” of the neighbourhood. And indeed whenever (which was often) Mme Blandais was asked if she had been to the Cambremers’, she would answer emphatically: “No, we went to the Falls of the Bec,” as though that were the sole reason for her not having s
pent the day at Féterne. And the president would charitably remark: “I envy you. I wish I had gone there instead. They must be well worth seeing.”
Beside the row of carriages, in front of the porch in which I stood waiting, was planted, like some shrub of a rare species, a young page who attracted the eye no less by the unusual and harmonious colouring of his hair than by his plant-like epidermis. Inside, in the hall, corresponding to the narthex, or Church of the Catechumens in a primitive basilica, through which the persons who were not staying in the hotel were entitled to pass, the comrades of the “outside” page did not indeed work much harder than he but did at least execute certain movements. It is probable that in the early morning they helped with the cleaning. But in the afternoon they stood there only like a chorus who, even when there is nothing for them to do, remain upon the stage in order to strengthen the representation. The general manager, the same who had so terrified me, reckoned on increasing their number considerably next year, for he had “big ideas.” And this prospect greatly afflicted the manager of the hotel, who found that all these boys were simply “busybodies,” by which he meant that they got in the visitors’ way and were of no use to anyone. But between lunch and dinner at least, between the exits and entrances of the visitors, they did fill an otherwise empty stage, like those pupils of Mme de Maintenon who, in the garb of young Israelites, carry on the action whenever Esther or Joad “goes off.” But the outside page, with his delicate tints, his slender, fragile frame, in proximity to whom I stood waiting for the Marquise to come down, preserved an immobility mixed with a certain melancholy, for his elder brothers had left the hotel for more brilliant careers elsewhere, and he felt isolated upon this alien soil. At last Mme de Villeparisis appeared. To stand by her carriage and to help her into it ought perhaps to have been part of the young page’s duties. But he knew that a person who brings her own servants to an hotel expects them to wait on her and is not as a rule lavish with her tips, and that the same was true also of the nobility of the old Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mme de Villeparisis belonged to both these categories. The arborescent page concluded therefore that he could expect nothing from her, and leaving her own maid and footman to pack her and her belongings into the carriage, he continued to dream sadly of the enviable lot of his brothers and preserved his vegetable immobility.
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