“Oh, ministers, my dear sir,” Mme de Villeparisis was saying, addressing in particular my old schoolfriend and picking up the thread of a conversation which had been interrupted by my arrival, “ministers, nobody ever wanted to see them. I was only a child at the time, but I can well remember the King begging my grandfather to invite M. Decazes12 to a rout at which my father was to dance with the Duchesse de Berry. ‘It will give me pleasure, Florimond,’ said the King. My grandfather, who was a little deaf, thought he had said M. de Castries, and found the request perfectly natural. When he understood that it was M. Decazes, he was furious at first, but he gave in, and wrote the same evening to M. Decazes, begging him to do him the honour of attending the ball which he was giving the following week. For we were polite in those days, and no hostess would have dreamed of simply sending her card and writing on it ‘Tea’ or ‘Dancing’ or ‘Music.’ But if we understood politeness, we were not incapable of impertinence either. M. Decazes accepted, but the day before the ball it was given out that my grandfather felt indisposed and had cancelled the ball. He had obeyed the King, but he had not had M. Decazes at his ball … Yes, indeed, I remember M. Molé very well, he was a man of wit—he showed that in his reception of M. de Vigny at the Academy—but he was very pompous, and I can see him now coming downstairs to dinner in his own house with his top hat in his hand.”
“Ah! how evocative that is of what must have been a pretty perniciously philistine epoch, for it was no doubt a universal habit to carry one’s hat in one’s hand in one’s own house,” observed Bloch, anxious to make the most of so rare an opportunity of learning from an eyewitness details of the aristocratic life of another day, while the archivist, who was a sort of intermittent secretary to the Marquise, gazed at her tenderly as though he were saying to the rest of us: “There, you see what she’s like, she knows everything, she has met everybody, you can ask her anything you like, she’s quite amazing.”
“Oh dear, no,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, drawing towards her as she spoke the glass containing the maiden-hair which presently she would continue painting. “It was simply a habit of M. de Molé’s. I never saw my father carry his hat in the house, except of course when the King came, because the King being at home wherever he is, the master of the house is then only a visitor in his own drawing-room.”
“Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of …” ventured M. Pierre, the historian of the Fronde, but so timidly that no one paid any attention. Having been suffering for some weeks from a nervous insomnia which resisted every attempt at treatment, he had given up going to bed, and, half-dead with exhaustion, went out only whenever his work made it imperative. Incapable of repeating too often these expeditions which, simple enough for other people, cost him as much effort as if he was obliged to come down from the moon, he was surprised to be brought up so frequently against the fact that other people’s lives were not organised on a constant and permanent basis with a view to providing the maximum utility to the sudden eruptions of his own. He sometimes found closed a library which he had set out to visit only after planting himself artificially on his feet and in a frock-coat like the invisible man in a story by Wells. Fortunately he had found Mme de Villeparisis at home and was going to be shown the portrait.
Meanwhile he was cut short by Bloch. “Really,” the latter observed, referring to what Mme de Villeparisis had said as to the etiquette for royal visits. “Do you know, I never knew that” (as though it were strange that he should not have known it).
“Talking of that sort of visit, do you know the stupid joke my nephew Basin played on me yesterday morning?” Mme de Villeparisis asked the librarian. “He told my people, instead of announcing him, to say that it was the Queen of Sweden who had called to see me.”
“What! He made them tell you just like that! I say, he must have a nerve,” exclaimed Bloch with a shout of laughter, while the historian smiled with a stately timidity.
“I was rather surprised, because I had only been back from the country a few days; I had given instructions, so as to be left in peace for a while, that no one was to be told that I was in Paris, and I wondered how the Queen of Sweden could have heard so soon, and in any case didn’t leave me a couple of days to get my breath,” went on Mme de Villeparisis, leaving her guests under the impression that a visit from the Queen of Sweden was in itself nothing unusual for their hostess.
And it was true that if earlier in the day Mme de Villeparisis had been checking the documentation of her Memoirs with the archivist, she was now quite unconsciously trying out their effect on an average audience representative of that from which she would eventually have to recruit her readers. Hers might differ in many ways from a really fashionable salon from which many of the bourgeois ladies whom she entertained would have been absent and where one would have seen instead such brilliant leaders of fashion as Mme Leroi had in course of time managed to secure, but this distinction is not perceptible in her Memoirs, in which certain mediocre connexions of the author’s have disappeared because there is no occasion to refer to them; while the absence of ladies who did not visit her leaves no gap because, in the necessarily restricted space at the author’s disposal, only a few persons can appear, and if these persons are royal personages, historic personalities, then the maximum impression of elegance which any volume of memoirs can convey to the public is achieved. In the opinion of Mme Leroi, Mme de Villeparisis’s salon was third-rate; and Mme de Villeparisis felt the sting of Mme Leroi’s opinion. But hardly anyone today remembers who Mme Leroi was, her opinions have vanished into thin air, and it is the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, frequented as it was by the Queen of Sweden, and as it had been by the Duc d’Aumale, the Duc de Broglie, Thiers, Montalembert, Mgr. Dupanloup, which will be regarded as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by that posterity which has not changed since the days of Homer and Pindar, and for which the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-royal, and the friendship of kings, of leaders of the people and other eminent men.
Now of all these Mme de Villeparisis had her share in her present salon and in the memories—sometimes slightly touched up—by means of which she extended it into the past. And then there was M. de Norpois who, while unable to restore his friend to any substantial position in society, on the other hand brought to her house such foreign or French statesmen as might have need of his services and knew that the only effective method of securing them was to pay court to Mme de Villeparisis. Perhaps Mme Leroi also knew these European celebrities. But, as an agreeable woman who shunned anything that smacked of the bluestocking, she would as little have thought of mentioning the Eastern Question to a Prime Minister as of discussing the nature of love with a novelist or a philosopher. “Love?” she had once replied to a pretentious lady who had asked for her views on love, “I make it often but I never talk about it.” When she had any of these literary or political lions in her house she contented herself, as did the Duchesse de Guermantes, with setting them down to play poker. They often preferred this to the serious conversations on general ideas in which Mme de Villeparisis forced them to engage. But these conversations, ridiculous as in the social sense they may have been, have furnished the Memoirs of Mme de Villeparisis with those admirable passages, those political dissertations which read well in volumes of autobiography as they do in tragedies in the style of Corneille. Furthermore, the salons of the Mme de Villeparisis of this world are alone destined to be handed down to posterity, because the Mme Lerois of this world cannot write, and, if they could, would not have the time. And if the literary dispositions of the Mme de Villeparisis are the cause of the disdain of the Mme Lerois, in its turn the disdain of the Lerois does a singular service to the literary dispositions of the Mme de Villeparisis by affording those bluestocking ladies that leisure which the career of letters requires. God, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the Mme Lerois, for he knows that if these s
hould invite the Mme Villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight.
Presently there entered with slow and solemn tread an old lady of tall stature who, beneath the raised brim of her straw hat, revealed a monumental pile of snowy hair in the style of Marie-Antoinette. I did not then know that she was one of three women still to be seen in Parisian society who, like Mme de Villeparisis, while all of the noblest birth, had been reduced, for reasons which were now lost in the mists of time and could have been explained to us only by some old gallant of their period, to entertaining only certain of the dregs of society who were not sought after elsewhere. Each of these ladies had her own “Duchesse de Guermantes,” the brilliant niece who came regularly to pay her respects, but none of them could have succeeded in attracting to her house the “Duchesse de Guermantes” of either of the others. Mme de Villeparisis was on the best of terms with these three ladies, but she did not like them. Perhaps the similarity between their social position and her own gave her a disagreeable impression of them. Besides, soured bluestockings as they were, seeking, by the number and frequency of the dramatic entertainments which they arranged in their houses, to give themselves the illusion of a regular salon, there had grown up among them a rivalry which the erosion of their wealth in the course of somewhat tempestuous lives, obliging them to watch their expenditure, to count on the services of professional actors or actresses free of charge, transformed into a sort of struggle for existence. Furthermore, the lady with the Marie-Antoinette hair-style, whenever she set eyes on Mme de Villeparisis, could not help being reminded of the fact that the Duchesse de Guermantes did not come to her Fridays. Her consolation was that at these same Fridays she could always count on having, blood being thicker than water, the Princesse de Poix, who was her own personal Guermantes, and who never went near Mme de Villeparisis, albeit Mme de Poix was an intimate friend of the Duchess.
Nevertheless from the mansion on the Quai Malaquais to the drawing-rooms of the Rue de Tournon, the Rue de la Chaise and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a bond as compelling as it was hateful united the three fallen goddesses, as to whom I should have been interested to learn, from some dictionary of social mythology, what amorous adventure, what sacrilegious presumption, had brought about their punishment. The same illustrious origins, the same present decline, no doubt had much to do with the necessity which compelled them, while hating each other, to frequent one another’s society. Besides, each of them found in the others a convenient way of impressing her guests. How should these fail to suppose that they had scaled the most inaccessible peak of the Faubourg when they were introduced to a lady with a string of titles whose sister was married to a Duc de Sagan or a Prince de Ligne? Especially as there was infinitely more in the newspapers about these sham salons than about the genuine ones. Indeed these old ladies’ “swell” nephews—and Saint-Loup the foremost of them—when asked by a friend to introduce him into society would say: “I’ll take you to my aunt Villeparisis’s, or to my aunt X’s—you meet interesting people there.” They knew very well that this would mean less trouble for themselves than trying to get the said friend invited by the smart nieces or sisters-in-law of these ladies. Certain very old men, and young women who had heard it from those men, told me that if these ladies were no longer received in society it was because of the extraordinary dissoluteness of their conduct, which, when I objected that dissolute conduct was not necessarily a barrier to social success, was represented to me as having gone far beyond anything to be met with today. The misconduct of these solemn dames who held themselves so erect assumed on the lips of those who hinted at it something that I was incapable of imagining, something proportionate to the magnitude of prehistoric days, to the age of the mammoth. In a word, these three Parcae with their white or blue or pink hair had been the ruin of an incalculable number of gentlemen. It struck me that the men of today exaggerated the vices of those fabulous times, like the Greeks who created Icarus, Theseus, Heracles out of men who had been but little different from those who long afterwards deified them. But one does not tabulate the sum of a person’s vices until he has almost ceased to be in a fit state to practise them, when from the magnitude of his social punishment, which is then nearing the completion of its term and which alone one can estimate, one measures, one imagines, one exaggerates the magnitude of the crime that has been committed. In that gallery of symbolical figures which is “society,” the really dissolute women, the true Messalinas, invariably present the solemn aspect of a lady of at least seventy, with an air of lofty distinction, who entertains everyone she can but not everyone she would like to, to whose house women whose own conduct is not above reproach refuse to go, to whom the Pope regularly sends his Golden Rose, and who as often as not has written a book about Lamartine’s early years that has been crowned by the French Academy.
“How d’ye do, Alix?” Mme de Villeparisis greeted the lady with the Marie-Antoinette hair-style, which lady cast a searching glance round the assembly to see whether there was not in this drawing-room any item that might be a valuable addition to her own, in which case she would have to discover it for herself, for Mme de Villeparisis, she was sure, would be malevolent enough to hide it from her. Thus Mme de Villeparisis took good care not to introduce Bloch to the old lady for fear of his being asked to produce the same play that he was arranging for her in the drawing-room of the Quai Malaquais. Besides, it was only tit for tat. For the evening before the old lady had had Mme Ristori reciting verses, and had taken care that Mme de Villeparisis, from whom she had filched the Italian artist, should not hear of this function until it was over. So that she should not read it first in the newspapers and feel ruffled, the old lady had come in person to tell her about it, showing no sense of guilt. Mme de Villeparisis, judging that the introduction of myself was unlikely to have the same drawbacks as that of Bloch, made me known to the Marie-Antoinette of the Quai Malaquais. The latter, who sought, by making the fewest possible movements, to preserve in her old age those lines, as of a Coysevox goddess, which had years ago charmed the young men of fashion and which spurious poets still celebrated in rhyming couplets—and had acquired the habit of a lofty and compensating stiffness common to all those whom a personal uncomeliness obliges to be continually making advances—just perceptibly lowered her head with a frigid majesty, and, turning the other way, took no more notice of me than if I had not existed. Her dual-purpose attitude seemed to be saying to Mme de Villeparisis: “You see, I’m not as hard up for acquaintance as all that, and I’m not interested—in any sense of the word, you old cat—in young men.” But when, twenty minutes later, she took her leave, taking advantage of the general hubbub she slipped into my ear an invitation to come to her box the following Friday with another of the three, whose high-sounding name—she had been born a Choiseul, moreover—made a prodigious impression on me.
“I understand, M’sieur, that you want to write somethin’ about Mme la Duchesse de Montmorency,” said Mme de Villeparisis to the historian of the Fronde in the gruff tone with which her genuine affability was furrowed by the shrivelled crotchiness, the physiological spleen of old age, as well as by the affectation of imitating the almost rustic speech of the old nobility. “I’ll show you her portrait, the original of the copy they have in the Louvre.”
She rose, laying down her brushes beside the flowers, and the little apron which then came into sight at her waist, and which she wore so as not to stain her dress with paint, added still further to the impression of an old peasant given by her bonnet and her big spectacles, and offered a sharp contrast to the luxury of her household, the butler who had brought in the tea and cakes, the liveried footman for whom she now rang to light up the portrait of the Duchesse de Montmorency, abbess of one of the most famous chapters in the east of France. Everyone had risen. “What is rather amusin’,” said our hostess, “is that in these chapters where our great-aunts were so often made abbesses, the daughters of the King o
f France would not have been admitted. They were very exclusive chapters.” “The King’s daughters not admitted!” cried Bloch in amazement, “why ever not?” “Why, because the House of France had not enough quarterin’s after that misalliance.” Bloch’s bewilderment increased. “A misalliance? The House of France? When was that?” “Why, when they married into the Medicis,” replied Mme de Villeparisis in the most natural tone in the world. “It’s a fine picture, is it not, and in a perfect state of preservation,” she added.
“My dear,” said the lady with the Marie-Antoinette hair-style, “surely you remember that when I brought Liszt to see you he said that it was this one that was the copy.”
“I shall bow to any opinion of Liszt’s on music, but not on painting. Besides, he was already gaga, and I don’t remember his ever saying anything of the sort. But it wasn’t you who brought him here. I had met him any number of times at dinner at Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein’s.”
Alix’s shot had misfired; she stood silent, erect and motionless. Plastered with layers of powder, her face had the appearance of stone. And, since the profile was noble, she seemed, on a triangular, moss-grown pedestal hidden by her cape, like a crumbling goddess in a park.
“Ah, I see another fine portrait,” said the historian.
The door opened and the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room.
“Oh, good evening,” Mme de Villeparisis greeted her without even a nod of the head, taking from her apron-pocket a hand which she held out to the newcomer; and ceasing at once to pay any further attention to her niece, turned back to the historian: “That is the portrait of the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld …”
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