If, in the drawing-room of Mme de Villeparisis, as in the church at Combray on the day of Mlle Percepied’s wedding, I had difficulty in rediscovering in the handsome but too human face of Mme de Guermantes the enigma of her name, I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation, profound, mysterious, would have the strangeness of a mediaeval tapestry or a Gothic window. But in order that I should not be disappointed by the words that I should hear uttered by a person who called herself Mme de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love with her, it would not have sufficed that those words should be shrewd, beautiful and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of the closing syllable of her name, that colour which on first seeing her I had been disappointed not to find in her person and had fancied as having taken refuge in her mind. True, I had already heard Mme de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup, people whose intelligence was in no way extraordinary, pronounce quite casually this name Guermantes, simply as that of a person who was coming to see them or with whom they were going to dine, without seeming to feel that there were latent in her name the glow of yellowing woods and a whole mysterious tract of country. But this must have been an affectation on their part, as when the classic poets give us no warning of the profound intentions which they nevertheless had, an affectation which I myself also strove to imitate, saying in the most natural tone: “The Duchesse de Guermantes,” as though it were a name that was just like other names. Besides, everyone declared that she was a highly intelligent woman, a witty conversationalist, living in a small circle of most interesting people: words which became accomplices of my dream. For when they spoke of an intelligent group, of witty talk, it was in no way intelligence as I knew it that I imagined, not even that of the greatest minds; it was not at all with men like Bergotte that I peopled this group. No, by intelligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by the sun, impregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed, had she made the most intelligent remarks (in the sense in which I understood the word when it was used of a philosopher or critic), Mme de Guermantes would perhaps have disappointed even more keenly my expectation of so special a faculty than if, in the course of a trivial conversation, she had confined herself to discussing cooking recipes or the furnishing of a country house, to mentioning the names of neighbours or relatives of hers, which would have given me a picture of her life.
“I thought I should find Basin here. He was meaning to come and see you today,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt.
“I haven’t set eyes on your husband for some days,” replied Mme de Villeparisis in a somewhat nettled tone. “In fact, I haven’t seen him—well, perhaps once—since that charming joke he played on me of having himself announced as the Queen of Sweden.”
Mme de Guermantes formed a smile by contracting the corners of her mouth as though she were biting her veil.
“We met her at dinner last night at Blanche Leroi’s. You wouldn’t know her now, she’s positively enormous. I’m sure she must be ill.”
“I was just telling these gentlemen that you said she looked like a frog.”
Mme de Guermantes emitted a sort of raucous noise which meant that she was laughing for form’s sake.
“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of the ox. Or rather, it isn’t quite that, because all her swelling is concentrated in her stomach: she’s more like a frog in an interesting condition.”
“Ah, I do find that funny,” said Mme de Villeparisis, secretly proud that her guests should be witnessing this display of her niece’s wit.
“It is purely arbitrary, though,” answered Mme de Guermantes, ironically detaching this selected epithet, as Swann would have done, “for I must admit I never saw a frog in the family way. Anyhow, the frog in question, who, by the way, does not require a king, for I never saw her so skittish as she’s been since her husband died, is coming to dine with us one day next week. I promised I’d let you know just in case.”
Mme de Villeparisis gave vent to an indistinct growl, from which emerged: “I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the night before last. Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me about it, quite amusingly, I must say.”
“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,” said Mme de Guermantes who, intimate though she was with M. de Bréauté-Consalvi, felt the need to advertise the fact by the use of this diminutive. “I mean M. Bergotte.”
I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty; moreover, I thought of him always as part of the intellectual section of humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that mysterious realm of which I had caught a glimpse through the purple hangings of a theatre box behind which, making the Duchess laugh, M. de Bréauté had been holding with her, in the language of the gods, that unimaginable thing, a conversation between people of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I was distressed to see the balance upset and Bergotte rise above M. de Bréauté. But above all I was dismayed to think that I had avoided Bergotte on the evening of Phèdre, that I had not gone up and spoken to him, when I heard Mme de Guermantes, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness, say to Mme de Villeparisis: “He’s the only person I have any wish to know. It would be such a pleasure.”
The presence of Bergotte by my side, which it would have been so easy for me to secure but which I should have thought liable to give Mme de Guermantes a bad impression of me, would no doubt, on the contrary, have resulted in her signalling to me to join her in her box, and inviting me to bring the eminent writer to lunch one day.
“I gather that he didn’t behave very well. He was presented to M. de Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” Mme de Guermantes went on, dwelling on this odd fact as she might have recounted that a Chinese had blown his nose on a sheet of paper. “He never once said ‘Your Royal Highness’ to him,” she added, with an air of amusement at this detail, as important to her mind as the refusal of a Protestant, during an audience with the Pope, to go on his knees before His Holiness.
Interested by these idiosyncrasies of Bergotte’s, she did not, however, appear to consider them reprehensible, and seemed rather to give him credit for them, though she would have been hard put to it to say why. Despite this unusual mode of appreciating Bergotte’s originality, it was a fact which I was later to regard as not wholly negligible that Mme de Guermantes, greatly to the surprise of many of her friends, considered Bergotte wittier than M. de Bréauté. Thus it is that such judgments, subversive, isolated, and yet after all right, are delivered in the world of society by those rare people who are superior to the rest. And they sketch then the first rough outlines of the hierarchy of values as the next generation will establish it, instead of abiding eternally by the old standards.
The Comte d’Argencourt, Chargé d’Affaires at the Belgian Legation and a second cousin by marriage of Mme de Villeparisis, came in limping, followed presently by two young men, the Baron de Guermantes and H.H. the Duc de Châtellerault, whom Mme de Guermantes greeted with: “Good evening, my dear Châtellerault,” with a nonchalant air and without moving from her pouf, for she was a great friend of the young Duke’s mother, which had given him a deep and lifelong respect for her. Tall, slim, with golden hair and skin, thoroughly Guermantes in type, these two young men looked like a condensation of the light of the spring evening which was flooding the spacious room. Following a custom which was the fashion at that time, they laid their top hats on the floor beside them. The historian of the Fronde assumed that they must be embarrassed, like peasants coming into the mayor’s office and not knowing what to do with their hats. Feeling that he ought in charity to come to the rescue of the awkwardness and timidity which he ascribed to them:
“No, no,” he said, “don’t leave them on the floor, they’ll be trodden on.”
A glance from the Baron de
Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing blue which froze the well-meaning historian.
“What is that person’s name?” the Baron asked me, having just been introduced to me by Mme de Villeparisis.
“M. Pierre,” I whispered.
“Pierre what?”
“Pierre: it’s his name, he’s a very distinguished historian.”
“Really? You don’t say so.”
“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves his in the hall. I tell him, when I see him come in like that, that he looks just like a clockmaker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”
“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Molé’s hat; we shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one heard him except me.
“She really is astonishing, the little Duchess,” said M. d’Argencourt, pointing to Mme de Guermantes who was talking to G——. “Whenever there’s a prominent person in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t be M. de Borelli everyday, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel. But then it’s bound to be M. Pierre Loti or M. Edmond Rostand. Yesterday evening at the Doudeauvilles’, where by the way she was looking splendid in her emerald tiara and a pink dress with a long train, she had M. Deschanel on one side and the German Ambassador on the other: she was holding forth to them about China. The general public, at a respectful distance where they couldn’t hear what was being said, were wondering whether there wasn’t going to be war. Really, you’d have said she was a queen holding her circle.”
Everyone had gathered round Mme de Villeparisis to watch her painting.
“Those flowers are a truly celestial pink,” said Legrandin, “I should say sky-pink. For there is such a thing as sky-pink just as there is sky-blue. But,” he lowered his voice in the hope that he would not be heard by anyone but the Marquise, “I think I still plump for the silky, the living rosiness of your rendering of them. Ah, you leave Pisanello and Van Huysum a long way behind, with their meticulous, dead herbals.”
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.
“What gives you that impression is that they painted flowers of their time which we no longer know, but they did it with great skill.”
“Ah! Flowers of their time! That is a most ingenious theory,” exclaimed Legrandin.
“I see you’re painting some fine cherry blossoms—or are they mayflowers?” began the historian of the Fronde, in some doubt as to the flower, but with a note of confidence in his voice, for he was beginning to forget the incident of the hats.
“No, they’re apple blossom,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, addressing her aunt.
“Ah! I see you’re a good countrywoman like me; you can tell one flower from another.”
“Why yes, so they are! But I thought the season for apple blossom was over now,” hazarded the historian, to cover his mistake.
“Not at all; on the contrary it’s not out yet; it won’t be out for another fortnight, or three weeks perhaps,” said the archivist who, since he helped with the management of Mme de Villeparisis’s estates, was better informed upon country matters.
“Yes, even round Paris, where they’re very far forward,” put in the Duchess. “Down in Normandy, don’t you know, at his father’s place,” she pointed to the young Duc de Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple-trees close to the sea, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until after the twentieth of May.”
“I never see them,” said the young Duke, “because they give me hay fever. Such a bore.”
“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.
“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the archivist informed him.
“It all depends: you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good year for apples. You know the Norman saying: ‘When it’s a good year for apples …’,” put in M. d’Argencourt who, not being quite French, was always trying to give himself a Parisian air.
“You’re quite right,” Mme de Villeparisis said to her niece, “these are from the South. It was a florist who sent them round and asked me to accept them as a present. You’re surprised, I dare say, Monsieur Vallenères,” she turned to the archivist, “that a florist should make me a present of apple blossom. Well, I may be an old woman, but I’m not quite on the shelf yet, I still have a few friends,” she went on with a smile that might have been taken as a sign of her simplicity but meant rather, I could not help feeling, that she thought it intriguing to pride herself on the friendship of a mere florist when she had such grand connexions.
Bloch rose and in his turn came over to look at the flowers which Mme de Villeparisis was painting.
“Never mind, Marquise,” said the historian, sitting down again, “even if we were to have another of those revolutions which have stained so many pages of our history with blood—and, upon my soul, in these days one can never tell,” he added with a circular and circumspect glance, as if to make sure that there were no “dissidents” in the room, though he did not suppose there were any, “with a talent like yours and your five languages you would be certain to get on all right.”
The historian of the Fronde was feeling quite refreshed, for he had forgotten his insomnia. But he suddenly remembered that he had not slept for six nights, whereupon a crushing weariness, born of his mind, took hold of his legs and bowed his shoulders, and his melancholy face began to droop like an old man’s.
Bloch wanted to express his admiration in an appropriate gesture, but only succeeded in knocking over the glass containing the spray of apple blossom with his elbow, and all the water was spilled on the carpet.
“You really have a fairy’s touch,” the historian said to the Marquise; having his back turned to me at that moment, he had not noticed Bloch’s clumsiness.
But Bloch took the remark as a jibe at him, and to cover his shame with a piece of insolence, retorted: “It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.”
Mme de Villeparisis rang the bell and a footman came to wipe the carpet and pick up the fragments of glass. She invited the two young men to her theatricals, and also Mme de Guermantes, with the injunction:
“Remember to tell Gisèle and Berthe” (the Duchesses d’Auberjon and de Portefin) “to be here a little before two to help me,” as she might have told hired waiters to come early to arrange the fruit-stands.
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