She treated her princely relatives, as she treated M. de Norpois, without any of the little courtesies which she showed to the historian, Cottard, Bloch and myself, and they seemed to have no interest for her beyond the possibility of serving them up as food for our social curiosity. This was because she knew that she need not put herself out to entertain people for whom she was not a more or less brilliant woman but the sister, touchy and used to tactful handling, of their father or uncle. There would have been no object in her trying to shine in front of them; she could never have deceived them as to the strength or weakness of her situation, for they knew her whole story only too well and respected the illustrious race from which she sprang. But, above all, they had ceased to be anything more for her than a dead stock that would never bear fruit again; they would never introduce her to their new friends, or share their pleasures with her. She could obtain from them only their occasional presence, or the possibility of speaking of them, at her five o’clock receptions as, later on, in her Memoirs, of which these receptions were only a sort of rehearsal, a preliminary reading aloud of the manuscript before a selected audience. And the society which all these noble kinsmen and kinswomen served to interest, to dazzle, to enthral, the society of the Cottards, of the Blochs, of well-known dramatists, historians of the Fronde and suchlike, it was this society that, for Mme de Villeparisis—in the absence of that section of the fashionable world which did not go to her house—represented movement, novelty, entertainment and life; it was from people like these that she was able to derive social advantages (which made it well worth her while to let them meet, now and then, though without ever getting to know her, the Duchesse de Guermantes): dinners with remarkable men whose work had interested her, a light opera or a pantomime staged complete by its author in her drawing-room, boxes for interesting shows.
Bloch got up to go. He had said aloud that the incident of the broken flower-glass was of no importance, but what he said under his breath was different, more different still what he thought: “If people can’t train their servants to put vases where they won’t risk soaking and even injuring their guests, they oughtn’t to go in for such luxuries,” he muttered angrily. He was one of those susceptible, highly-strung persons who cannot bear to have made a blunder which, though they do not admit it to themselves, is enough to spoil their whole day. In a black rage, he was just making up his mind never to go into society again. He had reached the point at which some distraction was imperative. Fortunately in a moment Mme de Villeparisis would press him to stay. Either because she was aware of the opinions of her friends and the rising tide of anti-semitism, or simply from absent-mindedness, she had not introduced him to any of the people in the room. He, however, being little used to society, felt that he ought to take leave of them all before going, out of good manners, but without warmth; he lowered his head several times, buried his bearded chin in his stiff collar, and scrutinised each of the party in turn through his glasses with a cold and peevish glare. But Mme de Villeparisis stopped him; she had still to discuss with him the little play which was to be performed in her house, and also she did not wish him to leave before he had had the satisfaction of meeting M. de Norpois (whose failure to appear surprised her), although as an inducement to Bloch this introduction was quite superfluous, he having already decided to persuade the two actresses whose names he had mentioned to her to come and sing for nothing in the Marquise’s drawing-room, in the interest of their careers, at one of those receptions to which the élite of Europe thronged. He had even offered in addition a tragic actress “with sea-green eyes, fair as Hera,” who would recite lyrical prose with a sense of plastic beauty. But on hearing this lady’s name Mme de Villeparisis had declined, for it was that of Saint-Loup’s mistress.
“I have better news,” she murmured in my ear. “I really believe it’s on its last legs, and that before very long they’ll have separated—in spite of an officer who has played an abominable part in the whole business,” she added. (For Robert’s family were beginning to look with a deadly hatred on M. de Borodino, who had given him leave, at the hair-dresser’s instance, to go to Bruges, and accused him of giving countenance to an infamous liaison.) “He’s a very bad man,” said Mme de Villeparisis with that virtuous accent common to all the Guermantes, even the most depraved. “Very, very bad,” she repeated, emphasising the word “very” and rolling the ‘r’s. One felt that she had no doubt of the Prince’s being present at all their orgies. But, as kindness of heart was the old lady’s dominant quality, her expression of frowning severity towards the horrible captain, whose name she articulated with an ironical emphasis: “The Prince de Borodino!”—as a woman for whom the Empire simply did not count—melted into a gentle smile at myself with a mechanical twitch of the eyelid indicating a vague connivance between us.
“I was quite fond of de Saint-Loup-en-Bray,” said Bloch, “dirty dog though he is, because he’s extremely well-bred. I have a great admiration for well-bred people, they’re so rare,” he went on, without realising, since he was himself so extremely ill-bred, how displeasing his words were. “I will give you an example which I consider most striking of his perfect breeding. I met him once with a young man just as he was about to spring into his wheelèd chariot, after he himself had buckled their splendid harness on a pair of steeds nourished with oats and barley, who had no need of the flashing whip to urge them on. He introduced us, but I did not catch the young man’s name—one never does catch people’s names when one’s introduced to them,” he added with a laugh, this being one of his father’s witticisms. “De Saint-Loup-en-Bray remained perfectly natural, made no fuss about the young man, seemed absolutely at his ease. Well, I found out by pure chance a day or two later that the young man was the son of Sir Rufus Israels!”
The end of this story sounded less shocking than its preface, for it remained quite incomprehensible to everyone in the room. The fact was that Sir Rufus Israels, who seemed to Bloch and his father an almost royal personage before whom Saint-Loup ought to tremble, was in the eyes of the Guermantes world a foreign upstart, tolerated in society, on whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself—far from it.
“I learned this,” said Bloch, “from Sir Rufus Israels’ agent, who is a friend of my father and a quite remarkable man. Oh, an absolutely wonderful individual,” he added with that affirmative energy, that note of enthusiasm which one puts only into convictions that do not originate from oneself.
“But tell me,” Bloch asked me, lowering his voice, “how much money do you suppose Saint-Loup has? Not that it matters to me in the least, you quite understand. I’m interested from the Balzacian point of view. You don’t happen to know what it’s in, French stocks, foreign stocks, or land or what?”
I could give him no information whatsoever. Suddenly raising his voice, Bloch asked if he might open the windows, and without waiting for an answer, went across the room to do so. Mme de Villeparisis said that it was out of the question, as she had a cold. “Oh, well, if it’s bad for you!” Bloch was downcast. “But you can’t say it’s not hot in here.” And breaking into a laugh, he swept a glance round the room in an appeal for support against Mme de Villeparisis. He received none, from these well-bred people. His blazing eyes, having failed to seduce any of the other guests, resignedly reverted to their former gravity of expression. He acknowledged his defeat with: “What’s the temperature? Twenty-two at least, I should say. Twenty-five? I’m not surprised. I’m simply dripping. And I have not, like the sage Antenor, son of the river Alpheus, the power to plunge myself in the paternal wave to staunch my sweat before laying my body in a bath of polished marble and anointing my limbs with fragrant oils.” And with that need which people feel to outline for the benefit of others medical theories the application of which would be beneficial to their own health: “Well, if you believe it’s good for you! I must say, I think the opposite. It’s exactly what gives you your cold.”
Bloch had expressed delight at the idea of
meeting M. de Norpois. He would like, he said, to get him to talk about the Dreyfus case.
“There’s a mentality at work there which I don’t altogether understand, and it would be rather intriguing to have an interview with this eminent diplomat,” he said in a sarcastic tone, so as not to appear to be rating himself below the Ambassador.
Mme de Villeparisis was sorry that he had said this so loud, but minded less when she saw that the archivist, whose strong Nationalist views kept her, so to speak, on a leash, was too far off to have overheard. She was more shocked to hear Bloch, led on by that demon of ill-breeding which made him permanently blind to the consequences of what he said, inquiring with a laugh at the paternal pleasantry:
“Haven’t I read a learned treatise by him in which he sets forth a string of irrefutable arguments to prove that the Russo-Japanese war was bound to end in a Russian victory and a Japanese defeat? And isn’t he a bit senile? I’m sure he’s the one I’ve seen taking aim at his chair before sliding across the room to it, as if on casters.”
“Good gracious, never!” the Marquise put in. “Just wait a minute. I don’t know what he can be doing.”
She rang the bell and, when the servant appeared, as she made no secret of, and indeed liked to advertise, the fact that her old friend spent the greater part of his time in her house: “Go and tell M. de Norpois to come,” she ordered. “He’s sorting some papers in my library; he said he would be twenty minutes, and I’ve been waiting now for an hour and three-quarters. He’ll talk to you about the Dreyfus case, or anything else you like,” she said grumpily to Bloch. “He doesn’t much approve of what’s happening.”
For M. de Norpois was not on good terms with the ministry of the day, and Mme de Villeparisis, although he had never taken the liberty of bringing any governmental personalities to her house (she still preserved all the unapproachable dignity of a great lady of the aristocracy and remained outside and above the political relations which he was obliged to cultivate), was kept well informed by him of everything that went on. Equally, these politicians of the present regime would never have dared to ask M. de Norpois to introduce them to Mme de Villeparisis. But several of them had gone down to see him at her house in the country when they needed his advice or help at critical junctures. They knew the address. They went to the house. They did not see its mistress. But at dinner that evening she would say: “I hear they’ve been down here bothering you. Are things going better?”
“You’re not in a hurry?” she now asked Bloch.
“No, not at all. I was thinking of going because I’m not very well; in fact there’s a possibility of my taking a cure at Vichy for my gall bladder,” he explained, articulating these words with a fiendish irony.
“Why, that’s just where my nephew Châtellerault’s got to go. You must fix it up together. Is he still here? He’s a nice boy, you know,” said Mme de Villeparisis, sincerely perhaps, thinking that two people whom she knew had no reason not to be friends with each other.
“Oh, I dare say he wouldn’t care about that—I don’t … I scarcely know him. He’s over there,” stammered Bloch, overwhelmed with delight.
The butler had evidently failed to deliver his mistress’s message properly, for M. de Norpois, to give the impression that he had just come in from the street and had not yet seen his hostess, had picked up the first hat that he found in the vestibule, one which I thought I recognised, and came forward to kiss Mme de Villeparisis’s hand with great ceremony, asking after her health with all the interest that people show after a long separation. He was not aware that the Marquise had removed in advance any semblance of verisimilitude from this charade, which indeed she eventually cut short by introducing him to Bloch. The latter, who had observed all the polite attentions that were being shown to a person whom he had not yet discovered to be M. de Norpois, and the formal, gracious, deep bows with which the Ambassador replied to them, evidently felt inferior to all this ceremonial and vexed to think that it would never be addressed to him, and said to me in order to appear at ease: “Who is that old idiot?” Perhaps, too, all this bowing and scraping by M. de Norpois had really shocked the better element in Bloch’s nature, the freer and more straightforward manners of a younger generation, and he was partly sincere in condemning it as absurd. However that might be, it ceased to appear absurd and indeed delighted him the moment it was himself, Bloch, to whom the salutations were addressed.
“Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” said Mme de Villeparisis, “I should like you to meet this gentleman. Monsieur Bloch, Monsieur le Marquis de Norpois.” She made a point, in spite of the way she bullied M. de Norpois, of addressing him always as “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” as a point of etiquette as well as from an exaggerated respect for his ambassadorial rank, a respect which the Marquis had inculcated in her, and also with the intention of applying that less familiar, more ceremonious posture towards one particular man which, in the salon of a distinguished woman, in contrast to the freedom with which she treats her other regular guests, marks that man out instantly as her lover.
M. de Norpois sank his azure gaze in his white beard, bent his tall body deep down as though he were bowing before all the renowned and imposing connotations of the name Bloch, and murmured: “I’m delighted …” whereat his young interlocutor, moved, but feeling that the illustrious diplomat was going too far, hastened to correct him, saying: “Not at all! On the contrary, it is I who am delighted.” But this ceremony, which M. de Norpois, out of friendship for Mme de Villeparisis, repeated for the benefit of every new person that his old friend introduced to him, did not seem to her adequate to the deserts of Bloch, to whom she said:
“Just ask him anything you want to know. Take him aside if it’s more convenient; he will be delighted to talk to you. I think you wished to speak to him about the Dreyfus case,” she went on, no more considering whether this would be agreeable to M. de Norpois than she would have thought of asking leave of the Duchesse de Montmorency’s portrait before having it lighted up for the historian, or of the tea before offering a cup of it.
“You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf, but he will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck very well, and Cavour. That is so, isn’t it?” she raised her voice, “you knew Bismarck well.”
“Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me with a knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my own which he had picked up at random. “You showed me a somewhat laboured little thing in which you went in for a good deal of hair-splitting. I gave you my frank opinion; what you had written was not worth the trouble of putting on paper. Are you preparing something for us? You were greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re not to say anything against Bergotte,” put in the Duchess. “I don’t dispute his pictorial talent; no one would, Duchess. He understands all about etching and engraving, if not brush-work on a large canvas like M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to me that in these days there is a tendency to mix up the genres and forget that the novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing your father on Sunday at our good friend A.J.’s,” he went on, turning again to me.
I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that admirable Bunch of Radishes which I remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece it is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I should have named this Bunch of Radishes.
“A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois wi
th a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it’s merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece,’ what will you say about Hébert’s Virgin or Dagnan-Bouveret?”
“I heard you refusing to have Robert’s woman,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much: she’s a perfect horror, you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.”
“Do you mean to say you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.
“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before anyone else’s—not that that’s anything to be proud of,” replied Mme de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless, since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she herself had had the first taste of her absurdities. “Hallo, I suppose I ought to go now,” she added, without moving.
She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a call together like a newly married couple, rather than to the often strained relations that existed between her and the strapping individual she had married, who, despite his advancing years, still led the life of a gay bachelor. Casting over the considerable party that was gathered round the tea-table the affable, waggish gaze—dazzled a little by the slanting rays of the setting sun—of the little round pupils lodged in the exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the excellent marksman that he was could always target with such perfect precision, the Duke advanced with a wondering, gingerly deliberation as though, alarmed by so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile suggesting a slightly tipsy “Good King Wenceslas,” and a half-open hand floating like a shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be clasped indiscriminately by his old friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled him, without having to make a single movement, or to interrupt his genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the alacrity of them all by simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear fellow; charmed, Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt”; and, on coming to myself, who was the most favoured of all when he had been told my name: “How do, young neighbour, how’s your father? What an admirable man!” He made no great demonstration except to Mme de Villeparisis, who greeted him with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her little apron.
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