Being formidably rich in a world where people were becoming steadily less so, and having adapted himself long since to the idea of this enormous fortune, he had all the vanity of the great nobleman combined with that of the man of means, the refinement and breeding of the former only just managing to counterbalance the smugness of the latter. One could understand, moreover, that his success with women, which made his wife so unhappy, was not due merely to his name and his wealth, for he was still remarkably handsome, and his profile retained the purity, the firmness of outline of a Greek god’s.
“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?” M. d’Argencourt asked the Duchess.
“Well, you know, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies in her hand, and more lilies on her dwess.” (Mme de Guermantes shared her aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an exceedingly rustic fashion, though she never rolled her ‘r’s like Mme de Villeparisis.)
Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had taken Bloch into the little recess where they could talk more freely, I went up to the old diplomat for a moment and put in a word about my father’s academic chair. He tried first of all to postpone the conversation to another day. I pointed out that I was going to Balbec. “What? Going to Balbec again? Why, you’re a regular globe-trotter.” Then he listened to what I had to say. At the name of Leroy-Beaulieu, he looked at me suspiciously. I conjectured that he had perhaps said something disparaging to M. Leroy-Beaulieu about my father and was afraid that the economist might have repeated it to him. All at once he seemed to be filled with a positive affection for my father. And after one of those decelerations in the flow of speech out of which suddenly a word explodes as though in spite of the speaker, whose irresistible conviction overcomes his stuttering efforts at silence: “No, no,” he said to me with emotion, “your father must not stand. In his own interest he must not, for his own sake, out of respect for his merits, which are great, and which would be compromised by such an adventure. He is too big a man for that. If he were elected, he would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. He is not an orator, thank heaven. And that is the one thing that counts with my dear colleagues, even if you only talk platitudes. Your father has an important goal in life; he should march straight ahead towards it, and not beat about the bush, even the bushes (more thorny than flowery) of the groves of Academe. Besides, he would not get many votes. The Academy likes to keep a postulant waiting for some time before taking him to its bosom. For the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I can’t say. But he must wait until the Society itself comes to seek him out. It observes with more fetishism than success the maxim Farà da sé of our neighbours across the Alps. Leroy-Beaulieu spoke to me about it all in a way I found highly displeasing. I should have said at a guess that he was hand in glove with your father? … I pointed out to him, a little sharply perhaps, that a man accustomed as he is to dealing with textiles and metals could not be expected to understand the part played by the imponderables, as Bismarck used to say. But, whatever happens, your father must on no account put himself forward as a candidate. Principiis obsta. His friends would find themselves placed in a delicate position if he presented them with a fait accompli. Indeed,” he went on brusquely with an air of candour, fixing his blue eyes on my face, “I am going to tell you something that will surprise you coming from me, who am so fond of your father. Well, precisely because I am fond of him (we are known as the inseparables—Arcades ambo), precisely because I know the immense service that he can still render to his country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I would not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to understand that I wouldn’t.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct converse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! if it only rested with me!” than for the satisfaction of making the honour which he himself has managed to secure seem less accessible, a greater distinction. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests of you all, I should prefer to see your father triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words which I assumed to have been dictated, if not by jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of willingness to oblige, and which were later, in the event, to acquire a different meaning.
“You haven’t thought of giving the Institut an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “It might be an enormous success” (which was to say, “give me a colossal advertisement”), he added, smiling at the Ambassador with an obsequious tenderness which made him raise his eyelids and reveal eyes as wide as the sky. I seemed to have seen this look before, though I had met the historian for the first time this afternoon. Suddenly I remembered having seen the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed to be able to cure breathless spasms of the kind from which I suffered by absurd inhalations of plant essences. When, in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a most sensational paper for the Academy of Medicine!” He had not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with the same air of interrogation, timid, suppliant and self-seeking, which I had just wonderingly observed on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological laws, like physical laws, have a more or less general application. And if the requisite conditions are the same, an identical expression lights up the eyes of different human animals, as an identical sunrise lights up places that are a long way apart and that have no connexion with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of commotion, had again gathered round Mme de Villeparisis to watch her at work.
“You know who we’re talking about, Basin?” the Duchess asked her husband.
“I can make a pretty good guess,” said the Duke. “As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.”
“You can’t imagine anything more ridiculous,” went on Mme de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt.
“In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled society people to declare that he was no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a complete imbecile.
“What I fail to understand,” resumed the Duchess, “is how in the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course I know one must never discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might still make fun of modern literature, it had to some extent seeped into her, either through popularisation in the press or through certain conversations, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’ ”
“Mysterious! Oh, I must say, cousin, that’s a bit beyond me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt.
“Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the Duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-natured woman of the world, but also with the uncompromising conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a clubman that there is something more than just noise in the Walküre. “After all, one never does know what makes one person fall in love with another; it may not be at all what we think,” she added with a smile, repudiating at once by this interpretation the idea she had just put forward. “After all, one never knows anythi
ng, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “So you see it’s wiser never to discuss other people’s choices in love.”
But having laid down this principle she proceeded at once to violate it by criticising Saint-Loup’s choice.
“All the same, don’t you know, it’s amazing to me that people can find any attraction in a ridiculous person.”
Bloch, hearing Saint-Loup’s name mentioned and gathering that he was in Paris, began to slander him so outrageously that everybody was shocked. He was beginning to nourish hatreds, and one felt that he would stop at nothing to gratify them. Having established the principle that he himself was of great moral integrity and that the sort of people who frequented La Boulie (a sporting club which he supposed to be highly fashionable) deserved penal servitude, he regarded every injury he could do to them as praiseworthy. He once went so far as to threaten to bring a lawsuit against one of his La Boulie friends. In the course of the trial he proposed to give certain evidence which would be entirely false, though the defendant would be unable to disprove it. In this way Bloch (who never in fact put his plan into action) counted on tormenting and alarming him still further. What harm could there be in that, since the man he sought to injure was a man who was interested only in fashion, a La Boulie man, and against people like that any weapon was justified, especially in the hands of a saint such as Bloch himself?
“I say, though, what about Swann?” objected M. d’Argencourt, who having at last succeeded in grasping the point of his cousin’s remarks, was impressed by their shrewdness and was racking his brains for instances of men who had fallen in love with women in whom he himself would have seen no attraction.
“Oh, but Swann’s case was quite different,” the Duchess protested. “It was a great surprise, I admit, because she was a bit of an idiot, but she was never ridiculous, and she was at one time pretty.”
“Pooh!” muttered Mme de Villeparisis.
“You didn’t find her pretty? Surely, she had some charming points, very fine eyes, good hair, and she used to dress and still dresses wonderfully. Nowadays, I quite agree, she’s unspeakable, but she has been a lovely woman in her time. Not that that made me any less sorry when Charles married her, because it was so unnecessary.”
The Duchess had not intended to say anything out of the common, but as M. d’Argencourt began to laugh she repeated these last words—either because she thought them amusing or because she thought it nice of him to laugh—and looked up at him with a caressing smile, to add the enchantment of her femininity to that of her wit. She went on:
“Yes, really, it wasn’t worth the trouble, was it? Still, after all, she did have some charm and I can quite understand why people might fall for her, but if you saw Robert’s young lady, I assure you you’d simply die laughing. Oh, I know somebody’s going to quote Augier at me: ‘What matters the bottle so long as one gets drunk?’14 Well, Robert may have got drunk all right, but he certainly hasn’t shown much taste in his choice of a bottle! First of all, would you believe it, she actually expected me to fit up a staircase right in the middle of my drawing-room. Oh, a mere nothing—what?—and she announced that she was going to lie flat on her stomach on the steps. And then, if you’d heard the things she recited! I only remember one scene, but I’m sure nobody could imagine anything like it: it was called The Seven Princesses.”
“Seven Princesses! Dear, dear, what a snob she must be!” cried M. d’Argencourt. “But, wait a minute, why, I know the whole play. The author sent a copy to the King, who couldn’t understand a word of it and called on me to explain it to him.”
“It isn’t, by any chance, by Sâr Péladan?” asked the historian of the Fronde, meaning to make a subtle and topical illusion, but in such a low voice that his question passed unnoticed.
“So you know The Seven Princesses, do you?” said the Duchess. “I congratulate you! I only know one, but she’s quite enough; I have no wish to make the acquaintance of the other six. If they’re all like the one I’ve seen!”
“What a goose!” I thought to myself, irritated by her icy greeting. I found a sort of bitter satisfaction in this proof of her total incomprehension of Maeterlinck. “To think that’s the woman I walk miles every morning to see. Really, I’m too kind. Well, it’s my turn now to ignore her.” Those were the words I said to myself, but they were the opposite of what I thought; they were purely conversational words such as we say to ourselves at those moments when, too excited to remain quietly alone with ourselves, we feel the need, for want of another listener, to talk to ourselves, without meaning what we say, as we talk to a stranger.
“I can’t tell you what it was like,” the Duchess went on. “It was enough to make you howl with laughter. Most people did, rather too much, I’m sorry to say, for the young person was not at all pleased and Robert has never really forgiven me. Though I can’t say I’m sorry, actually, because if it had been a success the lady would perhaps have come again, and I don’t think Marie-Aynard would have been exactly thrilled.”
Marie-Aynard was the name given in the family to Robert’s mother, Mme de Marsantes, the widow of Aynard de Saint-Loup, to distinguish her from her cousin, the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, also a Marie, to whose Christian name her nephews and cousins and brothers-in-law added, to avoid confusion, either that of her husband or another of her own, making her Marie-Gilbert or Marie-Hedwige.
“To begin with, there was a sort of rehearsal the night before, which was a wonderful affair!” went on Mme de Guermantes in ironical pursuit of her theme. “Just imagine, she uttered a sentence, no, not so much, not a quarter of a sentence, and then she stopped; after which she didn’t open her mouth—I’m not exaggerating—for a good five minutes.”
“Oh, I say,” cried M. d’Argencourt.
“With the utmost politeness I took the liberty of suggesting to her that this might seem a little unusual. And she said—I give you her actual words—‘One ought always to recite a thing as though one were just composing it oneself.’ It’s really monumental, that reply, when you come to think of it!”
“But I understood she wasn’t at all bad at reciting poetry,” said one of the two young men.
“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme de Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell that. It was quite enough to see her arriving with her lilies. I knew at once that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!”
Everybody laughed.
“I hope, my dear aunt, you weren’t annoyed by my little joke the other day about the Queen of Sweden. I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.”
“Oh, no, I’m not at all angry, I even give you leave to eat at my table, if you’re hungry,—Come along, M. Vallenères, you’re the daughter of the house,” Mme de Villeparisis went on to the archivist, repeating a time-honoured pleasantry.
M. de Guermantes sat up in the armchair into which he had sunk, his hat on the carpet by his side, and examined with a satisfied smile the plate of cakes that was being held out to him.
“Why, certainly, now that I’m beginning to feel at home in this distinguished company, I will take a sponge-cake; they look excellent.”
“This gentleman makes you an admirable daughter,” commented M. d’Argencourt, whom the spirit of imitation prompted to keep Mme de Villeparisis’s little joke in circulation.
The archivist handed the plate of cakes to the historian of the Fronde.
“You perform your functions admirably,” said the latter, startled into speech, and hoping also to win the sympathy of the crowd. At the same time he cast a covert glance of connivance at those who had anticipated him.
“Tell me, my dear aunt,” M. de Guermantes inquired of Mme de Villeparisis, “who was that rather handsome-looking gentleman who was leaving just now as I came in? I must know him, because he gave me a sweeping bow, but I couldn’t place him at all; you know I never can remember names, it’s such a nuisance,” he added with a self-satisfied air.
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mistaken, was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a Grandin de l’Eprevier.”
“No,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’d be only too glad to be Grandins of anything you choose to name. This one has a sister called Mme de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who my aunt means,” cried the Duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great graminivorous creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I’d go mad. But I began by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person I didn’t know come browsing into the room looking exactly like a cow.”
“Look here, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at home; I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do exaggerate so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plaintive tone, though not without a furtive smiling glance round the audience.
He knew that his wife’s conversational zest needed the stimulus of contradiction, the contradiction of common sense which protests that one cannot, for instance, mistake a woman for a cow. It was in this way that Mme de Guermantes, improving on a preliminary notion, had been inspired to produce many of her wittiest sallies. And the Duke would come forward with feigned naïvety to help her to bring off her effects, like the unacknowledged partner of a three-card trickster in a railway carriage.
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