A few years earlier I should have been only too glad to tell Mme Swann in what connexion I had behaved so tenderly towards M. de Norpois, since the connexion had been my desire to get to know her. But I no longer felt this desire, since I was no longer in love with Gilberte. At the same time I found it difficult to identify Mme Swann with the lady in pink of my childhood. Accordingly I spoke of the woman who was on my mind at the moment.
“Did you see the Duchesse de Guermantes just now?” I asked Mme Swann.
But since the Duchess did not greet Mme Swann when they met, the latter chose to appear to regard her as a person of no interest, whose presence in a room one did not even notice.
“I don’t know; I didn’t realise she was here,” she replied sourly, using an expression borrowed from English.
I was anxious nevertheless for information with regard not only to Mme de Guermantes but to all the people who came in contact with her, and (for all the world like Bloch), with the tactlessness of people who seek in their conversations not to give pleasure to others but to elucidate, from sheer egoism, points that are of interest to themselves, in my effort to form an exact idea of the life of Mme de Guermantes I questioned Mme de Villeparisis about Mme Leroi.
“Oh, yes, I know who you mean,” she replied with an affectation of contempt, “the daughter of those rich timber merchants. I’ve heard that she’s begun to go about quite a lot lately, but I must explain to you that I’m rather old now to make new acquaintances. I’ve known such interesting, such delightful people in my time that really I don’t believe Mme Leroi would add much to what I already have.”
Mme de Marsantes, who was playing lady-in-waiting to the Marquise, presented me to the Prince, and scarcely had she finished doing so than M. de Norpois also presented me in the most glowing terms. Perhaps he found it opportune to pay me a compliment which could in no way damage his credit since I had just been introduced; perhaps it was that he thought that a foreigner, even so distinguished a foreigner, was unfamiliar with French society and might think that he was being introduced to a young man of fashion; perhaps it was to exercise one of his prerogatives, that of adding the weight of his personal recommendation as an ambassador, or in his taste for the archaic to revive in the Prince’s honour the old custom, flattering to his rank, whereby two sponsors were necessary if one wished to be presented to a royal personage.
Mme de Villeparisis appealed to M. de Norpois, feeling it imperative that I should have his assurance that she had nothing to regret in not knowing Mme Leroi.
“Isn’t it true, M. l’Ambassadeur, that Mme Leroi is of no interest, very inferior to all the people who come here, and that I’m quite right not to have cultivated her?”
Whether from independence or because he was tired, M. de Norpois replied merely in a bow full of respect but devoid of meaning.
“Do you know,” went on Mme de Villeparisis with a laugh, “there are some absurd people in the world. Would you believe that I had a visit this afternoon from a gentleman who tried to persuade me that he found more pleasure in kissing my hand than a young woman’s?”
I guessed at once that this was Legrandin. M. de Norpois smiled with a slight quiver of the eyelid, as though he felt that such a remark had been prompted by a concupiscence so natural that one could not feel any resentment against the person who had felt it, almost as though it were the beginning of a romance which he was prepared to forgive, even to encourage, with the perverse tolerance of a Voisenon or a Crébillon fils.
“Many young women’s hands would be incapable of doing what I see there,” said the Prince, pointing to Mme de Villeparisis’s unfinished water-colours. And he asked her whether she had seen the flower paintings by Fantin-Latour which had recently been exhibited.
“They are first class, the work, as they say nowadays, of a fine painter, one of the masters of the palette,” declared M. de Norpois. “Nevertheless, in my opinion, they cannot stand comparison with those of Mme de Villeparisis, which give a better idea of the colouring of the flower.”
Even supposing that the partiality of an old lover, the habit of flattery, the prevailing opinions in a social circle, had dictated these words to the ex-Ambassador, they nevertheless proved on what a negation of true taste the judgment of society people is based, so arbitrary that the smallest trifle can make it rush to the wildest absurdities, on the way to which it comes across no genuinely felt impression to arrest it.
“I claim no credit for knowing about flowers, since I’ve lived all my life in the fields,” replied Mme de Villeparisis modestly. “But,” she added graciously, turning to the Prince, “if, when I was very young, I had some rather more serious notions about them than other country children, I owe it to a distinguished fellow-countryman of yours, Herr von Schlegel. I met him at Broglie, where I was taken by my aunt Cordelia (Marshal de Castellane’s wife, don’t you know?). I remember so well M. Lebrun, M. de Salvandy, M. Doudan, getting him to talk about flowers. I was only a little girl, and I couldn’t understand all he said. But he liked playing with me, and when he went back to your country he sent me a beautiful botany book to remind me of a drive we took together in a phaeton to the Val Richer, when I fell asleep on his knee. I’ve always kept the book, and it taught me to observe many things about flowers which I should not have noticed otherwise. When Mme de Barante published some of Mme de Broglie’s letters, charming and affected like herself, I hoped to find among them some record of those conversations with Herr von Schlegel. But she was a woman who only looked to nature for arguments in support of religion.”
Robert called me away to the far end of the room where he and his mother were.
“How very nice you’ve been,” I said to him, “I don’t know how to thank you. Can we dine together tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? Yes, if you like, but it will have to be with Bloch. I met him just now on the doorstep. He was rather stiff with me at first because I had quite forgotten to answer his last two letters (he didn’t tell me that was what had offended him, but I guessed it), but after that he was so friendly to me that I simply can’t disappoint him. Between ourselves, on his side at least, I feel it’s a friendship for life.”
I do not think that Robert was altogether mistaken. Furious detraction was often, with Bloch, the effect of a keen affection which he had supposed to be unrequited. And as he made little effort to imagine other people’s lives, and never dreamed that one might have been ill, or away from home, or otherwise occupied, a week’s silence was at once interpreted by him as arising from deliberate coldness. And so I never believed that his most violent outbursts as a friend, or in later years as a writer, went very deep. They were exacerbated if one replied to them with an icy dignity, or with a platitude which encouraged him to redouble his onslaught, but yielded often to a warmly sympathetic response. “As for my being nice to you,” went on Saint-Loup, “I haven’t really been nice at all. My aunt tells me that it’s you who avoid her, that you never utter a word to her. She wonders whether you have anything against her.”
Fortunately for myself, if I had been taken in by these words, our departure for Balbec, which I believed to be imminent, would have prevented my making any attempt to see Mme de Guermantes again, to assure her that I had nothing against her, and so put her under the necessity of proving that it was she who had something against me. But I had only to remind myself that she had not even offered to let me see her Elstirs. Moreover, this was not a disappointment; I had never expected her to talk to me about them; I knew that I did not appeal to her, that I had no hope of ever making her like me; the most that I had been able to look forward to was that, since I should not be seeing her again before I left Paris, her kindness would afford me an entirely soothing impression of her, which I could take with me to Balbec indefinitely prolonged, intact, instead of a memory mixed with anxiety and gloom.
Mme de Marsantes kept on interrupting her conversation with Robert to tell me how often he had spoken to her about me, how fond he was of me; she trea
ted me with a deference which I found almost painful because I felt it to be prompted by her fear of falling out because of me with this son whom she had not seen all day, with whom she must accordingly have supposed that the influence which she wielded was not equal to and must conciliate mine. Having heard me earlier asking Bloch for news of his uncle, M. Nissim Bernard, Mme de Marsantes inquired whether it was he who had at one time lived at Nice.
“In that case, he knew M. de Marsantes there before our marriage,” she told me. “My husband used often to speak of him as an excellent man, with such a delicate, generous nature.”
“To think that for once in his life he wasn’t lying! It’s incredible,” Bloch would have thought.
All this time I should have liked to explain to Mme de Marsantes that Robert felt infinitely more affection for her than for myself, and that even if she had shown hostility towards me it was not in my nature to attempt to set him against her, to detach him from her. But now that Mme de Guermantes had gone I had more leisure to observe Robert, and it was only then that I noticed that a sort of fury seemed to have taken possession of him once more, rising to the surface of his stern and sombre features. I was afraid lest, remembering the scene in the theatre that afternoon, he might be feeling humiliated in my presence at having allowed himself to be treated so harshly by his mistress without making any rejoinder.
Suddenly he broke away from his mother, who had put her arm round his neck, and, coming towards me, led me behind the little flower-strewn counter at which Mme de Villeparisis had resumed her seat and beckoned me to follow him into the smaller drawing-room. I was hurrying after him when M. de Charlus, who may have supposed that I was leaving the house, turned abruptly from Prince von Faffenheim, to whom he had been talking, and made a rapid circuit which brought him face to face with me. I saw with alarm that he had taken the hat in the lining of which were a capital “G” and a ducal coronet. In the doorway into the small drawing-room he said without looking at me:
“As I see that you have taken to going into society, you must give me the pleasure of coming to see me. But it’s a little complicated,” he went on with a distracted but calculating air, as if the pleasure had been one that he was afraid of not securing again once he had let slip the opportunity of arranging with me the means by which it might be realised. “I am very seldom at home; you will have to write to me. But I should prefer to explain things to you more quietly. I shall be leaving soon. Will you walk a short way with me? I shall only keep you for a moment.”
“You’d better take care, Monsieur,” I warned him. “You have picked up the wrong hat by mistake.”
“Do you want to prevent me from taking my own hat?”
I assumed, a similar mishap having recently occurred to myself, that, someone else having taken his hat, he had seized upon one at random so as not to go home bareheaded, and that I had placed him in a difficulty by exposing his stratagem. So I did not pursue the matter. I told him that I must say a few words to Saint-Loup. “He’s talking to that idiotic Duc de Guermantes,” I added. “That’s a charming thing to say: I shall tell my brother.” “Oh! you think that would interest M. de Charlus?” (I imagined that, if he had a brother, that brother must be called Charlus too. Saint-Loup had indeed explained his family tree to me at Balbec, but I had forgotten the details.) “Who’s talking about M. de Charlus?” said the Baron in an insolent tone. “Go to Robert. I know that you took part this morning in one of those lunch-time orgies that he has with a woman who is disgracing him. You would do well to use your influence with him to make him realise the pain he is causing his poor mother and all of us by dragging our name in the dirt.”
I should have liked to reply that at this degrading luncheon the conversation had been entirely about Emerson, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and that the young woman had lectured Robert to make him drink nothing but water. In the hope of bringing some balm to Robert, whose pride I thought had been wounded, I sought to excuse his mistress. I did not know that at that moment, in spite of his anger with her, it was on himself that he was heaping reproaches. But it always happens, in quarrels between a good man and a worthless woman and when the right is all on one side, that some trifle crops up which enables the woman to appear not to have been in the wrong on one point. And since she ignores all the other points, if the man feels the need of her, if he is upset by the separation, his weakness will make him exaggeratedly scrupulous, he will remember the absurd reproaches that have been flung at him and will ask himself whether they have not some foundation in fact.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that I was wrong about that necklace,” Robert said to me. “Of course, I didn’t do it with any ill intent, but I know very well that other people don’t look at things in the same way as oneself. She had a very hard time when she was young. In her eyes I’m bound to appear the rich man who thinks he can get anything he wants with his money and against whom a poor person can’t compete, whether in trying to influence Boucheron or in a lawsuit. Of course she has been horribly cruel to me, when I’ve never thought of anything but her good. But I do see clearly that she thinks I wanted to make her feel that one could keep a hold on her with money, and that’s not true. And she’s so fond of me—what must she be thinking? Poor darling, if you only knew how sweet and thoughtful she is, I simply can’t tell you what adorable things she’s often done for me. How wretched she must be feeling now! In any case, whatever happens I don’t want to let her think me a cad; I shall dash off to Boucheron’s and get the necklace. Who knows? Perhaps when she sees what I’ve done she’ll admit that she’s been partly in the wrong. You see, it’s the idea that she’s suffering at this moment that I can’t bear. What one suffers oneself one knows—it’s nothing. But to tell oneself that she’s suffering and not to be able to form any idea of what she feels—I think I should go mad, I’d rather not see her ever again than let her suffer. All I ask is that she should be happy without me if need be. You know, for me everything that concerns her is enormously important, it becomes something cosmic; I shall run to the jeweller’s and then go and ask her to forgive me. Until I get down there, what will she be thinking of me? If she could only know that I was on my way! Why don’t you come to her house on the off chance; perhaps everything will be all right. Perhaps,” he went on with a smile, as though hardly daring to believe in so idyllic a possibility, “we can all three dine together in the country. But one can’t tell yet. I’m so bad at handling her; poor sweet, I may perhaps hurt her feelings again. Besides, her decision may be irrevocable.”
Robert swept me back to his mother.
“Good-bye,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t know when I shall get leave again. Probably not for a month. I shall write to you as soon as I know.”
Certainly Robert was not in the least the sort of son who, when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exasperation towards her ought to counterbalance the smiles and greetings which he bestows on strangers. Nothing is more prevalent than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear to believe that rudeness to one’s own family is the natural complement to ceremonial behaviour. Whatever the wretched mother may say, her son, as though he had been brought along against his will and wished to make her pay dearly for his presence, immediately refutes the timidly ventured assertion with a sarcastic, precise, cruel contradiction; the mother at once conforms, though without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior being whose delightful nature she will continue to vaunt to all and sundry in his absence, but who, for all that, spares her none of his most wounding remarks. Saint-Loup was not at all like this; but the anguish which Rachel’s absence provoked in him caused him for different reasons to be no less harsh with his mother than those other sons are with theirs. And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like the beating of a wing, which Mme de Marsantes had been unable to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole body once again; but this time it was an anxious face and woebegone eyes that she fas
tened on him.
“What, Robert, you’re going off? Seriously? My little son—the one day I had a chance to see something of you!”
And then quite softly, in the most natural tone, in a voice from which she strove to banish all sadness so as not to inspire her son with a pity which would perhaps have been painful to him, or else useless and simply calculated to irritate him, as a simple common-sense assertion she added: “You know it’s not at all nice of you.”
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