“He doesn’t want to go back there, because of Rachel,” said the Prince de Foix.
“But I thought they’d broken it off,” interrupted M. de Bréauté.
“So far from breaking it off, I found her a couple of days ago in Robert’s rooms, and they didn’t look at all like people who’d quarrelled, I can assure you,” replied the Prince de Foix, who liked to spread every rumour that could damage Robert’s chances of marrying, and who might, moreover, have been misled by one of the intermittent resumptions of a liaison that was practically at an end.
“That Rachel was speaking to me about you. I run into her occasionally in the morning in the Champs-Elysées. She’s somewhat flighty as you say, what you call unbuttoned, a kind of ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ figuratively speaking, of course.” (This speech was addressed to me by Prince Von, who liked always to appear conversant with French literature and Parisian refinements.)
“Why, that’s just what it was—Morocco!” exclaimed the Princess, flinging herself into this opening.
“What on earth can he want in Morocco?” asked M. de Guermantes sternly. “Oriane can do absolutely nothing for him there, as he knows perfectly well.”
“He thinks he invented strategy,” Mme de Guermantes pursued the theme, “and then he uses impossible words for the simplest thing, which doesn’t prevent him from making blots all over his letters. The other day he announced that he’d been given some sublime potatoes, and that he’d taken a sublime stage box.”
“He speaks Latin,” the Duke went one better.
“What! Latin?” the Princess gasped.
“On my word of honour! Your Highness can ask Oriane if I’m not telling the truth.”
“Why, yes, Ma’am; the other day he said to us straight out, without stopping to think: ‘I know of no more touching example of sic transit gloria mundi.’ I can repeat the phrase now to your Highness because, after endless inquiries and by appealing to linguists, we succeeded in reconstructing it, but Robert flung it out without pausing for breath, one could hardly make out that there was Latin in it, he was just like a character in the Malade Imaginaire. And it was simply to do with the death of the Empress of Austria!”
“Poor woman!” cried the Princess, “what a delicious creature she was!”
“Yes,” replied the Duchess, “a trifle mad, a trifle headstrong, but she was a thoroughly good woman, a nice, kind-hearted lunatic; the only thing I could never understand was why she never managed to get a set of false teeth that fitted her; they always came loose halfway through a sentence and she was obliged to stop short or she’d have swallowed them.”
“That Rachel was telling me that young Saint-Loup worshipped you, that he was fonder of you than he was of her,” said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as he spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin.
“But in that case she must be jealous of me and hate me,” said I.
“Not at all, she said all sorts of nice things about you. The Prince de Foix’s mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred you to her. You don’t understand? Come home with me, and I’ll explain it all to you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, I’m going on to M. de Charlus at eleven.”
“Why, he sent round to me yesterday to ask me to dine with him this evening, but told me not to come after a quarter to eleven. But if you insist on going to him, at least come with me as far as the Théâtre-Français, you will be in the periphery,” said the Prince, who thought doubtless that this last word meant “proximity” or possibly “centre.”
But the bulging eyes in his coarse though handsome red face frightened me and I declined, saying that a friend was coming to call for me. This reply seemed to me in no way offensive. The Prince, however, apparently formed a different impression of it, for he did not say another word to me.
“I really must go and see the Queen of Naples—it must be a great grief to her,” said, or at least appeared to me to have said, the Princesse de Parme. For her words had come to me only indistinctly through the intervening screen of those addressed to me, albeit in an undertone, by Prince Von, who had doubtless been afraid of being overheard by the Prince de Foix if he spoke louder.
“Oh, dear, no!” replied the Duchess, “I don’t believe she feels any grief at all.”
“None at all! You do always fly to extremes, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, resuming his role as the cliff which, by standing up against the wave, forces it to fling even higher its crest of foam.
“Basin knows even better than I that I’m telling the truth,” replied the Duchess, “but he thinks he’s obliged to look severe because you are present, Ma’am, and he’s afraid of my shocking you.”
“Oh, please no, I beg of you,” cried the Princesse de Parme, dreading the slightest alteration on her account of these delicious evenings at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, this forbidden fruit which the Queen of Sweden herself had not yet acquired the right to taste.
“Why, it was to Basin himself, when he said to her with a duly sorrowful expression: ‘But I see the Queen is in mourning. For whom, pray? Is it a great grief to your Majesty?’ that she replied: ‘No, it’s not a deep mourning, it’s a light mourning, a very light mourning, it’s my sister.’ The truth is, she’s delighted about it, as Basin knows perfectly well. She invited us to a party that very evening, and gave me two pearls. I wish she could lose a sister every day! So far from weeping for her sister’s death, she was in fits of laughter over it. She probably says to herself, like Robert, ‘sic transit——’ I forget how it goes on,” she added modestly, knowing how it went on perfectly well.
In saying all this Mme de Guermantes was only indulging her wit, and in the most disingenuous way, for the Queen of Naples, like the Duchesse d’Alençon, who also died in tragic circumstances, had the warmest heart in the world and sincerely mourned her kinsfolk. Mme de Guermantes knew these noble Bavarian sisters, her cousins, too well not to be aware of this. “He is anxious not to go back to Morocco,” said the Princesse de Parme, grasping once more at the name Robert which Mme de Guermantes had held out to her, quite unintentionally, like a lifeline. “I believe you know General de Monserfeuil.”
“Very slightly,” replied the Duchess, who was an intimate friend of the officer in question. The Princess explained what it was that Saint-Loup wanted.
“Oh dear, well, yes, if I see him … It’s possible that I may run into him,” the Duchess replied, so as not to appear to be refusing, her relations with General de Monserfeuil seeming to have grown rapidly more intermittent since it had become a question of her asking him for something. This uncertainty did not, however, satisfy the Duke, who interrupted his wife.
“You know perfectly well you won’t be seeing him, Oriane, and besides you’ve already asked him for two things which he hasn’t done. My wife has a passion for doing people good turns,” he went on, getting more and more furious in order to force the Princess to withdraw her request without making her doubt his wife’s good nature and so that Mme de Parme should throw the blame on his own essentially crotchety character. “Robert could get anything he wanted out of Monserfeuil. Only, as he happens not to know what he wants, he gets us to ask for it because he knows there’s no better way of making the whole thing fall through. Oriane has asked too many favours of Monserfeuil. A request from her now would be a reason for him to refuse.”
“Oh, in that case, it would be better if the Duchess did nothing,” said Mme de Parme.
“Obviously,” the Duke concluded.
“That poor General, he’s been defeated again at the elections,” said the Princess, to change the subject.
“Oh, it’s nothing serious, it’s only the seventh time,” said the Duke, who, having been obliged himself to retire from politics, quite enjoyed hearing of other people’s failures at the polls. “He has consoled himself by giving his wife another baby.”
“What! Is that poor Mme de Monserfeuil pregnant again?” cried the Princess.
&
nbsp; “Why, of course,” replied the Duchess, “it’s the one ward where the poor General has never failed.”
In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, however small the party, to these repasts at which I had at one time imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. They did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, which was incidentally exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of my hosts, friends to whom they presented me with a tinge of benevolent patronage so marked (as a person for whom they had always had a sort of parental affection) that there was not one among them who would not have felt himself to be somehow failing the Duke and Duchess if he had given a ball without including my name on his list, and at the same time, while I sipped one of those Yquems which lay concealed in the Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed according to a variety of recipes judiciously elaborated and modified by the Duke himself. However, for one who had already sat down more than once at the mystic board, the consumption of these latter was not indispensable. Old friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, “with the tooth-picks” as Mme Swann would have said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of limeblossom tea in the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden outside. No one could remember having ever received from the Guermantes, on these evenings in the garden, anything else but orangeade. It had a sort of ritual meaning. To have added other refreshments would have seemed to be falsifying the tradition, just as a big at-home in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ceases to be an at-home if there is a play also, or music. You must be assumed to have come simply—even if there were five hundred of you—to pay a call on, let us say, the Princesse de Guermantes. People marvelled at my influence because I managed to procure the addition to this orangeade of a jug containing the juice of stewed cherries or stewed pears. I took a dislike on this account to the Prince d’Agrigente, who was like all those people who, lacking in imagination but not in covetousness, take a keen interest in what one is drinking and ask if they may taste a little of it themselves. Which meant that, every time, M. d’Agrigente, by diminishing my ration, spoiled my pleasure. For this fruit juice can never be provided in sufficient quantities to quench one’s thirst. Nothing is less cloying than that transmutation into flavour of the colour of a fruit, which, when cooked, seems to have travelled backwards to the season of its blossoming. Blushing like an orchard in spring, or else colourless and cool like the zephyr beneath the fruit-trees, the juice can be sniffed and gloated over drop by drop, and M. d’Agrigente prevented me, regularly, from taking my fill of it. Despite these distillations, the traditional orangeade persisted like the lime-blossom tea. In these humble kinds, the social communion was none the less celebrated. In this respect, doubtless, the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes had after all, as I had originally imagined them, remained more different from the rest of humanity than their disappointing exterior might have misled me into supposing. Numbers of elderly men came to receive from the Duchess, together with the invariable drink, a welcome that was often far from warm. Now this could not have been due to snobbishness, they themselves being of a rank to which there was none superior; nor to love of luxury: they did love it perhaps, but, in less exalted social conditions, might have been enjoying a glittering example of it, for on those same evenings the charming wife of a colossally rich financier would have given anything in the world to have them among the brilliant shooting-party she was giving for a couple of days for the King of Spain. They had nevertheless declined her invitation, and had come round without fail to see whether Mme de Guermantes was at home. They were not even certain of finding there opinions that conformed entirely with their own, or sentiments of any great cordiality; Mme de Guermantes would throw out from time to time—on the Dreyfus case, on the Republic, on the anti-religious laws, or even, in an undertone, on themselves, their weaknesses, the dullness of their conversation—comments which they had to appear not to notice. No doubt, if they kept up their habit of coming there, it was owing to their consummate training as epicures in things worldly, to their clear consciousness of the prime and perfect quality of the social pabulum, with its familiar, reassuring, sapid flavour, free of admixture or adulteration, with the origin and history of which they were as well acquainted as she who served them with it, remaining more “noble” in this respect than they themselves imagined. Now, on this occasion, among the visitors to whom I was introduced after dinner, it so happened that there was that General de Monserfeuil of whom the Princesse de Parme had spoken and whom Mme de Guermantes, of whose drawing-room he was one of the regular frequenters, had not expected that evening. He bowed before me, on hearing my name, as though I had been the President of the Supreme War Council. I had supposed it to be simply from some deep-rooted unwillingness to oblige, in which the Duke, as in wit if not in love, was his wife’s accomplice, that the Duchess had practically refused to recommend her nephew to M. de Monserfeuil. And I saw in this an indifference all the more blameworthy in that I seemed to have gathered from a few words which the Princess had let fall that Robert was in a post of danger from which it would be prudent to have him removed. But it was by the genuine malice of Mme de Guermantes that I was revolted when, the Princesse de Parme having timidly suggested that she might say something herself and on her own initiative to the General, the Duchess did everything in her power to dissuade her.
“But Ma’am,” she cried, “Monserfeuil has no sort of standing or influence whatever with the new Government. You would be wasting your breath.”
“I think he can hear us,” murmured the Princess, as a hint to the Duchess not to speak so loud.
“Your Highness needn’t be afraid, he’s as deaf as a post,” said the Duchess, without lowering her voice, though the General could hear her perfectly.
“The thing is, I believe M. de Saint-Loup is in a place that is not very safe,” said the Princess.
“It can’t be helped,” replied the Duchess, “he’s in the same boat as everybody else, the only difference being that it was he who asked to be sent there. Besides, no, it’s not really dangerous; if it was, you can imagine how anxious I should be to help. I’d have spoken to Saint-Joseph about it during dinner. He has far more influence, and he’s a real worker. But, as you see, he’s gone now. Besides, it would be less awkward than going to this one, who has three of his sons in Morocco just now and has refused to apply for them to be transferred; he might raise that as an objection. Since your Highness insists, I shall speak to Saint-Joseph—if I see him again, or to Beautreillis. But if I don’t see either of them, you mustn’t waste your pity on Robert. It was explained to us the other day where he is. I don’t think he could be anywhere better.”
“What a pretty flower, I’ve never seen one like it; there’s no one like you, Oriane, for having such marvellous things in your house,” said the Princesse de Parme, who, fearing that General de Monserfeuil might have overheard the Duchess, sought now to change the subject. I looked and recognised a plant of the sort that I had watched Elstir painting.
“I’m so glad you like them; they are charming, do look at their little purple velvet collars; the only thing against them is—as may happen with people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed—they have a hideous name and a horrid smell. In spite of which I’m very fond of them. But what is rather sad is that they’re going to die.”
“But they’re growing in a pot, they aren’t cut flowers,” said the Princess.
“No,” answered the Duchess with a smile, “but it comes to the same thing, as they’re all ladies. It’s a kind of plant where the ladies and the gentlemen don’t both grow on the same stalk. I’m like the people who keep a lady dog. I have to find a husband for my flowers. Otherwise I shan’t have any young ones!”
“How
very strange. Do you mean to say that in nature … ?”
“Yes, there are certain insects whose duty it is to bring about the marriage, as with sovereigns, by proxy, without the bride and bridegroom ever having set eyes on one another. And so, I assure you, I always tell my man to put my plant at the open window as often as possible, on the courtyard side and the garden side turn about, in the hope that the necessary insect will arrive. But the odds are so enormous! Just think, he would need to have just visited a person of the same species and the opposite sex, and he must then have taken it into his head to come and leave cards at the house. He hasn’t appeared so far—I believe my plant still deserves the name of virgin, but I must say a little more shamelessness would please me better. It’s just the same with that fine tree we have in the courtyard—it will die childless because it belongs to a species that’s very rare in these latitudes. In its case, it’s the wind that’s responsible for bringing about the union, but the wall is a trifle high.”
“Yes, indeed,” said M. de Bréauté, “you ought to have taken just a couple of inches off the top, that would have been quite enough. You have to know all the tricks of the trade. The flavour of vanilla we tasted in the excellent ice you gave us this evening, Duchess, comes from the plant of that name. It produces flowers which are both male and female, but a sort of partition between them prevents any communication. And so one could never get any fruit from them until a young negro, a native of Réunion, by the name of Albins, which by the way is rather a comic name for a black since it means ‘white,’ had the happy thought of using the point of a needle to bring the separate organs into contact.”
“Babal, you’re divine, you know everything,” cried the Duchess.
“But you yourself, Oriane, have taught me things I had no idea of,” the Princesse de Parme assured her.
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