“I am observing!”
The Marquis de Forestelle’s monocle was minuscule, had no border, and, requiring a constant painful clenching of the eye, where it was encrusted like a superfluous cartilage whose presence was inexplicable and whose material was exquisite, gave the Marquis’s face a melancholy delicacy, and made women think he was capable of great sorrows in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, surrounded by a gigantic ring, like Saturn, was the center of gravity of a face which regulated itself at each moment in relation to it, a face whose quivering red nose and thick-lipped sarcastic mouth attempted by their grimaces to equal the unceasing salvos of wit sparkling from the disk of glass, and saw itself preferred to the handsomest eyes in the world by snobbish and depraved young women in whom it inspired dreams of artificial charms and a refinement of voluptuousness; and meanwhile, behind his own, M. de Palancy, who, with his big, round-eyed carp’s head, moved about slowly in the midst of the festivities unclenching his mandibles from moment to moment as though seeking to orient himself, merely seemed to be transporting with him an accidental and perhaps purely symbolic fragment of the glass of his aquarium, a part intended to represent the whole, reminding Swann, a great admirer of Giotto’s Vices and Virtues at Padua, of Injustice, next to whom a leafy bough evokes the forests in which his lair is hidden.
Swann had walked on into the room, at the insistence of Mme. de Saint-Euverte, and, in order to hear a melody from Orphée95 that was being performed by a flautist, had placed himself in a corner where unfortunately his only view was of two mature ladies seated next to each other, the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, spent their time when attending a party, clutching their bags and followed by their daughters, looking for each other as though in a railway station, and did not rest easy until they had reserved, with a fan or a handkerchief, two seats side by side: Mme. de Cambremer, since she had very few acquaintances, being all the happier to have a companion, Mme. de Franquetot, who was in contrast extremely well connected, believing there was something elegant, something original, about showing all her fine friends that she preferred, to their company, an obscure lady with whom she shared memories of her youth. Full of a melancholy irony, Swann watched them listen to the piano intermezzo (Saint Francis Speaking to the Birds by Liszt)96 which had come after the flute melody, and follow the vertiginous playing of the virtuoso, Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes wild as if the keys over which he ran with such agility were a series of trapezes from which he might fall from a height of eighty yards, and at the same time casting at her neighbor looks of astonishment, of denial which signified: “This is not to be believed, I would never have thought a man could do this,” while Mme. de Cambremer, being a woman who had received a strong musical education, marked time with her head transformed into the arm of a metronome whose amplitude and rapidity of oscillations from one shoulder to the other had become such (with that sort of frenzy and abandon in the eyes characteristic of a kind of suffering which is no longer aware of itself nor tries to control itself and says “I can’t help it!”) that she kept snagging her solitaires in the straps of her bodice and was obliged to straighten the black grapes she had in her hair, though without ceasing to accelerate her motion. On the other side of Mme. de Franquetot, but a little in front, was the Marquise de Gallardon, occupied with her favorite thought, her alliance with the Guermantes, which in the eyes of the world and in her own was the source of a good deal of glory along with some shame, the most brilliant of them keeping her a bit at a distance, perhaps because she was tiresome, or because she was spiteful, or because she was from an inferior branch, or perhaps for no reason. When she found herself next to someone she did not know, as at this moment Mme. de Franquetot, it would pain her that her own awareness of her kinship with the Guermantes could not be manifested outwardly in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics of the Byzantine churches, placed one below another, inscribe in a vertical column, next to a holy personage, the words he is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation or a visit from her young cousin the Princesse des Laumes, in the six years the Princesse had been married. This thought filled her with anger, but also with pride; for, by dint of saying to people who were surprised not to see her at the home of Mme. des Laumes, that it was because she would have risked meeting Princesse Mathilde97 there—for which her ultra-Legitimist98 family would never have forgiven her—she had ended by believing this actually was the reason she did not go to her young cousin’s house. Yet she recalled having asked Mme. des Laumes several times how she might contrive to meet her, but recalled it only confusedly and also more than neutralized this slightly humiliating memory by murmuring: “After all it’s not up to me to make the first move, I’m twenty years older than she.” Fortified by the efficacy of these unspoken words, she proudly threw back her shoulders, which seemed detached from her bust and on which her head was positioned almost horizontally so that one was reminded of the “restored” head of a haughty pheasant brought to the table in all its feathers. It was not so much that she was not stocky, mannish, and plump by nature; but the insults she had received had straightened her up like those trees which, born in a bad position at the brink of a precipice, are forced to grow backward to keep their balance. Obliged as she was, in order to console herself for not being altogether the equal of the other Guermantes, to keep telling herself that it was because of the intransigence of her principles and her pride that she did not see them very often, this thought had ended by shaping her body and by giving her an imposing sort of presence that passed in the eyes of bourgeois women for a sign of breeding and sometimes disturbed with a fleeting desire the clubmen’s weary glances. If Mme. de Gallardon’s conversation had been subjected to those analyses which, by recording the greater or lesser frequency of each word, permit one to discover the key to a language in code, one would have realized that no expression, even the most ordinary, recurred in it as often as “at the home of my cousins the Guermantes,” “at the home of my aunt de Guermantes,” “the health of Elzéar de Guermantes,” “my cousin de Guermantes’s baignoire.”99 When anyone spoke to her about a famous personage, she would answer that without knowing him personally she had met him a thousand times at the home of her aunt de Guermantes, but she would answer this in a tone so icy and in a voice so low that it was clear that, if she did not know him personally, it was by virtue of all the ineradicable and stubborn principles which her shoulders touched behind her, like those ladders on which gymnastics instructors make you stretch out in order to develop your chest.
Now as it happened, the Princesse des Laumes, whom one would not have expected to see at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s, had just arrived. In order to show that she was not trying to advertise, in a drawing room to which she had come only out of condescension, the superiority of her rank, she had entered with her shoulders turned sideways even where there was no crowd to cleave through and no person attempting to get past her, staying deliberately at the back, with the air of being in her proper place, like a king who stands in line at the door of a theater so long as the management has not been informed that he is there; and, merely confining her gaze—so as not to seem to be signaling her presence and demanding attention—to a consideration of the design in the carpet or in her own skirt, she stood in the spot that had seemed to her the most modest (and from which she was well aware she would be drawn by a delighted exclamation from Mme. de Saint-Euverte as soon as the latter noticed her), next to Mme. de Cambremer, whom she did not know. She observed the pantomime of her music-loving neighbor, but did not imitate it. It was not that, the one time she came to spend five minutes at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished, so that the courtesy she was showing her might count double, to prove as friendly as possible. But by nature, she had a horror of what she called “exaggerations” and was anxious to show that she “did not have to” indulge in displays of e
motion which were not in keeping with the “style” of the circle she moved in, but which still, on the other hand, could not help but impress her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation akin to timidity which is developed in the most confident persons by the atmosphere of a new environment, even if it is an inferior one. She began to wonder if this gesticulation was not perhaps a necessary response to the piece being played, which did not come quite within the scope of the music she had heard up to now, if to refrain was not to give proof of incomprehension with respect to the work and impropriety toward the lady of the house: so that, in order to express both of her contradictory inclinations by a compromise, she first merely straightened up her shoulder straps or put a hand to her blond hair to secure the little balls of diamond-flecked coral or pink enamel which formed her simple and charming coiffure, while at the same time examining her ardent neighbor with cold curiosity, then with her fan she beat time for a moment, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, on the offbeat. When the pianist ended the piece by Liszt and began a prelude by Chopin, Mme. de Cambremer gave Mme. de Franquetot a tender smile full of knowledgeable satisfaction and allusion to the past. When she was young she had learned to caress the phrases of Chopin with their sinuous and excessively long necks, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking out and exploring a place for themselves far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected them to reach, and which frolic in this fantasy distance only to come back more deliberately—with a more premeditated return, with more precision, as though upon a crystal glass that resonates until you cry out—to strike you in the heart.
Living in a provincial family that had few friends, scarcely ever going out to a ball, she had intoxicated herself in the solitude of her manor house, with all those imaginary dancing couples, now slowing them, now speeding them, now scattering them like flowers, now leaving the ball for a moment to hear the wind blow in the pine trees, at the edge of the lake, and suddenly seeing, as he came toward her there, more unlike anything anyone had ever dreamed of than an earthly lover could be, a slender young man in white gloves whose voice had a strange, false lilt to it. But nowadays the old-fashioned beauty of that music seemed stale. Having fallen in the esteem of the discriminating public over the past several years, it had lost its position of distinction and its charm, and even those whose taste is bad no longer took more than an unacknowledged and moderate pleasure in it. Mme. de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She was aware that her young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new family, except regarding the things of the mind about which, since she knew a little harmony and even some Greek, she was especially enlightened) despised Chopin and suffered when she heard it played. But far away from the surveillance of that Wagnerian who was off in the distance with a group of people her own age, Mme. de Cambremer abandoned herself to her delightful impressions. The Princesse des Laumes was enjoying them too. Though without a natural gift for music, she had had lessons fifteen years earlier from a piano teacher of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who at the end of her life had been reduced to poverty and had returned, at the age of seventy, to giving piano lessons, to the daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils. She was dead now. But her method, her lovely sound, came back to life sometimes under the fingers of her pupils, even those who had become in other respects ordinary people, had abandoned music, and almost never opened a piano anymore. And so Mme. des Laumes could shake her head, with expert knowledge, with a just appreciation of the way the pianist was playing this prelude, which she knew by heart. The end of the phrase he had begun already sang on her lips. And she murmured, “It’s always charming,” with a double ch at the start of the word which was a mark of refinement and which, she felt, pursed her lips so romantically, like a beautiful flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony with them by giving them an expression just then of sentimentality and vague yearning. Meanwhile, Mme. de Gallardon was saying to herself how annoying it was that she only very rarely had the opportunity to meet the Princesse des Laumes, for she wanted to teach her a lesson by not responding to her greeting. She did not know her cousin was there. A movement of Mme. de Franquetot’s head revealed the Princesse to her. Immediately she hurried toward her, disturbing everyone; but though she wanted to preserve a haughty and glacial manner which would remind everyone that she did not wish to be on friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself coming face-to-face with Princesse Mathilde, and to whom it was not for her to make advances since she was not “of her generation,” still she wanted to offset this air of haughtiness and reserve by some remark that would justify her overture and force the Princesse to engage in conversation; and so when she came near her cousin, Mme. de Gallardon, with a hard expression and a hand outthrust like a “forced” card, said to her: “How is your husband?” in the concerned tone she would have used if the Prince had been gravely ill. The Princesse, bursting into a laugh which was peculiar to her and which was intended at once to show others that she was making fun of someone and also to make herself look prettier by concentrating her features around her animated lips and sparkling eyes, answered:
“Why, he’s never been better!”
And she laughed again. Whereupon Mme. de Gallardon, drawing herself up and contriving an even chillier expression, yet still concerned about the Prince’s condition, said to her cousin:
“Oriane” (here Mme. des Laumes looked with an air of surprise and merriment at an invisible third party in whose presence she seemed anxious to attest that she had never authorized Mme. de Gallardon to call her by her first name), “I would be so pleased if you could stop in at my house for a moment tomorrow evening to hear a clarinet quintet by Mozart. I would like to have your opinion.”
She seemed not to be offering an invitation, but to be asking a favor, and to need the Princesse’s assessment of the Mozart quintet as if it were a dish composed by a new cook about whose talents it was valuable to her to obtain the opinion of a gourmet.
“But I know that quintet. I can tell you right now . . . I like it!”
“You know, my husband isn’t well; it’s his liver . . . It would give him great pleasure to see you,” resumed Mme. de Gallardon, now placing the Princesse under a charitable obligation to appear at her soiree.
The Princesse never liked to tell people she did not want to go to their homes. Every day she would write notes expressing her regrets at having been prevented—by an unexpected visit from her mother-in-law, an invitation from her brother-in-law, the opera, an expedition to the country—from attending a soiree to which she would never have dreamed of going. In this way she gave many people the joy of believing that she was one of their friends, that she would readily have gone to visit them, that she had been kept from doing so only by princely inconveniences which they were flattered to see enter into competition with their soiree. Then, too, since she was part of that witty circle of the Guermantes in which something survived of the alert mentality unburdened by platitudes and conventional feelings which was handed down from Mérimée100 and had found its latest expression in the theater of Meilhac and Halévy,101 she adapted it even to social relations, transposed it even into her politeness, which endeavored to be positive and precise, and to approximate the plain truth. She would never develop at any length to a hostess the expression of her desire to be present at her party; she thought it friendlier to put to her a few little facts on which it would depend whether or not it was possible for her to come.
“The thing is,” she said to Mme. de Gallardon, “tomorrow evening I have to go see a friend who has been asking me to make a date with her for ages. If she takes us to the theater, even with the best will in the world there won’t be any chance of my coming to you; but if we stay in the house, since I know we’ll be alone, I’ll be able to leave her.”
“Oh, by the way, did you see your friend M. Swann?”
“Why no! My beloved Charles, I di
dn’t know he was here, I must try to attract his attention.”
“It’s funny that he should go to old Saint-Euverte’s,” said Mme. de Gallardon. “Oh, I know he’s intelligent,” she added, meaning he was a schemer, “but still and all, a Jew in the home of the sister and sister-in-law of two archbishops!”
“I confess to my shame that I’m not shocked,” said the Princess des Laumes.
“I know he’s a convert, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say converts remain more attached to their religion than anyone else, that it’s all just a pretense. Is that true?”
“I don’t know a thing about that.”
The pianist, who was to play two pieces by Chopin, after finishing the prelude had immediately attacked a polonaise. But now that Mme. de Gallardon had told her cousin that Swann was there, Chopin himself might have risen from the dead and played all his pieces in succession without Mme. des Laumes paying the slightest attention. She belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence in a place where she happened to be of someone from her set, though she had nothing in particular to say to him, monopolized her attention at the expense of everything else. From that moment on, in the hopes that Swann would notice her, the Princesse, like a tame white mouse when a bit of sugar is offered to it and then taken away, kept turning her face, which was filled with a thousand signs of complicity unrelated to the feeling in Chopin’s polonaise, in Swann’s direction, and if he moved, she would shift in a corresponding direction her magnetic smile.
“Oriane, don’t be angry,” resumed Mme. de Gallardon, who could never stop herself from sacrificing her greatest social ambitions and highest hopes of someday dazzling the world to the immediate, obscure, and private pleasure of saying something disagreeable, “but people do claim that M. Swann is someone whom one can’t have in one’s house, is that true?”
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