The following day, M. de Stermaria, who knew that the bâtonnier had on one occasion represented a friend of his in court, introduced himself.
‘Our mutual friends the de Cambremers had been trying to bring us together, but it was never the right day for both of us, or something of that kind,’ said the bâtonnier, who was like many another liar in imagining that no one will bother to check such an insignificant detail; yet if chance puts anyone in possession of the humble fact which contradicts the detail, it can be enough to damn a character and spoil trust for ever.
As usual, though more easily now that her father’s conversation with the bâtonnier had left her to her own devices, I sat and watched Mlle de Stermaria. One was struck not only by the eye-catching singularity and beauty of her every posture, as when she set both elbows on the table, her raised glass poised above her forearms, but also by the curt glance from an eye that let itself be only briefly caught, by a voice in which one sensed an underlying inbred hardness, barely masked by her individual inflections, which had irked my grandmother, as though Mlle de Stermaria had inherited some sort of pre-set ancestral mechanism which, after any expression of a private view, in a look or an intonation, automatically brought her back to neutral; and the observer’s mind was for ever drawn to the lineage which had handed down to her such a dearth of simple humanity, such deficiency in sensitivity, such meanness of spirit just below the surface. Yet, from certain soft gleams that flitted across her eye only to be quickly dulled, in which one could sense the almost humble docility that a penchant for the pleasures of the flesh gives to the haughtiest woman, who soon values only one thing in the world, and that thing is any man who affords her those pleasures, possibly just an actor or some paltry entertainer for whose sake one day she may even be prepared to leave her husband; and from a certain shade of sensual pink that bloomed on her pale cheeks, reminiscent of the blushes that glowed in the heart of the water-lilies on the Vivonne, I suspected she might not mind letting me be the one to taste on her person the poetic flavour of the life she led in Brittany, a life which, whether through a surfeit of habit, an innate distinction, or her displeasure at the poverty or avarice of her family, she seemed to find uninspiring, but which even so she contained within her body. From the meagre reserve of will-power which she had inherited, and which gave something craven to her expression, she might not have been able to summon up very vigorous resistance. The grey felt hat which she invariably wore at meal-times, with its pretentious and rather out-of-fashion plume, endeared her to me a little, not because it suited her complexion of pink and silver, but because, by letting me see her as impoverished, it brought her closer to my own level. It was just possible that, though constrained in the presence of her father to follow convention in the attitudes she adopted, but with principles different from his for the perceiving and classifying of other people, she saw in me not lowly rank but sex and youth. If only M. de Stermaria would go on an outing one day without her, and especially if Mme de Villeparisis had chosen that day to come and sit at our table and thus given Mlle de Stermaria an opinion of me which might make me bold enough to approach her, perhaps we might have been able to exchange a few words, arrange to meet, strike up an acquaintance. If her parents had left her to herself for a month in her romantic Breton château, we might have been able to wander alone in the gloaming, by the darkening waters, where the pinkish heather would have a softer glow under the oaks lashed by the leaping waves. Together we could ramble about her island fastness, which was steeped in so much charm for me because it had bounded the banal days of Mlle de Stermaria, and because the memory of it would haunt her eyes for ever. It felt as though I could never properly possess her anywhere else, as though I would have to trespass on the places which surrounded her with so many memories, as though these memories were a veil that my desire for her would have to strip away, one of those which is drawn between a woman and certain men by Nature (with the same purpose which makes it interpose the act of reproduction between all its creatures and their keenest pleasure, setting between the insect and the nectar it desires the pollen it must carry away) so that, misled by the illusion of possessing her more completely in that way, they feel compelled first to take possession of the landscapes among which she lives and which, though much more fruitful for the imagination than the sensual pleasure, would not have sufficed without it to attract them.
I had to look away from Mlle de Stermaria, whose father, presumably believing that making a person’s acquaintance was a peculiar, perfunctory act, accomplished in a single movement, lending itself to no development worthy of a man’s interest, beyond a mere handshake and a sharp glance, neither requiring conversation on the spot nor leading to any later intercourse, had now taken his leave of the bâtonnier and was on his way back to sit opposite his daughter, rubbing his hands together like a man who has just had a windfall. As for the bâtonnier, once the initial excitement of the encounter had subsided, he was to be heard, as on other days, saying to the head waiter:
‘I’m not a king, you know, Aimé – be off and serve the King! I say, Your Worship, just look at those little trout – why don’t we ask Aimé for some of them! Aimé, I must say, those little fish of yours look very irresistible! Why don’t you bring us some of them, Aimé? We’ll help ourselves!’
He kept repeating the name Aimé; and whenever he had a guest to dinner, the latter would say, ‘Well, I can see you’re highly regarded hereabouts,’ and would take to dropping the name of Aimé too, in accordance with that propensity certain people have, part shyness, part vulgarity, part foolishness, to believe it is smart and amusing to behave exactly like someone they happen to be with. The bâtonnier’s incessant repetitions of Aimé’s name were always accompanied by a smile, as he was pleased to show not only that he was in the head waiter’s good graces but also that the latter was beneath him. At every mention of his name, the head waiter also showed in a smile how touched and proud he was, how much he appreciated the honour and shared in the joke.
Daunting as meal-times always were for me in the Grand-Hôtel’s immense dining-room, which was usually full, they turned into an even greater ordeal with the arrival for a stay of a few days of the owner (or possibly just a managing director elected by a body of shareholders) not just of this palace but also of seven or eight others established in widely separated parts of the country, who would turn up from time to time at one or other of them and spend a week there. Every evening, shortly after the beginning of dinner, through the entrance to the dining-room would come a small man with white hair and a red nose, strikingly proper and impersonal, known, it was said, from London to Monte Carlo as one of Europe’s premier hotel-proprietors. On one occasion, having slipped out just as dinner was beginning, I found he was there when I came back in: he gave me a little bow, presumably to acknowledge that I was under his roof, but the stiffness of his manner made me wonder whether it expressed the reserve of the man who knows his own importance or the disdain deserved by the insignificant customer. With customers who were themselves people of importance, the managing director’s bow was just as stiff, but much deeper, and he lowered his eyelids with an appearance of muted respect, as he might have done at a funeral service when condoling with the father of the deceased or contemplating Holy Communion. Apart from these cold and infrequent bows, he made no movement whatsoever, as though to show that his eyes, which were very bright and seemed to protrude, could be aware of all things, dominate all things and make sure that all things, from the tiniest finishing touch to the broad effect of the whole, combined to make a perfect ‘Dinner at the Grand-Hôtel’. It was clear that he saw himself as no mere stage manager or orchestral conductor, but as a commander-in-chief. In the belief that he needed nothing but a gaze of the greatest intensity to know that everything was in order, that whoever might blunder, defeat could not ensue, and so as to shoulder every single one of his responsibilities, not only did he make no gestures, he even kept his eyes quite still, fixed in a stare of concentratio
n, encompassing and directing the entire theatre of operations. I suspected that even the movements of my soup-spoon did not escape his notice; and even if he went away soon after the soup, the result of his tour of inspection was that he took away with him my appetite for the rest of dinner. His own appetite was excellent, as could be seen at lunch, when he sat in the dining-room at the same time as all the other guests, as though he was no one special. The table at which he sat was distinguished by a single peculiarity: as he ate, the other manager, the ordinary one, stood by his side making conversation. Being the managing director’s subordinate, he sought to flatter him and went in great fear of him. My own fear of him was less acute at lunch-times, because when he sat like that among all his customers he had the discreet air of a general who happens to be sitting in a restaurant where some of his troops are eating, but pretends not to notice them. All the same, I breathed more freely when the commissionaire, surrounded by his pages and porters, announced: ‘He’s off again tomorrow morning. First to Dinard, then on to Biarritz and over to Cannes.’
My life in the hotel was now not only sad, because I knew so few people, but also inconvenient, because Françoise knew so many. Her contacts should perhaps have made many things easier for us. In fact, they did the opposite. Although members of the working classes had great difficulty in being treated as acquaintances by Françoise, and could manage to achieve this only at the cost of extreme politeness towards her, once they had been accepted by her, they became the only people to whom she accorded the slightest importance. Her time-honoured code held that she owed no deference to any of the friends of her employers and that, if she was pressed for time, she could refuse to bandy words with a lady inquiring about my grandmother. However, her ways of dealing with her own acquaintances, that is with the few lower-class persons who were the beneficiaries of her infrequent friendships, were governed by the most delicate and inflexible protocol. For example, having struck up relationships with the hotel’s coffee waiter and with a young chambermaid who did some sewing for a Belgian lady, Françoise gave up her practice of going back upstairs to attend to my grandmother as soon as lunch was over, delaying her return by a full hour, because the coffee waiter wanted to make her a cup of coffee or tisane down in the buttery, or the chambermaid had suggested she come and watch her sew, and to decline such offers was out of the question, was quite simply not done. The young chambermaid was particularly deserving of this sort of propriety, as she was an orphan who had been brought up by people not of her family, and she occasionally went to spend some days with them. This circumstance brought out all of Françoise’s pity and benevolent disdain. She, who had a family to belong to, a little farm-house handed down by her parents, where a brother of hers kept a few cows, could never have considered such a person, quite without roots, to be her equal. As the girl was looking forward to the mid-August holiday and the chance to go and stay with her foster family, Françoise could not contain herself: ‘She makes me laugh, she does. “I’m off home” she says, “for the 15th of August” she says – home! And it’s not even hers! It’s just some folk that took her in and there she is, going on about “home” as if it was a real one! The poor girl! Fancy, being so badly off that you haven’t even got a home to call your own!’ But if Françoise’s new friends had been only chambermaids in the employ of guests at the hotel, who ate with her in the guests’ servants’ quarters, and assumed from her lovely lace cap and her fine profile that she must be a real lady, possibly of noble birth but now living in reduced circumstances, or else choosing from affection to live as lady’s companion to my grandmother; if Françoise had limited her acquaintance, that is, to people who did not belong to the hotel, the inconvenience would not have been very great, as she could not then have prevented them from being of service to us, for the simple reason that there were no conceivable circumstances in which, whether acquainted or unacquainted with her, they might have been of any service to us at all. However, she had also got to know one of the wine waiters, a kitchen-hand and a housekeeper from one of the floors. The result of this for our daily arrangements was that, whereas at the very beginning of her stay Françoise, knowing no one, had kept ringing for the most trivial of reasons, at times when my grandmother and I would never have dared to ring – and if we raised some mild objection to this, she replied, ‘Well, we’re paying them enough!’ as though she herself was footing the bills – now that she was on friendly terms with one of the personalities from below stairs, a thing which had initially seemed to augur well for our comfort if either of us happened to have cold feet in bed, she would not countenance the idea of ringing, even at times which were in no way untoward; she said it would ‘put them out’, it would mean the furnaces would have to be relit or the servants’ dinner-hour would be disturbed and they would not like that. She would enforce her pronouncements with a form of words which, despite her unsure way of delivering it, was abundantly clear in the way it put us in the wrong: ‘The fact is …’ Whereupon, we would desist, so as not to make her come out with another one of far greater severity for us: ‘It’s the limit!’ The long and the short of it was that we had to make do without proper hot water because Françoise was a friend of the man whose job it was to heat it.
We too, eventually, found a friend, despite and because of my grandmother. She and Mme de Villeparisis, finding themselves face to face one morning in a doorway, were at last obliged to exchange greetings, but only after exchanging gestures of surprise and hesitation, going through a pantomime of standing back and doubting, then at length coming together with glad cries and polite exclamations, like a pair of actors in a scene by Molière who have been standing apart from one another, each delivering a soliloquy and supposedly not seeing the other, though there is no more than a few feet between them, and who suddenly catch sight of each other, cannot believe their eyes, start speaking at the same time, interrupting each other, all this under the eyes of the chorus, before at last falling into each other’s arms. After a moment’s conversation, Mme de Villeparisis tried tactfully to pass on; but my grandmother suggested they sit together until lunch-time, with the aim of discovering how she managed to have her mail delivered earlier than we did and be treated to such excellent grills (as a connoisseur of fine cuisine, Mme de Villeparisis was unimpressed by the fare offered by the hotel, where we were served meals which my grandmother would describe, with one of her quotations from Mme de Sévigné, as ‘so sumptuous that you starve’).19 Every day from then on, the Marquise took to spending a moment with us in the dining-room, sitting at our table until her own meal was served, insisting that we not stand at her approach, that we should not put ourselves out in any way on her account. Sometimes, after we had finished eating, we sat on with her, chatting, at the squalid moment when knives and crumpled napkins lie about on the tablecloth. I sat there trying to look far beyond this scene, casting my eyes seaward in an attempt to preserve my attachment to Balbec and the idea that I was now on the farthest extremity of the land, scanning the waves for Baudelaire’s words and paying no attention to the table, unless it was one of those days when we were served a giant fish, a sea-monster which unlike the knives and forks came to us straight from the primitive ages when wildlife first began to teem in the Ocean, in the days of the Cimmerians,20 where its body with its countless vertebrae, its pink and blue nerves, though put together by Nature, had been built to an architectural design, like a polychromatic cathedral of the deep.
Just as a barber, seeing that an officer to whose hair he gives especial attention has recognized another customer who has just come in and stands chatting with him, cannot help smiling as he goes to fetch the soap-bowl, because he is pleased to realize they belong to the same circles, and pleased too that his establishment is not a mere barber’s shop but a place where the most down-to-earth needs are compatible with the most refined pleasures of sociability, so Aimé, seeing that Mme de Villeparisis was treating us like old friends, went to fetch our rince-bouches with the tactfully knowing smile, ful
l of subdued pride, of the hostess who knows when her guests can do without her. His expression, happy and touched, was that of a father doting on the joy of a young couple whose futures have been plighted at his dinner-table. To bring this look of happiness to Aimé’s face, one needed only to speak the name of a titled person; and in this he was the opposite of Françoise, in whose hearing one could not mention ‘Count This’ or ‘Viscount That’ without her expression turning dark and her voice sounding curt and sour, which actually meant she cherished the nobility not less than Aimé but more. Also, Françoise had the quality which, in other people, she always found so unforgivable: she was proud. She was not of Aimé’s breed, amiable and full of good cheer. If you tell them about some intriguing circumstance which is new to them, which they have never read about in the newspaper, say, the pleasure they feel and show is wholehearted. But Françoise preferred never to appear surprised. If one said in her presence that the Archduke Rudolf,21 of whom she had never even heard, was not really dead, as was universally assumed to be the case, but still alive, she would have replied, ‘True,’ as though she had known about it for ages. Moreover, if Françoise was able to resist an impulse to anger on hearing the name of a noble spoken even by us (whom she humbly called her ‘masters’, to whom she was, in most things, entirely subservient) it was very likely because the lineage from which she sprang had enjoyed a comfortable independent position in her village, rivalled for good esteem only by the sort of noble family in whose household the likes of Aimé would have been employed since childhood as a servant, or who might even have taken him in as an act of charity. So in the eyes of Françoise, Mme de Villeparisis might well have been expected to apologize for being of noble birth. However, at least in France, being forgiven their nobility is not only the talent of lords and ladies, it is their sole occupation. Françoise, after the manner of servants, who are constantly accumulating fragmentary observations about the relations between their masters and other people, from which they draw sometimes faulty deductions – as humans do on the lives of animals –, was for ever jumping to the conclusion that we had been ‘slighted’, a notion inspired as much by her exaggerated love for us as by her delight in being unpleasant to us. But once she had unmistakably registered Mme de Villeparisis’s countless little acts of considerateness towards us, and even towards herself, Françoise forgave her for being a marquise; and since she had never ceased being grateful to her for being one, of all the people we knew, Mme de Villeparisis was her favourite. The fact was that, of all these people, none took such constant trouble to be pleasant. If my grandmother merely remarked on a book that Mme de Villeparisis was reading, or exclaimed at a gift of fine fruit sent to her by a friend, an hour later a footman came upstairs with the book or the fruit. Then, the next time we saw her, she would receive our thanks as though trying to excuse her kind gift on the grounds of some special usefulness it might have, saying only, ‘It’s no masterpiece, but with the newspapers arriving here so late, one must have something to read,’ or ‘At the seaside it’s always best to have fruit one can be sure of.’
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 34