The Duchess broke off abruptly, for a lady came in who was the Comtesse de Marsantes, Robert’s mother. Mme. de Marsantes was regarded in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as a superior being, of a goodness, a resignation that were positively angelic. So I had been told, and had had no particular reason to feel surprised, not knowing at the same time that she was the sister of the Duc de Guermantes. Later, I have always been taken aback, whenever I have learned that such women, melancholy, pure, victimised, venerated like the ideal forms of saints in church windows, had flowered from the same genealogical stem as brothers brutal debauched and vile. Brothers and sisters, when they are closely alike in features as were the Duc de Guermantes and Mme. de Marsantes, ought (I felt) to have a single intellect in common, the same heart, as a person would have who might vary between good and evil moods but in whom one could not, for all that, expect to find a vast breadth of outlook if he had a narrow mind, or a sublime abnegation if his heart was hard.
Mme. de Marsantes attended Brunetière’s lectures. She fascinated the Faubourg Saint-Germain and, by her saintly life, edified it as well. But the morphological link of handsome nose and piercing gaze led one, nevertheless, to classify Mme. de Marsantes in the same intellectual and moral family as her brother the Duke. I could not believe that the mere fact of her being a woman, and perhaps those of her having had an unhappy life and won everyone’s sympathy could make a person be so different from the rest of her family, as in the old romances, where all the virtues and graces are combined in the sister of wild and lawless brothers. It seemed to me that nature, less unconventional than the old poets, must make use almost exclusively of the elements common to the family, and I was unable to credit her with enough power of invention to construct, out of materials analogous to those that composed a fool and clod, a lofty mind without the least strain of clownishness, a saint unsoiled by any brutality. Mme. de Marsantes was wearing a gown of white surah embroidered with large palms, on which stood out flowers of a different material, these being black. This was because, three weeks earlier, she had lost her cousin, M. de Montmorency, a bereavement which did not prevent her from paying calls or even from going to small dinners, but always in mourning. She was a great lady. Atavism had filled her with the frivolity of generations of life at court, with all the superficial, rigorous duties that that implies. Mme. de Marsantes had not had the strength of character to regret for any length of time the death of her father and mother, but she would not for anything in the world have appeared in colours in the month following that of a cousin. She was more than pleasant to me,both because I was Robert’s friend and because I did not move in the same world as he. This pleasantness was accompanied by a pretence of shyness, by that sort of intermittent withdrawal of the voice, the eyes, the mind which a woman draws back to her like a skirt that has indiscreetly spread, so as not to take up too much room, to remain stiff and erect even in her suppleness, as a good upbringing teaches. A good upbringing which must not, however, be taken too literally, many of these ladies passing very swiftly into a complete dissolution of morals without ever losing the almost childlike correctness of their manners. Mme. de Marsantes was a trifle irritating in conversation since, whenever she had occasion to speak of a plebeian, as for instance Bergotte or Elstir, she would say, isolating the word, giving it its full value, intoning it on two different notes with a modulation peculiar to the Guermantes: “I have had thehonour, the greathon-our of meeting Monsieur Bergotte,” or “of making the acquaintance of Monsieur Elstir,” whether that her hearers might marvel at her humility or from the same tendency that Mme. de Guermantes shewed to revert to the use of obsolete forms, as a protest against the slovenly usages of the present day, in which people never professed themselves sufficiently “honored”. Whichever of these was the true reason, one felt that when Mme. de Marsantes said: “I have had thehonour, the greathon-our,” she felt she was playing an important part and shewing that she could take in the names of distinguished men as she would have welcomed the men themselves at her home in the country, had they happened to be in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, as her family connexion was numerous, as she was devoted to all her relatives, as, slow in speechand fond of explaining things at length, she was always trying to make clear the exact degree of kinship, she found herself (without any desire to create an effect and without really caring to talk about anyone except touching peasants and sublime gamekeepers) referring incessantly to all the mediatised houses in Europe, a failing which people less brilliantly connected than herself could not forgive, and, if they were at all intellectual, derided as a sign of stupidity.
In the country, Mme. de Marsantes was adored for the good that she did, but principally because the purity of a strain of blood into which for many generations there had flowed only what was greatest in the history of France had taken from her manner everything that the lower orders call “manners”, and had given her a perfect simplicity. She never shrank from kissing a poor woman who was in trouble, and would tell her to come up to the castle for a cartload of wood. She was, people said, the perfect Christian. She was determined to find an immensely rich wife for Robert. Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent, playing at simplicity. It is a pastime which costs an extremely high price, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know that you are not bound to live simply, that is to say that you are very rich. Some one said to me afterwards, when I had told him of my meeting her: “You saw of course that she must have been lovely as a young woman.” But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognize it as beauty. I said to myself this afternoon only that she had a tiny nose, very blue eyes, a long neck and a sad expression.
“Listen,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to the Duchesse de Guermantes, “I’m expecting a woman at any moment whom you don’t wish to know. I thought I’ld better warn you, to avoid any unpleasantness. But you needn’t be afraid, I shall never have her here again, only I was obliged to let her come to-day. It’s Swann’s wife.”
Mme. Swann, seeing the dimensions that the Dreyfus case had begun to assume, and fearing that her husband’s racial origin might be used against herself, had besought him never again to allude to the prisoner’s innocence. When he was not present she went farther and used to profess the most ardent Nationalism; in doing which she was only following the example of Mme. Verdurin, in whom a middle-class anti-semitism, latent hitherto, had awakened and grown to a positive fury. Mme. Swann had won by this attitude the privilege of membership in several of the women’s leagues that were beginning to be formed in anti-semitic society, and had succeeded in making friends with various members of the aristocracy. It may seem strange that, so far from following their example, the Duchesse de Guermantes, so close a friend of Swann, had on the contrary always resisted his desire, which he had not concealed from her, to introduce to her his wife. But we shall see in due course that this arose from the peculiar nature of the Duchess, who held that she was not “bound to” do things, and laid down with despotic force what had been decided by her social “free will”, which was extremely arbitrary.
“Thank you for telling me,” said the Duchess. “It would indeed be most unpleasant. But as I know her by sight I shall be able to get away in time.”
“I assure you, Oriane, she is really quite nice; anexcellent woman,” said Mme. de Marsantes.
“I have no doubt she is, but I feel no need to assure myself of it.”
“Have you been invited to Lady Israels’s?” Mme de Villeparisis asked the Duchess, to change the conversation.
“Why, thank heaven, I don’t know the woman,” replied Mme. de Guermantes. “You must ask Marie-Aynard. She knows her. I never could make out why.”
“I did indeed know her at one time,” said Mme. de Marsantes. “I confess my faults. But I have decided not to know her any more. It seems she’s one of the very worst of them, and makes no attempt to conceal it. Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable. I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we had old friends, country cousins, people of our own flesh and blood on whom we shut our doors, we threw them open to Jews. And now we see what thanks we get from them. But I’ve no right to speak; I have an adorable son, and, like a young fool, he says and does all the maddest things you can imagine,” she went on, having caught some allusion by M. d’Argencourt to Robert. “But, talking of Robert, haven’t you seen him?” she asked Mme. de Villeparisis; “being Saturday, I thought he’ld be coming to Paris on leave, and in that case he would be sure to pay you a visit.”
As a matter of fact Mme. de Marsantes thought that her son would not obtain leave that week; but knowing that, even if he did, he would never dream of coming to see Mme. de Villeparisis, she hoped, by making herself appear to have expected to find him in the room, to procure his forgiveness from her susceptible aunt for all the visits that he had failed to pay her.
“Robert here! But I have never had a single word from him; I don’t think I’ve seen him since Balbec.”
“He is so busy; he has so much to do,” pleaded Mme. de Marsantes.
A faint smile made Mme. de Guermantes’s eyelashes quiver as she studied the circle which, with the point of her sunshade, she was tracing on the carpet. Whenever the Duke had been too openly unfaithful to his wife, Mme. de Marsantes had always taken up the cudgels against her own brother on her sister-in-law’s behalf. The latter had a grateful and bitter memory of this protection, and was not herself seriously shocked by Robert’s pranks. At this point the door opened again and Robert himself entered the room.
“Well, talk of the Saint!” said Mme. de Guermantes.
Mme. de Marsantes, who had her back to the door, had not seen her son come in. When she did catch sight of him, her motherly bosom was convulsed with joy, as by the beating of a wing, her body half rose from her seat, her face quivered and she fastened on Robert eyes big with astonishment:
“What! You’ve come! How delightful! What a surprise!”
“Ah!Talk of the Saint!—I see,” cried the Belgian diplomat, with a shout of laughter.
“Delicious, ain’t it?” came tartly from the Duchess, who hated puns, and had ventured on this one only with a pretence of making fun of herself.
“Good afternoon, Robert,” she said, “I believe he’s forgotten his aunt.”
They talked for a moment, probably about myself, for as Saint-Loup was leaving her to join his motherMme. de Guermantes turned to me:
“Good afternoon; how are you?” was her greeting.
She allowed to rain on me the light of her azure gaze, hesitated for a moment, unfolded and stretched towards me the stem of her arm, leaned forward her body which sprang rapidly backwards like a bush that has been pulled down to the ground and, on being released, returns to its natural position. Thus she acted under the fire of Saint-Loup’s eyes, which kept her under observation and were making frantic efforts to obtain some further concession still from his aunt. Fearing that our conversation might fail altogether, he joined in, to stimulate it, and answered for me:
“He’s not very well just now, he gets rather tired; I think he would be a great deal better, by the way, if he saw you more often, for I can’t help telling you that he admires you immensely.”
“Oh, but that’s very nice of him,” said Mme. de Guermantes in a deliberately casual tone, as if I had brought her her cloak. “I am most flattered.”
“Look, I must go and talk to my mother for a minute; take my chair,” said Saint-Loup, thus forcing me to sit down next to his aunt.
We are both silent.
“I see you sometimes in the morning,” she said, as though she were telling me something that I did not know, and I for my part had never seen her. “It’s so good for one, a walk.”
“Oriane,” began Mme. de Marsantes in a low tone, “you said you were going on to Mme. de Saint-Ferréol’s; would you be so very kind as to tell her not to expect me to dinner, I shall stay at home now that I’ve gotRobert. And one other thing, but I hardly like to ask you, if you would leave word as you pass to tell them to send out at once for a box of the cigars Robert likes. ‘Corona’, they’re called. I’ve none in the house.”
Robert came up to us; he had caught only the name of Mme. de Saint-Ferréol.
“Who in the world is Mme. de Saint-Ferréol?” he inquired, in a surprised but decisive tone, for he affected a studied ignorance of everything to do with society.
“But, my dear boy, you know quite well,” said his mother, “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she gave you that nice billiard table you liked so much.”
“What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea of that. Really, my family are amazing,” he went on, turning so as to include me in the conversation and adopting unconsciously Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed his ideas, “they know the most unheard-of people, people called Saint-Ferréol” (emphasising the final consonant of each word) “and names like that; they go to balls, they drive in victorias, they lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”
Mme. de Guermantes made in her throat a slight, short, sharp sound, as of an involuntary laugh which one chokes back, meaning thereby to shew that she paid just as much tribute as the laws of kinship imposed on her to her nephew’s wit. A servant came in to say that the Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen had sent word to M. de Norpois that he was waiting.
“Bring him in, sir,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to the old Ambassador, who started in quest of the German Minister.
“Stop, sir; do you think I ought to shew him theminiature of the Empress Charlotte?”
“Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the Ambassador in a tone of conviction, and as though he were envying the fortunate Minister the favour that was in store for him.
“Oh, I know he’s verysound,” said Mme. de Marsantes, “and that is so rare among foreigners.ButButI’ve found out all about him. He is anti-semitism personified.”
The Prince’s name preserved in the boldness with which its opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the impulse, the mannered simplicity, the heavy delicacies of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “heim” of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a child I had gone with my grandmother, at the foot of a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink, at the Kurhof, their illustrious vintages with elaborate and sonorous names, like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard the Prince’s name spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the name itself seemed to shrink, to grow rich with humanity, to find large enough a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earth to earth, picturesque, savoury, light, with something about it, too, that was authorised, prescribed. And then, M. deGuermantes, in explaining who the Prince was, quoted a number of his titles, and I recognised the name of a village threaded by the river on which, every evening, my cure finished for the day, I used to go in a boat amid the mosquitoes, and that of a forest so far away that the doctor would not allow me to make the excursion to it. And indeed it was comprehensible that the suzerainty of the lord extended to the surrounding places and associated afresh in the enumeration of his titles the names which one could read, close together, upon a map. Thus beneath the visor of the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Knight of Franconia it was the face of a dear and smiling land, on which had often lingered for me the light of the six-o’clock sun, that I saw, at any rate before the Prince, Rheingraf and Elector Palatine, had entered the room. For I speedily learned that the revenues which he drew from the forest and river, peopled with gnomes and undines, and from the enchanted mountain on which rose the ancient Burg that cherished memories of Luther and Lewis the Germanic, he employed in keeping five Charron motor-cars, a house in Paris and one in London, a box on Mondays at the Opera and another for the “Tuesdays” at the “Francais”. He did not seem to me, nor did he seem to regard himself as different from other men of similar fortune and age who had a less poetic origin. He had their culture, their ideals, he was proud of his rank, but purely on account of the advantages it conferred on him, and had now only one ambition in life, to be elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, which was the reason of his coming to see Mme. de Villeparisis. If he, whose wife was aleader of the most exclusive set in Berlin, had begged to be introduced to the Marquise, it was not the result of any desire on his part for her acquaintance. Devoured for years past by this ambition to be elected to the Institute, he had unfortunately never been in a position to reckon above five the number of Academicians who seemed prepared to vote for him. He knew that M. de Norpois could by himself dispose of at least ten others, a number which he was capable, by skillful negotiations, of increasing still further. And so the Prince, who had known him in Russia when they were both there as Ambassadors, had gone to see him and had done everything in his power to win him over. But in vain might he multiply his friendly overtures, procure for the Marquis Russian decorations, quote him in articles on foreign politics; he had had before him an ingrate, a man in whose eyes all these attentions appeared to count as nothing, who had not advanced the prospects of his candidature one inch, had not even promised him his own vote. No doubt M. de Norpois received him with extreme politeness, indeed begged that he would not put himself out and “take the trouble to come so far out of his way,” went himself to the Prince’s residence, and when the Teutonic Knight had launched his: “I should like immensely to be your colleague,” replied in a tone of deep emotion: “Ah! I should be most happy!” And no doubt a simpleton, a Dr. Cottard would have said to himself: “Well, here he is in my house; it was he who insisted on coming, because he regards me as a more important person than himself; he tells me that he would be happy to see me in the Academy; words do have some meaning after all, damn it, probably ifhe doesn’t offer to vote for me it is because it hasn’t occurred to him. He lays so much stress on my great influence; presumably he imagines that larks drop into my mouth ready roasted, that I have all the support I want, and that is why he doesn’t offer me his; but I have only got to get him with his back to the wall, and just say to him quietly: ‘Very well, vote for me, will you?’ and he will be obliged to do it.”
But Prince von Faffenheim was no simpleton. He was what Dr. Cottard would have called “a fine diplomat” and he knew that M. de Norpois was no less fine a one than himself, nor a man who would have failed to realise without needing to be told that he could confer a favour on a candidate by voting for him. The Prince, in his Embassies and as Foreign Minister, had conducted, on his country’s behalf instead of, as in the present instance, his own, many of those conversations in which one knows beforehand just how far one is prepared to go and at what point one will decline to commit oneself. He was not unaware that, in this diplomatic language, to talk meant to offer. And it was for this reason that he had arranged for M. de Norpois to receive the Cordon of Saint Andrew. But if he had had to report to his Government the conversation which he had subsequently had with M. de Norpois, he would have stated in his dispatch: “I realised that I had gone the wrong way to work.” For as soon as he had returned to the subject of the Institute, M. de Norpois had repeated:
“I should like nothing better; nothing could be better, for my colleagues. They ought, I consider, to feel genuinely honoured that you should have thought of them. It is a really interesting candidature, a little outside ourordinary course. As you know, the Academy is very conventional, it takes fright at everything which has at all a novel sound. Personally, I deplore this. How often have I had occasion to say as much to my colleagues! I cannot be sure, God forgive me, that I did not even once let the word ‘hide-bound’ escape me,” he added, in an undertone, with a scandalised smile, almost aside, as in a scene on the stage, casting at the Prince a rapid, sidelong glance from his blue eyes, like a veteran actor studying the effect on his audience. “You understand, Prince, that I should not care to allow a personality so eminent as yourself to embark on a venture which was hopeless from the start. So long as my colleagues’ ideas linger so far behind the times, I consider that the wiser course will be to abstain. But you may rest assured that if I were ever to discern a mind that was a little more modern, a little more alive, shewing itself in that college, which is tending to become a mausoleum, if I could reckon upon any possible chance of your success, I should be the first to inform you of it.”
“The Cordon was a mistake,” thought the Prince; “the negotiations have not advanced in the least; that is not what he wanted. I have not yet laid my hand on the right key.”
This was a kind of reasoning of which M. de Norpois, formed in the same school as the Prince, would also have been capable. One may mock at the pedantic silliness with which diplomats of the Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording which is, for all practical purposes, meaningless. But their childishness has this compensation; diplomats know that, in the loaded scales which assure that European or otherequilibrium which we call peace, good feeling, sounding speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something else, in the possibility which the adversary does (if he is strong enough) or does not enjoy of satisfying, in exchange for what one oneself wants, a desire. With this order of truths, which an entirely disinterested person, such as my grandmother for instance, would not have understood, M. de Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim had frequently had to deal. Chargé d’Affaires in countries with which we had been within an ace of going to war, M. de Norpois, in his anxiety as to the turn which events were about to take, knew very well that it was not by the word “Peace”, nor by the word “War” that it would be revealed to him, but by some other, apparently commonplace word, a word of terror or blessing, which the diplomat, by the aid of his cipher, would immediately read and to which, to safeguard the honour of France, he would respond in another word, quite as commonplace, but one beneath which the Minister of the enemy nation would at once see written: “War.” Moreover, in accordance with a time-honoured custom, analogous to that which gave to the first meeting between two young people promised to one another in marriage the form of a chance encounter at a performance in the Théâtre du Gymnase, the dialogue in the course of which destiny was to dictate the word “War” or the word “Peace” was held, as a rule, not in the ministerial sanctum but on a bench in a Kurgarten where the Minister and M. de Norpois went independently to a thermal spring to drink at its source their little tumblers of some curative water. By a sort of tacit convention they met at thehour appointed for their cure, began by taking together a short stroll which, beneath its innocent appearance, each of the speakers knew to be as tragic as an order for mobilisation. And so, in a private matter like this nomination for election to the Institute, the Prince had employed the same system of induction which had served him in his public career, the same method of reading beneath superimposed symbols.
And certainly it would be wrong to pretend that my grandmother and the few who resembled her would have been alone in their failure to understand this kind of calculation. For one thing, the average human being, practising a profession the lines of which have been laid down for him from the start, comes near, by his want of intuition, to the ignorance which my grandmother owed to her lofty disinterestedness. Often one has to come down to “kept” persons, male or female, before one finds the hidden spring of actions or words apparently of the most innocent nature in self-interest, in the bare necessity to keep alive. What man does not know that when a woman whom he is going to pay says to him: “Don’t let’s talk about money,” the speech must be regarded as what is called in music “a silent beat” and that if, later on, she declares: “You are far too much trouble; you are always keeping things from me; I’ve done with you,” he must interpret this as: “Some one else has been offering her more.” And yet this is only the language of a lady of easy virtue, not so far removed from the ladies in society. Theapachefurnishes more striking examples. But M. de Norpois and the German Prince, ifapachesand their ways were unknown to them, had been accustomed to living on the same plane as nations, which are also, despitetheir greatness, creatures of selfishness and cunning, kept in order only by force, by consideration of their material interests which may drive them to murder, a murder that is often symbolic also, since its mere hesitation or refusal to fight may spell for a nation the word “Perish”. But inasmuch as all this is not set forth in Yellow and otherwise coloured Books, the people as a whole are naturally pacific; should they be warlike, it is instinctively, from hatred, from a sense of injury, not for the reasons which have made up the mind of their ruler, on the advice of his Norpois.
The following winter the Prince was seriously ill; he recovered, but his heart was permanently affected.
“The devil!” he said to himself, “I can’t afford to lose any time over the Institute. If I wait too long, I may be dead before they elect me. That really would be unpleasant.”
He composed, on the foreign politics of the last twenty years, an essay for theRevue des Deux Mondes, in which he referred more than once, and in the most flattering terms, to M. de Norpois. The French diplomat called upon him to thank him. He added that he did not know how to express his gratitude. The Prince said to himself, like a man who has been trying to fit various keys into a stubborn lock: “Still not the right one!” and, feeling somewhat out of breath as he shewed M. de Norpois to the door, thought:“Damn“Damnit, these fellows will see me in my grave before letting me in. We must hurry up.”
That evening, he met M. de Norpois again at the Opera.
“My dear Ambassador,” he began to him, “you told me to-day that you did not know what you could do to prove your gratitude; it was a great exaggeration, for youowe me none, but I am going to be so indelicate as to take you at your word.”
M. de Norpois had no less high an esteem for the Prince’s tact than the Prince had for his. He understood at once that it was not a request that Prince von Faffenheim was about to present to him, but an offer, and with a radiant affability made ready to hear it.
“Well now, you will think me highly indiscreet. There are two people to whom I am greatly attached—in quite different ways, as you will understand in a moment—two people both of whom have recently settled in Paris, where they intend to remain for the future: my wife, and the Grand Duchess John. They are thinking of giving a few dinners, chiefly in honour of the King and Queen of England, and what they would have liked more than anything in the world would have been to be able to offer their guests the company of a person for whom, without knowing her, they both of them feel a great admiration. I confess that I did not know how I was going to gratify their wish when I learned just now, by the most extraordinary accident, that you were a friend of this person. I know that she lives a most retired life, and sees only a very few people—‘happy few,’ as Stendhal would say—but if you were to give me your backing, with the generosity that you have always shewn me, I am sure that she would allow you to present me to her and to convey to her the wishes of both the Grand Duchess and the Princess. Perhaps she would consent to dine with us, when the Queen of England comes, and then (one never knows) if we don’t bore her too much, to spend the Easter holidays with us at Beaulieu, at the Grand Duchess John’s. The person I allude to is called the Marquise de Villeparisis.I confess that the hope of becoming one of the frequenters of such a school of wit would console me, would make me contemplate without regret the abandoning of my attempt at the Institute. For in her house, too, I understand, there is a regular flow of intellect and brilliant talk.”
With an inexpressible sense of pleasure the Prince felt that the lock no longer resisted, and that at last the key was turning.
“Such an alternative is wholly unnecessary, my dear Prince,” replied M. de Norpois; “nothing is more in harmony with the Institute than the house you speak of, which is a regular hotbed of Academicians. I shall convey your request to Mme. la Marquise de Villeparisis: she will undoubtedly be flattered. As for her dining with you, she goes out very little, and that will perhaps be more difficult to arrange. But I shall present you to her and you can plead your cause in person. You must on no account give up the Academy; to-morrow fortnight, as it happens, I shall be having luncheon, before going on with him to an important meeting, at Leroy-Beaulieu’s, without whom nobody can be elected; I had already allowed myself in conversation with him to let fall your name, with which, naturally, he was perfectly familiar. He raised certain objections. But it so happens that he requires the support of my group at the next election, and I fully intend to return to the charge; I shall tell him quite openly of the wholly cordial ties that unite us, I shall not conceal from him that, if you were to stand, I should ask all my friends to vote for you,” (here the Prince breathed a deep sigh of relief) “and he knows that I have friends. I consider that if I were to succeedin obtaining his assistance your chances would become very strong. Come that evening, at six, to Mme. de Villeparisis’s; I will introduce you to her and I can give you an account then of my conversation with him.”
Thus it was that Prince von Faffenheim had been led to call upon Mme. de Villeparisis. My profound disillusionment occurred when he spoke. It had never struck me that, if an epoch in history has features both particular and general which are stronger than those of a nationality, so that in a biographical dictionary with illustrations, which go so far as to include an authentic portrait of Minerva, Leibniz with his wig and ruff differs little from Marivaux or Samuel Bernard, a nationality has particular features stronger than those of a caste. In the present instance these were rendered before me not by a discourse in which I had expected, before I saw him, to hear the rustling of the elves and the dance of the kobolds, but by a transposition which certified no less plainly that poetic origin: the fact that, as he bowed, short, red, corpulent, over the hand of Mme. de Villeparisis, the Rheingraf said to her: “Aow to you too, Matame la Marquise,” in the accent of an Alsatian porter.
“Won’t you let me give you a cup of tea or a little of this cake; it is so good?” Mme. de Guermantes asked me, anxious to have shewn herself as friendly as possible. “I do the honours in this house just as if it was mine,” she explained in an ironical tone which gave a slightly guttural sound to her voice, as though she were trying to stifle a hoarse laugh.
“Sir,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to M. de Norpois, “you won’t forget that you have something to say to the Prince about the Academy?”
Mme. de Guermantes lowered her eyes and gave a semicircular turn to her wrist to look at the time.
“Gracious! I must fly at once if I’m to get to Mme. de Saint-Ferréol’s, and I’m dining with Mme. Leroi.”
And she rose without bidding me good-bye. She had just caught sight of Mme. Swann, who appeared considerably embarrassed at finding me in the room. She remembered, doubtless, that she had been the first to assure me that she was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence.
“I don’t want my mother to introduce me to Mme. Swann,” Saint-Loup said to me. “She’s an ex-whore. Her husband’s a Jew, and she comes here to pose as a Nationalist. Hallo, here’s uncle Palamède.”
The arrival of Mme. Swann had a special interest for me, due to an incident which had occurred a few days earlier and which I am obliged to record on account of the consequences which it was to have at a much later date, as the reader will learn in due course. Well, a few days before this visit to Mme. de Villeparisis, I had myself received a visitor whom I little expected, namely Charles Morel, the son (though I had never heard of his existence) of my great-uncle’s old servant. This great-uncle (he in whose house I had met the lady in pink) had died the year before. His servant had more than once expressed his intention of coming to see me; I had no idea of the object of his visit, but should have been glad to see him for I had learned from Françoise that he had a genuine veneration for my uncle’s memory and made a pilgrimage regularly to the cemetery in which he was buried. But, being obliged, for reasons of health, to retire to his home in the country, where he expected to remain for some time, he delegated the duty to his son. I wassurprised to see come into my room a handsome young fellow of eighteen, dressed with expensive rather than good taste, but looking, all the same, like anything in the world except the son of a gentleman’s servant. He made a point, moreover, at the start of our conversation, of severing all connexion with the domestic class from which he sprang, by informing me, with a smile of satisfaction, that he had won the first prize at the Conservatoire. The object of his visit to me was as follows: his father, when going through the effects of my uncle Adolphe, had set aside some which, he felt, could not very well be sent to my parents but were at the same time of a nature likely to interest a young man of my age. These were the photographs of the famous actresses, the notorious courtesans whom my uncle had known, the last fading pictures of that gay life of a man about town which he divided by a watertight compartment from his family life. While young Morel was shewing them to me, I noticed that he addressed me as though he were speaking to an equal. He derived from saying “you” to me as often, and “sir” as seldom as possible the pleasure natural in one whose father had never ventured, when addressing my parents, upon anything but the third person. Almost all these photographs bore an inscription such as: “To my best friend.” One actress, less grateful and more circumspect than the rest, had written: “To the best of friends,” which enabled her (so I was assured) to say afterwards that my uncle was in no sense and had never been her best friend but was merely the friend who had done the most little services for her, the friend she made use of, a good, kind man, in other words an old fool. In vain might young Morel seek to divest himself of his lowly origin, one felt thatthe shade of my uncle Adolphe, venerable and gigantic in the eyes of the old servant, had never ceased to hover, almost a holy vision, over the childhood and boyhood of the son. While I was turning over the photographs Charles Morel examined my room. And as I was looking for some place in which I might keep them, “How is it,” he asked me (in a tone in which the reproach had no need to find expression, so implicit was it in the words themselves), “that I don’t see a single photograph of your uncle in your room?” I felt the blood rise to my cheeks and stammered: “Why, I don’t believe I have such a thing.” “What, you haven’t one photograph of your uncle Adolphe, who was so devoted to you! I will send you one of my governor’s—he has quantities of them—and I hope you will set it up in the place of honour above that chest of drawers, which came to you from your uncle.” It is true that, as I had not even a photograph of my father or mother in my room, there was nothing so very shocking in there not being one of my uncle Adolphe. But it was easy enough to see that for old Morel, who had trained his son in the same way of thinking, my uncle was the important person in the family, my parents only reflecting a diminished light from his. I was in higher favour, because my uncle used constantly to say that I was going to turn out a sort of Racine, or Vaulabelle, and Morel regarded me almost as an adopted son, as a child by election of my uncle. I soon discovered that this young man was extremely “pushing”. Thus at this first meeting he asked me, being something of a composer as well and capable of setting short poems to music, whether I knew any poet who had a good position in society. I mentioned one. He did not know the work of this poetand had never heard his name, of which he made a note. Well, I found out that shortly afterwards he wrote to the poet telling him that, a fanatical admirer of his work, he, Morel, had composed a musical setting for one of his sonnets and would be grateful if the author would arrange for its performance at the Comtesse so-and-so’s. This was going a little too fast, and exposing his hand. The poet, taking offence, made no reply.
For the rest, Charles Morel seemed to have, besides his ambition, a strong leaning towards more concrete realities. He had noticed, as he came through the courtyard, Jupien’s niece at work upon a waistcoat, and although he explained to me only that he happened to want a fancy waistcoat at that very moment, I felt that the girl had made a vivid impression on him. He had no hesitation about asking me to come downstairs and introduce him to her, “but not as a connexion of your family, you follow me, I rely on your discretion not to drag in my father, say just a distinguished artist of your acquaintance, you know how important it is to make a good impression on tradespeople.” Albeit he had suggested to me that, not knowing him well enough to call him, he quite realised, “dear friend,” I might address him, before the girl, in some such terms as “not dear master, of course, ... although ... well, if you like, dear distinguished artist,” once in the shop, I avoided “qualifying” him, as Saint-Simon would have expressed it, and contented myself with reiterating his “you”. He picked out from several patterns of velvet one of the brightest red imaginable and so loud that, for all his bad taste, he was never able to wear the waistcoat when it was made. The girl settled down to work again with her two“apprentices”, but it struck me that the impression had been mutual, and that Charles Morel, whom she regarded as of her own “station” (only smarter and richer), had proved singularly attractive to her. As I had been greatly surprised to find among the photographs which his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir, I said to Charles Morel as I went with him to the outer gate: “I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well? I don’t see at what stage in his life I can fit her in exactly; and it interests me, because of M. Swann....” “Why, if I wasn’t forgetting to tell you that my father asked me specially to draw your attention to that lady’s picture. As a matter of fact, she was ‘lunching’ with your uncle the last time you ever saw him. My father was in two minds whether to let you in. It seems you made a great impression on the wench, and she hoped to see more of you. But just at that time there was some trouble in the family, by what my father tells me, and you never set eyes on your uncle again.” He broke off with a smile of farewell, across the courtyard, at Jupien’s niece. She was watching him and admiring, no doubt, his thin face and regular features, his fair hair and sparkling eyes. I, as I gave him my hand, was thinking of Mme. Swann and saying to myself with amazement, so far apart, so different were they in my memory, that I should have henceforth to identify her with the “Lady in pink.”
M. de Charlus was not long in taking his place by the side of Mme. Swann. At every social gathering at which he appeared and, contemptuous towards the men, courted by the women, promptly attached himself to the smartest of the latter, whose garments he seemed almost to puton as an ornament to his own, the Baron’s frock coat or swallowtails made one think of a portrait by some great painter of a man dressed in black but having by his side, thrown over a chair, the brilliantly coloured cloak which he is about to wear at some costume ball. This partnership, generally with some royal lady, secured for M. de Charlus various privileges which he liked to enjoy. For instance, one result of it was that his hostesses, at theatricals or concerts, allowed the Baron alone to have a front seat, in a row of ladies, while the rest of the men were crowded together at the back of the room. And then besides, completely absorbed, it seemed, in repeating, at the top of his voice, amusing stories to the enraptured lady, M. de Charlus was dispensed from the necessity of going to shake hands with any of the others, was set free, in other words, from all social duties. Behind the scented barrier in which the beauty of his choice enclosed him, he was isolated amid a crowded drawing-room, as, in a crowded theatre or concert-hall, behind the rampart of a box; and when anyone came up to greet him, through, so to speak, the beauty of his companion, it was permissible for him to reply quite curtly and without interrupting his business of conversation with a lady. Certainly Mme. Swann was scarcely of the rank of the people with whom he liked thus to flaunt himself. But he professed admiration for her, friendship for Swann, he knew that she would be flattered by his attentions and was himself flattered at being compromised by the prettiest woman in the room.
Mme. de Villeparisis meanwhile was not too well pleased to receive a visit from M. de Charlus. He, while admitting serious defects in his aunt’s character, was genuinely fondof her. But every now and then, carried away by anger, by an imaginary grievance, he would sit down and write to her, without making any attempt to resist his impulse, letters full of the most violent abuse, in which he made the most of trifling incidents which until then he seemed never even to have noticed. Among other examples I may instance the following, which my stay at Balbec brought to my knowledge: Mme. de Villeparisis, fearing that she had not brought enough money with her to Balbec to enable her to prolong her holiday there, and not caring, since she was of a thrifty disposition and shrank from unnecessary expenditure, to have money sent to her from Paris, had borrowed three thousand francs from M. de Charlus. A month later, annoyed, for some trivial reason, with his aunt, he asked her to repay him this sum by telegraph. He received two thousand nine hundred and ninety-odd francs. Meeting his aunt a few days later in Paris, in the course of a friendly conversation, he drew her attention, with the utmost politeness, to the mistake that her banker had made when sending the money. “But there was no mistake,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis, “the money order cost six francs seventy-five.” “Oh, of course, if it was intentional, it is all right,” said M. de Charlus, “I mentioned it only in case you didn’t know, because in that case, if the bank had done the same thing with anyone who didn’t know you as well as I do, it might have led to unpleasantness.” “No, no, there was no mistake.” “After all, you were quite right,” M. de Charlus concluded easily, stooping to kiss his aunt’s hand. And in fact he bore no resentment and was only amused at this little instance of her thrift. But some time afterwards, imagining that, in a family matter, his aunt had beentrying to get the better of him and had “worked up a regular conspiracy” against him, as she took shelter, foolishly enough, behind the lawyers with whom he suspected her of having plotted to undo him, he had written her a letter boiling over with insolence and rage. “I shall not be satisfied with having my revenge,” he added as a postscript; “I shall take care to make you a laughing-stock. To-morrow I shall tell everyone the story of the money order and the six francs seventy-five you kept back from me out of the three thousand I lent you; I shall disgrace you publicly.” Instead of so doing, he had gone to his aunt the next day to beg her pardon, having already regretted a letter in which he had used some really terrible language. But apart from this, to whom could he have told the story of the money order? Seeking no longer vengeance but a sincere reconciliation, now was the time for him to keep silence. But already he had repeated the story everywhere, while still on the best of terms with his aunt; he had told it without any malice, as a joke, and because he was the soul of indiscretion. He had repeated the story, but without Mme. de Villeparisis’s knowledge. With the result that, having learned from his letter that he intended to disgrace her by making public a transaction in which he had told her with his own lips that she had acted rightly, she concluded that he had been deceiving her from the first, and had lied when he pretended to be fond of her. This storm had now died down, but neither of them knew what opinion exactly the other had of her or him. This sort of intermittent quarrel is of course somewhat exceptional. Of a different order were the quarrels of Bloch and his friends. Of a different order again were those of M. de Charlus, as we shall presentlysee, with people wholly unlike Mme. de Villeparisis. In spite of which we must bear in mind that the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself. Whence all the rumours of divorce between couples who have always seemed so perfectly united and will soon afterwards speak of one another with affection, hence all the terrible things said by one friend of another from whom we supposed him to be inseparable and with whom we shall find him once more reconciled before we have had time to recover from our surprise; all the ruptures of alliances, after so short a time, between nations.
“I say, my uncle and Mme. Swann are getting warm over there!” remarked Saint-Loup. “And look at Mamma in the innocence of her heart going across to disturb them. To the pure all things are pure, I suppose!”
I studied M. de Charlus. The tuft of his grey hair, his eye, the brow of which was raised by his monocle to emit a smile, the red flowers in his buttonhole formed, so to speak, the three mobile apices of a convulsive and striking triangle. I had not ventured to bow to him, for he had given me no sign of recognition. And yet, albeit he had not turned his head in my direction, I was convinced that he had seen me; while he repeated some story to Mme. Swann, whose sumptuous, pansy-coloured cloak floated actually over the Baron’s knee, his roving eye, like that of a street hawker who is watching all the time for the “tecs” to appear, had certainly explored every corner of the room and taken note of all the people who were in it. M. de Châtellerault came up to bid him good day without any indication on M. de Charlus’s face that hehad seen the young Duke until he was actually standing in front of him. In this way, in fairly numerous gatherings such as this, M. de Charlus kept almost continuously on show a smile without any definite direction or particular object, which, pre-existing before the greetings of new arrivals, found itself, when these entered its zone, devoid of any indication of friendliness towards them. Nevertheless, it was obviously my duty to go across and speak to Mme. Swann. But as she was not certain whether I already knew Mme. de Marsantes and M. de Charlus, she was distinctly cold, fearing no doubt that I might ask her to introduce me to them. I then made my way to M. de Charlus, and at once regretted it, for though he could not have helped seeing me he shewed no sign whatsoever. As I stood before him and bowed I found standing out from his body, which it prevented me from approaching by the full length of his outstretched arm, a finger widowed, one would have said, of an episcopal ring, of which he appeared to be offering, for the kiss of the faithful, the consecrated site, and I was made to appear to have penetrated, without leave from the Baron and by an act of trespass for which he would hold me permanently responsible, the anonymous and vacant dispersion of his smile. This coldness was hardly of a kind to encourage Mme. Swann to melt from hers.
“How tired and worried you look,” said Mme. de Marsantes to her son who had come up to greet M. de Charlus.
And indeed the expression in Robert’s eyes seemed every minute to reach a depth from which it rose at once like a diver who has touched bottom. This bottom which hurt Robert so when he touched it that he left it at once,to return to it a moment later, was the thought that he had quarrelled with his mistress.
“Never mind,” his mother went on, stroking his cheek, “never mind; it’s good to see my little boy again.”
But this show of affection seeming to irritate Robert, Mme. de Marsantes led her son away to the other end of the room where in an alcove hung with yellow silk a group of Beauvais armchairs massed their violet-hued tapestries like purple irises in a field of buttercups. Mme. Swann, finding herself alone and having realised that I was a friend of Saint-Loup, beckoned to me to come and sit beside her. Not having seen her for so long I did not know what to talk to her about. I was keeping an eye on my hat, among the crowd of hats that littered the carpet, and I asked myself with a vague curiosity to whom one of them could belong which was not that of the Duc de Guermantes and yet in the lining of which a capital ‘G’ was surmounted by a ducal coronet. I knew who everyone in the room was, and could not think of anyone whose hat this could possibly be.
“What a pleasant man M. de Norpois is,” I said to Mme. Swann, looking at the Ambassador. “It is true, Robert de Saint-Loup says he’s a pest, but ...”
“He is quite right,” she replied.
Seeing from her face that she was thinking of something which she was keeping from me, I plied her with questions. For the satisfaction of appearing to be greatly taken up by some one in this room where she knew hardly anyone, she took me into a corner.
“I am sure this is what M. de Saint-Loup meant,” she began, “but you must never tell him I said so, for he would think me indiscreet, and I value his esteemvery highly; I am an ‘honest Injun,’ don’t you know. The other day, Charlus was dining at the Princesse de Guermantes’s; I don’t know how it was, but your name was mentioned. M. de Norpois seems to have told them—it’s all too silly for words, don’t go and worry yourself to death over it, nobody paid any attention, they all knew only too well the mischievous tongue that said it—that you were a hypocritical little flatterer.”
I have recorded a long way back my stupefaction at the discovery that a friend of my father, such as M. de Norpois was, could have expressed himself thus in speaking of me. I was even more astonished to learn that my emotion on that evening long ago when I had asked him about Mme. Swann and Gilberte was known to the Princesse de Guermantes, whom I imagined never to have heard of my existence. Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the “world”, from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourself; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated (such as those so enthusiastic speeches which I used at one time to make to all comers and on every occasion on the subject of Mme. Swann) has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourself have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances—in the present instance to the Princesse de Guermantes—and succeed in divertingat our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbour; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behaviour is no more like that which we form of them ourself, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature which we behold merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourself, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourself bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognise ourself in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you shew him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labelled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stuporif an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.”
A few years earlier I should have been only too glad to tell Mme. Swann in what connexion I had fawned upon M. de Norpois, since the connexion had been my desire to know her. But I no longer felt this desire, I was no longer in love with Gilberte. On the other hand I had not succeeded in identifying 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 bow to Mme. Swann when they met, the latter chose to appear to regard her as a person of no importance, whose presence in a room one did not even remark.
“I don’t know; I didn’trealiseher,” she replied sourly, using an expression borrowed from England.
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 conversation not to give pleasure to others but to elucidate, from sheer egoism, facts that are interesting 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 people. I’ve heard that she’s begun to go about quite a lot lately, but I must explain to you that I am rather old now to make new acquaintances. I have known suchinteresting, such delightful people in my time that really I do not believe Mme. Leroi would be any addition to what I already have.” Mme. de Marsantes, who was playing lady in waiting to the Marquise, presented me to the Prince, and, while she was still doing so, M. de Norpois also presented me in the most glowing terms. Perhaps he found it convenient to do me a courtesy which could in no way damage his credit since I had just been presented, perhaps it was because he thought that a foreigner, even so distinguished a foreigner, was unfamiliar with French society and might think that he was having introduced to him a young man of fashion, perhaps 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, that two sponsors were necessary if one wished to be presented.
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.
“Am I not right, M. l’Ambassadeur, Mme. Leroi is quite uninteresting, isn’t she, quite out of keeping with the people who come here; I was quite right not to make friends with her, wasn’t I?”
Whether from independence or because he was tired, M. de Norpois replied merely in a bow full of respect but devoid of meaning.
“Sir,” 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 such a remark had been prompted by a concupiscence so natural that one could not find fault with the person who had uttered it, almost as though it were the beginning of a romance which he was prepared to forgive, if not to encourage, with the perverse indulgence of a Voisenon or the younger Crébillon.
“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 of the first order, and indicate, as people say nowadays, a fine painter, one of the masters of the palette,” declared M. de Norpois; “I consider, all the same, that they stand no comparison with these, in which I find it easier to recognise the colouring of the flower.”
Even supposing that the partiality of an old lover, the habit of flattering people, the critical standard admissible in a small circle had dictated this speech to the ex-Ambassador, it proved upon what an absolute vacuum of true taste the judgment of people in society is based, so arbitrary that the smallest trifle can make it rush to the wildest absurdities, on the way to which it is stopped, held up by no genuinely felt impression.
“I claim no credit for knowing about flowers, I’ve lived all my life among the fields,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis modestly. “But,” she added graciously, turning to the Prince, “If I did, when I was quite a girl, form a rather more serious idea of them than children generally do in the country, I owe that to a distinguished fellow-countrymanof yours, Herr von Schlegel. I met him at Broglie, when I was staying there once with 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, I wasn’t able to follow 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 have got the book still, 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 looked for nothing from nature but arguments in support of religion.”
Robert called me away to the far end of the room where he and his mother were.
“You have been good to me,” I said, “how can I thank you? Can we dine together to-morrow?”
“To-morrow? 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. (At least, he didn’t tell me that that was what had annoyed 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 can feel it’s a life and death friendship.” Nor do I consider that Robert was altogether mistaken. Furious detraction was often, with Bloch, the effect of a keen affection which he had supposed to be unreturned. Andas he had little power of imagining the lives of other people, 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 meaning a deliberate coldness. And so I have never believed that his most violent outbursts as a friend, or in later years as a writer, went very deep. They rose to a paroxysm if one replied to them with an icy dignity, or by a platitude which encouraged him to redouble his onslaught, but yielded often to a warmly sympathetic attitude; “As for being good,” went on Saint-Loup, “you say I have been to you, but I haven’t been good at all, my aunt tells me that it’s you who avoid her, that you never said a word to her. She wondered whether you had anything against her.”
Fortunately for myself, if I had been taken in by this speech, our departure, which I believed to be imminent, for Balbec would have prevented my making any attempt to see Mme. Guermantes again, to assure her that I had nothing against her, and so to 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. Besides, this was not a disappointment; I had never expected her to begin talking to me about them; I knew that I did not appeal to her, that I need have no hope of ever making her like me; the most that I had been able to look forward to was that, thanks to her kindness, I might there and then receive, since I should not be seeing her again before I left Paris, an entirely pleasing impression, which I could take with me to Balbec indefinitely prolonged, intact, instead of a memory broken by anxiety and sorrow.
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 treated me with a deference which almost hurt me because I felt it to be prompted by her fear of being embroiled, on my account, with this son whom she had not seen all day, with whom she was eager to be alone, and over whom she must accordingly have supposed that the influence which she wielded was not equal to and must conciliate mine. Having heard me, earlier in the afternoon, make some reference to Bloch’s 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,” would have been Bloch’s comment.
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 had she shewn any 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 left the room, I had more leisure to observe Robert, and I noticed then for the first time that, once again, a sort of flood of anger seemed to be coursing through him, 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 withoutmaking 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, making a sign to me to follow him into the smaller room. I was hurrying after him when M. de Charlus, who must 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 little room he said, without looking at me:
“As I see that you have taken to going into society, you must do me the pleasure of coming to see me. But it’s a little complicated,” he went on with a distracted, 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 am just going. Will you walk a short way with me? I shall only keep you a moment.”
“You’ld better take care, sir,” I warned him; “you have picked up the wrong hat by mistake.”
“Do you want to stop me 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 bare-headed, and that I had placed him in a difficulty by exposing hisstratagemstratagem. I told him that I must say a few words toSaint-Loup. “He is still talking to that idiot the Duc de Guermantes,” I added. “That really is charming; 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 also. Saint-Loup had indeed explained his family tree to me at Balbec, but I had forgotten the details.) “Who has been talking to you about M. de Charlus?” replied the Baron in an arrogant tone. “Go to Robert.”
“I hear,” he went on, “that you took part this morning in one of those 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 had, I felt, been wounded, I sought to find an excuse for 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, even 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 as she ignores all the other points, the moment the man begins to feel the need of her company, or is demoralised by separation from her, his weakness will make his conscience more exacting, he will remember the absurd reproaches that have beenflung at him and will ask himself whether they have not some foundation in fact.
“I’ve come to the conclusion I was wrong about that matter of the necklace,” Robert said to me. “Of course, I never meant for a moment to do anything wrong, but, I know very well, 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 was bound to appear just the rich man who thinks he can get anything he wants with his money, and with whom a poor person cannot compete, whether in trying to influence Boucheron or in a lawsuit. Of course she has been horribly cruel to me, when I have never thought of anything but her good. But I do see clearly, she believes that 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 of me? Poor darling, if you only knew, she has such charming ways, I simply can’t tell you, she has often done the most adorable things for me. How wretched she must be feeling now! In any case, whatever happens in the long run, I don’t want to let her think me a cad; I shall dash off to Boucheron’s and get the necklace. You never know; very likely when she sees me with it, she will admit that she’s been in the wrong. Don’t you see, it’s the idea that she is suffering at this moment that I can’t bear. What one suffers oneself one knows; that’s nothing. But with her—to say to oneself that she’s suffering and not to be able to form any idea of what she feels—I think I shall go mad in a minute—I’ld much rather never see her again than let her suffer. She can be happy without me, if she must; that’s all I ask. Listen; you know, to me everything thatconcerns her is enormously important, it becomes something cosmic; I shall run to the jeweller’s and then go and ask her to forgive me. But until I get down there what will she be thinking of me? If she could only know that I was on my way! What about your going down there and telling her? For all we know, that might settle the whole business. Perhaps,” he went on with a smile, as though he hardly ventured to believe in so idyllic a possibility, “we can all three dine together in the country. But we can’t tell yet. I never know how to handle her. Poor child, I shall perhaps only hurt her more than ever. Besides, her decision may be irrevocable.”