“With the utmost politeness I took the liberty of suggesting to her that this might seem a little unusual. And she said—I give you her actual words—‘One ought always to recite a thing as though one were just composing it oneself.’ It’s really monumental, that reply, when you come to think of it!”
“But I understood she wasn’t at all bad at reciting poetry,” said one of the two young men.
“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme de Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell that. It was quite enough to see her arriving with her lilies. I knew at once that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!”
Everybody laughed.
“I hope, my dear aunt, you weren’t annoyed by my little joke the other day about the Queen of Sweden. I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.”
“Oh, no, I’m not at all angry, I even give you leave to eat at my table, if you’re hungry,—Come along, M. Vallenères, you’re the daughter of the house,” Mme de Villeparisis went on to the archivist, repeating a time-honoured pleasantry.
M. de Guermantes sat up in the armchair into which he had sunk, his hat on the carpet by his side, and examined with a satisfied smile the plate of cakes that was being held out to him.
“Why, certainly, now that I’m beginning to feel at home in this distinguished company, I will take a sponge-cake; they look excellent.”
“This gentleman makes you an admirable daughter,” commented M. d’Argencourt, whom the spirit of imitation prompted to keep Mme de Villeparisis’s little joke in circulation.
The archivist handed the plate of cakes to the historian of the Fronde.
“You perform your functions admirably,” said the latter, startled into speech, and hoping also to win the sympathy of the crowd. At the same time he cast a covert glance of connivance at those who had anticipated him.
“Tell me, my dear aunt,” M. de Guermantes inquired of Mme de Villeparisis, “who was that rather handsome-looking gentleman who was leaving just now as I came in? I must know him, because he gave me a sweeping bow, but I couldn’t place him at all; you know I never can remember names, it’s such a nuisance,” he added with a self-satisfied air.
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mistaken, was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a Grandin de l’Eprevier.”
“No,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’d be only too glad to be Grandins of anything you choose to name. This one has a sister called Mme de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who my aunt means,” cried the Duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great graminivorous creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I’d go mad. But I began by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person I didn’t know come browsing into the room looking exactly like a cow.”
“Look here, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at home; I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do exaggerate so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plaintive tone, though not without a furtive smiling glance round the audience.
He knew that his wife’s conversational zest needed the stimulus of contradiction, the contradiction of common sense which protests that one cannot, for instance, mistake a woman for a cow. It was in this way that Mme de Guermantes, improving on a preliminary notion, had been inspired to produce many of her wittiest sallies. And the Duke would come forward with feigned naïvety to help her to bring off her effects, like the unacknowledged partner of a three-card trickster in a railway carriage.
“I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like several,” exclaimed Mme de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know what to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my drawing-room in a hat and asking me how I was. I had half a mind to say: ‘Please, herd of cattle, you must be making a mistake, you can’t possibly know me, because you’re a herd of cattle,’ but after racking my brains I came to the conclusion that your Cambremer woman must be the Infanta Dorothea, who had said she was coming to see me one day and who is rather bovine too, so that I was just on the point of saying ‘Your Royal Highness’ and using the third person to a herd of cattle. She’s also got the same sort of dewlap as the Queen of Sweden. But actually this mass attack had been prepared for by long-range artillery fire, according to all the rules of war. For I don’t know how long before, I was bombarded with her cards; I used to find them lying about all over the house, on all the tables and chairs, like prospectuses. I couldn’t think what they were supposed to be advertising. You saw nothing in the house but ‘Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer’ with some address or other which I’ve forgotten and which you may be quite sure I shall never make use of.”
“But it’s very flattering to be taken for a queen,” said the historian of the Fronde.
“Good God, sir, kings and queens don’t amount to much these days,” said M. de Guermantes, partly because he liked to be thought broad-minded and modern, and also so as not to seem to attach any importance to his own royal connexions, which he valued highly.
Bloch and M. de Norpois had risen and were now in our vicinity.
“Well, Monsieur,” asked Mme de Villeparisis, “have you been talking to him about the Dreyfus case?”
M. de Norpois raised his eyes to the ceiling, but with a smile, as though calling on heaven to witness the enormity of the whims to which his Dulcinea compelled him to submit. Nevertheless he spoke to Bloch with great affability of the terrible, perhaps fatal period through which France was passing. As this presumably meant that M. de Norpois (to whom Bloch had confessed his belief in the innocence of Dreyfus) was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, the Ambassador’s geniality, his air of tacit admission that his interlocutor was in the right, of never doubting that they were both of the same opinion, of joining forces with him to denounce the Government, flattered Bloch’s vanity and aroused his curiosity. What were the important points which M. de Norpois never specified but on which he seemed implicitly to affirm that he was in agreement with Bloch? What opinion did he hold of the case that could bring them together? Bloch was all the more astonished at the mysterious unanimity which seemed to exist between him and M. de Norpois, in that it was not confined to politics, Mme de Villeparisis having spoken at some length to M. de Norpois of Bloch’s literary work.
“You are not of your age,” the former Ambassador told him, “and I congratulate you upon that. You are not of this age in which disinterested work no longer exists, in which writers offer the public nothing but obscenities or inanities. Efforts such as yours ought to be encouraged, and would be if we had a Government.”
Bloch was flattered by this picture of himself swimming alone amid a universal shipwreck. But here again he would have been glad of details, would have liked to know what were the inanities to which M. de Norpois referred. Bloch had the feeling that he was working along the same lines as plenty of others; he had never supposed himself to be so exceptional. He returned to the Dreyfus case, but did not succeed in disentangling M. de Norpois’s own views. He tried to induce him to speak of the officers whose names were appearing constantly in the newspapers at that time; they aroused more curiosity than the politicians who were involved in the affair, because they were not, like the politicians, well known already, but, wearing a special garb, emerging from the obscurity of a different kind of life and a religiously guarded silence, had only just appeared on the scene and spoken, like Lohengrin landing from a skiff drawn by a swan. Bloch had been able, thanks to a Nationalist lawyer of his acquaintance, to secure admission to several hearings of the Zola trial. He would arrive there in the morning and stay until the court rose, with a supply of sandwiches and a flask of coffee, as though for the final examination for a degree, and this change of routine stimulating a nervous excitement which the coffee and the e
motional interest of the trial worked up to a climax, he would come away so enamoured of everything that had happened in court that when he returned home in the evening he longed to immerse himself again in the thrilling drama and would hurry out to a restaurant frequented by both parties in search of friends with whom he would go over the day’s proceedings interminably and make up, by a supper ordered in an imperious tone which gave him the illusion of power, for the hunger and exhaustion of a day begun so early and unbroken by any interval for lunch. The human mind, hovering perpetually between the two planes of experience and imagination, seeks to fathom the ideal life of the people it knows and to know the people whose life it has had to imagine. To Bloch’s questions M. de Norpois replied:
“There are two officers in the case now being tried of whom I remember hearing some time ago from a man whose judgment inspired me with the greatest confidence, and who had a high opinion of them both—I mean M. de Miribel. They are Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart.”
“But,” exclaimed Bloch, “the divine Athena, daughter of Zeus, has put in the mind of each the opposite of what is in the mind of the other. And they are fighting against one another like two lions. Colonel Picquart had a splendid position in the Army, but his Moira has led him to the side that was not rightly his. The sword of the Nationalists will carve his tender flesh, and he will be cast out as food for the beasts of prey and the birds that feed on the fat of dead men.”
M. de Norpois made no reply.
“What are those two palavering about over there?” M. de Guermantes asked Mme de Villeparisis, pointing to M. de Norpois and Bloch.
“The Dreyfus case.”
“The devil they are. By the way, do you know who is a rabid supporter of Dreyfus? I give you a thousand guesses. My nephew Robert! I can tell you that when they heard of his goings-on at the Jockey there was a fine gathering of the clans, a regular outcry. And as he’s coming up for election next week . . .”
“Of course,” broke in the Duchess, “if they’re all like Gilbert, who’s always maintained that all the Jews ought to be sent back to Jerusalem . . .”
“Ah! then the Prince de Guermantes is quite of my way of thinking,” put in M. d’Argencourt.
The Duke showed off his wife, but did not love her. Extremely self-important, he hated to be interrupted, and was moreover in the habit of being rude to her at home. Quivering with the twofold rage of a bad husband when his wife speaks to him, and a glib talker when he is not listened to, he stopped short and transfixed the Duchess with a glare which made everyone feel uncomfortable.
“What makes you think we want to hear about Gilbert and Jerusalem?” he said at last. “That’s got nothing to do with it. But,” he went on in a gentler tone, “you must admit that if one of our family were to be black-balled at the Jockey, especially Robert whose father was president for ten years, it would be the limit. What do you expect, my dear, it’s caught ’em on the raw, those fellows, it made them roll their eyes. I don’t blame them, either; personally, you know that I have no racial prejudice, all that sort of thing seems to me out of date, and I do claim to move with the times; but damn it all, when one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup one isn’t a Dreyfusard. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
M. de Guermantes uttered the words “when one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup” with some emphasis. And yet he knew very well that it was a far greater thing to go by that of Duc de Guermantes. But if his self-esteem had a tendency to exaggerate if anything the superiority of the title Duc de Guermantes over all others, it was perhaps not so much the rules of good taste as the laws of imagination that prompted him thus to diminish it. Each of us sees in brighter colours what he sees at a distance, what he sees in other people. For the general laws which govern perspective in imagination apply just as much to dukes as to ordinary mortals. And not only the laws of imagination, but those of speech. Now, one or other of two laws of speech might apply here. One of them demands that we should express ourselves like others of our mental category and not of our caste. Under this law M. de Guermantes might, in his choice of expressions, even when he wished to talk about the nobility, be indebted to the humblest little tradesman, who would have said: “When one goes by the name of Duc de Guermantes,” whereas an educated man, a Swann, a Legrandin, would not have said it. A duke may write novels worthy of a grocer, even about life in high society, titles and pedigrees being of no help to him there, and the writings of a plebeian may deserve the epithet “aristocratic.” Who in this instance had been the inferior from whom M. de Guermantes had picked up “when one goes by the name,” he had probably not the least idea. But another law of speech is that, from time to time, as diseases appear and then vanish of which nothing more is ever heard, there come into being, no one knows how, spontaneously perhaps or by an accident like that which introduced into France a certain weed from America the seeds of which, caught in the wool of a travelling rug, fell on a railway embankment, modes of expression which one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have not in any way combined together to that end. So, just as in a certain year I heard Bloch say, referring to himself, that “the most charming people, the most brilliant, the best known, the most exclusive had discovered that there was only one man in Paris whom they felt to be intelligent and agreeable, whom they could not do without—namely Bloch,” and heard the same remark used by countless other young men who did not know him and varied it only by substituting their own names for his, so I was often to hear this “when one goes by the name.”
“What do you expect,” the Duke went on, “with the attitude he’s adopted, it’s fairly understandable.”
“It’s more comic than anything else,” said the Duchess, “when you think of his mother’s attitude, how she bores us to tears with her Patrie française, morning, noon and night.”
“Yes, but there’s not only his mother to be thought of, you can’t humbug us like that. There’s a wench, a bed-hopper of the worst type; she has far more influence over him than his mother, and she happens to be a compatriot of Master Dreyfus. She has infected Robert with her way of thinking.”
“You may not have heard, Duke, that there is a new word to describe that sort of attitude,” said the archivist, who was Secretary to the Committee against Reconsideration. “One says ‘mentality.’ It means exactly the same thing, but it has the advantage that nobody knows what you’re talking about. It’s the ne plus ultra just now, the ‘latest thing,’ as they say.”
Meanwhile, having heard Bloch’s name, he watched him question M. de Norpois with misgivings which aroused others as strong though of a different order in the Marquise. Trembling before the archivist, and always acting the anti-Dreyfusard in his presence, she dreaded what he would say were he to find out that she had asked to her house a Jew more or less affiliated to the “Syndicate.”15
“Indeed,” said the Duke, “‘mentality,’ you say. I must make a note of that and trot it out one of these days.” (This was no figure of speech, the Duke having a little pocket-book filled with “quotations” which he used to consult before dinner-parties.) “I like ‘mentality.’ There are a lot of new words like that which people suddenly start using, but they never last. Some time ago I read that a writer was ‘talentuous.’ Damned if I know what it means. And since then I’ve never come across the word again.”
“But ‘mentality’ is more widely used than ‘talentuous,’ ” the historian of the Fronde put in his oar. “I’m on a committee at the Ministry of Education where I’ve heard it used several times, as well as at my club, the Volney, and even at dinner at M. Emile Ollivier’s.”
“I who have not the honour to belong to the Ministry of Education,” replied the Duke with a feigned humility but with a vanity so intense that his lips could not refrain from curving in a smile, nor his eyes from casting round his audience a glance sparkling with joy, the ironical scorn in which made the poor historian blush, “I who have not the honour to belong to the Minis
try of Education,” he repeated, relishing the sound of his own voice, “nor to the Volney Club. My only clubs are the Union and the Jockey—you aren’t in the Jockey, I think, sir?” he asked the historian, who, reddening still further, scenting an insult and failing to understand it, began to tremble in every limb. “I who am not even invited to dine with M. Emile Ollivier, I must confess that I had never heard ‘mentality.’ I’m sure you’re in the same boat, Argencourt . . . You know,” he went on, “why they can’t produce the proofs of Dreyfus’s guilt. Apparently it’s because he’s the lover of the War Minister’s wife, that’s what people are saying on the sly.”
“Ah! I thought it was the Prime Minister’s wife,” said M. d’Argencourt.
“I think you’re all equally tiresome about this wretched case,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, in the social sphere, was always anxious to show that she did not allow herself to be led by anyone. “It can’t make any difference to me so far as the Jews are concerned, for the simple reason that I don’t know any of them and I intend to remain in that state of blissful ignorance. But on the other hand I do think it perfectly intolerable that just because they’re supposed to be right-thinking and don’t deal with Jewish tradesmen, or have ‘Down with the Jews’ written on their sunshades, we should have a swarm of Durands and Dubois and so forth, women we should never have known but for this business, forced down our throats by Marie-Aynard or Victurnienne. I went to see Marie-Aynard a couple of days ago. It used to be so nice there. Nowadays one finds all the people one has spent one’s life trying to avoid, on the pretext that they’re against Dreyfus, and others of whom you have no idea who they can be.”
“No, it was the War Minister’s wife; at least, that’s the talk of the coffee-houses,” went on the Duke, who liked to flavour his conversation with certain expressions which he imagined to be of the old school. “Personally, of course, as everyone knows, I take just the opposite view to my cousin Gilbert. I’m not feudal like him, I’d go about with a negro if he was a friend of mine, and I shouldn’t care two straws what anybody thought; still, after all you must agree with me that when one goes by the name of Saint-Loup one doesn’t amuse oneself by flying in the face of public opinion, which has more sense than Voltaire or even my nephew. Nor does one go in for what I may be allowed to call these acrobatics of conscience a week before one comes up for a club. It really is a bit stiff! No, it’s probably that little tart of his who worked him up to it. I expect she told him he would be classed among the ‘intellectuals.’ The intellectuals, that’s the shibboleth of those gentlemen. It’s given rise, by the way, to a rather amusing pun, though a very naughty one.”
The Guermantes Way Page 29
