One day, outside the Grand Hotel, where we were gathered on the front, I had just been addressing Albertine in the harshest, most humiliating language, and Rosemonde was saying: “Ah, how you’ve changed towards her; she used to be the only one who counted, it was she who ruled the roost, and now she isn’t even fit to be thrown to the dogs.” I was proceeding, in order to make my attitude towards Albertine still more marked, to say all the nicest possible things to Andrée, who, if she was tainted with the same vice, seemed to me more excusable since she was sickly and neurasthenic, when we saw Mme de Cambremer’s barouche, drawn by its two horses at a jog-trot, coming into the side street at the corner of which we were standing. The judge, who at that moment was advancing towards us, sprang back upon recognising the carriage, in order not to be seen in our company; then, when he thought that the Marquise’s eye might catch his, bowed to her with an immense sweep of his hat. But the carriage, instead of continuing along the Rue de la Mer as might have been expected, disappeared through the gate of the hotel. It was quite ten minutes later when the liftboy, out of breath, came to announce to me: “It’s the Marquise de Camembert who’s come to see Monsieur. I’ve been up to the room, I looked in the reading-room, I couldn’t find Monsieur anywhere. Luckily I thought of looking on the beach.” He had barely ended his speech when, followed by her daughter-in-law and by an extremely ceremonious gentleman, the Marquise advanced towards me, having probably come on from some tea-party in the neighbourhood, bowed down not so much by age as by the mass of costly trinkets with which she felt it more sociable and more befitting her rank to cover herself, in order to appear as “dressed up” as possible to the people whom she went to visit. It was in fact that “descent” of the Cambremers on the hotel which my grandmother had so greatly dreaded when she wanted us not to let Legrandin know that we might perhaps be going to Balbec. Then Mamma used to laugh at these fears inspired by an event which she considered impossible. And here it was actually happening, but by different channels and without Legrandin’s having had any part in it. “Do you mind my staying here, if I shan’t be in your way?” asked Albertine (in whose eyes there lingered, brought there by the cruel things I had just been saying to her, a few tears which I observed without seeming to see them, but not without rejoicing inwardly at the sight), “there’s something I want to say to you.” A hat with feathers, itself surmounted by a sapphire pin, was perched haphazardly on Mme de Cambremer’s wig, like a badge the display of which was necessary but sufficient, its position immaterial, its elegance conventional and its stability superfluous. Notwithstanding the heat, the good lady had put on a jet-black cloak, like a bishop’s vestment, over which hung an ermine stole the wearing of which seemed to depend not upon the temperature and season, but upon the nature of the ceremony. And on Mme de Cambremer’s bosom a baronial crest, fastened to a chain, dangled like a pectoral cross. The gentleman was an eminent barrister from Paris, of noble family, who had come down to spend a few days with the Cambremers. He was one of those men whose consummate professional experience inclines them to look down upon their profession, and who say, for instance: “I know I plead well, so it no longer amuses me to plead,” or: “I’m no longer interested in operating, because I know I operate well.” Intelligent, “artistic,” they see themselves in their maturity, richly endowed by success, shining with that “intelligence,” that “artistic” nature which their professional brethren acknowledge in them and which confer upon them an approximation of taste and discernment. They develop a passion for the paintings not of a great artist, but of an artist who nevertheless is highly distinguished, and spend upon the purchase of his work the fat incomes that their career procures for them. Le Sidaner was the artist chosen by the Cambremers’ friend, who incidentally was extremely agreeable. He talked well about books, but not about the books of the true masters, those who have mastered themselves. The only irritating defect that this amateur displayed was his constant use of certain ready-made expressions, such as “for the most part,” which gave an air of importance and incompleteness to the matter of which he was speaking. Mme de Cambremer had taken advantage, she told me, of a party which some friends of hers had been giving that afternoon in the Balbec direction to come and call upon me, as she had promised Robert de Saint-Loup. “You know he’s coming down to these parts quite soon for a few days. His uncle Charlus is staying near here with his sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de Saint-Loup means to take the opportunity of paying his aunt a visit and going to see his old regiment, where he is very popular, highly respected. We often have visits from officers who are never tired of singing his praises. How nice it would be if you and he would give us the pleasure of coming together to Féterne.”
I presented Albertine and her friends. Mme de Cambremer introduced us all to her daughter-in-law. The latter, so frigid towards the petty nobility with whom her seclusion at Féterne forced her to associate, so reserved, so afraid of committing herself, held out her hand to me with a radiant smile, feeling secure and delighted at seeing a friend of Robert de Saint-Loup, whom he, possessing a sharper social intuition than he allowed himself to betray, had mentioned to her as being a great friend of the Guermantes. So, unlike her mother-in-law, the young Mme de Cambremer employed two vastly different forms of politeness. It was at the most the former kind, curt and insufferable, that she would have conceded me had I met her through her brother Legrandin. But for a friend of the Guermantes she had not smiles enough. The most convenient room in the hotel for entertaining visitors was the reading-room, that place once so terrible into which I now went a dozen times every day, emerging freely, my own master, like those mildly afflicted lunatics who have so long been inmates of an asylum that the superintendent trusts them with a latch-key. And so I offered to take Mme de Cambremer there. And as this room no longer filled me with shyness and no longer held any charm for me, since the faces of things change for us like the faces of people, it was without any trepidation that I made this suggestion. But she declined it, preferring to remain out of doors, and we sat down in the open air, on the terrace of the hotel. I found there and rescued a volume of Mme de Sévigné which Mamma had not had time to carry off in her precipitate flight, when she heard that visitors had called for me. No less than my grandmother, she dreaded these invasions of strangers, and, in her fear of being too late to escape if she let herself be cornered, would flee with a rapidity which always made my father and me laugh at her. Mme de Cambremer carried in her hand, together with the handle of a sunshade, a number of embroidered bags, a hold-all, a gold purse from which there dangled strings of garnets, and a lace handkerchief. I could not help thinking that it would be more convenient for her to deposit them on a chair; but I felt that it would be improper and useless to ask her to lay aside the ornaments of her pastoral round and her social ministry. We gazed at the calm sea upon which, here and there, a few gulls floated like white petals. Because of the level of mere “medium” to which social conversation reduces us, and also of our desire to please not by means of those qualities of which we are ourselves unaware but of those which we think likely to be appreciated by the people who are with us, I began instinctively to talk to Mme de Cambremer née Legrandin in the strain in which her brother might have talked. “They have,” I said, referring to the gulls, “the immobility and whiteness of water-lilies.” And indeed they did appear to be offering a lifeless object to the little waves which tossed them about, so much so that the waves, by contrast, seemed in their pursuit of them to be animated by a deliberate intention, to have become imbued with life. The dowager Marquise could not find words enough to do justice to the superb view of the sea that we had from Balbec, and envied me, since from La Raspelière (where in fact she was not living that year), she had only such a distant glimpse of the waves. She had two remarkable habits, due at once to her exalted passion for the arts (especially for music) and to her want of teeth. Whenever she talked of aesthetic subjects her salivary glands—like those of certain animals when i
n rut—became so overcharged that the old lady’s toothless mouth allowed to trickle from the corners of her faintly mustachioed lips a few drops of misplaced moisture. Immediately she drew it in again with a deep sigh, like a person recovering his breath. Secondly, if some overwhelming musical beauty was at issue, in her enthusiasm she would raise her arms and utter a few summary opinions, vigorously masticated and if necessary issuing from her nose. Now it had never occurred to me that the vulgar beach at Balbec could indeed offer a “seascape,” and Mme de Cambremer’s simple words changed my ideas in that respect. On the other hand, as I told her, I had always heard people praise the matchless view from La Raspelière, perched on the summit of the hill, where, in a great drawing-room with two fireplaces, one whole row of windows swept the gardens and, through the branches of the trees, the sea as far as Balbec and beyond, and another row the valley. “How nice of you to say so, and how well you put it: the sea through the branches. It’s exquisite—reminiscent of . . . a painted fan.” And I gathered, from a deep breath intended to catch the falling spittle and dry the moustaches, that the compliment was sincere. But the Marquise née Legrandin remained cold, to show her contempt not for my words but for those of her mother-in-law. Indeed she not only despised the latter’s intellect but deplored her affability, being always afraid that people might not form a sufficiently high idea of the Cambremers.
“And how charming the name is,” said I. “One would like to know the origin of all those names.”
“That one I can tell you,” the old lady answered modestly. “It is a family place, it came from my grandmother Arrachepel, not an illustrious family, but good and very old country stock.”
“What! not illustrious!” her daughter-in-law tartly interrupted her. “A whole window in Bayeux cathedral is filled with their arms, and the principal church at Avranches has all their tombs. If these old names interest you,” she added, “you’ve come a year too late. We managed to appoint to the living at Criquetot, in spite of all the difficulties about changing from one diocese to another, the parish priest of a place where I myself have some land, a long way from here, Combray, where the worthy cleric felt that he was becoming neurasthenic. Unfortunately, the sea air didn’t agree with him at his age; his neurasthenia grew worse and he has returned to Combray. But he amused himself while he was our neighbour in going about looking up all the old charters, and he compiled quite an interesting little pamphlet on the place-names of the district. It has given him a fresh interest, too, for it seems he is spending his last years in writing a magnum opus about Combray and its surroundings. I shall send you his pamphlet on the surroundings of Féterne. It’s a most painstaking piece of scholarship. You’ll find the most interesting things in it about our old Raspelière, of which my mother-in-law speaks far too modestly.”
“In any case, this year,” replied the dowager Mme de Cambremer, “La Raspelière is no longer ours and doesn’t belong to me. But I can see that you have a painter’s instincts; I am sure you sketch, and I should so like to show you Féterne, which is far finer than La Raspelière.”
For ever since the Cambremers had let this latter residence to the Verdurins, its commanding situation had at once ceased to appear to them as it had appeared for so many years past, that is to say to offer the advantage, without parallel in the neighbourhood, of looking out over both sea and valley, and had on the other hand, suddenly and retrospectively, presented the drawback that one had always to go up or down hill to get to or from it. In short, one might have supposed that if Mme de Cambremer had let it, it was not so much to add to her income as to spare her horses. And she proclaimed herself delighted at being able at last to have the sea always so close at hand, at Féterne, she who for so many years (forgetting the two months that she spent there) had seen it only from up above and as though at the end of a vista. “I’m discovering it at my age,” she said, “and how I enjoy it! It does me a world of good. I would let La Raspelière for nothing so as to be obliged to live at Féterne.”
“To return to more interesting topics,” went on Legrandin’s sister, who addressed the old Marquise as “Mother” but with the passing of the years had come to treat her with insolence, “you mentioned water-lilies: I suppose you know Claude Monet’s pictures of them. What a genius! They interest me particularly because near Combray, that place where I told you I had some land . . .” But she preferred not to talk too much about Combray.
“Why, that must be the series that Elstir told us about, the greatest living painter,” exclaimed Albertine. who had said nothing so far.
“Ah! I can see that this young lady loves the arts.” cried old Mme de Cambremer; and drawing a deep breath, she recaptured a trail of spittle.
“You will allow me to put Le Sidaner before him. Mademoiselle,” said the barrister, smiling with the air of a connoisseur. And as he had appreciated, or seen others appreciating, years ago, certain “audacities” of Elstir’s, he added: “Elstir was gifted, indeed he almost belonged to the avant-garde, but for some reason or other he never kept up, he has wasted his life.”
Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin agreed with the barrister so far as Elstir was concerned, but, greatly to the chagrin of her guest, bracketed Monet with Le Sidaner. It would be untrue to say that she was a fool; she overflowed with a kind of intelligence that I had no use for. As the sun was beginning to set, the seagulls were now yellow, like the water-lilies on another canvas of that series by Monet. I said that I knew it, and (continuing to imitate the language of her brother, whom I had not yet ventured to name) added that it was a pity that she had not thought of coming a day earlier, for, at the same hour, there would have been a Poussin light for her to admire. Had some Norman squireen, unknown to the Guermantes, told her that she ought to have come a day earlier, Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin would doubtless have drawn herself up with an offended air. But I might have been far more familiar still, and she would have been all smiles and sweetness; I might in the warmth of that fine afternoon devour my fill of that rich honey cake which the young Mme de Cambremer so rarely was and which took the place of the dish of pastries that it had not occurred to me to offer my guests. But the name of Poussin, without altering the amenity of the society lady, aroused the protests of the connoisseur. On hearing that name, she produced six times in almost continuous succession that little smack of the tongue against the lips which serves to convey to a child who is misbehaving at once a reproach for having begun and a warning not to continue. “In heaven’s name, after a painter like Monet, who is quite simply a genius, don’t go and mention an old hack without a vestige of talent, like Poussin. I don’t mind telling you frankly that I find him the deadliest bore. I mean to say, you can’t really call that sort of thing painting. Monet, Degas, Manet, yes, there are painters if you like! It’s a curious thing,” she went on, fixing a searching and ecstatic gaze upon a vague point in space where she could see what was in her mind, “it’s a curious thing, I used at one time to prefer Manet. Nowadays I still admire Manet, of course, but I believe I like Monet even more. Ah, the cathedrals!” She was as scrupulous as she was condescending in informing me of the development of her taste. And one felt that the phases through which that taste had evolved were not, in her eyes, any less important than the different manners of Monet himself. Not that I had any reason to feel flattered by her confiding her enthusiasms to me, for even in the presence of the most dim-witted provincial lady, she could not remain for five minutes without feeling the need to confess them. When a noble lady of Avranches, who would have been incapable of distinguishing between Mozart and Wagner, said in the young Mme de Cambremer’s hearing: “We saw nothing new of any interest while we were in Paris. We went once to the Opéra-Comique, they were doing Pelléas et Mélisande, it’s dreadful stuff,” Mme de Cambremer not only boiled with rage but felt obliged to exclaim: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” and to “argue the point.” It was perhaps a Combray habit which she had picked up from my grandmother’s sisters, who called it “fighting the
good fight,” and loved the dinner-parties at which they knew all through the week that they would have to defend their idols against the Philistines. Similarly, Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin enjoyed “getting worked up” and having “a good set-to” about art, as other people do about politics. She stood up for Debussy as she would have stood up for a woman friend whose conduct had been criticised. She must however have known very well that when she said: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” she could not improvise, for the person whom she was putting in her place, the whole progression of artistic culture at the end of which they would have reached agreement without any need of discussion. “I must ask Le Sidaner what he thinks of Poussin,” the barrister remarked to me. “He’s a regular recluse, never opens his mouth, but I know how to winkle things out of him.”
“Anyhow,” Mme de Cambremer went on, “I have a horror of sunsets, they’re so romantic, so operatic. That is why I can’t abide my mother-in-law’s house, with its tropical plants. You’ll see, it’s just like a public garden at Monte-Carlo. That’s why I prefer your coast here. It’s more sombre, more sincere. There’s a little lane from which one doesn’t see the sea. On rainy days, there’s nothing but mud, it’s a little world apart. It’s just the same at Venice, I detest the Grand Canal and I don’t know anything so touching as the little alleys. But it’s all a question of atmosphere.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV Page 26
