“But,” I remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in her eyes was to inform her that he was once more in fashion, “M. Degas affirms that he knows nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly.”
“Really? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly,” said Mme de Cambremer, who had no wish to differ from Degas, “but I can speak about the ones in the Louvre, which are hideous.”
“He admires them immensely too.”
“I must look at them again. My memory of them is a bit hazy,” she replied after a moment’s silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was certain to form of Poussin before very long would depend, not upon the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the supplementary and this time definitive examination that she intended to make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to change her mind.
Contenting myself with what was a first step towards retraction, since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep her on the rack any longer I told her mother-in-law how much I had heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne. In modest terms she spoke of the little presbytery garden that she had behind the house, into which in the mornings, by simply pushing open a door, she went in her dressing-gown to feed her peacocks, hunt for newlaid eggs, and gather the zinnias or roses which, on the sideboard, framing the creamed eggs or fried fish in a border of flowers, reminded her of her garden paths. “It’s true, we have a great many roses,” she told me, “our rose garden is almost too near the house, there are days when it makes my head ache. It’s nicer on the terrace at La Raspelière where the breeze wafts the scent of the roses, but not so headily.”
I turned to her daughter-in-law: “It’s just like Pelléas,” I said to her, to gratify her taste for the modern, “that scent of roses wafted up to the terraces. It’s so strong in the score that, as I suffer from hay-fever and rose-fever, it sets me sneezing every time I listen to that scene.”
“What a marvellous thing Pelléas is,” cried the young Mme de Cambremer, “I’m mad about it”; and, drawing closer to me with the gestures of a wild woman seeking to captivate me, picking out imaginary notes with her fingers, she began to hum something which I took to represent for her Pelléas’s farewell, and continued with a vehement insistency as though it were important that she should at that moment remind me of that scene, or rather should prove to me that she remembered it. “I think it’s even finer than Parsifal,” she added, “because in Parsifal the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodic phrases, outworn by the very fact of being melodic.”
“I know you are a great musician, Madame,” I said to the dowager. “I should so much like to hear you play.”
Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin gazed at the sea so as not to be drawn into the conversation. Being of the opinion that what her mother-in-law liked was not music at all, she regarded the talent, bogus according to her, but in reality of the very highest order, that the other was acknowledged to possess as a technical accomplishment devoid of interest. It was true that Chopin’s only surviving pupil declared, and with justice, that the Master’s style of playing, his “feeling,” had been transmitted, through herself, to Mme de Cambremer alone, but to play like Chopin was far from being a recommendation in the eyes of Legrandin’s sister, who despised nobody so much as the Polish composer.
“Oh! they’re flying away,” exclaimed Albertine, pointing to the gulls which, casting aside for a moment their flowery incognito, were rising in a body towards the sun.
“Their giant wings from walking hinder them,” quoted Mme de Cambremer, confusing the seagull with the albatross.
“I do love them; I saw some in Amsterdam,” said Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”
“Ah! so you’ve been in Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin asked imperiously, in the tone in which she would have said: “You know the Guermantes?”—for snobbishness in changing its object does not change its accent. Albertine replied in the negative, thinking that they were living people. But her mistake was not apparent.
“I should be delighted to play to you,” the dowager Mme de Cambremer said to me. “But you know I only play things that no longer appeal to your generation. I was brought up in the worship of Chopin,” she said in a lowered tone, for she was afraid of her daughter-in-law, and knew that to the latter, who considered that Chopin was not music, to talk of playing him well or badly was meaningless. She admitted that her mother-in-law had technique, played the notes to perfection. “Nothing will ever make me say that she is a musician,” was Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin’s conclusion. Because she considered herself “advanced,” because (in matters of art only) “one could never be far enough to the Left,” she maintained not merely that music progressed, but that it progressed along a single straight line, and that Debussy was in a sense a super-Wagner, slightly more advanced again than Wagner. She did not realise that if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to suppose in a few years’ time, because an artist will after all make use of the weapons he has captured to free himself finally from one whom he has momentarily defeated, he nevertheless sought, when people were beginning to feel surfeited with works that were too complete, in which everything was expressed, to satisfy an opposite need. There were theories, of course, to bolster this reaction temporarily, like those theories which, in politics, come to the support of the laws against the religious orders, or of wars in the East (unnatural teaching, the Yellow Peril, etc., etc.). People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car was none the less to restore to favour. Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. In any case, the day was to come when, for a time, Debussy would be pronounced as flimsy as Massenet, and the agitations of Mélisande degraded to the level of Manon’s. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. But that time was still to come.
As on the Stock Exchange, when a rise occurs, a whole group of securities profit by it, so a certain number of despised artists benefited from the reaction, either because they did not deserve such scorn, or simply—which enabled one to be original when one sang their praises—because they had incurred it. And people even went so far as to seek out, in an isolated past, men of independent talent upon whose reputation the present movement would not have seemed likely to have any influence, but of whom one of the new masters was understood to have spoken favourably. Often it was because a master, whoever he may be, however exclusive his school, judges in the light of his own untutored instincts, gives credit to talent wherever it is to be found, or rather not so much to talent as to some agreeable inspiration which he has enjoyed in the past, which reminds him of a precious moment in his adolescence. At other times it was because certain artists of an earlier generation have in some fragment of their work achieved something that resembles what the master has gradually become aware that he himself wanted to do. Then he sees the old master as a sort of precursor; he values in him, under a wholly different form, an effort that is momentarily, partially fraternal. There are bits of Turner in the work of Poussin, phrases of Flaubert in Montesquieu. Sometimes, again, this rumoured predilection of a master was due to an error, starting heaven knows where and circulated among his followers. But in that case the name mentioned profited by the auspices under which it was introduced in the nick of time, for if there is some independence, some g
enuine taste expressed in the master’s choice, artistic schools go only by theory. Thus it was that the spirit of the times, following its habitual course which advances by digression, inclining first in one direction, then in the other, had brought back into the limelight a number of works to which the need for justice or for renewal, or the taste of Debussy, or a whim of his, or some remark that he had perhaps never made, had added the works of Chopin. Commended by the most trusted judges, profiting by the admiration that was aroused by Pelléas, they had acquired a fresh lustre, and even those who had not heard them again were so anxious to admire them that they did so in spite of themselves, albeit preserving the illusion of free will. But Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin spent part of the year in the country. Even in Paris, being an invalid, she was often confined to her room. It is true that the drawbacks of this mode of existence were noticeable chiefly in her choice of expressions, which she supposed to be fashionable but which would have been more appropriate to the written language, a distinction that she did not perceive, for she derived them more from reading than from conversation. The latter is not so necessary for an exact knowledge of current opinion as of the latest expressions. However, this rehabilitation of the Nocturnes had not yet been announced by the critics. The news of it had been transmitted only by word of mouth among the “young.” Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin remained unaware of it. I gave myself the pleasure of informing her, but by addressing my remark to her mother-in-law, as when, at billiards, in order to hit a ball one plays off the cushion, that Chopin, so far from being out of date, was Debussy’s favourite composer. “Really, how amusing,” said the daughter-in-law with a knowing smile as though it had been merely a deliberate paradox on the part of the composer of Pelléas. Nevertheless it was now quite certain that in future she would always listen to Chopin with respect and even pleasure. Hence my words, which had sounded the hour of deliverance for the dowager, produced on her face an expression of gratitude to myself and above all of joy. Her eyes shone like the eyes of Latude in the play entitled Latude, or Thirty-five Years in Captivity, and her bosom inhaled the sea air with that dilatation which Beethoven has depicted so well in Fidelio, at the point where his prisoners at last breathe again “this life-giving air.” I thought that she was going to press her hirsute lips to my cheek. “What, you like Chopin? He likes Chopin, he likes Chopin,” she cried in an impassioned nasal twang, as she might have said: “What, you know Mme de Franquetot too?”, with this difference, that my relations with Mme de Franquetot would have been a matter of profound indifference to her, whereas my knowledge of Chopin plunged her into a sort of artistic delirium. Her salivary hyper-secretion no longer sufficed. Not having even attempted to understand the part played by Debussy in the rediscovery of Chopin, she felt only that my judgment of him was favourable. Her musical enthusiasm overpowered her. “Elodie! Elodie! He likes Chopin!” Her bosom rose and she beat the air with her arms. “Ah! I knew at once that you were a musician,” she cried, “I can quite understand your liking his work, hhartistic as you are. It’s so beautiful!” And her voice was as pebbly as if, to express her ardour for Chopin, she had imitated Demosthenes and filled her mouth with all the shingle on the beach. Then came the ebb-tide, reaching as far as her veil which she had not time to lift out of harm’s way and which was drenched, and finally the Marquise wiped away with her embroidered handkerchief the tide-mark of foam in which the memory of Chopin had steeped her moustaches.
“Good heavens,” Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin exclaimed to me, “I’m afraid my mother-in-law’s cutting it rather fine: she’s forgotten that we’ve got my uncle de Ch’nouville dining. And besides, Cancan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” The name “Cancan” meant nothing to me, and I supposed that she might perhaps be referring to a dog. But as for the Ch’nouville relatives, the explanation was as follows. With the passage of time the young Marquise had outgrown the pleasure that she had once found in pronouncing their name in this manner. And yet it was the prospect of enjoying that pleasure that had decided her choice of a husband. In other social circles, when one referred to the Chenouville family, the custom was (whenever, that is to say, the particle was preceded by a word ending in a vowel, for in the opposite case you were obliged to lay stress upon the de, the tongue refusing to utter Madam’ d’Ch’nonceaux) that it was the mute e of the particle that was sacrificed. One said: “Monsieur d’Chenouville.” The Cambremer tradition was different, but no less imperious. It was the mute e of Chenouville that was suppressed. Whether the name was preceded by mon cousin or by ma cousine, it was always de Ch’nouville and never de Chenouville. (Of the father of these Chenouvilles they said “our uncle,” for they were not sufficiently “upper crust” at Féterne to pronounce the word “unk” like the Guermantes, whose studied jargon, suppressing consonants and naturalising foreign words, was as difficult to understand as old French or a modern dialect.) Every newcomer into the family circle at once received, in the matter of the Ch’nouvilles, a lesson which Mlle Legrandin had not required. When, paying a call one day, she had heard a girl say: “my aunt d’Uzai,” “my unk de Rouan,” she had not at first recognised the illustrious names which she was in the habit of pronouncing Uzès and Rohan; she had felt the astonishment, embarrassment and shame of a person who sees before him on the table a recently invented implement of which he does not know the proper use and with which he dare not begin to eat. But during that night and the next day she had rapturously repeated: “my aunt d’Uzai,” with that suppression of the final s that had stupefied her the day before but which it now seemed to her so vulgar not to know that, one of her friends having spoken to her of a bust of the Duchesse d’Uzès, Mlle Legrandin had answered her crossly and in a haughty tone: “You might at least pronounce her name properly: Mame d’Uzai.” From that moment she had realised that, by virtue of the transmutation of solid bodies into more and more subtle elements, the considerable and so honourably acquired fortune that she had inherited from her father, the finished education that she had received, her assiduous attendance at the Sorbonne, whether at Caro’s lectures or at Brunetière’s, and at the Lamoureux concerts, all this was to vanish into thin air, to find its ultimate sublimation in the pleasure of being able one day to say: “my aunt d’Uzai.” This did not exclude the thought that she would continue to associate, at least in the early days of her married life, not indeed with certain friends whom she liked and had resigned herself to sacrificing, but with certain others whom she did not like and to whom she looked forward to being able to say (since that, after all, was why she was marrying): “I must introduce you to my aunt d’Uzai,” and, when she saw that such an alliance was beyond her reach, “I must introduce you to my aunt de Ch’nouville,” and “I shall ask you to dinner with the Uzai.” Her marriage to M. de Cambremer had procured for Mlle Legrandin the opportunity to use the former of these sentences but not the latter, the circle in which her parents-in-law moved not being that which she had supposed and of which she continued to dream. Thus, after saying to me of Saint-Loup (adopting for the purpose one of his expressions, for if in talking to her I employed Legrandin’s expressions, she by an inverse suggestion answered me in Robert’s dialect which she did not know had been borrowed from Rachel), bringing her thumb and forefinger together and half-shutting her eyes as though she were gazing at something infinitely delicate which she had succeeded in capturing: “He has a charming quality of mind,” she began to extol him with such warmth that one might have supposed that she was in love with him (it had indeed been alleged that, some time back, when he was at Doncières, Robert had been her lover), in reality simply in order that I might repeat her words to him, and ended up with: “You’re a great friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes. I’m an invalid, I seldom go out, and I know that she sticks to a close circle of chosen friends, which I do think so wise of her, and so I know her very slightly, but I know she is a really remarkable woman.” Aware that Mme de Cambremer barely knew her, and anxious to put myself on a level with her, I glossed ov
er the subject and answered the Marquise that the person whom I did know well was her brother, M. Legrandin. At the sound of his name she assumed the same evasive air as I had on the subject of Mme de Guermantes, but combined with it an expression of displeasure, for she imagined that I had said this with the object of humiliating not myself but her. Was she gnawed by despair at having been born a Legrandin? So at least her husband’s sisters and sisters-in-law asserted, noble provincial ladies who knew nobody and nothing, and were jealous of Mme de Cambremer’s intelligence, her education, her fortune, and the physical attractions that she had possessed before her illness. “She can think of nothing else, that’s what’s killing her,” these spiteful provincial ladies would say whenever they spoke of Mme de Cambremer to no matter whom, but preferably to a commoner, either—if he was conceited and stupid—to enhance, by this affirmation of the shamefulness of the commoner’s condition, the value of the affability that they were showing him, or—if he was shy and sensitive and applied the remark to himself—to give themselves the pleasure, while receiving him hospitably, of insulting him indirectly. But if these ladies thought that they were speaking the truth about their sister-in-law, they were mistaken. She suffered not at all from having been born Legrandin, for she had forgotten the fact altogether. She was offended by my reminding her of it, and remained silent as though she had failed to understand, not thinking it necessary to enlarge upon or even to confirm my statement.
“Our cousins are not the chief reason for our cutting short our visit,” said the dowager Mme de Cambremer, who was probably more satiated than her daughter-in-law with the pleasure to be derived from saying “Ch’nouville.” “But, so as not to bother you with too many people, Monsieur,” she went on, indicating the barrister, “was reluctant to bring his wife and son to the hotel. They are waiting for us on the beach, and must be getting impatient.” I asked for an exact description of them and hastened in search of them. The wife had a round face like certain flowers of the ranunculus family, and a large vegetal growth at the corner of her eye. And, the generations of mankind preserving their characteristics like a family of plants, just as on the blemished face of his mother, an identical growth, which might have helped towards the classification of a variety of the species, protruded below the eye of the son. The barrister was touched by my civility to his wife and son. He expressed an interest in the subject of my stay at Balbec. “You must find yourself a bit homesick, for the people here are for the most part foreigners.” And he kept his eye on me as he spoke, for, not caring for foreigners, albeit he had many foreign clients, he wished to make sure that I was not hostile to his xenophobia, in which case he would have beaten a retreat, saying: “Of course, Mme X—— may be a charming woman. It’s a question of principle.” As at that time I had no definite opinion about foreigners, I showed no sign of disapproval, and he felt himself to be on safe ground. He went so far as to invite me to come one day to his house in Paris to see his collection of Le Sidaners, and to bring with me the Cambremers, with whom he evidently supposed me to be on intimate terms. “I shall invite you to meet Le Sidaner,” he said to me, confident that from that moment I would live only in expectation of that happy day. “You shall see what a delightful man he is. And his pictures will enchant you. Of course, I can’t compete with the great collectors, but I do believe that I own the largest number of his favourite canvases. They will interest you all the more, coming from Balbec, since they’re marine subjects, for the most part at least.” The wife and son, blessed with a vegetal nature, listened composedly. One felt that their house in Paris was a sort of temple to Le Sidaner. Temples of this sort are not without their uses. When the god has doubts about himself, he can easily stop the cracks in his opinion of himself with the irrefutable testimony of people who have dedicated their lives to his work.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV Page 27
