At Hermenonville M. de Chevregny would sometimes get in, a gentleman whose name, Brichot told us, signified like that of Mgr de Cabrières “a place where goats assemble.” He was related to the Cambremers, for which reason, and from a false appreciation of elegance, the latter often invited him to Féterne, but only when they had no other guests to dazzle. Living all the year round at Beausoleil, M. de Chevregny had remained more provincial than they. And so when he went for a few weeks to Paris, there was not a moment to waste if he was to “see everything” in the time; so much so that sometimes, a little dazed by the number of spectacles too rapidly digested, when he was asked if he had seen a particular play he would find that he was no longer absolutely sure. But this uncertainty was rare, for he had that detailed knowledge of Paris only to be found in people who seldom go there. He advised me which of the “novelties” I ought to see (“It’s well worth your while”), regarding them however solely from the point of view of the pleasant evening that they might help to spend, and so completely ignoring the aesthetic point of view as never to suspect that they might indeed occasionally constitute a “novelty” in the history of art. So it was that, speaking of everything in the same tone, he told us: “We went once to the Opéra-Comique, but the show there isn’t up to much. It’s called Pelléas et Mélisande. It’s trivial. Périer always acts well, but it’s better to see him in something else. At the Gymnase, on the other hand, they’re doing La Châtelaine. We went back to it twice; don’t miss it, whatever you do, it’s well worth seeing; besides, it’s played to perfection; there’s Frévalles, Marie Magnier, Baron fils”; and he went on to cite the names of actors of whom I had never heard, and without prefixing Monsieur, Madame or Mademoiselle like the Duc de Guermantes, who used to speak in the same ceremoniously contemptuous tone of the “songs of Mademoiselle Yvette Guilbert” and the “experiments of Monsieur Charcot.” This was not M. de Chevregny’s way: he said “Cornaglia and Dehelly” as he might have said “Voltaire and Montesquieu.” For in him, with regard to actors as to everything that was Parisian, the aristocrat’s desire to show his disdain was overcome by the provincial’s desire to appear on familiar terms with everyone.
Immediately after the first dinner-party that I had attended at La Raspelière with what was still called at Féterne “the young couple,” although M. and Mme de Cambremer were no longer, by any means, in their first youth, the old Marquise had written me one of those letters which one can pick out by their handwriting from among a thousand. She said to me: “Bring your delicious—charming—nice cousin. It will be a delight, a pleasure,” failing always to observe the sequence that the recipient of her letter would naturally have expected, and with such unerring dexterity that I finally changed my mind as to the nature of these diminuendos, decided that they were deliberate, and found in them the same depravity of taste—transposed into the social key—that drove Sainte-Beuve to upset all the normal relations between words, to alter any expression that was at all habitual. Two methods, taught probably by different masters, clashed in this epistolary style, the second making Mme de Cambremer redeem the monotony of her multiple adjectives by employing them in a descending scale, and avoiding an ending on the common chord. On the other hand, I was inclined to see in these inverse gradations, no longer a stylistic refinement, as when they were the handiwork of the dowager Marquise, but a stylistic awkwardness whenever they were employed by the Marquis her son or by her lady cousins. For throughout the family, to quite a remote degree of kinship and in admiring imitation of Aunt Zélia, the rule of the three adjectives was held in great favour, as was a certain enthusiastic way of catching your breath when talking. An imitation that had passed into the blood, moreover; and whenever, in the family, a little girl from her earliest childhood took to stopping short while she was talking to swallow her saliva, her parents would say: “She takes after Aunt Zélia,” would sense that as she grew older her upper lip would soon tend to be shadowed by a faint moustache, and would make up their minds to cultivate her inevitable talent for music.
It was not long before the relations of the Cambremers with Mme Verdurin were less satisfactory than with myself, for different reasons. They felt they must invite her to dine. The “young” Marquise said to me contemptuously: “I don’t see why we shouldn’t invite that woman. In the country one meets anybody, it’s of no great consequence.” But being at heart considerably awed, they frequently consulted me as to how they should put into effect their desire to make a polite gesture. Since they had invited Albertine and myself to dine with some friends of Saint-Loup, smart people of the neighbourhood who owned the château of Gourville and represented a little more than the cream of Norman society, to which Mme Verdurin, while pretending to despise it, was partial, I advised the Cambremers to invite the Mistress to meet them. But the lord and lady of Féterne, in their fear (so timorous were they) of offending their noble friends, or else (so ingenuous were they) of the possibility that M. and Mme Verdurin might be bored by people who were not intellectual, or yet again (since they were impregnated with a spirit of routine which experience had not fertilised) of mixing different kinds of people and committing a solecism, declared that it would not “work,” that they “wouldn’t hit it off together,” and that it would be much better to keep Mme Verdurin (whom they would invite with all her little group) for another evening. For this coming evening—the smart one, to meet Saint-Loup’s friends—they invited nobody from the little nucleus but Morel, in order that M. de Charlus might indirectly be informed of the brilliant people whom they had to their house, and also that the musician might help to entertain their guests, for he was to be asked to bring his violin. They threw in Cottard as well, because M. de Cambremer declared that he had some “go” about him and would “go down well” at a dinner-party; besides, it might turn out useful to be on friendly terms with a doctor if they should ever have anybody ill in the house. But they invited him by himself, so as not to “start anything with the wife.” Mme Verdurin was outraged when she heard that two members of the little group had been invited without herself to dine “informally” at Féterne. She dictated to the Doctor, whose first impulse had been to accept, a stiff reply in which he said: “We are dining that evening with Mme Verdurin,” a plural intended to teach the Cambremers a lesson and to show them that he was not detachable from Mme Cottard. As for Morel, Mme Verdurin had no need to draw up for him an impolite course of behaviour, for he adopted one of his own accord, for the following reason. If he preserved with regard to M. de Charlus, insofar as his pleasures were concerned, an independence which distressed the Baron, we have seen that the latter’s influence had made itself felt more strongly in other areas, and that he had for instance enlarged the young virtuoso’s knowledge of music and purified his style. But it was still, at this point in our story at least, only an influence. At the same time there was one domain where anything that M. de Charlus might say was blindly accepted and acted upon by Morel. Blindly and foolishly, for not only were M. de Charlus’s instructions false, but, even had they been valid in the case of a nobleman, when applied literally by Morel they became grotesque. The domain in which Morel was becoming so credulous and obeyed his master with such docility was the social domain. The violinist, who before meeting M. de Charlus had had no notion of society, had taken literally the brief and arrogant sketch of it that the Baron had outlined for him: “There are a certain number of outstanding families,” M. de Charlus had told him, “first and foremost the Guermantes, who claim fourteen alliances with the House of France, which is flattering to the House of France if anything, for it was to Aldonce de Guermantes and not to Louis the Fat, his younger half-brother, that the throne of France should have passed. Under Louis XIV, we ‘draped’ at the death of Monsieur, as having the same grandmother as the king. A long way below the Guermantes, one may however mention the La Trémoïlles, descended from the Kings of Naples and the Counts of Poitiers; the d’Uzès, not very old as a family but the oldest peers; the Luynes, of very
recent origin but with the lustre of distinguished marriages; the Choiseuls, the Harcourts, the La Rochefoucaulds. Add to these the Noailles (notwithstanding the Comte de Toulouse), the Montesquious and the Castellanes, and, I think I am right in saying, those are all. As for all the little people who call themselves Marquis de Cambremerde or de Gotoblazes, there is no difference between them and the humblest rookie in your regiment. Whether you go and do wee-wee at the Countess Cack’s or cack at the Baroness Wee-wee’s, it’s exactly the same, you will have compromised your reputation and have used a shitty rag instead of toilet paper. Which is unsavoury.”
Morel had piously taken in this history lesson, which was perhaps a trifle cursory; he looked upon these matters as though he were himself a Guermantes and hoped that he might some day have an opportunity of meeting the false La Tour d’Auvergnes in order to let them see, by the contemptuous way he shook hands with them, that he did not take them very seriously. As for the Cambremers, here was his very chance to prove to them that they were no better than “the humblest in his regiment.” He did not answer their invitation, and on the evening of the dinner declined at the last moment by telegram, as pleased with himself as if he had behaved like a Prince of the Blood. It must be added here that it is impossible to imagine the degree to which, in a more general sense, M. de Charlus could be intolerable, meddlesome and even—he who was so clever—stupid, in all the circumstances where the flaws in his character came into play. We may say indeed that these flaws are like an intermittent disease of the mind. Who has not observed the phenomenon in women, and even in men, endowed with remarkable intelligence but afflicted with nervous irritability? When they are happy, calm, satisfied with their surroundings, we marvel at their precious gifts; it is the truth, literally, that speaks through their lips. A touch of headache, the slightest prick to their self-esteem, is enough to alter everything. The luminous intelligence, become brusque, convulsive and shrunken, no longer reflects anything but an irritable, suspicious, teasing self, doing everything possible to displease.
The anger of the Cambremers was extreme; and in the meantime other incidents brought about a certain tension in their relations with the little clan. As we were returning, the Cottards, Charlus, Brichot, Morel and I, from a dinner at La Raspelière one evening after the Cambremers, who had been to lunch with friends at Harambouville, had accompanied us for part of our outward journey, “Since you’re so fond of Balzac, and can find examples of him in the society of today,” I had remarked to M. de Charlus, “you must feel that those Cambremers come straight out of the Scènes de la vie de province.” But M. de Charlus, for all the world as though he had been their friend and I had offended him by my remark, at once cut me short: “You say that because the wife is superior to the husband,” he remarked drily. “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that she was the Muse du département, or Mme de Bargeton, although …” M. de Charlus again interrupted me: “Say rather, Mme de Mortsauf.” The train stopped and Brichot got out. “Didn’t you see us making signs to you? You’re incorrigible.” “What do you mean?” “Why, haven’t you noticed that Brichot is madly in love with Mme de Cambremer?” I could see from the attitude of the Cottards and Charlie that there was not a shadow of doubt about this in the little nucleus. I thought that it must be malice on their part. “What, you didn’t notice how distressed he became when you mentioned her,” went on M. de Charlus, who liked to show that he had experience of women, and spoke of the sentiment they inspire as naturally as if it was what he himself habitually felt. But a certain equivocally paternal tone in addressing all young men—in spite of his exclusive affection for Morel—gave the lie to the womanising views which he expressed. “Oh! these children,” he said in a shrill, mincing, sing-song voice, “one has to teach them everything, they’re as innocent as newborn babes, they can’t even tell when a man is in love with a woman. I was more fly than that at your age,” he added, for he liked to use the expressions of the underworld, perhaps because they appealed to him, perhaps so as not to appear, by avoiding them, to admit that he consorted with people whose current vocabulary they were. A few days later, I was obliged to bow to the facts and acknowledge that Brichot was enamoured of the Marquise. Unfortunately he accepted several invitations to lunch with her. Mme Verdurin decided that it was time to put a stop to these proceedings. Quite apart from what she saw as the importance of such an intervention for the politics of the little nucleus, she had developed an ever-keener taste for remonstrations of this sort and the dramas to which they gave rise, a taste which idleness breeds just as much in the bourgeoisie as in the aristocracy. It was a day of great excitement at La Raspelière when Mme Verdurin was seen to disappear for a whole hour with Brichot, whom (it transpired) she proceeded to inform that Mme de Cambremer cared nothing for him, that he was the laughing-stock of her drawing-room, that he would be dishonouring his old age and compromising his situation in the academic world. She went so far as to refer in touching terms to the laundress with whom he lived in Paris, and to their little girl. She won the day; Brichot ceased to go to Féterne, but his grief was such that for two days it was thought that he would lose his sight altogether, and in any case his disease had taken a leap forward from which it never retreated. In the meantime, the Cambremers, who were furious with Morel, deliberately invited M. de Charlus on one occasion without him. Receiving no reply from the Baron, they began to fear that they had committed a gaffe, and, deciding that rancour was a bad counsellor, wrote somewhat belatedly to Morel, an ineptitude which made M. de Charlus smile by proving to him the extent of his power. “You shall answer for us both that I accept,” he said to Morel. When the evening of the dinner came, the party assembled in the great drawing-room of Féterne. In reality, the Cambremers were giving this dinner for those fine flowers of fashion M. and Mme Féré. But they were so afraid of displeasing M. de Charlus that although she had got to know the Férés through M. de Chevregny, Mme de Cambremer went into a frenzy of alarm when, on the day of the dinner-party, she saw him arrive to pay a call on them at Féterne. She thought up every imaginable excuse for sending him back to Beausoleil as quickly as possible, not quickly enough, however, for him not to run into the Férés in the courtyard, who were as shocked to see him dismissed like this as he himself was ashamed. But, whatever happened, the Cambremers wished to spare M. de Charlus the sight of M. de Chevregny, whom they judged to be provincial because of certain little points which can be overlooked within the family but have to be taken into account in front of strangers, who are in fact the last people in the world to notice them. But we do not like to display to them relatives who have remained at the stage which we ourselves have struggled to outgrow. As for M. and Mme Féré, they were in the highest degree what is described as “out of the top drawer.” In the eyes of those who so defined them, no doubt the Guermantes, the Rohans and many others were also out of the top drawer, but their name made it unnecessary to say so. Since not everyone was aware of the exalted birth of M. Féré’s mother, or of Mme Féré’s, or of the extraordinarily exclusive circle in which she and her husband moved, when you mentioned their name you invariably added by way of explanation that they were “out of the very top drawer.” Did their obscure name prompt them to a sort of haughty reserve? The fact remains that the Férés refused to know people on whom the La Trémoïlles would not have forborne to call. It had needed the position of queen of her particular stretch of coast, which the old Marquise de Cambremer held in the Manche, to make the Férés consent to come to one of her afternoons every year. The Cambremers had invited them to dinner and were counting largely on the effect that M. de Charlus was going to make on them. It was discreetly announced that he was to be one of the party. It chanced that Mme Féré did not know him. Mme de Cambremer, on learning this, felt a keen satisfaction, and the smile of a chemist who is about to bring into contact for the first time two particularly important bodies hovered over her lips. The door opened, and Mme de Cambremer almost fainted when she saw Morel enter the room alone. Like
a private secretary conveying his minister’s apologies, like a morganatic wife expressing the Prince’s regret that he is unwell (as Mme de Clinchamp used to do on behalf of the Duc d’Aumale), Morel said in the airiest of tones: “The Baron can’t come. He’s not feeling very well, at least I think that’s the reason … I haven’t seen him this week,” he added, these last words completing the despair of Mme de Cambremer, who had told M. and Mme Féré that Morel saw M. de Charlus at every hour of the day. The Cambremers pretended that the Baron’s absence was a blessing in disguise, and, without letting Morel hear them, said to their other guests: “We can do very well without him, can’t we, it will be all the more agreeable.” But they were furious, suspected a plot hatched by Mme Verdurin, and, tit for tat, when she invited them again to La Raspelière, M. de Cambremer, unable to resist the pleasure of seeing his house again and of mingling with the little group, came, but came alone, saying that the Marquise was so sorry, but her doctor had ordered her to stay at home. The Cambremers hoped by this partial attendance at the same time to teach M. de Charlus a lesson and to show the Verdurins that they were not obliged to treat them with more than a limited politeness, as Princesses of the Blood used in the old days to show duchesses out, but only as far as the middle of the second chamber. After a few weeks, they were scarcely on speaking terms.
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