male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of
the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of
faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new
and uncanny, now that their features,--instead of being to him symbols
of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who
until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after,
boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged--were at rest,
measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now
found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many
of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled
Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted
to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not
now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because
he did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréaute, who
were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than two
figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who
had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the
General's monocle, stuck like a shell-splinter in his common, scarred,
victorious, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it
left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops,
appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious
to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose, while
that which M. de Bréaute wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey
gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar
pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore,
glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the
microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and
never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness
of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of
refreshments.
"Hallo! you here! why, it's ages since I've seen you," the General
greeted Swann and, noticing the look of strain on his face and
concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away,
went on, "You're looking well, old man!" while M. de Bréauté turned
with, "My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?" to a 'society
novelist' who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his
own monocle, the sole instrument that he used in his psychological
investigations and remorseless analyses of character, and who now
replied, with an air of mystery and importance, rolling the 'r':--"I am
observing!"
The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minute and rimless, and, by
enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it
was incrusted like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which there
was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, it gave to his face a
melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of suffering
terribly when in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, girdled, like
Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which
composed itself afresh every moment in relation to the glass, while
his thrusting red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their
grimaces to rise to the level of the steady flame of wit that sparkled
in the polished disk, and saw itself preferred to the most ravishing
eyes in the world by the smart, depraved young women whom it set
dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss; and
then, behind him, M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp's head and
goggling eyes moved slowly up and down the stream of festive gatherings,
unlocking his great mandibles at every moment as though in search of
his orientation, had the air of carrying about upon his person only an
accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of
his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole which recalled to
Swann, a fervent admirer of Giotto's Vices and Virtues at Padua, that
Injustice by whose side a leafy bough evokes the idea of the forests
that enshroud his secret lair.
Swann had gone forward into the room, under pressure from Mme. de
Saint-Euverte and in order to listen to an aria from _Orfeo_ which was
being rendered on the flute, and had taken up a position in a corner
from which, unfortunately, his horizon was bounded by two ladies of
'uncertain' age, seated side by side, the Marquise de Cambremer and the
Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, used to spend
their time at parties in wandering through the rooms, each clutching her
bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at
a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved,
by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs;
Mme. de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all the more
glad of a companion, while Mme. de Franquetot, who, on the contrary,
was extremely popular, thought it effective and original to shew all
her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure
country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common. Filled
with ironical melancholy, Swann watched them as they listened to the
pianoforte intermezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds')
which came after the flute, and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy
flight; Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes starting from her head,
as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were
a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing,
a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of
astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn't
possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all
that!"; Mme. de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical
education, beating time with her head--transformed for the nonce into
the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and rapidity of whose movements
from one shoulder to the other (performed with that look of wild
abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shews who is no longer able to
analyse his pain, nor anxious to master it, and says merely "I can't
help it") so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings caught
in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged to put straight the
bunch of black grapes which she had in her hair, though without any
interruption of her constantly accelerated motion. On the other side
(and a little way in front) of Mme. de Franquetot, was the Marquise de
Gallardon, absorbed in her favourite meditation, namely upon her own
kinship with the Guermantes family, from which she derived both publicly
and in private a good deal of glory not unmingled with shame, the most
brilliant ornaments of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her,
perhaps because she was just a tiresome old woman, or because she was a
scandalous old woman, or because she came of an inferior branch of the
family, or very possibly for no reason at all. When she found herself
seated next to some one whom she did not know, as she was at this moment
next to Mme. de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that
her own consciousness of her Guermantes connection could not be made
externally manifest in visible character like those which, in the
mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a
vertical column by the side of some Sacred Personage the words which he
is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact
that she had never received an invitation, or even call, from her young
cousin the Princesse des Laumes, during the six years that had already
elapsed since the latter's marriage. The thought filled her with
anger--and with pride; for, by virtue of having told everyone who
expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme. des Laumes's, that it
was because of the risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there--a
degradation which her own family, the truest and bluest of Legitimists,
would never have forgiven her, she had come gradually to believe that
this actually was the reason for her not visiting her young cousin. She
remembered, it is true, that she had several times inquired of Mme. des
Laumes how they might contrive to meet, but she remembered it only in
a confused way, and besides did more than neutralise this slightly
humiliating reminiscence by murmuring, "After all, it isn't for me to
take the first step; I am at least twenty years older than she is." And
fortified by these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back
until they seemed to part company with her bust, while her head, which
lay almost horizontally upon them, made one think of the 'stuck-on' head
of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its
feathers. Not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant, having
been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but
successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may
observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice
and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she
was obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite on a level
with the rest of the Guermantes, to repeat to herself incessantly that
it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride
that she saw so little of them, the constant iteration had gradually
remoulded her body, and had given her a sort of 'bearing' which was
accepted by the plebeian as a sign of breeding, and even kindled, at
times, a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old gentlemen in clubs.
Had anyone subjected Mme. de Gallardon's conversation to that form of
analysis which by noting the relative frequency of its several terms
would furnish him with the key to a ciphered message, he would at
once have remarked that no expression, not even the commonest forms
of speech, occurred in it nearly so often as "at my cousins the
Guermantes's," "at my aunt Guermantes's," "Elzéar de Guermantes's
health," "my cousin Guermantes's box." If anyone spoke to her of a
distinguished personage, she would reply that, although she was not
personally acquainted with him, she had seen him hundreds of times at
her aunt Guermantes's, but she would utter this reply in so icy a tone,
with such a hollow sound, that it was at once quite clear that if
she did not know the celebrity personally that was because of all the
obstinate, ineradicable principles against which her arching shoulders
were stretched back to rest, as on one of those ladders on which
gymnastic instructors make us 'extend' so as to develop the expansion of
our chests.
At this moment the Princesse des Laumes, who had not been expected to
appear at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that evening, did in fact arrive. To
shew that she did not wish any special attention, in a house to which
she had come by an act of condescension, to be paid to her superior
rank, she had entered the room with her arms pressed close to her sides,
even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through, no one attempting
to get past her; staying purposely at the back, with the air of being
in her proper place, like a king who stands in the waiting procession at
the doors of a theatre where the management have not been warned of his
coming; and strictly limiting her field of vision--so as not to seem to
be advertising her presence and claiming the consideration that was her
due--to the study of a pattern in the carpet or of her own skirt, she
stood there on the spot which had struck her as the most modest (and
from which, as she very well knew, a cry of rapture from Mme. de
Saint-Euverte would extricate her as soon as her presence there was
noticed), next to Mme. de Cambremer, whom, however, she did not know.
She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her
passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to
say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme.
de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished
(so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by
coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly
and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she
called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see
that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was
not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although
such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of
that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the
most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment,
even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself
whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary
concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which,
it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had
ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of
her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards
the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a
compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment
she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden
hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny
diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with
a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would
beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her
independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's. When
he had finished the Liszt Intermezzo and had begun a Prelude by Chopin,
Mme. de Cambremer turned to Mme. de Franquetot with a tender smile,
full of intimate reminiscence, as well as of satisfaction (that of
a competent judge) with the performance. She had been taught in her
girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures,
the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by
seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of
the direction in which they started, the point which one might have
expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those
fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately--with a more
premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which,
if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish--to
clutch at one's heart.
Brought up in a provincial household with few friends or visitors,
hardly ever invited to a ball, she had fuddled her mind, in the solitude
of her old manor-house, over setting the pace, now crawling-slow, now
passionate, whirling, breathless, for all those imaginary waltzing
couples, gathering them like flowers, leaving the ball-room for a moment
to listen, where the wind sighed among the pine-trees, on the shore of
the lake, and seeing of a sudden advancing towards her, more different
from anything one had ever dreamed of than earthly lovers are, a slender
young man, whose voice was resonant and strange and false, in white
gloves. But nowadays the old-fashioned beauty of this music seemed
to have become a trifle stale. Having forfeited, some years back, the
esteem of 'really musical' people, it had lost its distinction and its
charm, and even those whose taste was frankly bad had ceased to find in
it more than a moderate pleasure to which they hardly liked to confess.
Mme. de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She knew that her
young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new and noble family,
except in such matters as related to the intellect, upon which, having
'got as far' as Harmony and the Greek alphabet, she was specially
enlightened) despised Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him
played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian,
who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own contemporaries,
Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite memories
and sensations. The Princesse des Laumes was touched also. Though
without any natural gift for music, she had received, some fifteen
years earlier, the instruction which a music-mistress of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who had been, towards the end of
her life, reduced to penury, had started, at seventy, to give to the
daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils. This lady was now dead.
But her method, an echo of her charming touch, came to life now and
then in the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had been in other
respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and hardly ever opened a
piano. And so Mme. des Laumes could let her head sway to and fro, fully
aware of the cause, with a perfect appreciation of the manner in which
the pianist was rendering this Prelude, since she knew it by heart. The
closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded already on her
lips. And she murmured "How charming it is!" with a stress on the
opening consonants of the adjective, a token of her refinement by which
she felt her lips so romantically compressed, like the petals of a
beautiful, budding flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into
harmony, illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental
gaze. Meanwhile Mme. de Gallardon had arrived at the point of saying to
herself how annoying it was that she had so few opportunities of meeting
the Princesse des Laumes, for she meant to teach her a lesson by not
acknowledging her bow. She did not know that her cousin was in the room.
A movement of Mme. Franquetot's head disclosed the Princess. At once
Mme. de Gallardon dashed towards her, upsetting all her neighbours;
although determined to preserve a distant and glacial manner which
should remind everyone present that she had no desire to remain on
friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself, any
day, cheek by jowl with the Princesse Mathilde, and to whom it was not
her duty to make advances since she was not 'of her generation,'
she felt bound to modify this air of dignity and reserve by some
non-committal remark which would justify her overture and would force
the Princess to engage in conversation; and so, when she reached her
cousin, Mme. de Gallardon, with a stern countenance and one hand thrust
out as though she were trying to 'force' a card, began with: "How is
your husband?" in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the
Prince had been seriously ill. The Princess, breaking into a laugh which
was one of her characteristics, and was intended at once to shew the
rest of an assembly that she was making fun of some one and also to
enhance her own beauty by concentrating her features around her animated
lips and sparkling eyes, answered: "Why; he's never been better in his
life!" And she went on laughing.
Mme. de Gallardon then drew herself up and, chilling her expression
still further, perhaps because she was still uneasy about the Prince's
health, said to her cousin:
"Oriane," (at once Mme. des Laumes looked with amused astonishment
towards an invisible third, whom she seemed to call to witness that she
had never authorised Mme. de Gallardon to use her Christian name) "I
should be so pleased if you would look in, just for a minute, to-morrow
evening, to hear a quintet, with the clarinet, by Mozart. I should like
to have your opinion of it."
She seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to be asking
favour, and to want the Princess's opinion of the Mozart quintet just
as though it had been a dish invented by a new cook, whose talent it
was most important that an epicure should come to judge.
"But I know that quintet quite well. I can tell you now--that I adore
it."
"You know, my husband isn't at all well; it's his liver. He would like
so much to see you," Mme. de Gallardon resumed, making it now a corporal
work of charity for the Princess to appear at her party.
The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their
houses. Every day she would write to express her regret at having
been kept away--by the sudden arrival of her husband's mother, by an
invitation from his brother, by the Opera, by some excursion to the
country--from some party to which she had never for a moment dreamed of
going. In this way she gave many people the satisfaction of feeling that
she was on intimate terms with them, that she would gladly have come to
their houses, and that she had been prevented from doing so only by some
princely occurrence which they were flattered to find competing with
their own humble entertainment. And then, as she belonged to that
witty 'Guermantes set'--in which there survived something of the
alert mentality, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional
sentiments, which dated from Mérimée, and found its final expression in
the plays of Meilhac and Halévy--she adapted its formula so as to suit
even her social engagements, transposed it into the courtesy which was
always struggling to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to
the plain truth. She would never develop at any length to a hostess the
expression of her anxiety to be present at her party; she found it more
pleasant to disclose to her all the various little incidents on which it
would depend whether it was or was not possible for her to come.
"Listen, and I'll explain," she began to Mme. de Gallardon. "To-morrow
evening I must go to a friend of mine, who has been pestering me to fix
a day for ages. If she takes us to the theatre afterwards, then I can't
possibly come to you, much as I should love to; but if we just stay in
the house, I know there won't be anyone else there, so I can slip away."
"Tell me, have you seen your friend M. Swann?"
"No! my precious Charles! I never knew he was here. Where is he? I must
catch his eye."
"It's a funny thing that he should come to old Saint-Euverte's," Mme. de
Gallardon went on. "Oh, I know he's very clever," meaning by that 'very
cunning,' "but that makes no difference; fancy a Jew here, and she the
sister and sister-in-law of two Archbishops."
"I am ashamed to confess that I am not in the least shocked," said the
Princesse des Laumes.
"I know he's a converted Jew, and all that, and his parents and
grandparents before him. But they do say that the converted ones are
worse about their religion than the practising ones, that it's all just
a pretence; is that true, d'you think?"
"I can throw no light at all on the matter."
The pianist, who was 'down' to play two pieces by Chopin, after
finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a Polonaise. But once Mme.
de Gallardon had informed her cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin
himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in
turn without Mme. des Laumes's paying him the slightest attention. She
belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the
untiring curiosity which the other half feels about the people whom it
does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it
does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence, in
any room in which she might find herself, of another member of her set,
even although she had nothing in particular to say to him, would occupy
her mind to the exclusion of every other consideration. From that
moment, in the hope that Swann would catch sight of her, the Princess
could do nothing but (like a tame white mouse when a lump of sugar is
put down before its nose and then taken away) turn her face, in which
were crowded a thousand signs of intimate connivance, none of them with
the least relevance to the sentiment underlying Chopin's music, in the
direction where Swann was, and, if he moved, divert accordingly the
course of her magnetic smile.
"Oriane, don't be angry with me," resumed Mme. de Gallardon, who could
never restrain herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions,
and the hope that she might one day emerge into a light that would
dazzle the world, to the immediate and secret satisfaction of saying
something disagreeable, "people do say about your M. Swann that he's the
sort of man one can't have in the house; is that true?"
"Why, you, of all people, ought to know that it's true," replied the
Princesse des Laumes, "for you must have asked him a hundred times, and
he's never been to your house once."
And leaving her cousin mortified afresh, she broke out again into a
laugh which scandalised everyone who was trying to listen to the music,
but attracted the attention of Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who had stayed,
out of politeness, near the piano, and caught sight of the Princess now
for the first time. Mme. de Saint-Euverte was all the more delighted
to see Mme. des Laumes, as she imagined her to be still at Guermantes,
looking after her father-in-law, who was ill.
"My dear Princess, you here?"
"Yes, I tucked myself away in a corner, and I've been hearing such
lovely things."
"What, you've been in the room quite a time?"