In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV of 4 by Marcel Proust
Close beside us, M. de Cambremer, who was already seated, seeing that M. de Charlus was standing, made as though to rise and offer him his chair. This offer may have arisen, in the Marquis’s mind, from nothing more than a vague wish to be polite. M. de Charlus preferred to attach to it the sense of a duty which the simple squire knew that he owed to a prince, and felt that he could not establish his right to this precedence better than by declining it. And so he exclaimed: “Good gracious me! Please! The idea!” The astutely vehement tone of this protest had in itself something typically “Guermantes” which became even more evident in the imperious, supererogatory and familiar gesture with which he brought both his hands down, as though to force him to remain seated, upon the shoulders of M. de Cambremer who had not risen: “Come, come, my dear fellow,” the Baron insisted, “that would be the last straw! There’s really no need! In these days we keep that for Princes of the Blood.”
I made no more impression on the Cambremers than on Mme Verdurin by my enthusiasm for their house. For the beauties they pointed out to me left me cold, whilst I was carried away by confused reminiscences; at times I even confessed to them my disappointment at not finding something correspond to what its name had made me imagine. I enraged Mme de Cambremer by telling her that I had supposed the place to be more rustic. On the other hand I broke off in an ecstasy to sniff the fragrance of a breeze that crept in through the chink of the door. “I see you like draughts,” they said to me. My praise of a piece of green lustre plugging a broken pane met with no greater success: “How frightful!” exclaimed the Marquise. The climax came when I said: “My greatest joy was when I arrived. When I heard my footsteps echoing in the gallery, I felt I had walked into some village mairie, with a map of the district on the wall.” This time, Mme de Cambremer resolutely turned her back on me.
“You didn’t find the arrangement too bad?” her husband asked her with the same compassionate anxiety with which he would have inquired how his wife had stood some painful ceremony. “They have some fine things.”
But since malice, when the hard and fast rules of a sure taste do not confine it within reasonable limits, finds fault with everything in the persons or in the houses of the people who have supplanted you, “Yes, but they are not in the right places,” replied Mme de Cambremer. “Besides, are they really as fine as all that?”
“You noticed,” said M. de Cambremer, with a melancholy that was tempered with a note of firmness, “there are some Jouy hangings that are worn away, some quite threadbare things in this drawing-room!”
“And that piece of stuff with its huge roses, like a peasant woman’s quilt,” said Mme de Cambremer, whose entirely spurious culture was confined exclusively to idealist philosophy, Impressionist painting and Debussy’s music. And, so as not to criticise merely in the name of luxury but in that of taste: “And they’ve put up draught-curtains! Such bad form! But what do you expect? These people simply don’t know, where could they possibly have learned? They must be retired tradespeople. It’s really not bad for them.”
“I thought the chandeliers good,” said the Marquis, though it was not evident why he should make an exception of the chandeliers, in the same way as, inevitably, whenever anyone spoke of a church, whether it was the Cathedral of Chartres, or of Rheims, or of Amiens, or the church at Balbec, what he would always make a point of mentioning as admirable would be: “the organ-case, the pulpit and the misericords.”
“As for the garden, don’t speak about it,” said Mme de Cambremer. “It’s sheer butchery. Those paths running all lopsided.”
I took the opportunity while Mme Verdurin was serving coffee to go and glance over the letter which M. de Cambremer had brought me and in which his mother invited me to dinner. With that faint trace of ink, the handwriting revealed an individuality which in the future I should be able to recognise among a thousand, without any more need to have recourse to the hypothesis of special pens than to suppose that rare and mysteriously blended colours are necessary to enable a painter to express his original vision. Indeed a paralytic, stricken with agraphia after a stroke and reduced to looking at the script as at a drawing without being able to read it, would have gathered that the dowager Mme de Cambremer belonged to an old family in which the zealous cultivation of literature and the arts had brought a breath of fresh air to its aristocratic traditions. He would have guessed also the period in which the Marquise had learned simultaneously to write and to play Chopin’s music. It was the time when well-bred people observed the rule of affability and what was called the rule of the three adjectives. Mme de Cambremer combined both rules. One laudatory adjective was not enough for her, she followed it (after a little dash) with a second, then (after another dash) with a third. But, what was peculiar to her was that, in defiance of the literary and social aim which she set herself, the sequence of the three epithets assumed in Mme de Cambremer’s letters the aspect not of a progression but of a diminuendo. Mme de Cambremer told me, in this first letter, that she had seen Saint-Loup and had appreciated more than ever his “unique—rare—real” qualities, that he was coming to them again with one of his friends (the one who was in love with her daughter-in-law), and that if I cared to come, with or without them, to dine at Féterne she would be “delighted—happy—pleased.” Perhaps it was because her desire to be amiable outran the fertility of her imagination and the riches of her vocabulary that the lady, while determined to utter three exclamations, was incapable of making the second and third anything more than feeble echoes of the first. Had there only been a fourth adjective, nothing would have remained of the initial amiability. Finally, with a certain refined simplicity which cannot have failed to produce a considerable impression upon her family and indeed her circle of acquaintance, Mme de Cambremer had acquired the habit of substituting for the word “sincere” (which might in time begin to ring false) the word “true.” And to show that it was indeed by sincerity that she was impelled, she broke the conventional rule that would have placed the adjective “true” before its noun, and planted it boldly after. Her letters ended with: “Croyez à mon amitié vraie”; “Croyez à ma sympathie vraie.” Unfortunately, this had become so stereotyped a formula that the affectation of frankness was more suggestive of a polite fiction than the time-honoured formulas to whose meaning one no longer gives a thought.
I was, however, hindered from reading her letter by the confused hubbub of conversation over which rang out the louder accents of M. de Charlus, who, still on the same topic, was saying to M. de Cambremer: “You reminded me, when you offered me your chair, of a gentleman from whom I received a letter this morning addressed ‘To His Highness the Baron de Charlus,’ and beginning: ‘Monseigneur.’ ”15
“To be sure, your correspondent was exaggerating a bit,” replied M. de Cambremer, giving way to a discreet show of mirth.
M. de Charlus had provoked this, but he did not partake in it. “Well, if it comes to that, my dear fellow,” he said, “I may tell you that, heraldically speaking, he was entirely in the right. I’m not making a personal issue of it, you understand. I’m speaking of it as though it were someone else. But one has to face the facts, history is history, there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s not for us to rewrite it. I need not cite the case of the Emperor William, who at Kiel invariably addressed me as ‘Monseigneur.’ I have heard it said that he gave the same title to all the dukes of France, which is improper, but is perhaps simply a delicate attention aimed over our heads at France herself.”
“More delicate, perhaps, than sincere,” said M. de Cambremer.
“Ah! there I must differ from you. Mind you, speaking personally, a gentleman of the lowest rank such as that Hohenzollern, a Protestant to boot, and one who has usurped the throne of my cousin the King of Hanover, can be no favourite of mine,” added M. de Charlus, with whom the annexation of Hanover seemed to rankle more than that of Alsace-Lorraine. “But I believe the penchant that the Emperor feels for us to be profoundly sincere. Fools will tell you
Observing that Morel was listening, M. de Charlus proceeded to develop the reasons for his claim. “I have pointed out to my brother that it is not in the third part of the Gotha, but in the second, not to say the first, that the account of our family ought to be included,” he said, without stopping to think that Morel did not know what the “Gotha” was. “But that is his affair, he is the head of our house, and so long as he raises no objection and allows the matter to pass, I can only shut my eyes.”
“I found M. Brichot most interesting,” I said to Mme Verdurin as she joined me, and I slipped Mme de Cambremer’s letter into my pocket.
“He has a cultured mind and is an excellent man,” she replied coldly. “Of course what he lacks is originality and taste, and he has a fearsome memory. They used to say of the ‘forebears’ of the people we have here this evening, the émigrés, that they had forgotten nothing. But they had at least the excuse,” she said, borrowing one of Swann’s epigrams, “that they had learned nothing. Whereas Brichot knows everything, and hurls chunks of dictionary at our heads during dinner. I’m sure there’s nothing you don’t know now about the names of all the towns and villages.”
While Mme Verdurin was speaking, it occurred to me that I had intended to ask her something, but I could not remember what it was.
“I’m sure you are talking about Brichot,” said Ski. “Eh, Chantepie, and Freycinet, he didn’t spare you anything. I was watching you, little Mistress.”
“Oh yes, I saw you, I nearly burst.”
I could not say today what Mme Verdurin was wearing that evening. Perhaps even at the time I was no more able to, for I do not have an observant mind. But feeling that her dress was not unambitious, I said to her something polite and even admiring. She was like almost all women, who imagine that a compliment that is paid to them is a literal statement of the truth, a judgment impartially, irresistibly pronounced as though it referred to a work of art that has no connexion with a person. And so it was with an earnestness which made me blush for my own hypocrisy that she replied with the proud and artless question that is habitual in such circumstances: “Do you like it?”
“You’re talking about Chantepie, I’m sure,” said M. Verdurin as he came towards us.
I had been alone, as I thought of my strip of green lustre and of a scent of wood, in failing to notice that, while he enumerated these etymological derivations, Brichot had been provoking derision. And since the impressions that for me gave things their value were of the sort which other people either do not feel or unthinkingly reject as insignificant, and which consequently (had I managed to communicate them) would have been misunderstood or else scorned, they were entirely useless to me and had the additional drawback of making me appear stupid in the eyes of Mme Verdurin who saw that I had “swallowed” Brichot, as I had already appeared stupid to Mme de Guermantes because I had enjoyed myself at Mme d’Arpajon’s. With Brichot, however, there was another reason. I was not one of the little clan. And in every clan, whether it be social, political, or literary, one contracts a perverse facility for discovering in a conversation, in an official speech, in a story, in a sonnet, everything that the plain reader would never have dreamed of finding there. How often have I found myself, after reading with a certain excitement a tale skilfully told by a fluent and slightly old-fashioned Academician, on the point of saying to Bloch or to Mme de Guermantes: “How charming this is!” when before I had opened my mouth they exclaimed, each in a different language: “If you want to be really amused, read a story by So-and-so. Human stupidity has never sunk to greater depths.” Bloch’s scorn derived mainly from the fact that certain effects of style, pleasing enough in themselves, were slightly faded; that of Mme de Guermantes from the notion that the story seemed to prove the direct opposite of what the author meant, for reasons of fact which she had the ingenuity to deduce but which would never have occurred to me. I was no less surprised to discover the irony that underlay the Verdurins’ apparent friendliness for Brichot than to hear some days later, at Féterne, the Cambremers say to me, on hearing my enthusiastic praise of La Raspelière: “You can’t be sincere, after what they’ve done to it.” It is true that they admitted that the china was good. Like the shocking draught-curtains, it had escaped my notice. “Anyhow, when you go back to Balbec, you’ll now know what Balbec means,” said M. Verdurin sarcastically. It was precisely the things Brichot had taught me that interested me. As for what was called his wit, it was exactly the same as had at one time been so highly appreciated by the little clan. He talked with the same irritating fluency, but his words no longer struck a chord, having to overcome a hostile silence or disagreeable echoes; what had changed was not what he said but the acoustics of the room and the attitude of his audience. “Take care,” Mme Verdurin murmured, pointing to Brichot. The latter, whose hearing remained keener than his vision, darted at the Mistress a short-sighted and philosophical glance which he hastily withdrew. If his outward eyes had deteriorated, those of his mind had on the contrary begun to take a larger view of things. He saw how little was to be expected of human affection, and had resigned himself to the fact. Undoubtedly the discovery pained him. It may happen that even the man who on one evening only, in a circle where he is usually greeted with pleasure, realises that the others have found him too frivolous or too pedantic or too clumsy or too cavalier, or whatever it may be, returns home miserable. Often it is a difference of opinion, or of approach, that has made him appear to other people absurd or old-fashioned. Often he is perfectly well aware that those others are inferior to himself. He could easily dissect the sophistries with which he has been tacitly condemned, and is tempted to pay a call, to write a letter: on second thoughts, he does nothing, and awaits the invitation for the following week. Sometimes, too, these falls from grace, instead of ending with the evening, last for months. Arising from the instability of social judgments, they increase that instability further. For the man who knows that Mme X despises him, feeling that he is respected at Mme Y’s, pronounces her