In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (13 page)

Gilberte’s girl friends were not all plunged in that state of intoxication in which it is impossible to make any decisions. Some of them even refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase that was very popular that year: “I can see I’m not having much of a success with my tea!” And to eradicate even more completely any notion of ceremony, she would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, saying: “It’s just like a wedding breakfast. Goodness, how stupid servants are!”

She would nibble away, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had all those cakes at her disposal without having asked her mother’s permission, when Mme Swann, whose “day” coincided as a rule with Gilberte’s tea-parties, having shown one of her visitors to the door, came sweeping in a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with an air of astonishment: “I say, that looks good, what you’ve got there. It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake.”

“But, Mamma, do! We invite you,” Gilberte would answer.

“Thank you, no, my precious; what would my visitors say? I’ve still got Mme Trombert and Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps. You know dear Mme Bontemps never pays very short visits, and she has only just come. What would all those good people say if I didn’t go back to them? If no one else calls, I’ll come back and have a chat with you (which will be far more amusing) after they’ve all gone. I really think I’ve earned a little rest. I’ve had forty-five different people today, and forty-two of them have told me about Gérôme’s picture! But you must come along one of these days,” she turned to me, “and take ‘your’ tea with Gilberte. She’ll make it for you just as you like it, as you have it in your own little ‘den’,” she added as she rushed off to her visitors and as if it had been something as familiar to me as my own habits (such as the habit I might have had of drinking tea, had I ever done so; as for my “den,” I was uncertain whether I had one or not) that I had come to seek in this mysterious world. “When can you come? Tomorrow? We’ll make you some toast that’s every bit as good as you get at Colombin’s. No? You are horrid!”—for, since she too had begun to form a salon, she was adopting Mme Verdurin’s mannerisms, and notably her tone of simpering autocracy. “Toast” being as unfamiliar to me as “Colombin’s,” this further promise could not have added to my temptation. It will appear stranger, now that everyone uses such expressions—perhaps even at Combray—that I had not at first understood who Mme Swann was speaking of when I heard her sing the praises of our old “nurse.” I did not know any English; I soon gathered, however, that the word was intended to denote Françoise. Having been so terrified in the Champs-Elysées of the bad impression that she must make, I now learned from Mme Swann that it was all the things that Gilberte had told them about my “nurse” that had attracted her husband and her to me. “One feels that she is so devoted to you, that she must be so nice!” (At once my opinion of Françoise was diametrically changed. Conversely, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.) Finally I learned from some words which Mme Swann let fall with regard to Mme Blatin (whose good nature she acknowledged but whose visits she dreaded) that personal relations with that lady would have been of less value to me than I had supposed, and would not in any way have improved my standing with the Swanns.

If I had now begun to explore with tremors of reverence and joy the enchanted domain which, against all expectations, had opened to me its hitherto impenetrable approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The realm into which I was admitted was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their way, after shaking my hand, when they crossed the hall at the same moment as myself but in the other direction. But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told that it was I, would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter. I remembered the letter, so complete and so persuasive, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which he had not deigned even to acknowledge. I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which subsequently life, without one’s so much as knowing how it went about it, so easily unravels. My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, now enabled me to enjoy the same favours as if, having had as a companion at some school where I was always at the top of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in the throne-room. Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he were not over-burdened with glorious occupations, would take me into his library and there allow me for an hour on end to respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to observations of which my excitement prevented me from understanding a single word; would show me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre or the Bibliothèque Nationale possessed, but at which I found it impossible to look. At such moments I should have been delighted if Swann’s butler had demanded from me my watch, my tie-pin, my boots, and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir; in the admirable words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we do not know the author, although, like these epics, and with all deference to Wolf and his theory,
⁵
it most certainly had one (one of those inventive and modest souls such as we come across every year, who light upon such gems as “putting a name to a face,” though their own names they never reveal),
I no longer knew what I was doing
. The most I was capable of was astonishment, when my visit was at all prolonged, at the nullity of achievement, at the utter inconclusiveness of those hours spent in the enchanted dwelling. But my disappointment arose neither from the inadequacy of the works of art that were shown to me nor from the impossibility of fixing upon them my distracted gaze. For it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made it miraculous for me to be sitting in Swann’s library, it was the attachment to those objects—which might have been the ugliest in the world—of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had for so many years located in that room and which still impregnated it; similarly the multitude of mirrors, of silver-backed brushes, of altars to Saint Anthony of Padua carved and painted by the most eminent artists, her friends, counted for nothing in the feeling of my own unworthiness and of her regal benevolence which was aroused in me when Mme Swann received me for a moment in her bedroom, in which three beautiful and impressive creatures, her first, second and third lady’s-maids, smilingly prepared for her the most marvellous toilettes, and towards which, on the order conveyed to me by the footman in knee-breeches that Madame wished to say a few words to me, I would make my way along the tortuous path of a corridor perfumed for the whole of its length with the precious essences which ceaselessly wafted from her dressing-room their fragrant exhalations.

When Mme Swann had returned to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing, for even with only two people in the room, and as though she had to cope with all the “chums” at once, she would raise her voice, ejaculate her words, as she had so often in the “little clan” heard the “Mistress” do, at the moments when she “led the conversation.” The expressions which we have recently borrowed from other people being those which, for a time at least, we are fondest of using, Mme Swann used to select sometimes those which she had learned from distinguished people whom her husband had not been able to avoid introducing to her (it was from them that she derived the mannerism which consists in suppressing the article or demonstrative pronoun before an adjective qualifying a person’s name), sometimes others more vulgar (such as “He’s a mere nothing!”—the favourite expression of one of her friends), and tried to
place them in all the stories which, from a habit formed in the “little clan,” she loved to tell. She would follow these up automatically with, “I do love that story!” or “Do admit, it’s a very
good
story!” which came to her, through her husband, from the Guermantes whom she did not know.

Mme Swann had left the dining-room, but her husband, having just returned home, would make his appearance among us in turn. “Do you know if your mother is alone, Gilberte?” “No, Papa, she still has some visitors.” “What, still? At seven o’clock! It’s appalling. The poor woman must be absolutely broken. It’s odious.” (At home I had always heard the first syllable of this word pronounced with a long “o,” like “ode,” but M. and Mme Swann made it short, as in “odd.”) “Just think of it; ever since two o’clock this afternoon!” he went on, turning to me. “And Camille tells me that between four and five he let in at least a dozen people. Did I say a dozen? I believe he told me fourteen. No, a dozen; I don’t remember. When I came home I had quite forgotten it was her ‘day,’ and when I saw all those carriages outside the door I thought there must be a wedding in the house. And just now, while I’ve been in the library for a short while, the bell has never stopped ringing; upon my word, it’s given me quite a headache. And are there a lot of them in there still?” “No; only two.” “Who are they, do you know?” “Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps.” “Oh! the wife of the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Public Works.” “I know her husband works in some Ministry or other, but I don’t know what as,” Gilberte would say in a babyish manner.

“What’s that? You silly child, you talk as if you were
two years old. What do you mean: ‘works in some Ministry or other’ indeed! He’s nothing less than Chief Secretary, head of the whole show, and what’s more—what on earth am I thinking of? Upon my word, I’m getting as stupid as yourself: he isn’t the Chief Secretary, he’s the Permanent Secretary.”

“How should I know? Is that supposed to mean a lot, being Permanent Secretary?” answered Gilberte, who never let slip an opportunity of displaying her own indifference to anything that gave her parents cause for vanity. (She may, of course, have considered that she only enhanced the brilliance of such an acquaintance by not seeming to attach any undue importance to it.)

“I should think it did ‘mean a lot’!” exclaimed Swann, who preferred to this modesty, which might have left me in doubt, a more explicit parlance. “Why it means simply that he’s the first man after the Minister. In fact, he’s more important than the Minister, because it’s he who does all the work. Besides, it appears that he’s immensely able, a man quite of the first rank, a most distinguished individual. He’s an Officer of the Legion of Honour. A delightful man, and very good-looking too.”

(This man’s wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone’s wishes and advice because he was a “charming creature.” He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, bad breath, and a glass eye.)

“I may tell you,” he added, turning to me, “that I’m greatly amused to see that lot serving in the present government, because they are Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, typical of the old-fashioned bourgeoisie, reactionary, clerical, tremendously straitlaced. Your grandfather knew quite well, at least by name and by sight, old Chenut, the father, who never tipped cabmen more than a sou, though he was a rich man for those days, and the Baron Bréau-Chenut. All their money went in the Union Générale smash—you’re too young to remember that, of course—and, gad! they’ve had to get it back as best they could.”

“He’s the uncle of a girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine.’ She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but meanwhile she’s an odd fish.”

“She is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone.”

“I don’t know her. I only used to see her about, and hear them calling ‘Albertine’ here and ‘Albertine’ there. But I do know Mme Bontemps, and I don’t like her much either.”

“You are quite wrong; she’s charming, pretty, intelligent. She’s even quite witty. I shall go in and say how d’ye do to her, and ask her if her husband thinks we’re going to have a war, and whether we can rely on King Theodosius. He’s bound to know, don’t you think, since he’s in the counsels of the gods.”

It was not thus that Swann used to talk in days gone by; but which of us cannot call to mind some quite unpretentious royal princess who has let herself be carried off by a footman, and then, ten years later, trying to get back into society and sensing that people are not very willing to call on her, spontaneously adopts the language of all the old bores, and, when a fashionable duchess is mentioned, can be heard to say: “She came to see me only yesterday,” or “I live a very quiet life”? Thus it is superfluous to make a study of social mores, since we can deduce them from psychological laws.

The Swanns shared this failing of people who are not much sought after; a visit, an invitation, a mere friendly word from anyone at all prominent was for them an event to which they felt the need to give full publicity. If bad luck would have it that the Verdurins were in London when Odette gave a rather smart dinner-party, it would be arranged for some common friend to cable a report to them across the Channel. The Swanns were incapable even of keeping to themselves the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette. They spoke of them to their friends, passed them from hand to hand. Thus the Swanns’ drawing-room was reminiscent of a seaside hotel where telegrams are posted up on a board.