In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (49 page)

“By the way, I can’t think why you wouldn’t invite his wife,” said Cottard, “he would be with us still.”

“Will you mind what you’re saying, please. I don’t open my doors to trollops, Monsieur le Professeur,” said Mme Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done everything in her power to make Elstir return, even with his wife. But before they were married she had tried to separate them, had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, a thief. For once in a way she had failed to effect a breach. It was with the Verdurin salon that Elstir had broken; and he was glad of it, as converts bless the illness or misfortune that has caused them to withdraw from the world and has shown them the way of salvation.

“He really is magnificent, the Professor,” she said. “Why not declare outright that I keep a disorderly house. Anyone would think you didn’t know what Madame Elstir was. I’d sooner have the lowest streetwalker at my table! Oh no, I’m not stooping to that! But in any case it would have been stupid of me to overlook the wife when the husband no longer interests me—he’s out of date, he can’t even draw.”

“It’s extraordinary in a man of his intelligence,” said Cottard.

“Oh, no!” replied Mme Verdurin, “even at the time when he had talent—for he did have talent, the wretch, and to spare—what was tiresome about him was that he hadn’t a spark of intelligence.”

In order to form this opinion, Mme Verdurin had not waited for their quarrel, or until she had ceased to care for his painting. The fact was that, even at the time when he formed part of the little group, it sometimes happened that Elstir would spend whole days in the company of some woman whom, rightly or wrongly, Mme Verdurin considered a goose, and this, in her opinion, was not the conduct of an intelligent man. “No,” she observed judiciously, “I consider that his wife and he are made for one another. Heaven knows, there isn’t a more boring creature on the face of the earth, and I should go mad if I had to spend a couple of hours with her. But people say that he finds her very intelligent. There’s no use denying it, our Tiche was
extremely stupid
. I’ve seen him bowled over by women you can’t conceive, amiable idiots we’d never have allowed into our little clan. Well, he used to write to them, and argue with them, he, Elstir! That doesn’t prevent his having charming qualities, oh, charming, and deliciously absurd, naturally.” For Mme Verdurin was convinced that men who are truly remarkable are capable of all sorts of follies. A false idea in which there is nevertheless a grain of truth. Certainly, people’s “follies” are insupportable. But a want of balance which we discover only in course of time is the consequence of the entering into a human brain of refinements for which it is not normally adapted. So that the oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd. “There, I shall be able to show you his flowers now,” she said to me, seeing that her husband was making signals to her to rise. And she took M. de Cambremer’s arm again. M. Verdurin wanted to apologise for this to M. de Charlus, as soon as he had got rid of Mme de Cambremer, and to give him his reasons, chiefly for the pleasure of discussing these social distinctions with a man of title, momentarily the inferior of those who assigned to him the place to which they considered him entitled. But first of all he was anxious to make it clear to M. de Charlus that intellectually he esteemed him too highly to suppose that he could pay any attention to these trivialities.

“Forgive my mentioning these trifles,” he began, “for I can well imagine how little importance you attach to them. Middle-class minds take them seriously, but the others, the artists, the people who are really
of our sort
, don’t give a rap for them. Now, from the first words we exchanged, I realised that you were
one of us
!” M. de Charlus, who attached a very different meaning to this expression, gave a start. After the Doctor’s oglings, his host’s insulting frankness took his breath away. “Don’t protest, my dear sir, you are
one of us
, it’s as clear as daylight,” M. Verdurin went on. “Mind you, I don’t know whether you practise any of the arts, but that’s not necessary. Nor is it always sufficient. Dechambre, who has just died, played exquisitely, with the most vigorous execution, but he wasn’t
one of us
, you felt at once that he wasn’t. Brichot isn’t
one of us
. Morel is, my wife is, I can feel that you are . . .”

“What were you going to say to me?” interrupted M. de Charlus, who was beginning to feel reassured as to M. Verdurin’s meaning, but preferred that he should not utter these equivocal remarks quite so loud.

“Only that we put you on the left,” replied M. Verdurin.

M. de Charlus, with a tolerant, genial, insolent smile, replied: “Why, that’s not of the slightest importance,
here
!” And he gave a little laugh that was all his own—a laugh that came down to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had tinkled now, unchanged, for a good many centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could appreciate its precious quality, like that of certain old musical instruments that have become very rare. There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of someone, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light, just as certain works of Bach are never accurately rendered because our orchestras lack those small, high trumpets, with a sound so entirely their own, for which the composer wrote this or that part.

“But,” explained M. Verdurin, hurt, “we did it on purpose. I attach no importance whatever to titles of nobility,” he went on, with that contemptuous smile which I have seen so many people I have known, unlike my grandmother and my mother, assume when they speak of something they do not possess to those who will thereby, they imagine, be prevented from using it to show their superiority over them. “But you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he’s a marquis, while you’re only a baron . . .”

“Pardon me,” M. de Charlus haughtily replied to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duke of Brabant, Squire of Montargis, Prince of Oléron, of Carency, of Viareggio and of the Dunes. However, it’s not of the slightest importance. Please don’t distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his delicate smile which blossomed at these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were out of your depth.”

Mme Verdurin came across to me to show me Elstir’s flowers. If the act of going out to dinner, to which I had grown so indifferent, by taking the form, which entirely revivified it, of a journey along the coast followed by an ascent in a carriage to a point six hundred feet above the sea, had produced in me a sort of intoxication, this feeling had not been dispelled at La Raspelière. “Just look at this, now,” said the Mistress, showing me some huge and splendid roses by Elstir, whose unctuous scarlet and frothy whiteness stood out, however, with almost too creamy a relief from the flower-stand on which they were arranged. “Do you suppose he would still have the touch to achieve that? Don’t you call that striking? And what marvellous texture! One longs to finger it. I can’t tell you what fun it was to watch him painting them. One could feel that he was interested in trying to get just that effect.” And the Mistress’s gaze rested musingly on this present from the artist which epitomised not merely his great talent but their long friendship which survived only in these mementoes of it that he had bequeathed to her; behind the flowers that long ago he had picked for her, she seemed to see the shapely hand that had painted them, in the course of a morning, in their freshness, so that, they on the table, it leaning against the back of a chair in the dining-room, had been able to meet face to face at the Mistress’s lunch-party, the still-living roses and their almost lifelike portrait. “Almost” only, for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain. He had shown in this water-colour the appearance of the roses which he had seen, and which, but for him, no one would ever have known; so that one might say that they were a new variety with which this painter, like a skilful horticulturist, had enriched the rose family. “From the day he left the little nucleus, he was finished. It seems my dinners made him waste his time, that I hindered the development of his
genius
,” she said in a tone of irony. “As if the society of a woman like myself could fail to be beneficial to an artist!” she exclaimed with a burst of pride.

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.