In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (42 page)

He would repeat the name 'Aimé' all day long, one result of which was
that when he had anyone to dinner the guest would remark "I can see,
you are quite at home in this place," and would feel himself obliged
to keep, on saying 'Aimé' also, from that tendency, combining elements
of timidity, vulgarity and silliness, which many people have, to
believe that it is smart and witty to copy to the letter what is said
by the company in which they may happen to be. The barrister repeated
the name incessantly, but with a smile, for he felt that he was
exhibiting at once the good terms on which he stood with the head
waiter and his own superior station. And the head waiter, whenever he
caught the sound of his own name, smiled too, as though touched and at
the same time proud, shewing that he was conscious of the honour and
could appreciate the pleasantry.

Terrifying as I always found these meals, in the vast restaurant,
generally full, of the mammoth hotel, they became even more terrifying
when there arrived for a few days the Proprietor (or he may have been
only the General Manager, appointed by a board of directors) not only
of this 'palace' but of seven or eight more besides, situated at all
the four corners of France, in each of which, travelling continuously,
he would spend a week now and again. Then, just after dinner had
begun, there appeared every evening in the doorway of the dining–room
this small man with white hair and a red nose, astonishingly neat and
impassive, who was known, it appeared, as well in London as at
Monte–Carlo, as one of the leading hotel–keepers in Europe. Once when
I had gone out for a moment at the beginning of dinner, as I came in
again I passed close by him, and he bowed to me, but with a coldness
in which I could not distinguish whether it should be attributed to
the reserve of a man who could never forget what he was, or to his
contempt for a customer of so little importance. To those whose
importance was considerable the Managing Director would bow, with
quite as much coldness but more deeply, lowering his eyelids with a
reverence that was almost offended modesty, as though he had found
himself confronted, at a funeral, with the father of the deceased or
with the Blessed Sacrament. Except for these icy and infrequent
salutations, he made not the slightest movement, as if to show that
his glittering eyes, which appeared to be starting out of his head,
saw everything, controlled everything, assured to us in the 'Hotel
dinner' perfection in every detail as well as a general harmony. He
felt, evidently, that he was more than the producer of a play, than
the conductor of an orchestra, nothing less than a general in supreme
command. Having decided that a contemplation carried to its utmost
intensity would suffice to assure him that everything was in
readiness, that no mistake had been made which could lead to
disaster,—to invest him, in a word, with full responsibility, he
abstained not merely from any gesture but even from moving his eyes,
which, petrified by the intensity of their gaze, took in and directed
everything that was going on. I felt that even the movements of my
spoon did not escape him, and were he to vanish after the soup, for
the whole of dinner the review that he had held would have taken away
my appetite. His own was exceedingly good, as one could see at
luncheon, which he took like an ordinary guest of the hotel at a table
that anyone else might have had in the public dining–room. His table
had this peculiarity only, that by his side, while he was eating, the
other manager, the resident one, remained standing all the time to
make conversation. For being subordinate to this Managing Director he
was anxious to please a man of whom he lived in constant fear. My fear
of him diminished during these luncheons, for being then lost in the
crowd of visitors he would exercise the discretion of a general
sitting in a restaurant where there are also private soldiers, in not
seeming to take any notice of them. Nevertheless when the porter, from
among a cluster of pages, announced to me: "He leaves to–morrow
morning for Dinard. Then he's going down to Biarritz, and after that
to Cannes," I began to breathe more freely.

My life in the hotel was rendered not only dull because I had no
friends there but uncomfortable because Françoise had made so many. It
might be thought that they would have made things easier for us in
various respects. Quite the contrary. The proletariat, if they
succeeded only with great difficulty in being treated as people she
knew by Françoise, and could not succeed at all unless they fulfilled
the condition of shewing the utmost politeness to her, were, on the
other hand, once they had reached the position, the only people who
'counted.' Her time–honoured code taught her that she was in no way
bound to the friends of her employers, that she might, if she was
busy, shut the door without ceremony in the face of a lady who had
come to call on my grandmother. But towards her own acquaintance, that
is to say, the select handful of the lower orders whom she admitted to
an unconquerable intimacy, her actions were regulated by the most
subtle and most stringent of protocols. Thus Françoise having made the
acquaintance of the man in the coffee–shop and of a little maid who
did dressmaking for a Belgian lady, no longer came upstairs
immediately after luncheon to get my grandmother's things ready, but
came an hour later, because the coffee man had wanted to make her a
cup of coffee or a
tisane
in his shop, or the maid had invited her to
go and watch her sew, and to refuse either of them would have been
impossible, and one of the things that were not done. Moreover,
particular attention was due to the little sewing–maid, who was an
orphan and had been brought up by strangers to whom she still went
occasionally for a few days' holiday. Her unusual situation aroused
Franchise's pity, and also a benevolent contempt. She, who had a
family, a little house that had come to her from her parents, with a
field in which her brother kept his cows, how could she regard so
uprooted a creature as her equal? And since this girl hoped, on
Assumption Day, to be allowed to pay her benefactors a visit,
Françoise kept on repeating: "She does make me laugh! She says, 'I
hope to be going home for the Assumption.' 'Home!' says she! It isn't
just that it's not her own place, they're people who took her in from
nowhere, and the creature says 'home' just as if it really was her
home. Poor girl! What a wretched state she must be in, not to know
what it is to have a home." Still, if Françoise had associated only
with the ladies'–maids brought to the hotel by other visitors, who fed
with her in the 'service' quarters and, seeing her grand lace cap and
her handsome profile, took her perhaps for some lady of noble birth,
whom 'reduced circumstances,' or a personal attachment had driven to
serve as companion to my grandmother, if in a word Françoise had known
only people who did not belong to the hotel, no great harm would have
been done, since she could not have prevented them from doing us any
service, for the simple reason that in no circumstances, even without
her knowledge, would it have been possible for them to serve us at
all. But she had formed connexions also with one of the wine waiters,
with a man in the kitchen, and with the head chambermaid of our
landing. And the result of this in our everyday life was that
Françoise, who on the day of her arrival, when she still did not know
anypne, would set all the bells jangling for the slightest thing, at
an hour when my grandmother and I would never have dared to ring, and
if we offered some gentle admonition answered: "Well, we're paying
enough for it, aren't we?" as though it were she herself that would
have to pay; nowadays, since she had made friends with a personage in
the kitchen, which had appeared to us to augur well for our future
comfort, were my grandmother or I to complain of cold feet, Françoise,
even at an hour that was quite normal, dared not ring; she assured us
that it would give offence because they would have to light the
furnace again, or because it would interrupt the servants' dinner and
they would be annoyed. And she ended with a formula that, in spite of
the ambiguous way in which she uttered it, was none the less clear,
and put us plainly in the wrong: "The fact is…" We did not insist,
for fear of bringing upon ourselves another, far more serious: "It's a
matter…!" So that it amounted to this, that we could no longer have
any hot water because Françoise had become a friend of the man who
would have to heat it.

In the end we too formed a connexion, in spite of but through my
grandmother, for she and Mme. de Villeparisis came in collision one
morning in a doorway and were obliged to accost each other, not
without having first exchanged gestures of surprise and hesitation,
performed movements of recoil and uncertainty, and finally uttered
protestations of joy and greeting, as in some of Molière's plays,
where two actors who have been delivering long soliloquies from
opposite sides of the stage, a few feet apart, are supposed not to
have seen each other yet, and then suddenly catch sight of each other,
cannot believe their eyes, break off what they are saying and finally
address each other (the chorus having meanwhile kept the dialogue
going) and fall into each other's arms. Mme. de Villeparisis was
tactful, and made as if to leave my grandmother to herself after the
first greetings, but my grandmother insisted on her staying to talk to
her until luncheon, being anxious to discover how her friend managed
to get her letters sent up to her earlier than we got ours, and to get
such nice grilled things (for Mme. de Villeparisis, a great epicure,
had the poorest opinion of the hotel kitchen which served us with
meals that my grandmother, still quoting Mme. de Sévigné, described as
"of a magnificence to make you die of hunger.") And the Marquise
formed the habit of coming every day, until her own meal was ready, to
sit down for a moment at our table in the dining–room, insisting that
we should not rise from our chairs or in any way put ourselves out. At
the most we would linger, as often as not, in the room after finishing
our luncheon, to talk to her, at that sordid moment when the knives
are left littering the tablecloth among crumpled napkins. For my own
part, so as to preserve (in order that I might be able to enjoy
Balbec) the idea that I was on the uttermost promontory of the earth,
I compelled myself to look farther afield, to notice only the sea, to
seek in it the effects described by Baudelaire and to let my gaze fall
upon our table only on days when there was set on it some gigantic
fish, some marine monster, which unlike the knives and forks was
contemporary with the primitive epochs in which the Ocean first began
to teem with life, in the Cimmerians' time, a fish whose body with its
numberless vertebrae, its blue veins and red, had been constructed by
nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome
cathedral of the deep.

As a barber, seeing an officer whom he is accustomed to shave with
special deference and care recognise a customer who has just entered
the shop and stop for a moment to talk to him, rejoices in the thought
that these are two men of the same social order, and cannot help
smiling as he goes to fetch the bowl of soap, for he knows that in his
establishment,' to the vulgar routine of a mere barber's–shop, are
being added social, not to say aristocratic pleasures, so Aimé, seeing
that Mme. de Villeparisis had found in us old friends, went to fetch
our finger–bowls with precisely the smile, proudly modest and
knowingly discreet, of a hostess who knows when to leave her guests to
themselves. He suggested also a pleased and loving father who looks
on, without interfering, at the happy pair who have plighted their
troth at his hospitable board. Besides, it was enough merely to utter
the name of a person of title for Aimé to appear pleased, unlike
Françoise, before whom you could not mention Count So–and–so without
her face darkening and her speech becoming dry and sharp, all of which
meant that she worshipped the aristocracy not less than Aimé but far
more. But then Françoise had that quality which in others she
condemned as the worst possible fault; she was proud. She was not of
that friendly and good–humoured race to which Aimé belonged. They
feel, they exhibit an intense delight when you tell them a piece of
news which may be more or less sensational but is at any rate new, and
not to be found in the papers. Françoise declined to appear surprised.
You might have announced in her hearing that the Archduke Rudolf—not
that she had the least suspicion of his having ever existed—was not,
as was generally supposed, dead, but 'alive and kicking'; she would
have answered only 'Yes,' as though she had known it all the time. It
may, however, have been that if even from our own lips, from us whom
she so meekly called her masters, who had so nearly succeeded in
taming her, she could not, without having to check an angry start,
hear the name of a noble, that was because the family from which she
had sprung occupied in its own village a comfortable and independent
position, and was not to be threatened in the consideration which it
enjoyed save by those same nobles, in whose households, meanwhile,
from his boyhood, an Aimé would have been domiciled as a servant, if
not actually brought up by their charity. Of Françoise, then, Mme. de
Villeparisis must ask pardon, first, for her nobility. But (in France,
at any rate) that is precisely the talent, in fact the sole occupation
of our great gentlemen and ladies. Françoise, following the common
tendency of servants, who pick up incessantly from the conversation of
their masters with other people fragmentary observations from which
they are apt to draw erroneous inductions, as the human race generally
does with respect to the habits of animals, was constantly discovering
that somebody had 'failed' us, a conclusion to which she was easily
led, not so much, perhaps, by her extravagant love for us, as by the
delight that she took in being disagreeable to us. But having once
established, without possibility of error, the endless little
attentions paid to us, and paid to herself also by Mme. de
Villeparisis, Françoise forgave her for being a Marquise, and, as she
had never ceased to be proud of her because she was one, preferred her
thenceforward to all our other friends. It must be added that no one
else took the trouble to be so continually nice to us. Whenever my
grandmother remarked on a book that Mme. de Villeparisis was reading,
or said she had been admiring the fruit which some one had just sent
to our friend, within an hour the footman would come to our rooms with
book or fruit. And the next time we saw her, in response to our
thanks, she would say only, seeming to seek some excuse for the
meagreness of her present in some special use to which it might be
put: "It's nothing wonderful, but the newspapers come so late here,
one must have something to read." Or, "It is always wiser to have
fruit one can be quite certain of, at the seaside."—"But I don't
believe I've ever seen you eating oysters," she said to us, increasing
the sense of disgust which I felt at that moment, for the living flesh
of the oyster revolted me even more than the gumminess of the stranded
jellyfish defiled for me the beach at Balbec; "they are delicious down
here! Oh, let me tell my maid to fetch your letters when she goes for
mine. What, your daughter writes every day? But what on earth can you
find to say to each other?" My grandmother was silent, but it may be
assumed that her silence was due to scorn, in her who used to repeat,
when she wrote to Mamma, the words of Mme. de Sévigné: "As soon as I
have received a letter, I want another at once; I cannot breathe until
it comes. There are few who are worthy to understand what I mean." And
I was afraid of her applying to Mme. de Villeparisis the conclusion:
"I seek out those who are of the chosen few, and I avoid the rest."
She fell back upon praise of the fruit which Mme. de Villeparisis had
sent us the day before. And this had been, indeed, so fine that the
manager, in spite of the jealousy aroused by our neglect of his
official offerings, had said to me: "I am like you; I'm madder about
fruit than any other kind of dessert." My grandmother told her friend
that she had enjoyed them all the more because the fruit which we got
in the hotel was generally horrid. "I cannot," she went on, "say, like
Mme. de Sévigné, that if we should take a sudden fancy for bad fruit
we should be obliged to order it from Paris." "Oh yes, of course, you
read Mme. de Sévigné. I saw you with her letters the day you came."
(She forgot that she had never officially seen my grandmother in the
hotel until their collision in the doorway.) "Don't you find it rather
exaggerated, her constant anxiety about her daughter? She refers to it
too often to be really sincere. She is not natural." My grandmother
felt that any discussion would be futile, and so as not to be obliged
to speak of the things she loved to a person incapable of
understanding them, concealed by laying her bag upon them the
Mémoires de Mme. de Beausergent
.