In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (30 page)

“And how charming the name is,” said I. “One would like to know the origin of all those names.”

“That one I can tell you,” the old lady answered modestly. “It is a family place, it came from my grandmother Arrachepel, not an illustrious family, but good and very old country stock.”

“What! not illustrious!” her daughter-in-law tartly interrupted her. “A whole window in Bayeux cathedral is filled with their arms, and the principal church at Avranches has all their tombs. If these old names interest you,” she added, “you’ve come a year too late. We managed to appoint to the living at Criquetot, in spite of all the difficulties about changing from one diocese to another, the parish priest of a place where I myself have some land, a long way from here, Combray, where the worthy cleric felt that he was becoming neurasthenic. Unfortunately, the sea air didn’t agree with him at his age; his neurasthenia grew worse and he has returned to Combray. But he amused himself while he was our neighbour in going about looking up all the old charters, and he compiled quite an interesting little pamphlet on the place-names of the district. It has given him a fresh interest, too, for it seems he is spending his last years in writing a magnum opus about Combray and its surroundings. I shall send you his pamphlet on the surroundings of Féterne. It’s a most painstaking piece of scholarship. You’ll find the most interesting things in it about our old Raspelière, of which my mother-in-law speaks far too modestly.”

“In any case, this year,” replied the dowager Mme de Cambremer, “La Raspelière is no longer ours and doesn’t belong to me. But I can see that you have a painter’s instincts; I am sure you sketch, and I should so like to show you Féterne, which is far finer than La Raspelière.”

For ever since the Cambremers had let this latter residence to the Verdurins, its commanding situation had at once ceased to appear to them as it had appeared for so many years past, that is to say to offer the advantage, without parallel in the neighbourhood, of looking out over both sea and valley, and had on the other hand, suddenly and retrospectively, presented the drawback that one had always to go up or down hill to get to or from it. In short, one might have supposed that if Mme de Cambremer had let it, it was not so much to add to her income as to spare her horses. And she proclaimed herself delighted at being able at last to have the sea always so close at hand, at Féterne, she who for so many years (forgetting the two months that she spent there) had seen it only from up above and as though at the end of a vista. “I’m discovering it at my age,” she said, “and how I enjoy it! It does me a world of good. I would let La Raspelière for nothing so as to be obliged to live at Féterne.”

“To return to more interesting topics,” went on Legrandin’s sister, who addressed the old Marquise as “Mother” but with the passing of the years had come to treat her with insolence, “you mentioned water-lilies: I suppose you know Claude Monet’s pictures of them. What a genius! They interest me particularly because near Combray, that place where I told you I had some land . . .” But she preferred not to talk too much about Combray.

“Why, that must be the series that Elstir told us about, the greatest living painter,” exclaimed Albertine. who had said nothing so far.

“Ah! I can see that this young lady loves the arts.” cried old Mme de Cambremer; and drawing a deep breath, she recaptured a trail of spittle.

“You will allow me to put Le Sidaner before him. Mademoiselle,” said the barrister, smiling with the air of a connoisseur. And as he had appreciated, or seen others appreciating, years ago, certain “audacities” of Elstir’s, he added: “Elstir was gifted, indeed he almost belonged to the avant-garde, but for some reason or other he never kept up, he has wasted his life.”

Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin agreed with the barrister so far as Elstir was concerned, but, greatly to the chagrin of her guest, bracketed Monet with Le Sidaner. It would be untrue to say that she was a fool; she overflowed with a kind of intelligence that I had no use for. As the sun was beginning to set, the seagulls were now yellow, like the water-lilies on another canvas of that series by Monet. I said that I knew it, and (continuing to imitate the language of her brother, whom I had not yet ventured to name) added that it was a pity that she had not thought of coming a day earlier, for, at the same hour, there would have been a Poussin light for her to admire. Had some Norman squireen, unknown to the Guermantes, told her that she ought to have come a day earlier, Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin would doubtless have drawn herself up with an offended air. But I might have been far more familiar still, and she would have been all smiles and sweetness; I might in the warmth of that fine afternoon devour my fill of that rich honey cake which the young Mme de Cambremer so rarely was and which took the place of the dish of pastries that it had not occurred to me to offer my guests. But the name of Poussin, without altering the amenity of the society lady, aroused the protests of the connoisseur. On hearing that name, she produced six times in almost continuous succession that little smack of the tongue against the lips which serves to convey to a child who is misbehaving at once a reproach for having begun and a warning not to continue. “In heaven’s name, after a painter like Monet, who is quite simply a genius, don’t go and mention an old hack without a vestige of talent, like Poussin. I don’t mind telling you frankly that I find him the deadliest bore. I mean to say, you can’t really call that sort of thing painting. Monet, Degas, Manet, yes, there are painters if you like! It’s a curious thing,” she went on, fixing a searching and ecstatic gaze upon a vague point in space where she could see what was in her mind, “it’s a curious thing, I used at one time to prefer Manet. Nowadays I still admire Manet, of course, but I believe I like Monet even more. Ah, the cathedrals!” She was as scrupulous as she was condescending in informing me of the development of her taste. And one felt that the phases through which that taste had evolved were not, in her eyes, any less important than the different manners of Monet himself. Not that I had any reason to feel flattered by her confiding her enthusiasms to me, for even in the presence of the most dim-witted provincial lady, she could not remain for five minutes without feeling the need to confess them. When a noble lady of Avranches, who would have been incapable of distinguishing between Mozart and Wagner, said in the young Mme de Cambremer’s hearing: “We saw nothing new of any interest while we were in Paris. We went once to the Opéra-Comique, they were doing
Pelléas et Mélisande
, it’s dreadful stuff,” Mme de Cambremer not only boiled with rage but felt obliged to exclaim: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” and to “argue the point.” It was perhaps a Combray habit which she had picked up from my grandmother’s sisters, who called it “fighting the good fight,” and loved the dinner-parties at which they knew all through the week that they would have to defend their idols against the Philistines. Similarly, Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin enjoyed “getting worked up” and having “a good set-to” about art, as other people do about politics. She stood up for Debussy as she would have stood up for a woman friend whose conduct had been criticised. She must however have known very well that when she said: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” she could not improvise, for the person whom she was putting in her place, the whole progression of artistic culture at the end of which they would have reached agreement without any need of discussion. “I must ask Le Sidaner what he thinks of Poussin,” the barrister remarked to me. “He’s a regular recluse, never opens his mouth, but I know how to winkle things out of him.”

“Anyhow,” Mme de Cambremer went on, “I have a horror of sunsets, they’re so romantic, so operatic. That is why I can’t abide my mother-in-law’s house, with its tropical plants. You’ll see, it’s just like a public garden at Monte-Carlo. That’s why I prefer your coast here. It’s more sombre, more sincere. There’s a little lane from which one doesn’t see the sea. On rainy days, there’s nothing but mud, it’s a little world apart. It’s just the same at Venice, I detest the Grand Canal and I don’t know anything so touching as the little alleys. But it’s all a question of atmosphere.”

“But,” I remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in her eyes was to inform her that he was once more in fashion, “M. Degas affirms that he knows nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly.”

“Really? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly,” said Mme de Cambremer, who had no wish to differ from Degas, “but I can speak about the ones in the Louvre, which are hideous.”

“He admires them immensely too.”

“I must look at them again. My memory of them is a bit hazy,” she replied after a moment’s silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was certain to form of Poussin before very long would depend, not upon the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the supplementary and this time definitive examination that she intended to make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to change her mind.

Contenting myself with what was a first step towards retraction, since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep her on the rack any longer I told her mother-in-law how much I had heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne. In modest terms she spoke of the little presbytery garden that she had behind the house, into which in the mornings, by simply pushing open a door, she went in her dressing-gown to feed her peacocks, hunt for newlaid eggs, and gather the zinnias or roses which, on the sideboard, framing the creamed eggs or fried fish in a border of flowers, reminded her of her garden paths. “It’s true, we have a great many roses,” she told me, “our rose garden is almost too near the house, there are days when it makes my head ache. It’s nicer on the terrace at La Raspelière where the breeze wafts the scent of the roses, but not so headily.”

I turned to her daughter-in-law: “It’s just like
Pelléas
,” I said to her, to gratify her taste for the modern, “that scent of roses wafted up to the terraces. It’s so strong in the score that, as I suffer from hay-fever and rose-fever, it sets me sneezing every time I listen to that scene.”

“What a marvellous thing
Pelléas
is,” cried the young Mme de Cambremer, “I’m mad about it”; and, drawing closer to me with the gestures of a wild woman seeking to captivate me, picking out imaginary notes with her fingers, she began to hum something which I took to represent for her Pelléas’s farewell, and continued with a vehement insistency as though it were important that she should at that moment remind me of that scene, or rather should prove to me that she remembered it. “I think it’s even finer than
Parsifal
,” she added, “because in
Parsifal
the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodic phrases, outworn by the very fact of being melodic.”

“I know you are a great musician, Madame,” I said to the dowager. “I should so much like to hear you play.”

Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin gazed at the sea so as not to be drawn into the conversation. Being of the opinion that what her mother-in-law liked was not music at all, she regarded the talent, bogus according to her, but in reality of the very highest order, that the other was acknowledged to possess as a technical accomplishment devoid of interest. It was true that Chopin’s only surviving pupil declared, and with justice, that the Master’s style of playing, his “feeling,” had been transmitted, through herself, to Mme de Cambremer alone, but to play like Chopin was far from being a recommendation in the eyes of Legrandin’s sister, who despised nobody so much as the Polish composer.

“Oh! they’re flying away,” exclaimed Albertine, pointing to the gulls which, casting aside for a moment their flowery incognito, were rising in a body towards the sun.

“Their giant wings from walking hinder them,” quoted Mme de Cambremer, confusing the seagull with the albatross.

“I do love them; I saw some in Amsterdam,” said Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”

“Ah! so you’ve been in Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin asked imperiously, in the tone in which she would have said: “You know the Guermantes?”—for snobbishness in changing its object does not change its accent. Albertine replied in the negative, thinking that they were living people. But her mistake was not apparent.

“I should be delighted to play to you,” the dowager Mme de Cambremer said to me. “But you know I only play things that no longer appeal to your generation. I was brought up in the worship of Chopin,” she said in a lowered tone, for she was afraid of her daughter-in-law, and knew that to the latter, who considered that Chopin was not music, to talk of playing him well or badly was meaningless. She admitted that her mother-in-law had technique, played the notes to perfection. “Nothing will ever make me say that she is a musician,” was Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin’s conclusion. Because she considered herself “advanced,” because (in matters of art only) “one could never be far enough to the Left,” she maintained not merely that music progressed, but that it progressed along a single straight line, and that Debussy was in a sense a super-Wagner, slightly more advanced again than Wagner. She did not realise that if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to suppose in a few years’ time, because an artist will after all make use of the weapons he has captured to free himself finally from one whom he has momentarily defeated, he nevertheless sought, when people were beginning to feel surfeited with works that were too complete, in which everything was expressed, to satisfy an opposite need. There were theories, of course, to bolster this reaction temporarily, like those theories which, in politics, come to the support of the laws against the religious orders, or of wars in the East (unnatural teaching, the Yellow Peril, etc., etc.). People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car was none the less to restore to favour. Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the
Ring
. In any case, the day was to come when, for a time, Debussy would be pronounced as flimsy as Massenet, and the agitations of Mélisande degraded to the level of Manon’s. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. But that time was still to come.