The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (179 page)

M. de Norpois sank his azure gaze in his white beard, bent his tall body deep down as though he were bowing before all the renowned and imposing connotations of the name Bloch, and murmured: “I’m delighted …” whereat his young interlocutor, moved, but feeling that the illustrious diplomat was going too far, hastened to correct him, saying: “Not at all! On the contrary, it is I who am delighted.” But this ceremony, which M. de Norpois, out of friendship for Mme de Villeparisis, repeated for the benefit of every new person that his old friend introduced to him, did not seem to her adequate to the deserts of Bloch, to whom she said:

“Just ask him anything you want to know. Take him aside if it’s more convenient; he will be delighted to talk to you. I think you wished to speak to him about the Dreyfus case,” she went on, no more considering whether this would be agreeable to M. de Norpois than she would have thought of asking leave of the Duchesse de Montmorency’s portrait before having it lighted up for the historian, or of the tea before offering a cup of it.

“You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf, but he will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck very well, and Cavour. That is so, isn’t it?” she raised her voice, “you knew Bismarck well.”

“Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me with a knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my own which he had picked up at random. “You showed me a somewhat laboured little thing in which you went in for a good deal of hair-splitting. I gave you my frank opinion; what you had written was not worth the trouble of putting on paper. Are you preparing something for us? You were greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re not to say anything against Bergotte,” put in the Duchess. “I don’t dispute his pictorial talent; no one would, Duchess. He understands all about etching and engraving, if not brush-work on a large canvas like M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to me that in these days there is a tendency to mix up the genres and forget that the novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing your father on Sunday at our good friend A.J.’s,” he went on, turning again to me.

I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that admirable
Bunch of Radishes
which I remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece it is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I should have named this
Bunch of Radishes
.

“A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it’s merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece,’ what will you say about Hébert’s
Virgin
or Dagnan-Bouveret?”

“I heard you refusing to have Robert’s woman,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much: she’s a perfect horror, you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.”

“Do you mean to say you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.

“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before anyone else’s—not that that’s anything to be proud of,” replied Mme de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless, since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she herself had had the first taste of her absurdities. “Hallo, I suppose I ought to go now,” she added, without moving.

She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a call together like a newly married couple, rather than to the often strained relations that existed between her and the strapping individual she had married, who, despite his advancing years, still led the life of a gay bachelor. Casting over the considerable party that was gathered round the tea-table the affable, waggish gaze—dazzled a little by the slanting rays of the setting sun—of the little round pupils lodged in the exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the excellent marksman that he was could always target with such perfect precision, the Duke advanced with a wondering, gingerly deliberation as though, alarmed by so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile suggesting a slightly tipsy “Good King Wenceslas,” and a half-open hand floating like a shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be clasped indiscriminately by his old friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled him, without having to make a single movement, or to interrupt his genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the alacrity of them all by simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear fellow; charmed, Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt”; and, on coming to myself, who was the most favoured of all when he had been told my name: “How do, young neighbour, how’s your father? What an admirable man!” He made no great demonstration except to Mme de Villeparisis, who greeted him with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her little apron.

Being formidably rich in a world where people were becoming steadily less so, and having adapted himself long since to the idea of this enormous fortune, he had all the vanity of the great nobleman combined with that of the man of means, the refinement and breeding of the former only just managing to counterbalance the smugness of the latter. One could understand, moreover, that his success with women, which made his wife so unhappy, was not due merely to his name and his wealth, for he was still remarkably handsome, and his profile retained the purity, the firmness of outline of a Greek god’s.

“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?” M. d’Argencourt asked the Duchess.

“Well, you know, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies in her hand, and more lilies on her
dwess
.” (Mme de Guermantes shared her aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an exceedingly rustic fashion, though she never rolled her ‘r’s like Mme de Villeparisis.)

Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had taken Bloch into the little recess where they could talk more freely, I went up to the old diplomat for a moment and put in a word about my father’s academic chair. He tried first of all to postpone the conversation to another day. I pointed out that I was going to Balbec. “What? Going to Balbec again? Why, you’re a regular
globe-trotter
.” Then he listened to what I had to say. At the name of Leroy-Beaulieu, he looked at me suspiciously. I conjectured that he had perhaps said something disparaging to M. Leroy-Beaulieu about my father and was afraid that the economist might have repeated it to him. All at once he seemed to be filled with a positive affection for my father. And after one of those decelerations in the flow of speech out of which suddenly a word explodes as though in spite of the speaker, whose irresistible conviction overcomes his stuttering efforts at silence: “No, no,” he said to me with emotion, “your father
must not
stand. In his own interest he must not, for his own sake, out of respect for his merits, which are great, and which would be compromised by such an adventure. He is too big a man for that. If he were elected, he would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. He is not an orator, thank heaven. And that is the one thing that counts with my dear colleagues, even if you only talk platitudes. Your father has an important goal in life; he should march straight ahead towards it, and not beat about the bush, even the bushes (more thorny than flowery) of the groves of Academe. Besides, he would not get many votes. The Academy likes to keep a postulant waiting for some time before taking him to its bosom. For the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I can’t say. But he must wait until the Society itself comes to seek him out. It observes with more fetishism than success the maxim
Farà da sé
of our neighbours across the Alps. Leroy-Beaulieu spoke to me about it all in a way I found highly displeasing. I should have said at a guess that he was hand in glove with your father? … I pointed out to him, a little sharply perhaps, that a man accustomed as he is to dealing with textiles and metals could not be expected to understand the part played by the imponderables, as Bismarck used to say. But, whatever happens, your father must on no account put himself forward as a candidate.
Principiis obsta
. His friends would find themselves placed in a delicate position if he presented them with a
fait accompli
. Indeed,” he went on brusquely with an air of candour, fixing his blue eyes on my face, “I am going to tell you something that will surprise you coming from me, who am so fond of your father. Well, precisely because I am fond of him (we are known as the inseparables—
Arcades ambo
), precisely because I know the immense service that he can still render to his country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I would not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to understand that I wouldn’t.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct converse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! if it only rested with me!” than for the satisfaction of making the honour which he himself has managed to secure seem less accessible, a greater distinction. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests of you all, I should prefer to see your father triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words which I assumed to have been dictated, if not by jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of willingness to oblige, and which were later, in the event, to acquire a different meaning.

“You haven’t thought of giving the
Institut
an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “It might be an enormous success” (which was to say, “give me a colossal advertisement”), he added, smiling at the Ambassador with an obsequious tenderness which made him raise his eyelids and reveal eyes as wide as the sky. I seemed to have seen this look before, though I had met the historian for the first time this afternoon. Suddenly I remembered having seen the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed to be able to cure breathless spasms of the kind from which I suffered by absurd inhalations of plant essences. When, in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a most sensational paper for the Academy of Medicine!” He had not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with the same air of interrogation, timid, suppliant and self-seeking, which I had just wonderingly observed on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological laws, like physical laws, have a more or less general application. And if the requisite conditions are the same, an identical expression lights up the eyes of different human animals, as an identical sunrise lights up places that are a long way apart and that have no connexion with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of commotion, had again gathered round Mme de Villeparisis to watch her at work.

“You know who we’re talking about, Basin?” the Duchess asked her husband.

“I can make a pretty good guess,” said the Duke. “As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.”

“You can’t imagine anything more ridiculous,” went on Mme de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt.

“In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled society people to declare that he was no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a complete imbecile.

“What I fail to understand,” resumed the Duchess, “is how in the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course I know one must never discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might still make fun of modern literature, it had to some extent seeped into her, either through popularisation in the press or through certain conversations, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’ ”

“Mysterious! Oh, I must say, cousin, that’s a bit beyond me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt.

“Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the Duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-natured woman of the world, but also with the uncompromising conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a clubman that there is something more than just noise in the
Walküre
. “After all, one never does know what makes one person fall in love with another; it may not be at all what we think,” she added with a smile, repudiating at once by this interpretation the idea she had just put forward. “After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “So you see it’s wiser never to discuss other people’s choices in love.”

But having laid down this principle she proceeded at once to violate it by criticising Saint-Loup’s choice.