The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (184 page)

“Thank you for warning me,” said the Duchess. “It would indeed be most disagreeable. But as I know her by sight I shall be able to get away in time.”

“I assure you, Oriane, she is really quite nice; an excellent woman,” said Mme de Marsantes.

“I have no doubt she is, but I feel no need to assure myself of it in person.”

“Have you been invited to Lady Israels’s?” Mme de Villeparisis asked the Duchess, to change the subject.

“Why, thank heaven, I don’t know the woman,” replied Mme de Guermantes. “You must ask Marie-Aynard. She knows her. I never could make out why.”

“I did indeed know her at one time,” said Mme de Marsantes. “I confess my sins. But I have decided not to know her any more. It seems she’s one of the very worst of them, and makes no attempt to conceal it. Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable. I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we closed our doors to old country cousins, people of our own flesh and blood, we threw them open to Jews. And now we see what thanks we get from them. But alas, I’ve no right to speak; I have an adorable son who, young fool that he is, goes round talking the most utter nonsense,” she went on, having caught some allusion by M. d’Argencourt to Robert. “But, talking of Robert, haven’t you seen him?” she asked Mme de Villeparisis. “Since it’s Saturday, I thought he might have come to Paris for twenty-four hours, and in that case would have been sure to pay you a visit.”

As a matter of fact Mme de Marsantes thought that her son would not obtain leave that week; but knowing that, even if he did, he would never dream of coming to see Mme de Villeparisis, she hoped, by making herself appear to have expected to find him there, to make his susceptible aunt forgive him for all the visits that he had failed to pay her.

“Robert here! But I haven’t even had a word from him. I don’t think I’ve seen him since Balbec.”

“He is so busy; he has so much to do,” said Mme de Marsantes.

A faint smile made Mme de Guermantes’s eyelashes quiver as she studied the circle which she was tracing on the carpet with the point of her sunshade. Whenever the Duke had been too openly unfaithful to his wife, Mme de Marsantes had always taken up the cudgels against her own brother on her sister-in-law’s behalf. The latter had a grateful and bitter memory of this support, and was not herself seriously shocked by Robert’s pranks. At this point the door opened again and Robert himself came in.

“Well, talk of the Saint!”
¹⁷
said Mme de Guermantes.

Mme de Marsantes, who had her back to the door, had not seen her son come in. When she caught sight of him, her motherly bosom was convulsed with joy as by the beating of a wing, her body half rose from her seat, her face quivered and she fastened on Robert eyes that glowed with wonderment.

“What, you’ve come! How delightful! What a surprise!”

“Ah!
talk of the Saint
—I see,” cried the Belgian diplomat with a shout of laughter.

“Delicious, isn’t it?” the Duchess retorted curtly, for she hated puns, and had ventured this one only with a pretence of self-mockery.

“Good evening, Robert,” she said. “Well, so this is how we forget our aunt.”

They talked for a moment, doubtless about me, for as Saint-Loup was leaving her to join his mother Mme de Guermantes turned to me:

“Good evening, how are you?” was her greeting.

She showered me with the light of her azure gaze, hesitated for a moment, unfolded and stretched towards me the stem of her arm, and leaned forward her body which sprang rapidly backwards like a bush that has been pulled down to the ground and, on being released, returns to its natural position. Thus she acted under the fire of Saint-Loup’s eyes, which kept her under observation from a distance and made frantic efforts to obtain some further concession still from his aunt. Fearing that our conversation might dry up altogether, he came across to fuel it, and answered for me:

“He’s not very well just now, he gets rather tired. I think he would be a great deal better, by the way, if he saw you more often, for I don’t mind telling you that he enjoys seeing you very much.”

“Oh, but that’s very nice of him,” said Mme de Guermantes in a deliberately trite tone, as if I had brought her her coat. “I’m most flattered.”

“Look, I must go and talk to my mother for a minute; take my chair,” said Saint-Loup, thus forcing me to sit down next to his aunt.

We were both silent.

“I catch sight of you sometimes in the morning,” she said, as though she were giving me a piece of news and as though I for my part never saw her. “It’s so good for one, a walk.”

“Oriane,” said Mme de Marsantes in a low voice, “you said you were going on to Mme de Saint-Ferréol’s. Would you be so very kind as to tell her not to expect me to dinner. I shall stay at home now that I’ve got Robert. And might I ask you in passing to see that someone sends out at once for a box of the cigars Robert likes? ‘Corona,’ they’re called. I’ve none in the house.”

Robert came up to us. He had caught only the name of Mme de Saint-Ferréol.

“Who in the world is Mme de Saint-Ferréol?” he inquired in a tone of studied surprise, for he affected ignorance of everything to do with society.

“But, my darling boy, you know perfectly well,” said his mother. “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she who gave you that nice billiard table you liked so much.”

“What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea. Really, my family are amazing,” he went on, half-turning towards me and unconsciously adopting Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed his ideas, “they know the most unheard-of people, people called Saint-Ferréol” (emphasising the final consonant of each word) “or something like that; my family go to balls, they drive in victorias, they lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”

Mme de Guermantes made a slight, short, sharp sound in her throat as of an involuntary laugh choked back, which was intended to show that she acknowledged her nephew’s wit to the degree which kinship demanded. A servant came in to say that the Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen sent word to M. de Norpois that he had arrived.

“Go and fetch him, Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to the ex-Ambassador, who set off in quest of the German Prime Minister.

“Wait, Monsieur. Do you think I ought to show him the miniature of the Empress Charlotte?”

“Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the Ambassador in a tone of conviction, as though he envied the fortunate Minister the favour that was in store for him.

“Oh, I know he’s very
sound
,” said Mme de Marsantes, “and that is so rare among foreigners. But I’ve found out all about him. He’s anti-semitism personified.”

The Prince’s name preserved, in the boldness with which its opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the energy, the mannered simplicity, the heavy refinements of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “Heim” of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a small child I had gone with my grandmother, under a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard it spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the Prince’s name seemed to shrink, to become imbued with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetising, light, with something about it that was authorised, prescribed. Furthermore, M. de Guermantes, in explaining who the Prince was, quoted a number of his titles, and I recognised the name of a village traversed by a river on which, every evening, the cure finished for the day, I used to go boating amid the mosquitoes, and that of a forest far enough away for the doctor not to allow me to make the excursion to it. And indeed it was comprehensible that the suzerainty of the noble gentleman should extend to the surrounding places and associate afresh in the enumeration of his titles the names which one could read side by side on a map. Thus beneath the visor of the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Knight of Franconia it was the face of a beloved, smiling land, on which the rays of the evening sun had often lingered for me, that I saw, at any rate before the Prince, Rhinegrave and Elector Palatine, had entered the room. For I speedily learned that the revenues which he drew from the forest and the river peopled with gnomes and undines, and from the magic mountain on which rose the ancient Burg that still cherished memories of Luther and Louis the German, he employed in keeping five Charron motor-cars, a house in Paris and another in London, a box on Mondays at the Opéra and another for the “Tuesdays” at the “Français.” He did not seem to me to be—nor did he himself seem to believe that he was—different from other men of similar wealth and age who had a less poetic origin. He had their culture, their ideals, he was proud of his rank but purely on account of the advantages it conferred on him, and had now only one ambition in life, to be elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, which was the reason of his coming to see Mme de Villeparisis.

If he, whose wife was a leader of the most exclusive set in Berlin, had solicited an introduction to the Marquise, it was not the result of any desire on his part for her acquaintance. Devoured for years past by this ambition to be elected to the
Institut
, he had unfortunately never been in a position to reckon above five the number of Academicians who seemed prepared to vote for him. He knew that M. de Norpois could by himself command at least a dozen votes, a number which he was capable, by skilful negotiations, of increasing still further. And so the Prince, who had known him in Russia when they were both there as ambassadors, had gone to see him and had done everything in his power to win him over. But in vain might he intensify his friendly overtures, procure for the Marquis Russian decorations, quote him in articles on foreign policy, he had been faced with a heartless ingrate, a man in whose eyes all these attentions appeared to count as nothing, who had not advanced the prospects of his candidature one inch, had not even promised him his own vote. True, M. de Norpois received him with extreme politeness, indeed begged him not to put himself out and “take the trouble to come so far out of his way,” went himself to the Prince’s residence, and when the Teutonic knight had launched his: “I should very much like to be your colleague,” replied in a tone of deep emotion: “Ah! I should be most happy!” And no doubt a simpleton, a Dr Cottard, would have said to himself: “Well, here he is in my house; it was he who insisted on coming because he regards me as a more important person than himself; he tells me he’d be happy to see me in the Academy; words do have some meaning after all, damn it, so if he doesn’t offer to vote for me it’s probably because it hasn’t occurred to him. He lays so much stress on influence that he must imagine the plums fall into my lap, that I have all the support I need and that’s why he doesn’t offer me his; but I’ve only to corner him here, just the two of us, and say to him: ‘Very well, vote for me,’ and he’ll be obliged to do it.”

But Prince von Faffenheim was no simpleton. He was what Dr Cottard would have called “a shrewd diplomat” and he knew that M. de Norpois was a no less shrewd one and a man who would have realised without needing to be told that he could confer a favour on a candidate by voting for him. The Prince, in his ambassadorial missions and as Foreign Minister, had conducted, on his country’s behalf instead of, as in the present instance, his own, many of those conversations in which one knows beforehand just how far one is prepared to go and at what point one will decline to commit oneself. He was not unaware that in diplomatic parlance to talk means to offer. And it was for this reason that he had arranged for M. de Norpois to receive the Order of Saint Andrew. But if he had had to report to his Government the conversation which he had subsequently had with M. de Norpois, he would have stated in his dispatch: “I realised that I had taken the wrong tack.” For as soon as he had returned to the subject of the
Institut
, M. de Norpois had repeated:

“I should like nothing better; nothing could be better for my colleagues. They ought, I consider, to feel genuinely honoured that you should have thought of them. It’s a really interesting candidature, a little outside our normal practice. As you know, the Academy is very hide-bound; it takes fright at anything that smacks of novelty. Personally, I deplore this. How often have I not had occasion to say as much to my colleagues! I cannot be sure, God forgive me, that I did not even once let the term ‘stick-in-the-mud’ escape my lips,” he added with a scandalised smile in an undertone, almost an aside, as though on the stage, giving the Prince a rapid, sidelong glance from his blue eyes, like a veteran actor studying an effect on his audience. “You understand, Prince, that I should not care to allow a personality so eminent as yourself to embark on a venture which was hopeless from the start. So long as my colleagues’ ideas linger so far behind the times, I consider that the wiser course will be to abstain. But you may rest assured that if I were ever to discern a slightly more modern, a slightly more lively spirit emerge in that college, which is tending to become a mausoleum, if I felt you had a genuine chance of success, I should be the first to inform you of it.”

“The Order was a mistake,” thought the Prince; “the negotiations have not advanced one step. That’s not what he wanted. I have not yet laid my hand on the right key.”

This was a kind of reasoning of which M. de Norpois, formed in the same school as the Prince, would also have been capable. One may mock at the pedantic silliness which makes diplomats of the Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording which is to all intents and purposes meaningless. But their childishness has this compensation: diplomats know that, in the scales which ensure that balance of power, European or otherwise, which we call peace, good feeling, fine speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something else, in the possibility which the adversary enjoys, if he is strong enough, or does not enjoy, of satisfying a desire in exchange for something in return. With this order of truths, which an entirely disinterested person, such as my grandmother for instance, would not have understood, M. de Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim had frequently to deal. As an envoy in countries with which we had been within an ace of going to war, M. de Norpois, in his anxiety as to the turn which events were about to take, knew very well that it was not by the word “Peace,” nor by the word “War,” that it would be revealed to him, but by some other, apparently commonplace word, a word of terror or blessing, which the diplomat, by the aid of his cipher, would immediately know how to interpret and to which, to safeguard the dignity of France, he would respond in another word, quite as commonplace, but one beneath which the minister of the enemy nation would at once decipher: “War.” Moreover, in accordance with a time-honoured custom, analogous to that which used to give to the first meeting between two young people promised to one another in marriage the form of a chance encounter at a performance in the Théâtre du Gymnase, the dialogue in the course of which destiny was to dictate the word “War” or the word “Peace” took place, as a rule, not in the ministerial sanctum but on a bench in a Kurgarten where the minister and M. de Norpois went independently to a thermal spring to drink at its source their little tumblers of some curative water. By a sort of tacit convention they met at the hour appointed for their cure, and began by taking together a short stroll which, beneath its benign appearance, the two interlocutors knew to be as tragic as an order for mobilisation. And so, in a private matter like this nomination for election to the Institute, the Prince had employed the same system of induction which had served him in the diplomatic service, the same method of reading beneath superimposed symbols.