The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (232 page)

“Besides the people you know already, she’s asked King Theodosius’s brother at the last moment.”

At these tidings the Duchess’s features exuded contentment and her speech boredom: “Oh, God, more princes!”

“But that one is amiable and intelligent,” Swann remarked.

“Not altogether, though,” replied the Duchess, apparently seeking for words that would give more novelty to her thought. “Have you ever noticed with princes that the nicest of them are never entirely nice? They must always have an opinion about everything. And as they have no opinions of their own, they spend the first half of their lives asking us ours and the second half serving them up to us again. They positively must be able to say that this has been well played and that not so well. When there’s no difference. Do you know, this little Theodosius junior (I forget his name) asked me once what an orchestral motif was called. I answered” (the Duchess’s eyes sparkled and a laugh exploded from her beautiful red lips) “‘It’s called an orchestral motif.’ I don’t think he was any too well pleased, really. Oh, my dear Charles,” she went on with a languishing air, “what a bore it can be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It’s true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don’t know what it’s like.”

A servant appeared. It was the young lover who had had a quarrel with the concierge, until the Duchess, out of the kindness of her heart, had brought about an apparent peace between them.

“Am I to go round this evening to inquire after M. le Marquis d’Osmond?” he asked.

“Most certainly not, nothing before tomorrow morning. In fact I don’t want you to remain in the house tonight. His footman, whom you know, might very well come and bring you the latest report and send you out after us. Be off with you, go anywhere you like, have a spree, sleep out, but I don’t want to see you here before tomorrow morning.”

The footman’s face glowed with happiness. At last he would be able to spend long hours with his betrothed, whom he had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the concierge, the Duchess had considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, on a tide of happiness which the Duchess saw and the reason for which she guessed. She felt a sort of pang and as it were an itching in all her limbs at the thought of this happiness being snatched behind her back, unbeknown to her, and it made her irritated and jealous.

“No, Basin, he must stay here; he’s not to stir out of the house.”

“But Oriane, that’s absurd, the house is crammed with servants, and you have the costumier’s people coming as well at twelve to dress us for our ball. There’s absolutely nothing for him to do, and he’s the only one who’s a friend of Mama’s footman; I’d much sooner get him right away from the house.”

“Listen, Basin, let me do what I want. I shall have a message for him during the evening, as it happens—I’m not yet sure at what time. In any case you’re not to budge from here for a single instant, do you hear?” she said to the despairing footman.

If there were continual quarrels, and if servants did not stay long with the Duchess, the person to whose charge this guerrilla warfare was to be laid was indeed irremovable, but it was not the concierge. No doubt for the heavy work, for the martyrdoms it was particularly tiring to inflict, for the quarrels which ended in blows, the Duchess entrusted the blunter instruments to him; but even then he played his role without the least suspicion that he had been cast for it. Like the household servants, he was impressed by the Duchess’s kindness, and the imperceptive footmen who came back, after leaving her service, to visit Françoise used to say that the Duke’s house would have been the finest “place” in Paris if it had not been for the porter’s lodge. The Duchess made use of the lodge in the same way as at different times clericalism, freemasonry, the Jewish peril and so on have been made use of. Another footman came into the room.

“Why haven’t they brought up the package M. Swann sent here? And, by the way (you’ve heard, Charles, that Mama is seriously ill?), Jules went round to inquire for news of M. le Marquis d’Osmond: has he come back yet?”

“He’s just arrived this instant, M. le Duc. They’re expecting M. le Marquis to pass away at any moment.”

“Ah, he’s alive!” exclaimed the Duke with a sigh of relief. “They’re expecting, are they? Well, they can go on expecting. While there’s life there’s hope,” he added cheerfully for our benefit. “They’ve been talking to me about him as though he were dead and buried. In a week from now he’ll be fitter than I am.”

“It’s the doctors who said that he wouldn’t last out the evening. One of them wanted to call again during the night. The head one said it was no use. M. le Marquis would be dead by then; they’ve only kept him alive by injecting him with camphorated oil.”

“Hold your tongue, you damned fool,” cried the Duke in a paroxysm of rage. “Who the devil asked you for your opinion? You haven’t understood a word of what they told you.”

“It wasn’t me they told, it was Jules.”

“Will you hold your tongue!” roared the Duke, and, turning to Swann: “What a blessing he’s still alive! He’ll regain his strength gradually, don’t you know. Still alive, after being in such a critical state—that in itself is an excellent sign. One mustn’t expect everything at once. It can’t be at all unpleasant, a little injection of camphorated oil.” He rubbed his hands. “He’s alive; what more could anyone want? After all that he’s gone through, it’s a great step forward. Upon my word, I envy him having such a constitution. Ah! these invalids, you know, people do all sorts of little things for them that they don’t do for us. For instance, today some beggar of a chef sent me up a leg of mutton with
béarnaise
sauce—it was done to a turn, I must admit, but just for that very reason I took so much of it that it’s still lying on my stomach. However, that doesn’t make people come to inquire after me as they do after dear Amanien. We do too much inquiring. It only tires him. We must leave him room to breathe. They’re killing the poor fellow by sending round to him all the time.”

“Well,” said the Duchess to the footman as he was leaving the room, “I gave orders for the envelope containing a photograph which M. Swann sent me to be brought up here.”

“Madame la Duchesse, it’s so large that I didn’t know if I could get it through the door. We’ve left it in the hall. Does Madame la Duchesse wish me to bring it up?”

“Oh, in that case, no; they ought to have told me, but if it’s so big I shall see it in a moment when I come downstairs.”

“I forgot to tell Mme la Duchesse that Mme la Comtesse Molé left a card this morning for Mme la Duchesse.”

“What, this morning?” said the Duchess with an air of disapproval, feeling that so young a woman ought not to take the liberty of leaving cards in the morning.

“About ten o’clock, Madame la Duchesse.”

“Show me the cards.”

“In any case, Oriane, when you say that it was a funny idea on Marie’s part to marry Gilbert,” went on the Duke, reverting to the original topic of conversation, “it’s you who have an odd way of writing history. If either of them was a fool, it was Gilbert, for having married of all people a woman so closely related to the King of the Belgians, who has usurped the name of Brabant which belongs to us. To put it briefly, we are of the same blood as the Hesses, and of the elder branch. It’s always stupid to talk about oneself,” he apologised to me, “but after all, whenever we’ve been not only to Darmstadt, but even to Cassel and all over electoral Hesse, all the landgraves have always been most courteous in giving us precedence as being of the elder branch.”

“But really, Basin, you don’t mean to tell me that a person who was honorary commandant of every regiment in her country, who people thought would become engaged to the King of Sweden …”

“Oh, Oriane, that’s too much; anyone would think you didn’t know that the King of Sweden’s grandfather was tilling the soil at Pau when we had been ruling the roost for nine hundred years throughout the whole of Europe.”

“That doesn’t alter the fact that if somebody were to say in the street: ‘Hallo, there’s the King of Sweden,’ everyone would at once rush to see him as far as the Place de la Concorde, and if he said: ‘There’s M. de Guermantes,’ nobody would know who it was.”

“What an argument!”

“Besides, I can’t understand how, once the title of Duke of Brabant has passed to the Belgian royal family, you can continue to claim it.”

The footman returned with the Comtesse Molé’s card, or rather what she had left in place of a card. On the pretext that she did not have one with her, she had taken from her pocket a letter addressed to herself, and keeping the contents had handed in the envelope which bore the inscription: “La Comtesse Molé.” As the envelope was rather large, following the fashion in note-paper which prevailed that year, this “card” was almost twice the size of an ordinary visiting card.

“That’s what people call Mme Molé’s ‘simplicity,’ ” said the Duchess sarcastically. “She wants to make us think that she had no cards on her to show her originality. But we know all about that, don’t we, my little Charles, we’re quite old enough and quite original enough ourselves to see through the tricks of a little lady who has only been going about for four years. She is charming, but she doesn’t seem to me, all the same, to have the weight to imagine that she can stun the world with so little effort as merely by leaving an envelope instead of a card and leaving it at ten o’clock in the morning. Her old mother mouse will show her that she knows a thing or two about that.”

Swann could not help smiling at the thought that the Duchess, who was, as it happened, a trifle jealous of Mme Molé’s success, would find it quite in accordance with the “Guermantes wit” to make some insolent retort to her visitor.

“So far as the title of Duc de Brabant is concerned, I’ve told you a hundred times, Oriane …” the Duke continued, but the Duchess, without listening, cut him short.

“But, my dear Charles, I’m longing to see your photograph.”

“Ah!
Extinctor draconis latrator Anubis
,” said Swann.

“Yes, it was so charming what you said about that apropos of San Giorgio at Venice. But I don’t understand why Anubis?”

“What’s the one like who was an ancestor of Babal?” asked M. de Guermantes.

“You want to see his bauble,” said his wife drily, to show that she herself despised the pun. “I want to see them all,” she added.

“I’ll tell you what, Charles, let’s go downstairs till the carriage comes,” said the Duke. “You can pay your call on us in the hall, because my wife won’t let us have any peace until she’s seen your photograph. I’m less impatient, I must say,” he added complacently. “I’m not easily stirred myself, but she would see us all dead rather than miss it.”

“I entirely agree with you, Basin,” said the Duchess, “let’s go into the hall; we shall at least know why we have come down from your study, whereas we shall never know how we have come down from the Counts of Brabant.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times how the title came into the House of Hesse,” said the Duke (while we were going downstairs to look at the photograph, and I thought of those that Swann used to bring me at Combray), “through the marriage of a Brabant in 1241 with the daughter of the last Landgrave of Thuringia and Hesse, so that really it’s the title of Prince of Hesse that came to the House of Brabant rather than that of Duke of Brabant to the House of Hesse. You will remember that our battle-cry was that of the Dukes of Brabant: ‘Limbourg to her conqueror!’ until we exchanged the arms of Brabant for those of Guermantes, in which I think myself that we were wrong, and the example of the Gramonts will not make me change my opinion.”

“But,” replied Mme de Guermantes, “as it’s the King of the Belgians who is the conqueror … Besides, the Belgian Crown Prince calls himself Duc de Brabant.”

“But, my dear child, your argument will not hold water for a moment. You know as well as I do that there are titles of pretension which can perfectly well survive even if the territory is occupied by usurpers. For instance, the King of Spain describes himself equally as Duke of Brabant, claiming in virtue of a possession less ancient than ours, but more ancient than that of the King of the Belgians. He also calls himself Duke of Burgundy, King of the West and East Indies, and Duke of Milan. Well, he’s no more in possession of Burgundy, the Indies or Brabant than I possess Brabant myself, or the Prince of Hesse either, for that matter. The King of Spain likewise proclaims himself King of Jerusalem, as does the Austrian Emperor, and Jerusalem belongs to neither one nor the other.”

He stopped for a moment, perturbed by the thought that the mention of Jerusalem might have embarrassed Swann, in view of “current events,” but only went on more rapidly: “What you said just now might be said of anyone. We were at one time Dukes of Aumale, a duchy that has passed as regularly to the House of France as Joinville and Chevreuse have to the House of Albert. We make no more claim to those titles than to that of Marquis de Noirmoutiers, which was at one time ours, and became perfectly regularly the appanage of the House of La Trémoïlle, but because certain cessions are valid, it does not follow that they all are. For instance,” he went on, turning to me, “my sister-in-law’s son bears the title of Prince d’Agrigente, which comes to us from Joan the Mad, as that of Prince de Tarente comes to the La Trémoïlles. Well, Napoleon went and gave this title of Tarente to a soldier, who may have been an excellent campaigner, but in doing so the Emperor was disposing of what belonged to him even less than Napoleon III when he created a Duc de Montmorency, since Périgord had at least a mother who was a Montmorency, while the Tarente of Napoleon I had no more Tarente about him than Napoleon’s wish that he should become so. That didn’t prevent Chaix d’Est-Ange, alluding to our uncle Condé, from asking the Imperial Attorney if he had picked up the title of Duc de Montmorency in the moat at Vincennes.”

“Look, Basin, I ask for nothing better than to follow you to the moat of Vincennes, or even to Taranto. And that reminds me, Charles, of what I was going to say to you when you were telling me about your San Giorgio of Venice. We have a plan, Basin and I, to spend next spring in Italy and Sicily. If you were to come with us, just think what a difference it would make! I’m not thinking only of the pleasure of seeing you, but imagine, after all you’ve told me about the remains of the Norman Conquest and of antiquity, imagine what a trip like that would become if you were with us! I mean to say that even Basin—what am I saying, Gilbert!—would benefit by it, because I feel that even his claims to the throne of Naples and all that sort of thing would interest me if they were explained by you in old Romanesque churches in little villages perched on hills as in primitive paintings. But now we’re going to look at your photograph. Open the envelope,” she said to a footman.