The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (282 page)

“Who was in this
Chercheuse d’Esprit
, my good Saniette?” asked M. Verdurin. Although he felt that the storm had passed, the old archivist hesitated before answering.

“There you go,” said Mme Verdurin, “you frighten him, you make fun of everything he says, and then you expect him to answer. Come along, tell us who was in it, and you shall have some galantine to take home,” said Mme Verdurin, making a cruel allusion to the penury into which Saniette had plunged himself by trying to rescue the family of a friend.

“I can remember only that it was Mme Samary who played the Zerbina,” said Saniette.

“The Zerbina? What in the world is that?” M. Verdurin shouted, as though the house were on fire.

“It’s one of the stock types in the old repertory, see
Le Capitaine Fracasse
, as who should say the Braggart, the Pedant.”

“Ah, the pedant, that’s you. The Zerbina! No, really the man’s cracked,” exclaimed M. Verdurin. (Mme Verdurin looked at her guests and laughed as though to apologise for Saniette.) “The Zerbina, he imagines that everybody will know at once what it means. You’re like M. de Longepierre, the stupidest man I know, who said to us quite familiarly the other day ‘the Banat.’ Nobody had any idea what he meant. Finally we were informed that it was a province of Serbia.”

To put an end to Saniette’s torture, which hurt me more than it hurt him, I asked Brichot if he knew what the word Balbec meant. “Balbec is probably a corruption of Dalbec,” he told me. “One would have to consult the charters of the Kings of England, suzerains of Normandy, for Balbec was a dependency of the barony of Dover, for which reason it was often styled Balbec d’Outre-Mer, Balbec-en-Terre. But the barony of Dover itself came under the bishopric of Bayeux, and, notwithstanding the rights that were temporarily enjoyed over the abbey by the Templars, from the time of Louis d’Harcourt, Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux, it was the bishops of that diocese who appointed to the benefice of Balbec. So it was explained to me by the incumbent of Douville, a bald, eloquent, fanciful man and a devotee of the table, who lives by the rule of Brillat-Savarin, and who expounded to me in somewhat sibylline terms a loose pedagogy, while he fed me upon some admirable fried potatoes.”

While Brichot smiled to show how witty it was to juxtapose such disparate matters and to employ an ironically lofty diction in treating of commonplace things, Saniette was trying to find a loophole for some witticism which would raise him from the abyss into which he had fallen. The witticism was what was known as a “more or less,” but it had changed its form, for there is an evolution in puns as in literary styles, an epidemic that disappears is replaced by another, and so forth. At one time the typical “more or less” was the “height of …” But this was out of date, no one used it any more, except for Cottard who might still say, on occasion, in the middle of a game of piquet: “Do you know what is the height of absentmindedness? It’s to think that the Edict of [
l’édit de
] Nantes was an Englishwoman.” These “heights” had been replaced by nicknames. In reality it was still the old “more or less,” but, as the nickname was in fashion, people did not notice. Unfortunately for Saniette, when these “more or lesses” were not his own, and as a rule were unknown to the little nucleus, he produced them so timidly that, in spite of the laugh with which he followed them up to indicate their humorous nature, nobody saw the point. And if on the other hand the joke was his own, as he had generally hit upon it in conversation with one of the faithful, and the latter had repeated it, appropriating the authorship, the joke was in that case known, but not as being Saniette’s. And so when he slipped in one of these it was recognised, but, because he was its author, he was accused of plagiarism.

“Thus,” Brichot continued, “
bec
, in Norman, is a stream; there is the Abbey of Bec, Mobec, the stream from the marsh (
mor
or
mer
meant a marsh, as in Morville, or in Bricquemar, Alvimare, Cambremer), Bricquebec, the stream from the high ground, coming from
briga
, a fortified place, as in Bricqueville, Bricquebosc, le Bric, Briand, or from
brice
, bridge, which is the same as
Brücke
in German (Innsbruck), and as the English
bridge
which ends so many place-names (Cambridge, for instance). You have moreover in Normandy many other instances of
bec
: Caudebec, Bolbec, le Robec, le Bec-Hellouin, Becquerel. It’s the Norman form of the German
Bach
, Offenbach, Anspach; Varaguebec, from the old word
varaigne
, equivalent to
warren
, means protected woods or ponds. As for
dal
,” Brichot went on, “it is a form of
Thal
, a valley: Darnetal, Rosendal, and indeed, close to Louviers, Becdal. The river that has given its name to Balbec is, by the way, charming. Seen from a
falaise
(
Fels
in German, in fact not far from here, standing on a height, you have the picturesque town of Falaise), it runs close under the spires of the church, which is actually a long way from it, and seems to be reflecting them.”

“I can well believe it,” said I, “it’s an effect that Elstir is very fond of. I’ve seen several sketches of it in his studio.”

“Elstir! You know Tiche?” cried Mme Verdurin. “But do you know that we used to be the closest friends. Thank heaven, I never see him now. No, but ask Cottard or Brichot, he used to have his place laid at my table, he came every day. Now, there’s a man of whom you can say that it did him no good to leave our little nucleus. I shall show you presently some flowers he painted for me; you’ll see the difference from the things he’s doing now, which I don’t care for at all, not at all! Why, I got him to do a portrait of Cottard, not to mention all the sketches he did of me.”

“And he gave the Professor purple hair,” said Mme Cottard, forgetting that at the time her husband had not been even a Fellow of the College. “Would you say that my husband had purple hair, Monsieur?”

“Never mind!” said Mme Verdurin, raising her chin with an air of contempt for Mme Cottard and of admiration for the man of whom she was speaking, “it was the work of a bold colourist, a fine painter. Whereas,” she added, turning again to me, “I don’t know whether you call it painting, all those outlandish great compositions, those hideous contraptions he exhibits now that he has given up coming to me. I call it daubing, it’s all so hackneyed, and besides, it lacks relief and personality. There are bits of everybody in it.”

“He has revived the grace of the eighteenth century, but in a modern form,” Saniette burst out, fortified and emboldened by my friendliness, “but I prefer Helleu.”

“There’s not the slightest connexion with Helleu,” said Mme Verdurin.

“Yes, yes, it’s hotted-up eighteenth century. He’s a steam Watteau,” and he began to laugh.
¹⁴

“Old, old as the hills. I’ve had that served up to me for years,” said M. Verdurin, to whom indeed Ski had once repeated the remark, but as his own invention. “It’s unfortunate that when once in a way you say something quite amusing and make it intelligible, it isn’t your own.”

“I’m sorry about it,” Mme Verdurin went on, “because he was really gifted, he has wasted a very remarkable painterly talent. Ah, if only he’d stayed with us! Why, he would have become the greatest landscape painter of our day. And it was a woman who dragged him down so low! Not that that surprises me, for he was an attractive enough man, but common. At bottom, he was a mediocrity. I may tell you that I felt it at once. Really, he never interested me. I was quite fond of him, that was all. For one thing, he was so dirty! Tell me now, do
you
like people who never wash?”

“What is this prettily coloured thing that we’re eating?” asked Ski.

“It’s called strawberry mousse,” said Mme Verdurin.

“But it’s ex-qui-site. You ought to open bottles of Château-Margaux, Château-Lafite, port wine.”

“I can’t tell you how he amuses me, he never drinks anything but water,” said Mme Verdurin, seeking to cloak with her delight at this flight of fancy her alarm at the thought of such extravagance.

“But not to drink,” Ski went on. “You shall fill all our glasses, and they will bring in marvellous peaches, huge nectarines; there, against the sunset, it will be as luscious as a beautiful Veronese.”

“It would cost almost as much,” M. Verdurin murmured.

“But take away those cheeses with their hideous colour,” said Ski, trying to snatch the plate from in front of his host, who defended his gruyère with all his might.

“You can see why I don’t miss Elstir,” Mme Verdurin said to me, “this one is far more gifted. Elstir is simply hard work, the man who can’t tear himself away from his painting when he feels like it. He’s the good pupil, the exam fiend. Ski, now, only follows his own fancy. You’ll see him light a cigarette in the middle of dinner.”

“By the way, I can’t think why you wouldn’t invite his wife,” said Cottard, “he would be with us still.”

“Will you mind what you’re saying, please. I don’t open my doors to trollops, Monsieur le Professeur,” said Mme Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done everything in her power to make Elstir return, even with his wife. But before they were married she had tried to separate them, had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, a thief. For once in a way she had failed to effect a breach. It was with the Verdurin salon that Elstir had broken; and he was glad of it, as converts bless the illness or misfortune that has caused them to withdraw from the world and has shown them the way of salvation.

“He really is magnificent, the Professor,” she said. “Why not declare outright that I keep a disorderly house. Anyone would think you didn’t know what Madame Elstir was. I’d sooner have the lowest streetwalker at my table! Oh no, I’m not stooping to that! But in any case it would have been stupid of me to overlook the wife when the husband no longer interests me—he’s out of date, he can’t even draw.”

“It’s extraordinary in a man of his intelligence,” said Cottard.

“Oh, no!” replied Mme Verdurin, “even at the time when he had talent—for he did have talent, the wretch, and to spare—what was tiresome about him was that he hadn’t a spark of intelligence.”

In order to form this opinion, Mme Verdurin had not waited for their quarrel, or until she had ceased to care for his painting. The fact was that, even at the time when he formed part of the little group, it sometimes happened that Elstir would spend whole days in the company of some woman whom, rightly or wrongly, Mme Verdurin considered a goose, and this, in her opinion, was not the conduct of an intelligent man. “No,” she observed judiciously, “I consider that his wife and he are made for one another. Heaven knows, there isn’t a more boring creature on the face of the earth, and I should go mad if I had to spend a couple of hours with her. But people say that he finds her very intelligent. There’s no use denying it, our Tiche was
extremely stupid
. I’ve seen him bowled over by women you can’t conceive, amiable idiots we’d never have allowed into our little clan. Well, he used to write to them, and argue with them, he, Elstir! That doesn’t prevent his having charming qualities, oh, charming, and deliciously absurd, naturally.” For Mme Verdurin was convinced that men who are truly remarkable are capable of all sorts of follies. A false idea in which there is nevertheless a grain of truth. Certainly, people’s “follies” are insupportable. But a want of balance which we discover only in course of time is the consequence of the entering into a human brain of refinements for which it is not normally adapted. So that the oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd. “There, I shall be able to show you his flowers now,” she said to me, seeing that her husband was making signals to her to rise. And she took M. de Cambremer’s arm again. M. Verdurin wanted to apologise for this to M. de Charlus, as soon as he had got rid of Mme de Cambremer, and to give him his reasons, chiefly for the pleasure of discussing these social distinctions with a man of title, momentarily the inferior of those who assigned to him the place to which they considered him entitled. But first of all he was anxious to make it clear to M. de Charlus that intellectually he esteemed him too highly to suppose that he could pay any attention to these trivialities.

“Forgive my mentioning these trifles,” he began, “for I can well imagine how little importance you attach to them. Middle-class minds take them seriously, but the others, the artists, the people who are really
of our sort
, don’t give a rap for them. Now, from the first words we exchanged, I realised that you were
one of us
!” M. de Charlus, who attached a very different meaning to this expression, gave a start. After the Doctor’s oglings, his host’s insulting frankness took his breath away. “Don’t protest, my dear sir, you are
one of us
, it’s as clear as daylight,” M. Verdurin went on. “Mind you, I don’t know whether you practise any of the arts, but that’s not necessary. Nor is it always sufficient. Dechambre, who has just died, played exquisitely, with the most vigorous execution, but he wasn’t
one of us
, you felt at once that he wasn’t. Brichot isn’t
one of us
. Morel is, my wife is, I can feel that you are …”

“What were you going to say to me?” interrupted M. de Charlus, who was beginning to feel reassured as to M. Verdurin’s meaning, but preferred that he should not utter these equivocal remarks quite so loud.

“Only that we put you on the left,” replied M. Verdurin.

M. de Charlus, with a tolerant, genial, insolent smile, replied: “Why, that’s not of the slightest importance,
here
!” And he gave a little laugh that was all his own—a laugh that came down to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had tinkled now, unchanged, for a good many centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could appreciate its precious quality, like that of certain old musical instruments that have become very rare. There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of someone, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light, just as certain works of Bach are never accurately rendered because our orchestras lack those small, high trumpets, with a sound so entirely their own, for which the composer wrote this or that part.