“You haven’t thought of giving the Institute an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “You could make a considerable success of a subject like that,” (which was to say, “you would give me a colossal advertisement,”) he added, smiling at the Ambassador pusillanimously, but with a warmth of feeling which made him raise his eyelids and expose a double horizon of eye. I seemed to have seen this look before, and yet 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 choking fits of the kind from which I suffered by some absurd inhalation of the essential oils of plants. 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 Cotterd’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, anxious, appealing, which it had just puzzled me to see on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little nothing in common, but psychological like physical laws have a more or less general application. And the requisite conditions are the same; an identical expression lights the eyes of different human animals, as a single sunrise lights different places, a long way apart, which have no connexion with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of noise, 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.
“Ah! As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.”
“You can’t imagine,” went on Mme. de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt “anything more ridiculous.”
“In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled people in society 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 mustn’t 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 laugh at modern literature, it, either by its dissemination through the popular press or else in the course of conversation, had begun to percolate into her mind, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’”
“Mysterious! Oh, I must confess, 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 rooted conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a bored gentleman from the Club 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 suggested. “After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “Besides, one understands, doesn’t one; one simply can’t explain other people’s choices in love.”
But having laid down this principle she proceeded at once to abandon it and to criticise Saint-Loup’s choice.
“All the same, don’t you know, it is amazing to me that a man can find any attraction in a person who’s simply silly.”
Bloch, hearing Saint-Loup’s name mentioned and gathering that he was in Paris, promptly made a remark about him so outrageous that everybody was shocked. He was beginning to nourish hatreds, and one felt that he would stop at nothing to gratify them. Once he had established the principle that he himself was of great moral worth and that the sort of people who frequented La Boulie (an athletic club which he supposed to be highly fashionable) deserved penal servitude, every blow he could get against them seemed to him praiseworthy. He went so far once as to speak of a lawsuit which he was anxious to bring against one of his La poulie friends. In the course of the trial he proposed to give certain evidence which would be entirely untrue, though the defendant would be unable to impugn his veracity. In this way Bloch (who, incidentally, never put his plan into action) counted on baffling and infuriating his antagonist. What harm could there be in that, since he whom he sought to injure was a man who thought only of doing the ‘right thing,’ a La Boulie man, and against people like that any weapon was justified, especially in the hands of a Saint, such as Bloch himself?
“I say, though, what about Swann?” objected M. d’Argencourt, who having at last succeeded in understanding the point of his cousin’s speech, was impressed by her accuracy of observation, and was racking his brains for instances of men who had fallen in love with women in whom he himself had seen no attraction.
“Oh, but Swann’s case was quite different,” the Duchess protested. “It was a great surprise, I admit, because she’s just a well-meaning idiot, but she was never silly, and she was at one time good looking.”
“Oh, oh!” muttered Mme. de Villeparisis.
“You never thought so? Surely, she had some charming points, very fine eyes, good hair, she used to dress, and does still dress, wonderfully. Nowadays, I quite agree, she’s horrible, but she has been a lovely woman in her time. Not that that made me any less sorry when Charles married her, because it was so unnecessary.” The Duchess had not intended to say anything out of the common, but as M. d’Argencourt began to laugh she repeated these last words — either because she thought them amusing or because she thought it nice of him to laugh — and looked up at him with a coaxing smile, to add the enchantment of her femininity to that of her wit. She went on: “Yes, really, it wasn’t worth the trouble, was it; still, after all, she did have some charm and I can quite understand anybody’s falling in love with her, but if you saw Robert’s girl, I assure you, you’d simply die of laughter. Oh, I know somebody’s going to quote Augier at me: ‘What matters the bottle so long as one gets drunk?’ Well, Robert may have got drunk, all right, but he certaintly hasn’t shewn much taste in his choice of a bottle! First of all, would you believe that she actually expected me to fit up a staircase right in the middle of my drawing-room. Oh, a mere nothing — what?— and she announced that she was going to lie flat on her stomach on the steps. And then, if you’d heard the things she recited, I only remember one scene, but I’m sure nobody could imagine anything like it; it was called the Seven Princesses.”
“Seven Princesses! Dear, dear, what a snob she must be!” cried M. d’Argencourt. “But, wait a minute, why, I know the whole play. The author sent a copy to the King, who couldn’t understand a word of it and called on me to explain it to him.”
“It isn’t by any chance, from the Sar Peladan?” asked the historian of the Fronde, meaning to make a subtle and topical allusion, but in so low a tone that his question passed unnoticed.
“So you know the Seven Princesses, do you?” replied the Duchess, “I congratulate you! I only know one, but she’s quite enough; I have no wish to make the acquaintance of the other six. If they are all like the one I’ve seen!”
“What a goose!” I thought to myself. Irritated by the coldness of her greeting, I found a sort of bitter satisfaction in this proof of her complete inability to understand Maeterlinck. “To think that’s the woman I walk miles every morning to see. Really, I’m too kind. Well, it’s my turn now not to want to see her.” Thus I reasoned with myself; but my words ran counter to my thoughts; they were purely conversational words such as we say to ourselves at those moments when, too much excited to remain quietly alone, we feel the need, for want of another listener, to talk to ourselves, without meaning what we say, as we talk to a stranger.
“I can’t tell you what it was like,” the Duchess went on; “you simply couldn’t help laughing. Not that anyone tried; rather the other way, I’m sorry to say, for the young person was not at all pleased and Robert has never really forgiven me. Though I can’t say I’m sorry, actually, because if it had been a success the lady would perhaps have come again, and I don’t quite see Marie-Aynard approving of that.”
This was the name given in the family to Robert’s mother, Mme. de Marsantes, the widow of Aynard de Saint-Loup, to distinguish her from her cousin, the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, also a Marie, to whose Christian name her nephews and cousins and brothers-in-law added, to avoid confusion, either that of her husband or another of her own, making her Marie-Gilbert or Marie-Hedwige.
“To begin with, there was a sort of rehearsal the night before, which was a wonderful affair!” went on Mme. de Guermantes in ironical pursuit of her theme. “Just imagine, she uttered a sentence, no, not so much, not a quarter of a sentence, and then she stopped; she didn’t open her mouth — I’m not exaggerating — for a good five minutes.”
“Oh, I say,” cried M. d’Argencourt.
“With the utmost politeness I took the liberty of hinting to her that this might seem a little unusual. And she said — I give you her actual words —’One ought always to repeat a thing as though one were just composing it oneself.’ When you think of it, that really is monumental.”
“But I understood she wasn’t at all bad at reciting poetry,” said one of the two young men.
“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme. de Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell that. It was quite enough to see her come in with her lilies. I knew at once that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!”
Everybody laughed.
“I hope, my dear aunt, you aren’t angry with me, over my little joke the other day about the Queen of Sweden. I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.’
“Oh, no, I’m not at all angry, I even give you leave to eat at my table, if you’re hungry.— Come along, M. Valmère, you’re the daughter of the house,” Mme. de Villeparisis went on to the librarian, repeating a time-honoured pleasantry.
M de Guermantes sat upright in the armchair in which he had come to anchor his hat on the carpet by his side, and examined with a satisfied smile the plate of little cakes that was being held out to him.
“This gentleman makes you an admirable daughter,” commented M. d’Argencourt, whom the spirit of imitation prompted to keep Mme. de Villeparisis’s little joke in circulation.
The librarian handed the plate of cakes to the historian of the Fronde.
“You perform your functions admirably,” said the latter, startled into speech, and hoping also to win the sympathy of the crowd. At the same time he cast a covert glance of connivance at those who had anticipated him.
“Tell me, my dear aunt,” M. de Guermantes inquired of Mme. de Villeparisis, “who was that rather good-looking man who was going out just now as I came in? I must know him, because he gave me a sweeping bow, but I couldn’t place him at all; you know I never can remember names, it’s such a nuisance,” he added, in a tone of satisfaction.
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mistaken, was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a Grandin de l’Epervier.”
“No,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’d be only too glad to be Grandins of anything you chose to name. This one has a sister called Mme. de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who’ my aunt means,” cried the Duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great graminivorous creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I should go mad. But I began by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person I didn’t know come browsing into the room looking exactly like a cow.”
“Listen, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at home; I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do exaggerate so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plaintive tone, though not without a quick smiling glance at the audience.
He knew that his wife’s lively wit needed the stimulus of contradiction, the contradiction of common sense which protests that one cannot (for instance) mistake a woman seriously for a cow; by this process Mme. de Guermantes, enlarging upon her original idea, had been inspired to produce many of her most brilliant sayings. And the Duke in his innocent fashion helped her, without seeming to do so, to bring off her effects like, in a railway carriage, the unacknowledged partner of the three-card player.
“I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like a dozen,” exclaimed Mme. de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know what to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my drawing-room in a hat and heard them ask me how I was. I had half a mind to say: ‘Please, herd of cattle, you must be making a mistake, you can’t possibly know me, because you’re a herd of cattle,’ but after racking my brains over her I came to the conclusion that your Cambremer woman must be the Infanta Dorothea who had said she was coming to see me one day, and is rather bovine also, so that I was just on the point of saying: ‘Your Royal Highness’ and using the third person to a herd of cattle. The cut of her dewlap reminded me rather, too, of the Queen of Sweden. But this massed attack had been prepared for by long range artillery fire, according to all the rules of war. For I don’t know how long before, I was bombarded with her cards; I used to find them lying about all over the house, on all the tables and chairs like prospectuses. I couldn’t think what they were supposed to be advertising. You saw nothing in the house but ‘Marquis et Marquise de Cambremer’ with some address or other which I’ve forgotten; you may be quite sure nothing will ever take me there.”
“But it’s a great distinction to look like a Queen,” said the historian of the Fronde.
“Gad, sir, Kings and Queens, in these days, don’t amount to much,” said M. de Guermantes, partly because he liked to be thought broad-minded and modern, and also so as not to seem to attach any importance to his own royal friendships, which he valued highly.
Bloch and M. de Norpois had returned from the other room and came towards us.
“Well, sir,” asked Mme. de Villeparisis, “have you been talking to him about the Dreyfus case?”
M. de Norpois raised his eyes to the ceiling, but with a smile, as though calling on heaven to witness the monstrosity of the caprices to which his Dulcinea compelled him to submit. Nevertheless he spoke to Bloch with great affability of the terrible, perhaps fatal period through which France was passing. As this presumably meant that M. de Norpois (to whom Bloch had confessed his belief in the innocence of Dreyfus) was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, the Ambassador’s geniality, his air of tacit admission that his listener was in the right, of never doubting that they were both of the same opinion, of being prepared to join forces with him to overthrow the Government, flattered Bloch’s vanity and aroused his curiosity. What were the important points which M. de Norpois never specified but on which he seemed implicitly to affirm that he was in agreement with Bloch; what opinion, then, did he hold of the case, that could bring them together? Bloch was all the more astonished at the mysterious unanimity which seemed to exist between him and M. de Norpois, in that it was not confined to politics, Mme. de Villeparisis having spoken at some length to M. de Norpois of Bloch’s literary work.
“You are not of your age,” the former Ambassador told him, “and I congratulate you upon that. You are not of this age in which disinterested work no longer exists, in which writers offer the public nothing but obscenities or ineptitudes. Efforts such as yours ought to be encouraged, and would be, if we had a Government.”
Bloch was flattered by this picture of himself swimming alone amid a universal shipwreck. But here again he would have been glad of details, would have liked to know what were the ineptitudes to which M. de Norpois referred. Bloch had the feeling that he was working along the same lines as plenty of others; he had never supposed himself to be so exceptional. He returned to the Dreyfus case, but did not succeed in elucidating M. de Norpois’s own views. He tried to induce him to speak of the officers whose names were appearing constantly in the newspapers at that time; they aroused more curiosity than the politicians who were involved also, because they were not, like the politicians, well known already, but, wearing a special garb, emerging from the obscurity of a different kind of life and a religiously guarded silence, simply stood up and spoke and disappeared again, like Lohengrin landing from a skiff drawn by a swan. Bloch had been able, thanks to a Nationalist lawyer of his acquaintance, to secure admission to several hearings of the Zola trial. He would arrive there in the morning and stay until the court rose, with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee, as though for the final examination for a degree, and this change of routine stimulating a nervous excitement which the coffee and the emotional interest of the trial worked up to a climax, he would come out so enamoured of everything that had happened in court that, in the evening, as he sat at home, he would long to immerse himself again in that beautiful dream and would hurry out, to a restaurant frequented by both parties, in search of friends with whom he would go over interminably the whole of the day’s proceedings, and make up, by a supper ordered in an imperious tone which gave him the illusion of power, for the hunger and exhaustion of a day begun so early and unbroken by any interval for luncheon. The human mind, hovering perpetually between the two planes of experience and imagination, seeks to fathom the ideal life of the people it knows and to know the people whose life it has had to imagine. To Bloch’s questions M. de Norpois replied:
“There are two officers involved in the case now being tried of whom I remember hearing some time ago from a man in whose judgment I felt great confidence, and who praised them both highly — I mean M. de Miribel. They are Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart.”