A Dinner in Town, Marcel Proust
A Dinner in Town
But, Fundanius, who shared with you the pleasures of that meal? I am longing to know.
– Horace*
1
Honoré was late; he said hello to the hosts, to the guests he knew, was introduced to the others, and went to sit down at table. After a few moments, his neighbour, a very young man, asked him to name the guests and tell him something about them. Honoré had never met him in society until now. He was very handsome. The hostess kept gazing at him with burning eyes that indicated quite well enough why she had invited him, and showed that he would soon be part of her circle. Honoré sensed within him the potential for future greatness, but, without any envy, out of polite benevolence, he decided it was his duty to reply.
He looked around. Opposite, two neighbours were not talking to each other; they had been invited together, out of clumsy good intentions, and placed next to each other because they were both active in literature. But on top of this initial reason for hating each other, they had a more specific one. The older, a kinsman – doubly hypnotized – of M. Paul Desjardins and M. de Vogüé, affected a scornful silence towards the younger man, the favourite disciple of M. Maurice Barrès,* who considered him in turn with a certain irony. Furthermore, the ill will each of them felt exaggerated – greatly against their respective desires – the importance of the other, as if the chief of rogues had been forced to confront the king of imbeciles.
Further along, a superb Spanish woman was eating in a furious temper. She had unhesitatingly – being a serious kind of person – sacrificed a lovers’ tryst this evening to the probability that she might advance her social career by coming to dinner in an elegant household. And indeed, there was every likelihood that she had made the right choice. The snobbery of Mme Fremer was for her lady friends, and the snobbery of her lady friends was for Mme Fremer, like a mutual insurance against becoming commonplace and bourgeois.
But chance had so willed it that Mme Fremer was going through, on just this very evening, a stock of people she hadn’t had time to invite to her dinners before – people to whom, for different reasons, she really wanted to be polite, and whom she had assembled almost at random. The whole gathering was suitably crowned by a duchess, but one whom the Spanish woman already knew and who was of no further interest to her.
And so she kept exchanging angry glances with her husband, whose guttural voice could always be heard at these evening receptions saying successively (leaving between each request an interval of five minutes suitably filled with other little tasks), “Would you please introduce me to the Duke?” And, to the Duke, “Monsieur, would you please introduce me to the Duchess?” And, to the Duchess, “Madame, may I introduce my wife to you?”
Exasperated at having to waste his time, he had nonetheless resigned himself to striking up a conversation with his neighbour, the associate of the master of the house. For over a year, Fremer had been begging his wife to invite this man. She had finally yielded and had hidden him away between the Spanish woman’s husband and a humanist. The humanist, an omnivorous reader, was also an omnivorous eater.
Quotations and burps kept welling from his lips, and these two disagreeable characteristics were equally repugnant to the woman next to him, a noble commoner, Mme Lenoir. She had soon brought the conversation round to the victories of the Prince de Buivres in Dahomey* and said in a voice tremulous with emotion, “Dear boy, how delighted I am to see him honouring his family!” She was indeed a cousin of the Buivres, who, all being younger than she was, treated her with the deference due to her age, her attachment to the royal family, her huge fortune and the unfailing sterility of her three marriages.
She had transferred to the entire Buivres clan all the family feelings of which she was capable. She took personal umbrage when any of them so misbehaved that he had to be put under legal guardianship; and, around her right-thinking brow, on the parting in her Orleanist hair, she naturally wore the laurels of the family member who happened to be a general. Initially an intruder into that hitherto so exclusive family, she had become its head and, as it were, its dowager.
She felt really exiled in modern society, and always spoke with nostalgic affection of the “gentlemen of bygone days”. Her snobbery was all in her imagination: indeed, her imagination contained nothing else. Names rich in history and glory exerted a singular influence on her sensitive mind, and she took great delight, quite devoid of self-interest, in dining with princes or reading memoirs from the Ancien Régime. She always wore the same grape-bedecked hats, which were as invariable as her principles. Her eyes sparkled with inanity. Her smiling face was noble, her affected gestures exaggerated and meaningless. Thanks to her trust in God, she was in a similarly optimistic flutter on the eve of a garden party or a revolution, and made darting little gestures that seemed designed to ward off radicalism or bad weather.
Her neighbour the humanist was talking to her with wearisome eloquence and a dreadfully facile gift for the right formula; he kept quoting Horace to excuse his gluttony and drunkenness in the eyes of others, and to add a poetic sheen to those failings in his own. Invisible, ancient and yet freshly plucked roses wreathed his narrow brow. But with an equal politeness, which came to her easily since she found in it a way of exerting her influence and showing her respect – nowadays rare – for old traditions, Mme Lenoir turned every five minutes or so to talk to M. Fremer’s associate.
The latter had, in any case, no cause for complaint. From the other end of the table, Mme Fremer was addressing to him the most charming flatteries. She wanted this dinner to count for several years’ worth and, resolved not to have to invite this wet blanket for a long time to come, she was burying him under garlands of praise. As for M. Fremer, who worked all day at his bank and then in the evening found himself being dragged out into society by his wife, or forced to stay at home if they were giving a reception, he was always ready to eat anyone alive, but always muzzled, so that he had ended up by putting on, in the most everyday circumstances, an expression compounded of muted irritation, sulky resignation, barely contained exasperation and profound brutishness.
However, on this particular evening, this expression on the financier’s face had given way to a cordial satisfaction every time that his eyes met those of his associate. Although he couldn’t stand him in the ordinary course of things, he had discovered in himself feelings of fleeting but sincere affection for him, not because he found it easy to dazzle him with his opulence, but because of that same vague fellow feeling that overcomes us when we are abroad and see a Frenchman, even an odious one.
He, so violently torn away every evening from his habits, so unjustly deprived of the rest he had deserved, so cruelly uprooted, at last felt a bond, one that usually filled him with violent resentment, but strong nonetheless, which made him feel close to someone and meant that he could emerge and even escape from his fierce and desperate isolation.
Opposite him, Mme Fremer allowed the enchanted eyes of her fellow diners to reflect her blond beauty. The double reputation which surrounded her like an aura was a deceiving prism through which everyone tried to distinguish her true features. An ambitious woman, an intriguer, almost an adventurer – or so it was said in the world of finance that she had abandoned for a more brilliant destiny – she appeared, on the contrary, in the eyes of the faubourg and the royal family (whom she had quite won over with her superior intelligence), an angel of gentleness and virtue.
In addition, she had not forgotten her old and humbler friends, and remembered them in particular when they were ill or bereaved – those touching circumstances which had the added advantage that, since they then of course stayed at home instead of going out into society, they could not complain about not being invited anywhere. Hence she gave full rein to her charitable impulses, and in her conversations with relatives or priests at the bedside of the dying, she shed sincere tears, killing little by little the remorse that her excessively easy life inspired in her scrupulous heart.
But the most likeable guest was the young Duchess of D***, whose clear, alert mind, never anxious or confused, contrasted so strangely with the incurable melancholy of her lovely eyes, the pessimism of her lips, the boundless and noble weariness of her hands. This energetic lover of life in every shape and form – kindness, literature, theatre, action and friendship – kept biting, without spoiling them, like a flower cast aside, her beautiful red lips, whose corners a disenchanted smile barely raised.
Her eyes seemed to indicate a mind that had foundered once and for all on the sickly waters of regret. How many times, in the street, at the theatre, had wistful passers-by allowed those variable stars to illumine their dreams! Just now
