But already my memories of what I have been told about all this are giving place to others, for the B. A. G., resuming its slow crawl, continues to set down or take up passengers at the following stations.
At Grattevast, where his sister lived with whom he had been spending the afternoon, there would sometimes appear M. Pierre de Verjus, Comte de Crécy (who was called simply the Comte de Crécy), a gentleman without means but of the highest nobility, whom I had come to know through the Cambremers, although he was by no means intimate with them. As he was reduced to an extremely modest, almost a penurious existence, I felt that a cigar, a ‘drink’ were things that gave him so much pleasure that I formed the habit, on the days when I could not see Albertine, of inviting him to Balbec.
A man of great refinement, endowed with a marvellous power of self-expression, snow-white hair, and a pair of charming blue eyes, he generally spoke in a faint murmur, very delicately, of the comforts of life in a country house, which he had evidently known from experience, and also of pedigrees. On my inquiring what was the badge engraved on his ring, he told me with a modest smile: “It is a branch of verjuice.” And he added with a relish, as though sipping a vintage: “Our arms are a branch of verjuice—symbolic, since my name is Verjus—slipped and leaved vert.” But I fancy that he would have been disappointed if at Balbec I had offered him nothing better to drink than verjuice.
He liked the most expensive wines, because he had had to go without them, because of his profound knowledge of what he was going without, because he had a palate, perhaps also because he had an exorbitant thirst. And so when I invited him to dine at Balbec, he would order the meal with a refinement of skill, but ate a little too much, and drank copiously, made them warm the wines that needed warming, place those that needed cooling upon ice. Before dinner and after he would give the right date or number for a port or an old brandy, as he would have given the date of the creation of a marquisate which was not generally known but with which he was no less familiar.
As I was in Airne’s eyes a favoured customer, he was delighted that I should give these special dinners and would shout to the waiters:
“Quick, lay number 25”; he did not even say ‘lay’ but ‘lay me,’ as though the table were for his own use. And, as the language of head waiters is not quite the same as of that of sub-heads, assistants, boys, and so forth, when the time came for me to ask for the bill he would say to the waiter who had served us, making a continuous, soothing gesture with the back of his hand, as though he were trying to calm a horse that was ready to take the bit in its teeth: “Don’t go too fast” (in adding up the bill), “go gently, very gently.”
Then, as the waiter was retiring with this guidance, Aimé, fearing lest his recommendations might not be carried out to the letter, would call him back: “Here, let me make it out.” And as I told him not to bother:
“It’s one of my principles that we ought never, as the saying is, to sting a customer.” As for the manager, since my guest was attired simply, always in the same clothes, which were rather threadbare (albeit nobody would so well have practised the art of dressing expensively, like one of Balzac’s dandies, had he possessed the means), he confined himself, out of respect for me, to watching from a distance to see that everything was all right, and ordering, with a glance, a wedge to be placed under one leg of the table which was not steady.
This was not to say that he was not qualified, though he concealed his early struggles, to lend a hand like anyone else. It required some exceptional circumstance nevertheless to induce him one day to carve the turkey-poults himself. I was out, but I heard afterwards that he carved them with a sacerdotal majesty, surrounded, at a respectful distance from the service-table, by a ring of waiters who were endeavouring thereby not so much to learn the art as to make themselves conspicuously visible, and stood gaping in open-mouthed admiration. Visible to the manager, for that matter (as he plunged a slow gaze into the flanks of his victims, and no more removed his eyes, filled with a sense of his exalted mission, from them than if he had been expected to read in them some augury), they were certainly not.
The hierophant was not conscious of my absence even. When he heard of it, he was distressed: “What, you didn’t see me carving the turkey-poults myself?” I replied that having failed, so far, to see Rome, Venice, Siena, the Prado, the Dresden gallery, the Indies, Sarah in Phèdre, I had learned to resign myself, and that I would add his carving of turkey-poults to my list. The comparison with the dramatic art (Sarah in Phèdre) was the only one that he seemed to understand, for he had already been told by me that on days of gala performances the elder Coque-lin had accepted a beginner’s parts, even that of a character who says but a single line or nothing at all.
“It doesn’t matter, I am sorry for your sake. When shall I be carving again? It will need some great event, it will need a war.” (It did, as a matter of fact, need the armistice.) From that day onwards, the calendar was changed, time was reckoned thus: “That was the day after the day I carved the turkeys myself.” “That’s right, a week after the manager carved the turkeys himself.” And so this prosectomy furnished, like the Nativity of Christ or the Hegira, the starting point for a calendar different from the rest, but neither so extensively adopted nor so long observed.
The sadness of M. de Crécy’s life was due, just as much as to his no longer keeping horses and a succulent table, to his mixing exclusively with people who were capable of supposing that Cambremers and Guermantes were one and the same thing. When he saw that I knew that Legrandin, who had now taken to calling himself Legrand de Méséglise, had no sort of right to that name, being moreover heated by the wine that he was drinking, he broke out in a transport of joy. His sister said to me with an understanding air: “My brother is never so happy as when he has a chance of talking to you.” He felt indeed that he was alive now that he had discovered somebody who knew the unimportance of the Cambremers and the greatness of the Guermantes, somebody for whom the social universe existed. So, after the burning of all the libraries on the face of the globe and the emergence of a race entirely unlettered, an old Latin scholar would recover his confidence in life if he heard somebody quoting a line of Horace.
And so, if he never left the train without saying to me: “When is our next little gathering?”, it was not so much with the hunger of a parasite as with the gluttony of a savant, and because he regarded our symposia at Balbec as an opportunity for talking about subjects which were precious to him and of which he was never able to talk to anyone else, and analogous in that way to those dinners at which assemble on certain specified dates, round the particularly succulent board of the Union Club, the Society of Bibliophiles. He was extremely modest, so far as his own family was concerned, and it was not from M. de Crécy that I learned that it was a very great family indeed, and a genuine branch transplanted to France of the English family which bears the title of Crecy. When I learned that he was a true Crécy, I told him that one of Mme. de Guermantes’s nieces had married an American named Charles Crecy, and said that I did not suppose there was any connexion between them.
“None,” he said. “Any more than—not, of course, that my family is so distinguished—heaps of Americans who call themselves Montgomery, Berry, Chandos or Capel have with the families of Pembroke, Buckingham or Essex, or with the Duc de Berry.” I thought more than once of telling him, as a joke, that I knew Mme. Swann, who as a courtesan had been known at one time by the name Odette de Crécy; but even if the Duc d’Alencon had shewn no resentment when people mentioned in front of him Émilienne d’Alencon, I did not feel that I was on sufficiently intimate terms with M. de Crécy to carry a joke so far. “He comes of a very great family,” M. de Montsurvent said to me one day.
“His family name is Saylor.” And he went on to say that on the wall of his old castle above Incarville, which was now almost uninhabitable and which he, although born to a great fortune, was now too much impoverished to put in repair, was still to be read the old motto of the family. I
