At Hermenonville there would get in sometimes M. de Chevregny, whose name, Brichot told us, signified like that of Mgr. de Cabrières, a place where goats assemble. He was related to the Cambremers, for which reason, and from a false idea of what was fashionable, the latter often invited him to Féterne, but only when they had no other guests to dazzle. Living all the year round at Beausoleil, M. de Chevregny had remained more provincial than they. And so when he went for a few weeks to Paris, there was not a moment to waste if he was to ‘see everything’ in the time; so much so that occasionally, a little dazed by the number of spectacles too rapidly digested, when he was asked if he had seen a particular play he would find that he was no longer sure.
But this uncertainty was rare, for he had that detailed knowledge of Paris only to be found in people who seldom go there. He advised me which of the ‘novelties’ I ought to see (“It’s worth your while”), regarding them however solely from the point of view of the pleasant evening that they might help to spend, and so completely ignoring the aesthetic point of view as never to suspect that they might indeed constitute a ‘novelty’ occasionally in the history of art. So it was that, speaking of everything in the same tone, he told us: “We went once to the Opéra-Comique, but the show there is nothing much.
It’s called Pelléas et Mélisande. It’s rubbish. Périer always acts well, but it’s better to see him in something else. At the Gymnase, on the other hand, they’re doing La Châtelaine. We went again to it twice; don’t miss it, whatever you do, it’s well worth seeing; besides, it’s played to perfection; you have Frévalles, Marie Magnier, Baron fils”; and he went on to quote the names of actors of whom I had never heard, and without prefixing Monsieur, Madame or Mademoiselle, like the Duc de Guermantes, who used to speak in the same ceremoniously contemptuous tone of the ‘songs of Mademoiselle Yvette Guilbert’ and the ‘experiments of Monsieur Charcot.’ This was not M. de Chevregny’s way, he said “Cornaglia and Dehelly,” as he might have said “Voltaire and Montesquieu.” For in him, with regard to actors as to everything that was Parisian, the aristocrat’s desire to shew his scorn was overcome by the desire to appear on familiar terms of the provincial.
Immediately after the first dinner-party that I had attended at la Raspelière with what was still called at Féterne ‘the young couple,’ albeit M. and Mme. de Cambremer were no longer, by any means, in their first youth, the old Marquise had written me one of those letters which one can pick out by their handwriting from among a thousand. She said to me: “Bring your delicious—charming—nice cousin. It will be a delight, a pleasure,” always avoiding, and with such unerring dexterity, the sequence that the recipient of her letter would naturally have expected, that I finally changed my mind as to the nature of these diminuendoes, decided that they were deliberate, and found in them the same corruption of taste—transposed into the social key—that drove Sainte-Beuve to upset all the normal relations between words, to alter any expression that was at all conventional.
Two methods, taught probably by different masters, came into conflict in this epistolary style, the second making Mme. de Cambremer redeem the monotony of her multiple adjectives by employing them in a descending scale, by avoiding an ending upon the perfect chord. On the other hand, I was inclined to see in these inverse gradations, not an additional refinement, as when they were the handiwork of the Dowager Marquise, but an additional clumsiness whenever they were employed by the Marquis her son or by his lady cousins. For throughout the family, to quite a remote degree of kinship and in admiring imitation of aunt Zélia, the rule of the three adjectives was held in great honour, as was a certain enthusiastic way of catching your breath when you were talking.
An imitation that had passed into the blood, moreover; and whenever, in the family circle, a little girl, while still in the nursery, stopped short while she was talking to swallow her saliva, her parents would say: “She takes after aunt Zélia,” would feel that as she grew up, her upper lip would soon tend to hide itself beneath a faint moustache, and would make up their minds to cultivate her inherited talent for music.
It was not long before the Cambremers were on less friendly terms with Mme. Verdurin than with myself, for different reasons. They felt, they must invite her to dine. The ‘young’ Marquise said to me contemptuously: “I don’t see why we shouldn’t invite that woman, in the country one meets anybody, it needn’t involve one in anything.” But being at heart considerably impressed, they never ceased to consult me as to the way in which they should carry out their desire to be polite. I thought that as they had invited Albertine and myself to dine with some friends of Saint-Loup, smart people of the neighbourhood, who owned the château of Gourville, and represented a little more than the cream of Norman society, for which Mme. Verdurin, while pretending never to look at it, thirsted, I advised the Cambremers to invite the Mistress to meet them.
But the lord and lady of Féterne, in their fear (so timorous were they) of offending their noble friends, or (so simple were they) that M. and Mme. Verdurin might be bored by people who were not intellectual, or yet again (since they were impregnated with a spirit of routine which experience had not fertilised) of mixing different kinds of people, and making a social blunder, declared that it would not be a success, and that it would be much better to keep Mme. Verdurin (whom they would invite with all her little group) for another evening.
For this coming evening—the smart one, to meet Saint-Loup’s friends—they invited nobody from the little nucleus but Morel, in order that M. de Charlus might indirectly be informed of the brilliant people whom they had in their house, and also that the musician might help them to entertain their guests, for he was to be asked to bring his violin. They threw in Cottard as well, because M. de Cambremer declared that he had ‘a go’ about him, and would be a success at the dinner-table; besides, it might turn out useful to be on friendly terms with a doctor, if they should ever have anybody ill in the house.
But they invited him by himself, so as not to ‘start any complications with the wife.’ Mme. Verdurin was furious when she heard that two members of the little group had been invited without herself to dine at Féterne ‘quite quietly.’ She dictated to the doctor, whose first impulse had been to accept, a stiff reply in which he said: “We are dining that evening with Mme. Verdurin,” a plural which was to teach the Cambremers a lesson, and to shew them that he was not detachable from Mme. Cottard. As for Morel, Mme. Verdurin had no need to outline a course of impolite behaviour for him, he found one of his own accord, for the following reason.
If he preserved, with regard to M. de Charlus, in so far as his pleasures were concerned, an independence which distressed the Baron, we have seen that the latter’s influence was making itself felt more and more in other regions, and that he had for instance enlarged the young virtuoso’s knowledge of music and purified his style. But it was still, at this point in our story, at least, only an influence. At the same time there was one subject upon which anything that M. de Charlus might say was blindly accepted and put into practice by Morel. Blindly and foolishly, for not only were M. de Charlus’s instructions false, but, even had they been justifiable in the case of a great gentleman, when applied literally by Morel they became grotesque.
The subject as to which Morel was becoming so credulous and obeyed his master with such docility was that of social distinction. The violinist, who, before making M. de Charlus’s acquaintance, had had no conception of society, had taken literally the brief and arrogant sketch of it that the Baron had outlined for him. “There are a certain number of outstanding families,” M. de Charlus had told him, “first and foremost the Guermantes, who claim fourteen alliances with the House of France, which is flattering to the House of France if anything, for it was to Aldonce de Guermantes and not to Louis the Fat, his consanguineous but younger brother, that the Throne of France should have passed.
Under Louiv XIV, we ‘draped’ at the death of Monsieur, having the same grandmother as the king; a long way below the Guermantes, one may however mention the families of La Trémoïlle, descended from the Kings of Naples and the Counts of Poitiers; of d’Uzès, scarcely old as a family, but the premier peers; of Luynes, who are
