But they were furious, suspected a plot hatched by Mme. Verdurin, and, tit for tat, when she invited them again to la Raspelière, M. de Cambremer, unable to resist the pleasure of seeing his house again and of mingling with the little group, came, but came alone, saying that the Marquise was so sorry, but her doctor had ordered her to stay in her room.
The Cambremers hoped by this partial attendance at once to teach M. de Charlus a lesson, and to shew the Verdurins that they were not obliged to treat them with more than a limited politeness, as Princesses of the Blood used in the old days to ‘shew out’ Duchesses, but only to the middle of the second saloon. After a few weeks, they were scarcely on speaking terms. M. de Cambremer explained this to me as follows: “I must tell you that with M. de Charlus it was rather difficult. He is an extreme Dreyfusard….” “Oh, no!” “Yes…. Anyhow his cousin the Prince de Guermantes is, they’ve come in for a lot of abuse over that.
I have some relatives who are very particular about that sort of thing. I can’t afford to mix with those people, I should quarrel with the whole of my family.” “Since the Prince de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard, that will make it all the easier,” said Mme. de Cambremer, “for Saint-Loup, who is said to be going to marry his niece, is one too. Indeed, that is perhaps why he is marrying her.” “Come now, my dear, you mustn’t say that Saint-Loup, who is a great friend of ours, is a Dreyfusard. One ought not to make such allegations lightly,” said M. de Cambremer. “You would make him highly popular in the army!” “He was once, but he isn’t any longer,” I explained to M. de Cambremer. “As for his marrying Mlle, de Guermantes-Brassac, is there any truth in that?” “People are talking of nothing else, but you should be in a position to know.” “But I repeat that he told me himself, he was a Dreyfusard,” said Mme. de Cambremer. “Not that there isn’t every excuse for him, the Guermantes are half German.” “The Guermantes in the Rue de Varenne, you can say, are entirely German,” said Cancan.
“But Saint-Loup is a different matter altogether; he may have any amount of German blood, his father insisted upon maintaining his title as a great nobleman of France, he rejoined the service in 1871 and was killed in the war in the most gallant fashion. I may take rather a strong line about these matters, but it doesn’t do to exaggerate either one way or the other. In medio… virtus, ah, I forget the exact words.
It’s a remark Doctor Cottard made. Now, there’s a man who can always say the appropriate thing. You ought to have a small Larousse in the house.” To avoid having to give an opinion as to the Latin quotation, and to get away from the subject of Saint-Loup, as to whom her husband seemed to think that she was wanting in tact, Mme. de Cambremer fell back upon the Mistress whose quarrel with them was even more in need of an explanation.
“We were delighted to let la Raspelière to Mme, Verdurin,” said the Marquise. “The only trouble is, she appears to imagine that with the house, and everything else that she has managed to tack on to it, the use of the meadow, the old hangings, all sorts of things which weren’t in the lease at all, she should also be entitled to make friends with us. The two things are entirely distinct. Our mistake lay in our not having done everything quite simply through a lawyer or an agency.
At Féterne it doesn’t matter, but I can just imagine the face my aunt de Ch’nouville would make if she saw old mother Verdurin come marching in, on one of my days, with her hair streaming. As for M. de Charlus, of course, he knows some quite nice people, but he knows some very nasty people too.” I asked for details. Driven into a corner, Mme. de Cambremer finally admitted:
“People say that it was he who maintained a certain Monsieur Moreau, Morille, Morue, I don’t remember. Nothing to do, of course, with Morel, the violinist,” she added, blushing.
“When I realised that Mme. Verdurin imagined that because she was our tenant in the Manche, she would have the right to come and call upon me in Paris, I saw that it was time to cut the cable.”
Notwithstanding this quarrel with the Mistress, the Cambremers were on quite good terms with the faithful, and would readily get into our carriage when they were travelling by the train. Just before we reached Douville, Albertine, taking out her mirror for the last time, would sometimes feel obliged to change her gloves, or to take off her hat for a moment, and, with the tortoiseshell comb which I had given her and which she wore in her hair, would smooth the plaits, pull out the puffs, and if necessary, over the undulations which descended in regular valleys to the nape of her neck, push up her chignon.
Once we were in the carriages which had come to meet us, we no longer had any idea where we were; the roads were not lighted; we could tell by the louder sound of the wheels that we were passing through a village, we thought we had arrived, we found ourselves once more in the open country, we heard bells in the distance, we forgot that we were in evening dress, and had almost fallen asleep when, at the end of this wide borderland of darkness which, what with the distance we had travelled and the incidents characteristic of all railway journeys, seemed to have carried us on to a late hour of the night and almost half way back to Paris, suddenly after the crunching of the carriage wheels over a finer gravel had revealed to us that we had turned into the park, there burst forth, reintroducing us into a social existence, the dazzling lights of the drawing-room, then of the dining-room where we were suddenly taken aback by hearing eight o’clock strike, that hour which we supposed to have so long since passed, while the endless dishes and vintage wines followed one another round men in black and women with bare arms, at a dinner-party ablaze with light like any real dinner-party, surrounded only, and thereby changing its character, by the double veil, sombre and strange, that was woven for it, with a sacrifice of their first solemnity to this social purpose, by the nocturnal, rural, seaside hours of the journey there and back.
The latter indeed obliged us to leave the radiant and soon forgotten splendour of the lighted drawing-room for the carriages in which I arranged to sit beside Albertine so that my mistress might not be left with other people in my absence, and often for another reason as well, which was that we could both do many things in a dark carriage, in which the jolts of the downward drive would moreover give us an excuse, should a sudden ray of light fall upon us, for clinging to one another. When M. de Cambremer was still on visiting terms with the Verdurins, he would ask me: “You don’t think that this fog will bring on your choking fits?
My sister was terribly bad this morning. Ah! You have been having them too,” he said with satisfaction. “I shall tell her that to-night. I know that, as soon as I get home, the first thing she will ask will be whether you have had any lately.” He spoke to me of my sufferings only to lead up to his sister’s, and made me describe mine in detail simply that he might point out the difference between them and hers. But notwithstanding these differences, as he felt that his sister’s choking fits entitled him to speak with authority, he could not believe that what ‘succeeded’ with hers was not indicated as a cure for mine, and it irritated him that I would not try these remedies, for if there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it upon other people. “Not that I need speak, a mere outsider, when you are here before the areopagus, at the fountainhead of wisdom. What does Professor Cottard think about them?”
I saw his wife once again, as a matter of fact, because she had said that my ‘cousin’ had odd habits, and I wished to know what she meant by that. She denied having said it, but finally admitted that she had been speaking of a person whom she thought she had seen with my cousin. She did not know the person’s name and said faintly that, if she was not mistaken, it was the wife of a banker, who was called Lina, Linette, Lisette, Lia,
