But she is the dregs of society. It’s just as though you were to ask me for an introduction to my milliner. And worse than that, for my milliner is charming. You are a little bit cracked, my poor boy. In any case, I beg that you will be polite to the people to whom I have introduced you, leave cards on them, and go and see them, and not talk to them about Baroness Putbus of whom they have never heard.” I asked whether Mme. d’Orvillers was not inclined to be flighty. “Oh, not in the least, you are thinking of some one else, why, she’s rather a prude, if anything. Ain’t she, Basin?” “Yes, in any case I don’t think there has ever been anything to be said about her,” said the Duke.
“You won’t come with us to the ball?” he asked me. “I can lend you a Venetian cloak and I know some one who will be damned glad to see you there—Oriane for one, that I needn’t say—but the Princesse de Parme. She’s never tired of singing your praises, and swears by you alone. It’s fortunate for you—since she is a trifle mature—that she is the model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have chosen you as a sigisbee, as it was called in my young days, a sort of cavalière servente.”
I was interested not in the ball but in my appointment with Albertine. And so I refused. The carriage had stopped, the footman was shouting for the gate to be opened, the horses pawing the ground until it was flung apart and the carriage passed into the courtyard. “Till we meet again,” said the Duke. “I have sometimes regretted living so close to Marie,” the Duchess said to me, “because I may be very fond of her, but I am not quite so fond of her company. But have never regretted it so much as to-night, since it has allowed me so little of yours.” “Come, Oriane, no speechmaking.” The Duchess would have liked me to come inside for a minute. She laughed heartily, as did the Duke, when I said that I could not because I was expecting a girl to call at any moment. “You choose a funny time to receive visitors,” she said to me.
“Come along, my child, there is no time to waste,” said M. de Guermantes to his wife. “It is a quarter to twelve, and time we were dressed….” He came in collision, outside his front door which they were grimly guarding, with the two ladies of the walking-sticks, who had not been afraid to descend at dead of night from their mountain-top to prevent a scandal. “Basin, we felt we must warn you, in case you were seen at that ball: poor Amanien has just passed away, an hour ago.” The Duke felt a momentary alarm. He saw the delights of the famous ball snatched from him as soon as these accursed mountaineers had informed him of the death of M. d’Osmond.
But he quickly recovered himself and flung at his cousins a retort into which he introduced, with his determination not to forego a pleasure, his incapacity to assimilate exactly the niceties of the French language:
“He is dead! No, no, they exaggerate, they exaggerate!” And without giving a further thought to his two relatives who, armed with their alpenstocks, were preparing to make their nocturnal ascent, he fired off a string of questions at his valet:
“Are you sure my helmet has come?” “Yes, Monsieur le Duc.” “You’re sure there’s a hole in it I can breathe through?
I don’t want to be suffocated, damn it!” “Yes, Monsieur le Duc.” “Oh, thunder of heaven, this is an unlucky evening. Oriane, I forgot to ask Babal whether the shoes with pointed toes were for you!” “But, my dear, the dresser from the Opéra-Comique is here, he will tell us. I don’t see how they could go with your spurs.” “Let us go and find the dresser,” said the Duke. “Good-bye, my boy, I should ask you to come in while we are trying on, it would amuse you. But we should only waste time talking, it is nearly midnight and we must not be late in getting there or we shall spoil the set.”
I too was in a hurry to get away from M. and Mme. de Guermantes as quickly as possible. Phèdre finished at about half past eleven. Albertine must have arrived by now. I went straight to Françoise: “Is Mlle. Albertine in the house?” “No one has called.”
Good God, that meant that no one would call! I was in torment, Al-bertine’s visit seeming to me now all the more desirable, the less certain it had become.
Françoise was cross too, but for quite a different reason. She had just installed her daughter at the table for a succulent repast. But, on hearing me come in, and seeing that there was not time to whip away the dishes and put out needles and thread as though it were a work party and not a supper party: “She has just been taking a spoonful of soup,” Françoise explained to me, “I forced her to gnaw a bit of bone,” to reduce thus to nothing her daughter’s supper, as though the crime lay in its abundance.
Even at luncheon or dinner, if I committed the error of entering the kitchen, Françoise would pretend that they had finished, and would even excuse herself with “I just felt I could eat a scrap,” or ‘a mouthjul.’ But I was speedily reassured on seeing the multitude of the plates that covered the table, which Françoise, surprised by my sudden entry, like a thief in the night which she was not, had not had time to conjure out of sight. Then she added: “Go along to your bed now, you have done enough work today” (for she wished to make it appear that her daughter not only cost us nothing, lived by privations, but was actually working herself to death in our service).
“You are only crowding up the kitchen, and disturbing Master, who is expecting a visitor. Go on, upstairs,” she repeated, as though she were obliged to use her authority to send her daughter to bed, who, the moment supper was out of the question, remained in the kitchen only for appearance’s sake, and if I had stayed five minutes longer would have withdrawn of her own accord. And turning to me, in that charming popular and yet, somehow, personal French which was her spoken language: “Master doesn’t see that her face is just cut in two with want of sleep.” I remained, delighted at not having to talk to Françoise’s daughter.
I have said that she came from a small village which was quite close to her mother’s, and yet different from it in the nature of the soil, its cultivation, in dialect; above all in certain characteristics of the inhabitants.
Thus the ‘butcheress’ and Françoise’s niece did not get on at all well together, but had this point in common, that, when they went out on an errand, they would linger for hours at ‘the sister’s’ or ‘the cousin’s,’ being themselves incapable of finishing a conversation, in the course of which the purpose with which they had set out faded so completely from their minds that, if we said to them on their return:
“Well! Will M. le Marquis de Norpois be at home at a quarter past six?” they did not even beat their brows and say: “Oh, I forgot all about it,” but “Oh!
I didn’t understand that Master wanted to know that, I thought I had just to go and bid him good day.” If they ‘lost their heads’ in this manner about a thing that had been said to them an hour earlier, it was on the other hand impossible to get out of their heads what they had once heard said, by ‘the’ sister or cousin.
Thus, if the butcheress had heard it said that the English made war upon us in ‘70 at the same time as the Prussians, and I had explained to her until I was tired that this was not the case, every three weeks the butcheress would repeat to me in the course of conversation: “It’s all because of that war the English made on us in ‘70, with the Prussians.”
“But I’ve told you a hundred times that you are wrong.”—She would then answer, implying that her conviction was in no way shaken: “In any case, that’s no reason for wishing them any harm. Plenty of water has run under the bridges since ‘70,” and so forth. On another occasion, advocating a war with England which I opposed, she said: “To be sure, it’s always better not to go to war; but when you must, it’s best to do it at once.
As the sister was explaining just now, ever since that war the English made on us in ‘70, the commercial treaties have ruined us. After we’ve beaten them, we won’t allow one Englishman into France, unless he pays three hundred francs to come in, as we have to pay now to land in England.”
Such was, in addition to great honesty and, when they were speaking, an obstinate refusal to allow any
