That’s what is called arriving at the psychological moment. Can’t you picture us missing the train, Mme. Verdurin seeing the carriages come back without us: Tableau!” added the doctor, who had not yet recovered from his emotion. “That would be a pretty good joke, wouldn’t it? Now then, Brichot, what have you to say about our little escapade?” inquired the doctor with a note of pride. “Upon my soul,” replied Brichot, “why, yes, if you had found the train gone, that would have been what the late Villemain used to call a wipe in the eye!” But I, distracted at first by these people who were strangers to me, was suddenly reminded of what Cottard had said to me in the ball-room of the little casino, and, just as though there were an invisible link uniting an organ to our visual memory, the vision of Albertine leaning her breasts against Andrée’s caused my heart a terrible pain.
This pain did not last: the idea of Albertine’s having relations with women seemed no longer possible since the occasion, forty-eight hours earlier, when the advances that my mistress had made to Saint-Loup had excited in me a fresh jealousy which had made me forget the old. I was simple enough to suppose that one taste of necessity excludes another. At Harambouville, as the tram was full, a farmer in a blue blouse who had only a third class ticket got into our compartment. The doctor, feeling that the Princess must not be allowed to travel with such a person, called a porter, shewed his card, describing him as medical officer to one of the big railway companies, and obliged the station-master to make the farmer get out.
This incident so pained and alarmed Saniette’s timid spirit that, as soon as he saw it beginning, fearing already lest, in view of the crowd of peasants on the platform, it should assume the proportions of a rising, he pretended to be suffering from a stomach-ache, and, so that he might not be accused of any share in the responsibility for the doctor’s violence, wandered down the corridor, pretending to be looking for what Cottard called the ‘water.’ Failing to find one, he stood and gazed at the scenery from the other end of the ‘twister.’ “If this is your first appearance at Mme. Verdurin’s, Sir,” I was addressed by Brichot, anxious to shew off his talents before a newcomer, “you will find that there is no place where one feels more the ‘amenities of life,’ to quote one of the inventors of dilettantism, of pococurantism, of all sorts of words in -ism that are in fashion among our little snobbesses, I refer to M. le Prince de Talleyrand.”
For, when he spoke of these great noblemen of the past, he thought it clever and ‘in the period’ to prefix a ‘M.’ to their titles, and said ‘M. le Duc de La Rochefoucauld,’ ‘M. le Cardinal de Retz,’ referring to these also as ‘That struggle-for-lifer de Gondi,’ ‘that Boulangist de Marcillac.’ And he never failed to call Montesquieu, with a smile, when he referred to him: “Monsieur le Président Secondât de Montesquieu.” An intelligent man of the world would have been irritated by a pedantry which reeked so of the lecture-room.
But in the perfect manners of the man of the world when speaking of a Prince, there is a pedantry also, which betrays a different caste, that in which one prefixes ‘the Emperor’ to the name ‘William’ and addresses a Royal Highness in the third person. “Ah, now that is a man,” Brichot continued, still referring to ‘Monsieur le Prince de Talleyrand’—“to whom we take off our hats.
He is an ancestor.” “It is a charming house,” Cottard told me, “you will find a little of everything, for Mme. Verdurin is not exclusive, great scholars like Brichot, the high nobility, such as the Princess Sherbatoff, a great Russian lady, a friend of the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, who even sees her alone at hours when no one else is admitted.” As a matter of fact the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, not wishing Princess Sherbatoff, who for years past had been cut by everyone, to come to her house when there might be other people, allowed her to come only in the early morning, when Her Imperial Highness was not at home to any of those friends to whom it would have been as unpleasant to meet the Princess as it would have been awkward for the Princess to meet them.
As, for the last three years, as soon as she came away, like a manicurist, from the Grand Duchess, Mme. Sherbatoff would go on to Mme. Verdurin, who had just awoken, and stuck to her for the rest of the day, one might say that the Princess’s loyalty surpassed even that of Brichot, constant as he was at those Wednesdays, both in Paris, where he had the pleasure of fancying himself a sort of Chateaubriand at l’Abbaye-aux-Bois, and in the country, where he saw himself becoming the equivalent of what might have been in the salon of Mme. de Châtelet the man whom he always named (with an erudite sarcasm and satisfaction): “M. de Voltaire.”
Her want of friends had enabled Princess Sherbatoff to shew for some years past to the Verdurins a fidelity which made her more than an ordinary member of the ‘faithful,’ the type of faithfulness, the ideal which Mme. Verdurin had long thought unattainable and which now, in her later years, she at length found incarnate in this new feminine recruit. However keenly the Mistress might feel the pangs of jealousy, it was without precedent that the most assiduous of her faithful should not have ‘failed’ her at least once.
The most stay-at-home yielded to the temptation to travel; the most continent fell from virtue; the most robust might catch influenza, the idlest be caught for his month’s soldiering, the most indifferent go to close the eyes of a dying mother. And it was in vain that Mme. Verdurin told them then, like the Roman Empress, that she was the sole general whom her legion must obey, like the Christ or the Kaiser that he who loved his father or mother more than her and was not prepared to leave them and follow her was not worthy of her, that instead of slacking in bed or letting themselves be made fools of by bad women they would do better to remain in her company, by her, their sole remedy and sole delight.
But destiny which is sometimes pleased to brighten the closing years of a life that has passed the mortal span had made Mme. Verdurin meet the Princess Sherbatoff. Out of touch with her family, an exile from her native land, knowing nobody but the Baroness Putbus and the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, to whose houses, because she herself had no desire to meet the friends of the former, and the latter no desire that her friends should meet the Princess, she went only in the early morning hours when Mme. Verdurin was still asleep, never once, so far as she could remember, having been confined to her room since she was twelve years old, when she had had the measles, having on the 3lst of December replied to Mme. Verdurin who, afraid of being left alone, had asked her whether she would not ‘shake down’ there for the night, in spite of its being New Year’s Eve: “Why, what is there to prevent me, any day of the year?
Besides, to-morrow is a day when one stays at home, and this is my home,” living in a boarding-house, and moving from it whenever the Verdurins moved, accompanying them upon their holidays, the Princess had so completely exemplified to Mme. Verdurin the line of Vigny:
Thou only didst appear that which one seeks always, that the Lady President of the little circle, anxious to make sure of one of her ‘faithful’ even after death, had made her promise that whichever of them survived the other should be buried by her side.
Before strangers—among whom we must always reckon him to whom we lie most barefacedly because he is the person whose scorn we should most dread: ourself—Princess Sherbatoff took care to represent her only three friendships—with the Grand Duchess, the Verdurins, and the Baroness Putbus—as the only ones, not which cataclysms beyond her control had allowed to emerge from the destruction of all the rest, but which a free choice had made her elect in preference to any other, and to which a certain love of solitude and simplicity had made her confine herself. “I see nobody else,” she would say, insisting upon the inflexible character of what appeared to be rather a rule that one imposes upon oneself than a necessity to which one submits.
She would add: “I visit only three houses,” as a
