For my part, I call it daubing, it’s all so hackneyed, and besides, it lacks relief, personality. It’s anybody’s work.” “He revives the grace of the eighteenth century, but in a modern form,” Saniette broke out, fortified and reassured by my affability. “But I prefer Helleu.” “He’s not in the least like Helleu,” said Mme. Verdurin. “Yes, he has the fever of the eighteenth century. He’s a steam Watteau,” and he began to laugh.
“Old, old as the hills, I’ve had that served up to me for years,” said M. Verdurin, to whom indeed Ski had once repeated the remark, but as his own invention. “It’s unfortunate that when once in a way you say something quite amusing and make it intelligible, it is not your own.” “I’m sorry about it,” Mme. Verdurin went on, “because he was really gifted, he has wasted a charming temperament for painting. Ah! if he had stayed with us! Why, he would have become the greatest landscape painter of our day.
And it is a woman that has dragged him down so low! Not that that surprises me, for he was a pleasant enough man, but common. At bottom, he was a mediocrity. I may tell you that I felt it at once. Really, he never interested me. I was very fond of him, that was all. For one thing, he was so dirty. Tell me, do you, now, really like people who never wash?” “What is this charmingly coloured thing that we are eating?” asked Ski. “It is called strawberry mousse,” said Mme. Verdurin. “But it is ex-qui-site.
You ought to open bottles of Château-Margaux, Château-Lafite, port wine.” “I can’t tell you how he amuses me, he never drinks anything but water,” said Mme. Verdurin, seeking to cloak with her delight at such a flight of fancy her alarm at the thought of so prodigal an outlay. “But not to drink,” Ski went on, “you shall fill all our glasses, they will bring in marvelous peaches, huge nectarines, there against the sunset; it will be as gorgeous as a fine Veronese.” “It would cost almost as much,” M. Verdurin murmured. “But take away those cheeses with their hideous colour,” said Ski, trying to snatch the plate from before his host, who defended his gruyère with his might and main. “You can realise that I don’t regret Elstir,” Mme. Verdurin said to me, “that one is far more gifted.
Elstir is simply hard work, the man who can’t make himself give up painting when he would like to. He is the good student, the slavish competitor. Ski, now, only follows his own fancy. You will see him light a cigarette in the middle of dinner.” “After all, I can’t see why you wouldn’t invite his wife,” said Cottard, “he would be with us still.” “Will you mind what you’re saying, please, I don’t open my doors to street-walkers, Monsieur le Professeur,” said Mme. Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done everything in her power to make Elstir return, even with his wife. But before they were married she had tried to make them quarrel, had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, a thief. For once in a way she had failed to effect a breach.
It was with the Verdurin salon that Elstir had broken; and he was glad of it, as converts bless the illness or misfortune that has withdrawn them from the world and has made them learn the way of salvation. “He really is magnificent, the Professor,” she said. “Why not declare outright that I keep a disorderly house? Anyone would think you didn’t know what Madame Elstir was like. I would sooner have the lowest street-walker at my table! Oh no, I don’t stand for that sort of thing. Besides I may tell you that it would have been stupid of me to overlook the wife, when the husband no longer interests me, he is out of date, he can’t even draw.”
“That is extraordinary in a man of his intelligence,” said Cottard. “Oh, no!” replied Mme. Verdurin, “even at the time when he had talent, for he had it, the wretch, and to spare, what was tiresome about him was that he had not a spark of intelligence.” Mme. Verdurin, in passing this judgment upon Elstir, had not waited for their quarrel, or until she had ceased to care for his painting.
The fact was that, even at the time when he formed part of the little group, it would happen that Elstir spent the whole day in the company of some woman whom, rightly or wrongly, Mme. Verdurin considered a goose, which, in her opinion, was not the conduct of an intelligent man. “No,” she observed with an air of finality, “I consider that his wife and he are made for one another. Heaven knows, there isn’t a more boring creature on the face of the earth, and I should go mad if I had to spend a couple of hours with her. But people say that he finds her very intelligent. There’s no use denying it, our Tiche was extremely stupid.
I have seen him bowled over by people you can’t conceive, worthy idiots we should never have allowed into our little clan. Well! He wrote to them, he argued with them, he, Elstir! That doesn’t prevent his having charming qualities, oh, charming and deliciously absurd, naturally.” For Mme. Verdurin was convinced that men who are truly remarkable are capable of all sorts of follies.
A false idea in which there is nevertheless a grain of truth. Certainly, people’s follies are insupportable. But a want of balance which we discover only in course of time is the consequence of the entering into a human brain of delicacies for which it is not regularly adapted. So that the oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd. “Look, I shall be able to shew you his flowers now,” she said to me, seeing that her husband was making signals to her to rise.
And she took M. de Cambremer’s arm again. M. Verdurin tried to apologise for this to M. de Charlus, as soon as he had got rid of Mme. de Cambremer, and to give him his reasons, chiefly for the pleasure of discussing these social refinements with a gentleman of title, momentarily the inferior of those who assigned to him the place to which they considered him entitled. But first of all he was anxious to make it clear to M. de Charlus that intellectually he esteemed him too highly to suppose that he could pay any attention to these trivialities.
“Excuse my mentioning so small a point,” he began, “for I can understand how little such things mean to you. Middle-class minds pay attention to them, but the others, the artists, the people who are really of our sort, don’t give a rap for them. Now, from the first words we exchanged, I realised that you were one of us!” M. de Charlus, who gave a widely different meaning to this expression, drew himself erect.
After the doctor’s oglings, he found his host’s insulting frankness suffocating. “Don’t protest, my dear Sir, you are one of us, it is plain as daylight,” replied M. Verdurin. “Observe that I have no idea whether you practise any of the arts, but that is not necessary. It is not always sufficient. Dechambre, who has just died, played exquisitely, with the most vigorous execution, but he was not one of us, you felt at once that he was not one of us.
Brichot is not one of us. Morel is, my wife is, I can feel that you are….” “What were you going to tell me?” interrupted M. de Charlus, who was beginning to feel reassured as to M. Verdurin’s meaning, but preferred that he should not utter these misleading remarks quite so loud. “Only that we put you on the left,” replied M. Verdurin. M. de Charlus, with a comprehending, genial, insolent smile, replied: “Why! That is not of the slightest importance, here!” And he gave a little laugh that was all his own—a laugh that came to him probably from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who herself had inherited it, in identical form, from an ancestress, so that it had been sounding now, without change, for not a few centuries in little old-fashioned European courts, and one could relish its precious quality like that of certain old musical instruments that have now grown rare.
There are times when, to paint a complete portrait of some one, we should have to add a phonetic imitation to our verbal description, and our portrait of the figure that M. de Charlus presented is liable to remain incomplete in the absence of that little laugh, so delicate, so light, just as certain compositions are never accurately rendered because our orchestras lack those ‘small trumpets,’ with a sound so entirely their own, for which the composer wrote this or that part. “But,” M. Verdurin explained, stung by his laugh,
