Add but a fourth adjective, and, of her initial friendliness, there would be nothing left. Moreover, with a certain refined simplicity which cannot have failed to produce a considerable impression upon her family and indeed in her circle of acquaintance, Mme. de Cambremer had acquired the habit of substituting for the word (which might in time begin to ring false) ‘sincere,’ the word ‘true.’
And to shew that it was indeed by sincerity that she was impelled, she broke the conventional rule that would have placed the adjective ‘true’ before its noun, and planted it boldly after. Her letters ended with:
“Croyez à mon amitié vraie.” “Croyez à ma sympathie vraie.” Unfortunately, this had become so stereotyped a formula that the affectation of frankness was more suggestive of a polite fiction than the time-honoured formulas, of the meaning of which people have ceased to think.
I was, however, hindered from reading her letter by the confused sound of conversation over which rang out the louder accents of M. de Charlus, who, still on the same topic, was saying to M. de Cambremer: “You reminded me, when you offered me your chair, of a gentleman from whom I received a letter this morning, addressed: ‘To His Highness, the Baron de Charlus,’ and beginning ‘Monseigneur.’” “To be sure, your correspondent was slightly exaggerating,” replied M. de Cambremer, giving way to a discreet show of mirth. M. de Charlus had provoked this; he did not partake in it. “Well, if it comes to that, my dear fellow,” he said, “I may observe that, heraldically speaking, he was entirely in the right.
I am not regarding it as a personal matter, you understand. I should say the same of anyone else. But one has to face the facts, history is history, we can’t alter it and it is not in our power to rewrite it. I need not cite the case of the Emperor William, who at Kiel never ceased to address me as ‘Monseigneur.’ I have heard it said that he gave the same title to all the Dukes of France, which was an abuse of the privilege, but was perhaps simply a delicate attention aimed over our heads at France herself.” “More delicate, perhaps, than sincere,” said M. de Cambremer. “Ah! There I must differ from you.
Observe that, personally, a gentleman of the lowest rank such as that Hohenzollern, a Protestant to boot, and one who has usurped the throne of my cousin the King of Hanover, can be no favourite of mine,” added M. de Charlus, with whom the annexation of Hanover seemed to rankle more than that of Alsace-Lorraine. “But I believe the feeling that turns the Emperor in our direction to be profoundly sincere. Fools will tell you that he is a stage emperor. He is on the contrary marvellously intelligent; it is true that he knows nothing about painting, and has forced Herr Tschudi to withdraw the Elstirs from the public galleries.
But Louis XIV did not appreciate the Dutch Masters, he had the same fondness for display, and yet he was, when all is said, a great Monarch. Besides, William II has armed his country from the military and naval point of view in a way that Louis XIV failed to do, and I hope that his reign will never know the reverses that darkened the closing days of him who is fatuously styled the Roi Soleil. The Republic made a great mistake, to my mind, in rejecting the overtures of the Hohenzollern, or responding to them only in driblets. He is very well aware of it himself and says, with that gift that he has for the right expression: ‘What I want is a clasped hand, not a raised hat.’
As a man, he is vile; he has abandoned, surrendered, denied his best friends, in circumstances in which his silence was as deplorable as theirs was grand,” continued M. de Charlus, who was irresistibly drawn by his own tendencies to the Eulenburg affair, and remembered what one of the most highly placed of the culprits had said to him:
“The Emperor must have relied upon our delicacy to have dared to allow such a trial.
But he was not mistaken in trusting to our discretion. We would have gone to the scaffold with our lips sealed.” “All that, however, has nothing to do with what I was trying to explain, which is that, in Germany, mediatised Princes like ourselves are Durchlaucht, and in France our rank of Highness was publicly recognised. Saint-Simon tries to make out that this was an abuse on our part, in which he is entirely mistaken.
The reason that he gives, namely that Louis XIV forbade us to style him the Most Christian King and ordered us to call him simply the King, proves merely that we held our title from him, and not that we had not the rank of Prince. Otherwise, it would have to be withheld from the Duc de Lorraine and ever so many others. Besides, several of our titles come from the House of Lorraine through Thérèse d’Espinay, my great-grandmother, who was the daughter of the Damoiseau de Commercy.” Observing that Morel was listening, M. de Charlus proceeded to develop the reasons for his claim. “I have pointed out to my brother that it is not in the third part of Gotha, but in the second, not to say the first, that the account of our family ought to be included,” he said, without stopping to think that Morel did not know what ‘Gotha’ was. “But that is his affair, he is the Head of my House, and so long as he raises no objection and allows the matter to pass, I have only to shut my eyes.”
“M. Brichot interests me greatly,” I said to Mme. Verdurin as she joined me, and I slipped Mme. de Cambremer’s letter into my pocket. “He has a cultured mind and is an excellent man,” she replied coldly. “Of course what he lacks is originality and taste, he has a terrible memory. They used to say of the ‘forebears’ of the people we have here this evening, the émigrés, that they had forgotten nothing. But they had at least the excuse,” she said, borrowing one of Swann’s epigrams, “that they had learned nothing. Whereas Brichot knows everything, and hurls chunks of dictionary at our heads during dinner.
I’m sure you know everything now about the names of all the towns and villages.” While Mme. Verdurin was speaking, it occurred to me that I had determined to ask her something, but I could not remember what it was. I could not at this moment say what Mme. Verdurin was wearing that evening. Perhaps even then I was no more able to say, for I have not an observant mind. But feeling that her dress was not unambitious I said to her something polite and even admiring.
She was like almost all women, who imagine that a compliment that is paid to them is a literal statement of the truth, and is a judgment impartially, irresistibly pronounced, as though it referred to a work of art that has no connexion with a person. And so it was with an earnestness which made me blush for my own hypocrisy that she replied with the proud and artless question, habitual in the circumstances: “You like it?” “I know you’re talking about Brichot. Eh, Chantepie, Freycinet, he spared you nothing. I had my eye on you, my little Mistress!” “I saw you, it was all I could do not to laugh.” “You are talking about Chantepie, I am certain,” said M. Verdurin, as he came towards us.
I had been alone, as I thought of my strip of green cloth and of a scent of wood, in failing to notice that, while he discussed etymologies, Brichot had been provoking derision. And inasmuch as the expressions which, for me, gave their value to things were of the sort which other people either do not feel or reject without thinking of them, as unimportant, they were entirely useless to me and had the additional drawback of making me appear stupid in the eyes of Mme. Verdurin who saw that I had ‘swallowed’ Brichot, as before I had appeared stupid to Mme. de Guermantes, because I enjoyed going to see Mme. d’Arpajon. With Brichot, however, there was another reason.
I was not one of the little clan. And in every clan, whether it be social, political, literary, one contracts a perverse facility in discovering in a conversation, in an official speech, in a story, in a sonnet, everything that the honest reader would never have dreamed of finding there. How many times have I found myself, after reading with a certain emotion a tale skilfully told by a learned and slightly old-fashioned Academician, on the point of saying to Bloch or to Mme. de Guermantes: “How charming this is!” when before I had opened my mouth they exclaimed, each in a different language: “If you want to be really amused, read a tale by So-and-so. Human stupidity has never sunk to greater depths.”
Bloch’s scorn was aroused principally by the discovery that certain effects of style, pleasant enough in themselves, were slightly faded; that of Mme. de Guermantes because the tale seemed to prove the direct opposite of what the author meant, for reasons of fact which she had the ingenuity to deduce but which would never have occurred to me. I was no less surprised to discover the irony that underlay the Verdurins’ apparent friendliness for
