the asparagus and mousseline sauce: “wait, now, I do believe that Zola has actually written an essay on Elstir, the painter whose things you were looking at just now—the only ones of his, really, that I care for,” she concluded. As a matter of fact she hated Elstir’s work, but found a unique quality in anything that was in her own house. I asked M. de Guermantes if he knew the name of the gentleman in the tall hat who figured in the picture of the crowd and whom I recognised as the same person whose portrait the Guermantes also had and had hung beside the other, both dating more or less from the same early period in which Elstir’s personality was not yet completely established and he derived a certain inspiration from Manet. “Good Lord, yes,” he replied, “I know it’s a fellow who is quite well-known and no fool either, in his own line, but I have no head for names. I have it on the tip of my tongue, Monsieur … Monsieur … oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I can’t remember it. Swann would be able to tell you, it was he who made Mme. de Guermantes buy all that stuff; she is always too good-natured, afraid of hurting people’s feelings if she refuses to do things; between ourselves, I believe he’s landed us with a lot of rubbish. What I can tell you is that the gentleman you mean has been a sort of Maecenas to M. Elstir, he started him and has often helped him out of tight places by ordering pictures from him. As a compliment to this man—if you can call that sort of thing a 264compliment—he has painted him standing about among that crowd, where with his Sunday-go-to-meeting look he creates a distinctly odd effect. He may be a big gun in his own way but he is evidently not aware of the proper time and place for a top hat. With that thing on his head, among all those bare-headed girls, he looks like a little country lawyer on the razzle-dazzle. But tell me, you seem quite gone on his pictures. If I had only known, I should have got up the subject properly. Not that there’s any need to rack one’s brains over the meaning of M. Elstir’s work, as one would for Ingres’s Source or the Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche. What one appreciates in his work is that it’s shrewdly observed, amusing, Parisian, and then one passes on to the next thing. One doesn’t need to be an expert to look at that sort of thing. I know of course that they’re merely sketches, still, I don’t feel myself that he puts enough work into them. Swann was determined that we should buy a Bundle of Asparagus. In fact it was in the house for several days. There was nothing else in the picture, a bundle of asparagus exactly like what you’re eating now. But I must say I declined to swallow M. Elstir’s asparagus. He asked three hundred francs for them. Three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus. A louis, that’s as much as they’re worth, even if they are out of season. I thought it a bit stiff. When he puts real people into his pictures as well, there’s something rather caddish, something detrimental about him which does not appeal to me. I am surprised to see a delicate mind, a superior brain like yours admire that sort of thing.” “I don’t know why you should say that, Basin,” interrupted the Duchess, who did not like to hear people run down 265anything that her rooms contained. “I am by no means prepared to admit that there’s nothing distinguished in Elstir’s pictures. You have to take it or leave it. But it’s not always lacking in talent. And you must admit that the ones I bought are singularly beautiful.” “Well, Oriane, in that style of thing I’ld a thousand times rather have the little study by M. Vibert we saw at the water-colour exhibition. There’s nothing much in it, if you like, you could take it in the palm of your hand, but you can see the man’s clever through and through: that unwashed scarecrow of a missionary standing before the sleek prelate who is making his little dog do tricks, it’s a perfect little poem of subtlety, and in fact goes really deep.” “I believe you know M. Elstir,” the Duchess went on to me, “as a man, he’s quite pleasant.” “He is intelligent,” said the Duke; “one is surprised, when one talks to him, that his painting should be so vulgar.” “He is more than intelligent, he is really quite clever,” said the Duchess in the confidently critical tone of a person who knew what she was talking about. “Didn’t he once start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Princesse de Parme. “Yes, in shrimp pink,” replied Mme. de Guermantes, “but that’s not going to hand his name down to posterity. It’s a ghastly thing; Basin wanted to have it destroyed.” This last statement was one which Mme. de Guermantes often made. But at other times her appreciation of the picture was different: “I do not care for his painting, but he did once do a good portrait of me.” The former of these judgments was addressed as a rule to people who spoke to the Duchess of her portrait, the other to those who did not refer to it and whom therefore she was anxious to inform of its existence. The former was inspired in her by 266coquetry, the latter by vanity. “Make a portrait of you look ghastly. Why, then it can’t be a portrait, it’s a falsehood; I don’t know one end of a brush from the other, but I’m sure if I were to paint you, merely putting you down as I see you, I should produce a masterpiece,” said the Princesse de Parme ingenuously. “He sees me probably as I see myself, without any allurements,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, with the look, melancholy, modest and coaxing, which seemed to her best calculated to make her appear different from what Elstir had portrayed. “That portrait ought to appeal to Mme. de Gallardon,” said the Duke. “Because she knows nothing about pictures?” asked the Princesse de Parme, who knew that Mme. de Guermantes had an infinite contempt for her cousin. “But she’s a very good woman, isn’t she?” The Duke assumed an air of profound astonishment. “Why, Basin, don’t you see the Princess is making fun of you?” (The Princess had never dreamed of doing such a thing.) “She knows as well as you do that Gallardonette is an old poison,” went on Mme. de Guermantes, whose vocabulary, limited as a rule to all these old expressions, was as savoury as those dishes which it is possible to come across in the delicious books of Pampille, but which have in real life become so rare, dishes where the jellies, the butter, the gravy, the quails are all genuine, permit of no alloy, where even the salt is brought specially from the salt-marshes of Brittany; from her accent, her choice of words, one felt that the basis of the Duchess’s conversation came directly from Guermantes. In this way the Duchess differed profoundly from her nephew Saint-Loup, the prey of so many new ideas and expressions; it is difficult, when one’s mind is troubled by 267the ideas of Kant and the longings of Baudelaire, to write the exquisite French of Henri IV, which meant that the very purity of the Duchess’s language was a sign of limitation, and that, in her, both her intelligence and her sensibility had remained proof against all innovation. Here again, Mme. de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was exactly the content of my own thoughts) and by everything which, by virtue of that exclusion, it had been able to preserve, that seductive vigour of the supple bodies which no exhausting necessity to think, no moral anxiety or nervous trouble has deformed. Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the procession of the girls of the little band along the seashore. Mme. de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and held in subjection by her natural courtesy, by the respect due to another person’s intellectual worth, all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, albeit she had remained a pillar of virtue, might equally well have been, a good few years ago now, the most brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan. Only she was incapable of realising what I had sought for in her, the charm of her historic name, and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes. Were our relations founded upon a misunderstanding which could not fail to become manifest as soon as my homage, instead of being addressed to the relatively superior woman that she believed herself to be, should be diverted to some other woman of equal mediocrity and breathing the same unconscious 268charm? A misunderstanding so entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer like myself and a woman of the world, one however that profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the