Commended by the judges in whom one had entire confidence, profiting by the admiration that was aroused by Pelléas, they had acquired a fresh lustre, and even the people who had not heard them again were so anxious to admire them that they did so in spite of themselves, albeit preserving the illusion of free will. But Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin spent part of the year in the country. Even in Paris, being an invalid, she was largely confined to her own room. It is true that the drawbacks of this mode of existence were noticeable chiefly in her choice of expressions which she supposed to be fashionable and which would have been more appropriate to the written language, a distinction that she did not perceive, for she derived them more from reading than from conversation.
The latter is not so necessary for an exact knowledge of current opinion as of the latest expressions. Unfortunately this revival of the Nocturnes had not yet been announced by the critics. The news of it had been transmitted only by word of mouth among the ‘younger’ people. It remained unknown to Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin. I gave myself the pleasure of informing her, but by addressing my remark to her mother-in-law, as when at billiards in order to hit a ball one aims at the cushion, that Chopin, so far from being out of date, was Debussy’s favourite composer. “Indeed, that’s quaint,” said the daughter-in-law with a subtle smile as though it had been merely a deliberate paradox on the part of the composer of Pelléas. Nevertheless it was now quite certain that in future she would always listen to Chopin with respect and even pleasure. Moreover my words which had sounded the hour of deliverance for the dowager produced on her face an expression of gratitude to myself and above all of joy.
Her eyes shone like the eyes of Latude in the play entitled Latude, or Thirty-five Years in Captivity, and her bosom inhaled the sea air with that dilatation which Beethoven has so well described in Fidelio, at the point where his prisoners at last breathe again ‘this life-giving air.’ As for the dowager, I thought that she was going to press her hirsute lips to my cheek. “What, you like Chopin? He likes Chopin, he likes Chopin,” she cried with a nasal trumpet-tone of passion; she might have been saying: “What, you know Mme. de Franquetot too?”
with this difference, that my relations with Mme. de Franquetot would have left her completely indifferent, whereas my knowledge of Chopin plunged her in a sort of artistic delirium. Her salivary super-secretion no longer sufficed. Not having attempted even to understand the part played by Debussy in the rediscovery of Chopin, she felt only that my judgment of him was favourable. Her musical enthusiasm overpowered her.
“Elodie! Elodie! He likes Chopin!” her bosom rose and she beat the air with her arms. “Ah! I knew at once that you were a musician,” she cried. “I can quite understand an artist such as you are liking him. He’s so lovely!” And her voice was as pebbly as if, to express her ardour for Chopin, she had copied Demosthenes and filled her mouth with all the shingle on the beach. Then came the turn of the tide, reaching as far as her veil which she had not time to lift out of harm’s way and which was flooded; and lastly the Marquise wiped away with her embroidered handkerchief the tidemark of foam in which the memory of Chopin had steeped her moustaches.
“Good heavens,” Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin remarked to me, “I’m afraid my mother-in-law’s cutting it rather fine, she’s forgotten that we’ve got my Uncle de Ch’nouville dining. Besides, Cancan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” The word ‘Cancan’ was beyond me, and I supposed that she might perhaps be referring to a dog. But as for the Ch’nouville relatives, the explanation was as follows. With the lapse of time the young Marquise had outgrown the pleasure that she had once found in pronouncing their name in this manner. And yet it was the prospect of enjoying that pleasure that had decided her choice of a husband.
In other social circles, when one referred to the Chenouville family, the custom was (whenever, that is to say, the particle was preceded by a word ending in a vowel sound, for otherwise you were obliged to lay stress upon the de, the tongue refusing to utter Madam’ d’Ch’nonceaux) that it was the mute e of the particle that was sacrificed. One said: “Monsieur d’Chenouville.” The Cambremer tradition was different, but no less imperious. It was the mute e of Chenouville that was suppressed. Whether the name was preceded by mon cousin or by ma cousine, it was always de Ch’nouville and never de Chenouville. (Of the father of these Chenouvilles, one said ‘our Uncle’ for they were not sufficiently ‘smart set’ at Féterne to pronounce the word ‘Unk’ like the Guermantes, whose deliberate jargon, suppressing consonants and naturalising foreign words, was as difficult to understand as Old French or a modern dialect.)
Every newcomer into the family circle at once received, in the matter of the Ch’nouvilles, a lesson which Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin had not required. When, paying a call one day, she had heard a girl say: “My Aunt d’Uzai,” “My Unk de Rouan,” she had not at first recognised the illustrious names which she was in the habit of pronouncing: Uzès, and Rolîan, she had felt the astonishment, embarrassment and shame of a person who sees before him on the table a recently invented implement of which he does not know the proper use and with which he dares not begin to eat.
But during that night and the next day she had rapturously repeated: “My Aunt Uzai,” with that suppression of the final s, a suppression that had stupefied her the day before, but which it now seemed to her so vulgar not to know that, one of her friends having spoken to her of a bust of the Duchesse d’Uzès, Mlle. Legrandin had answered her crossly, and in an arrogant tone: “You might at least pronounce her name properly: Mme. d’Uzai.”
From that moment she had realised that, by virtue of the transmutation of solid bodies into more and more subtle elements, the considerable and so honourably acquired fortune that she had inherited from her father, the finished education that she had received, her regular attendance at the Sorbonne, whether at Caro’s lectures or at Brunetiere’s, and at the Lamoureux concerts, all this was to be rendered volatile, to find its utmost sublimation in the pleasure of being able one day to say:
“My Aunt d’Uzai.”
This did not exclude the thought that she would continue to associate, in the earlier days, at least, of her married life, not indeed with certain women friends whom she liked and had resigned herself to sacrificing, but with certain others whom she did not like and to whom she looked forward to being able to say (since that, after all, was why she was marrying): “I must introduce you to my Aunt d’Uzai,” and, when she saw that such an alliance was beyond her reach, “I must introduce you to my Aunt de Ch’nouville,” and “I shall ask you to dine to meet the Uzai.” Her marriage to M. de Cambremer had procured for Mlle. Legrandin the opportunity to use the former of these phrases but not the latter, the circle in which her parents-in-law moved not being that which she had supposed and of which she continued to dream.
After saying to me of Saint-Loup (adopting for the occasion one of his expressions, for if in talking to her I used those expressions of Legrandin, she by a reverse suggestion answered me in Robert’s dialect which she did not know to be borrowed from Rachel), bringing her thumb and forefinger together and half-shutting her eyes as though she were gazing at something infinitely delicate which she had succeeded in capturing: “He has a charming quality of mind,” she began to extol him with such warmth that one might have supposed that she was in love with him (it had indeed been alleged that, some time back, when he was at Don-cières, Robert had been her lover), in reality simply that I might repeat her words to him, and ended up with: “You are a great friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes.
I am an invalid, I never go anywhere, and I know that she sticks to a close circle of chosen friends, which I do think so wise of her, and so I know her very slightly, but I know she is a really remarkable woman.” Aware that Mme. de Carnbremer barely knew her, and anxious to reduce myself to her level, I avoided the subject and answered the Marquise that the person whom I did know well was her brother, M. Legrandin. At the sound of his name she assumed the same evasive air as myself over the name of Mme. de Guermantes, but combined with it an expression of annoyance, for she supposed that I had said this with the object of humiliating not myself but her.
Was she gnawed by despair at having been born a Legrandin? So at least her husband’s sisters
