And, to embellish this consecrated utterance with the ritual gesture, he made as though he could not resist the desire to pinch Brichot’s leg. “He never changes, the rascal,” Ski went on, and without stopping to think of the effect, at once tragic and comic, that the don’s semi-blindness gave to his words: “Always a sharp look-out for the ladies.” “You see,” said M. de Cambremer, “what it is to meet with a scholar. Here have I been shooting for fifteen years in the forest of Chantepie, and I’ve never even thought of what the name meant.” Mme. de Cambremer cast a stern glance at her husband; she did not like him to humble himself thus before Brichot.
She was even more annoyed when, at every ‘ready-made’ expression that Cancan employed, Cottard, who knew the ins and outs of them all, having himself laboriously acquired them, pointed out to the Marquis, who admitted his stupidity, that they meant nothing. “Why ‘stupid as a cabbage?’ Do you suppose cabbages are stupider than anything else? You say:’repeat the same thing thirty-six times.’ Why thirty-six? Why do you say:’sleep like a top?’ Why ‘Thunder of Brest?’
Why ‘play four hundred tricks?’” But at this, the defence of M. de Cambremer was taken up by Brichot who explained the origin of each of these expressions. But Mme. de Cambremer was occupied principally in examining the changes that the Verdurins had introduced at la Raspelière, in order that she might be able to criticise some, and import others, or possibly the same ones, to Féterne. “I keep wondering what that lustre is that’s hanging all crooked. I can hardly recognise my old Raspelière,” she went on, with a familiarly aristocratic air, as she might have spoken of an old servant meaning not so much to indicate his age as to say that she had seen him in his cradle.
And, as she was a trifle bookish in her speech: “All the same,” she added in an undertone, “I can’t help feeling that if I were inhabiting another person’s house, I should feel some compunction about altering everything like this.” “It is a pity you didn’t come with them,” said Mme. Verdurin to M. de Charlus and Morel, hoping that M. de Charlus was now ‘enrolled’ and would submit to the rule that they must all arrive by the same train. “You are sure that Chantepie means the singing magpie, Chochotte?” she went on, to shew that, like the great hostess that she was, she could join in every conversation at the same time.
“Tell me something about this violinist,” Mme. de Cambremer said to me, “he interests me; I adore music, and it seems to me that I have heard of him before, complete my education.” She had heard that Morel had come with M. de Charlus and hoped, by getting the former to come to her house, to make friends with the latter. She added, however, so that I might not guess her reason for asking, “M. Brichot, too, interests me.”
For, even if she was highly cultivated, just as certain persons inclined to obesity eat hardly anything, and take exercise all day long without ceasing to grow visibly fatter, so Mme. de Cambremer might in vain master, and especially at Féterne, a philosophy that became ever more esoteric, music that became ever more subtle, she emerged from these studies only to weave plots that would enable her to cut the middle-class friends of her girlhood and to form the connexions which she had originally supposed to be part of the social life of her ‘in laws,’ and had then discovered to be far more exalted and remote.
A philosopher who was not modern enough for her, Leibnitz, has said that the way is long from the intellect to the heart. This way Mme. de Cambremer had been no more capable than her brother of traversing. Abandoning the study of John Stuart Mill only for that of Lachelier, the less she believed in the reality of the external world, the more desperately she sought to establish herself, before she died, in a good position in it. In her passion for realism in art, no object seemed to her humble enough to serve as a model to painter or writer.
A fashionable picture or novel would have made her feel sick;
Tolstoi’s mujiks, or Millet’s peasants, were the extreme social boundary beyond which she did not allow the artist to pass. But to cross the boundary that limited her own social relations, to raise herself to an intimate acquaintance with Duchesses, this was the goal of all her efforts, so ineffective had the spiritual treatment to which she subjected herself, by the study of great masterpieces, proved in overcoming the congenital and morbid snobbishness that had developed in her.
This snobbishness had even succeeded in curing certain tendencies to avarice and adultery to which in her younger days she had been inclined, just as certain peculiar and permanent pathological conditions seem to render those who are subject to them immune to other maladies. I could not, all the same, refrain, as I listened to her, from giving her credit, without deriving any pleasure from them, for the refinement of her expressions. They were those that are used, at a given date, by all the people of the same intellectual breadth, so that the refined expression provides us at once, like the arc of a circle, with the means to describe and limit the entire circumference. And so the effect of these expressions is that the people who employ them bore me immediately, because I feel that I already know them, but are generally regarded as superior persons, and have often been offered me as delightful and unappreciated companions.
“You cannot fail to be aware, Madame, that many forest regions take their name from the animals that inhabit them. Next to the forest of Chantepie, you have the wood Chantereine.” “I don’t know who the queen may be, but you are not very polite to her,” said M. de Cambremer. “One for you, Chochotte,” said Mme. de Verdurin. “And apart from that, did you have a pleasant journey?” “We encountered only vague human beings who thronged the train.
But I must answer M. de Cambremer’s question; reine, in this instance, is not the wife of a king, but a frog. It is the name that the frog has long retained in this district, as is shewn by the station, Renneville, which ought to be spelt Reineville.” “I say, that seems a fine animal,” said M. de Cambremer to Mme. Verdurin, pointing to a fish. (It was one of the compliments by means of which he considered that he paid his scot at a dinner-party, and gave an immediate return of hospitality. “There is no need to invite them,” he would often say, in speaking of one or other couple of their friends to his wife. “They were delighted to have us.
It was they that thanked me for coming.”) “I must tell you, all the same, that I have been going every day for years to Renneville, and I have never seen any more frogs there than anywhere else. Madame de Cambremer brought the curé here from a parish where she owns a considerable property, who has very much the same turn of mind as yourself, it seems to me. He has written a book.” “I know, I have read it with immense interest,” Brichot replied hypocritically.
The satisfaction that his pride received indirectly from this answer made M. de Cambremer laugh long and loud. “Ah! well, the author of, what shall I say, this geography, this glossary, dwells at great length upon the name of a little place of which we were formerly, if I may say so, the Lords, and which is called Pont-a-Couleuvre. Of course I am only an ignorant rustic compared with such a fountain of learning, but I have been to Pont-à-Couleuvre a thousand times if he’s been there once, and devil take me if I ever saw one of his beastly serpents there, I say beastly, in spite of the tribute the worthy La Fontaine pays them.” (The Man and the Serpent was one of his two fables.) “You have not seen any, and you have been quite right,” replied Brichot.
“Undoubtedly, the writer you mention knows his subject through and through, he has written a remarkable book.” “There!” exclaimed Mme. de Cambremer, “that book, there’s no other word for it, is a regular Benedictine opus.” “No doubt he has consulted various polyptychs (by which we mean the lists of benefices and cures of each diocese), which may have furnished him with the names of lay patrons and ecclesiastical collators. But there are other sources. One of the most learned of my friends has delved into them. He found that the place in question was named Pont-a-Quileuvre. This odd name encouraged him to carry his researches farther, to a Latin text in which the bridge that your friend supposes to be infested with serpents is styled Pons cui aperit: A closed bridge that was opened only upon due payment.”
“You were speaking of frogs. I, when I find myself among such learned folk, feel like the frog before the areopagus,” (this being his other fable) said Cancan who often indulged, with a hearty laugh, in this pleasantry thanks to which he imagined himself to be making, at one and the same time, out of humility and with aptness, a profession of ignorance and a display of learning. As for Cottard, blocked upon one side by M. de
