“When you come to a relatively high altitude, such as this where we now are, do you find that the change increases your tendency to choking fits?” he asked me with the certainty of either arousing admiration or enlarging his own knowledge. M. de Cambremer heard the question and smiled. “I can’t tell you how amused I am to hear that you have choking fits,” he flung at me across the table. He did not mean that it made him happy, though as a matter of fact it did. For this worthy man could not hear any reference to another person’s sufferings without a feeling of satisfaction and a spasm of hilarity which speedily gave place to the instinctive pity of a kind heart. But his words had another meaning which was indicated more precisely by the clause that followed.
“It amuses me,” he explained, “because my sister has them too.” And indeed it did amuse him, as it would have amused him to hear me mention as one of my friends a person who was constantly coming to their house. “How small the world is,” was the reflexion which he formed mentally and which I saw written upon his smiling face when Cottard spoke to me of my choking fits. And these began to establish themselves, from the evening of this dinner-party, as a sort of interest in common, after which M. de Cambremer never failed to inquire, if only to hand on a report to his sister.
As I answered the questions with which his wife kept plying me about Morel, my thoughts returned to a conversation I had had with my mother that afternoon. Having, without any attempt to dissuade me from going to the Verdurins’ if there was a chance of my being amused there, suggested that it was a house of which my grandfather would not have approved, which would have made him exclaim: “On guard!” my mother had gone on to say: “Listen, Judge Toureuil and his wife told me they had been to luncheon with Mme. Bon-temps. They asked me no questions. But I seemed to gather from what was said that your marriage to Albertine would be the joy of her aunt’s life.
I think the real reason is that they are all extremely fond of you. At the same time the style in which they suppose that you would be able to keep her, the sort of friends they more or less know that we have, all that is not, I fancy, left out of account, although it may be a minor consideration. I should not have mentioned it to you myself, because I attach no importance to it, but as I imagine that people will mention it to you, I prefer to get a word in first.” “But you yourself, what do you think of her?” I asked my mother. “Well, it’s not I that am going to marry her. You might certainly do a thousand times better.
But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I cannot tell you what I think of Albertine; I don’t think of her. I shall say to you, like Madame de Sévigné: ‘She has good qualities, at least I suppose so. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. One thing she is not, she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say, she is something else.
And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy.’” But by these very words which left it to myself to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me in that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phèdre and, what was more, to take to writing, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Perhaps the best thing would be to wait a little longer, to begin by regarding Albertine as in the past, so as to find out whether I really loved her. I might take her, as a distraction, to see the Verdurins, and this thought reminded me that I had come there myself that evening only to learn whether Mme. Putbus was staying there or was expected. In any case, she was not dining with them. “Speaking of your friend Saint-Loup,” said Mme. de Cambremer, using an expression which shewed a closer sequence in her ideas than her remarks might have led one to suppose, for if she spoke to me about music she was thinking about the Guermantes; “you know that everybody is talking about his marriage to the niece of the Princesse de Guermantes.
I may tell you that, so far as I am concerned, all that society gossip leaves me cold.” I was seized by a fear that I might have spoken unfeelingly to Robert about the girl in question, a girl full of sham originality, whose mind was as mediocre as her actions were violent. Hardly ever do we hear anything that does ‘not make us regret something that we have said. I replied to Mme. de Cambremer, truthfully as it happened, that I knew nothing about it, and that anyhow I thought that the girl was still too young to be engaged.
“That is perhaps why it is not yet official, anyhow there is a lot of talk about it.” “I ought to warn you,” Mme. Verdurin observed dryly to Mme. de Cambremer, having heard her talking to me about Morel and supposing, when Mme. de Cambremer lowered her voice to speak of Saint-Loup’s engagement, that Morel was still under discussion. “You needn’t expect any light music here. In matters of art, you know, the faithful who come to my Wednesdays, my children as I call them, are all fearfully advanced,” she added with an air of proud terror.
“I say to them sometimes: My dear people, you move too fast for your Mistress, not that she has ever been said to be afraid of anything daring. Every year it goes a little farther; I can see the day coming when they will have no more use for Wagner or Indy.” “But it is splendid to be advanced, one can never be advanced enough,” said Mme. de Cambremer, scrutinising as she spoke every corner of the dining-room, trying to identify the things that her mother-in-law had left there, those that Mme. Verdurin had brought with her, and to convict the latter red-handed of want of taste. At the same time, she tried to get me to talk of the subject that interested her most, M. de Charlus. She thought it touching that he should be looking after a violinist. “He seems intelligent.” “Why, his mind is extremely active for a man of his age,” said I. “Age?
But he doesn’t seem at all old, look, the hair is still young.” (For, during the last three or four years, the word hair had been used with the article by one of those unknown persons who launch the literary fashions, and everybody at the same radius from the centre as Mme. de Cambremer would say ‘the hair,’ not without an affected smile. At the present day, people still say ‘the hair’ but, from an excessive use of the article, the pronoun will be born again.) “What interests me most about M. de Charlus,” she went on, “is that one can feel that he has the gift. I may tell you that I attach little importance to knowledge. Things that can be learned do not interest me.” This speech was not incompatible with Mme. de Cambremer’s own distinction which was, in the fullest sense, imitated and acquired.
But it so happened that one of the things which one had to know at that moment was that knowledge is nothing, and is not worth a straw when compared with originality. Mme. de Cambremer had learned, with everything else, that one ought not to learn anything. “That is why,” she explained to me, “Brichot, who has an interesting side to him, for I am not one to despise a certain spicy erudition, interests me far less.”
But Brichot, at that moment, was occupied with one thing only; hearing people talk about music, he trembled lest the subject should remind Mme. Verdurin of the death of Dechambre. He decided to say something that would avert that harrowing memory. M. de Cambremer provided him with an opportunity with the question: “You mean to say that wooded places always take their names from animals?” “Not at all,” replied Brichot, proud to display his learning before so many strangers, among whom, I had told him, he would be certain to interest one at least. “We have only to consider how often, even in the names of people, a tree is preserved, like a fern in a piece of
