Gilberte recognised the drawings. “One would say Elstir,” she suggested. “Why, yes,” replied the Duchess without thinking, “it was, as a matter of fact, your fa… some friends of ours who made us buy them. They are admirable. To my mind, they are superior to his paintings.” I who had not heard this conversation went closer to the drawings to examine them. “Why, this is the Elstir that…” I saw Mme. de Guermantes’s signals of despair. “Ah, yes! The Elstir that I admired upstairs. It shews far better here than in that passage. Talking of Elstir, I mentioned him yesterday in an article in the Figaro. Did you happen to read it?” “You have written an article in the Figaro?” exclaimed M. de Guermantes with the same violence as if he had exclaimed: “Why, she is my cousin.” “Yes, yesterday.” “In the Figaro, you are certain? That is a great surprise. For we each of us get our Figaro, and if one of us had missed it, the other would certainly have noticed it. That is so, ain’t it, Oriane, there was nothing in the paper.” The Duke sent for the Figaro and accepted the facts, as though, previously, the probability had been that I had made a mistake as to the newspaper for which I had written. “What’s that, I don’t understand, do you mean to say, you have written an article in the Figaro,” said the Duchess, making an effort in order to speak of a matter which did not interest her. “Come, Basin, you can read it afterwards.” “No, the Duke looks so nice like that with his big beard sweeping over the paper,” said Gilberte.
“I shall read it as soon as I am at home.” “Yes, he wears a beard now that everybody is clean-shaven,” said the Duchess, “he never does anything like other people. When we were first married, he shaved not only his beard but his moustaches as well. The peasants who didn’t know him by sight thought that he couldn’t be French. He was called at that time the Prince des Laumes.” “Is there still a Prince des Laumes?” asked Gilberte, who was interested in everything that concerned the people who had refused to bow to her during all those years. “Why, no!” the Duchess replied with a melancholy, caressing gaze. “Such a charming title! One of the finest titles in France!” said Gilberte, a certain sort of banality emerging inevitably, as a clock strikes the hour, from the lips of certain quite intelligent persons. “Yes, indeed, I regret it too. Basin would have liked his sister’s—son to take it, but it is not the same thing; after all it is possible, since it is not necessarily the eldest son, the title may pass to a younger brother. I was telling you that in those days Basin was clean-shaven; one day, at a pilgrimage—you remember, my dear,” she turned to her husband, “that pilgrimage at Paray-le-Monial—my brother-in-law Charlus who always enjoys talking to peasants, was saying to one after another: ‘Where do you come from?’ and as he is extremely generous, he would give them something, take them off to have a drink. For nobody was ever at the same time simpler and more haughty than Même. You’ll see him refuse to bow to a Duchess whom he doesn’t think duchessy enough, and shower compliments upon a kennel-man.
And so, I said to Basin: ‘Come, Basin, say something to them too.’ My husband, who is not always very inventive—“ “Thank you, Oriane,” said the Duke, without interrupting his reading of my article in which he was immersed—“approached one of the peasants and repeated his brother’s question in so many words: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘I am from Les Laumes.’ ‘You are from Les Laumes. Why, I am your Prince.’ Then the peasant looked at Basin’s smooth face and replied: “S not true. You’re an English.’” [Translator’s footnote: Mme. de Guermantes forgets that she has already told this story at the expense of the Prince de Léon. See The Captive, p. 403.] One saw thus in these anecdotes told by the Duchess those great and eminent titles, such as that of the Prince des Laumes, rise to their true position, in their original state and their local colour, as in certain Books of Hours one sees, amid the mob of the period, the soaring steeple of Bourges.
Some cards were brought to her which a footman had just left at the door. “I can’t think what has come over her, I don’t know her. It is to you that I am indebted for this, Basin. Not that they have done you any good, all these people, my poor dear,” and, turning to Gilberte:
“I really don’t know how to explain to you who she is, you certainly have never heard of her, she calls herself Lady Rufus Israel.”
Gilberte flushed crimson: “I do not know her,” she said (which was all the more untrue in that Lady Israel and Swann had been reconciled two years before the latter’s death and she addressed Gilberte by her Christian name), “but I know quite well, from hearing about her, who it is that you mean.” The truth is that Gilberte had become a great snob. For instance, another girl having one day, whether in malice or from a natural want of tact, asked her what was the name of her real—not her adoptive—father, in her confusion, and as though to mitigate the crudity of what she had to say, instead of pronouncing the name as ‘Souann’ she said ‘Svann,’ a change, as she soon realised, for the worse, since it made this name of English origin a German patronymic. And she had even gone on to say, abasing herself so as to rise higher: “All sorts of stories have been told about my birth, but of course I know nothing about that.”
Ashamed as Gilberte must have felt at certain moments when she thought of her parents (for even Mme. Swann represented to her and was a good mother) of such an attitude towards life, we must, alas, bear in mind that its elements were borrowed doubtless from her parents, for we do not create the whole of our own personality.
But with a certain quantity of egoism which exists in the mother, a different egoism, inherent in the father’s family, is combined, which does not invariably mean that it is added, nor even precisely that it serves as a multiple, but rather that it creates a fresh egoism infinitely stronger and more redoubtable. And, in the period that has elapsed since the world began, during which families in which some defect exists in one form have been intermarrying with families in which the same defect exists in another, thereby creating a peculiarly complex and detestable variety of that defect in the offspring, the accumulated egoisms (to confine ourselves, for the moment, to this defect) would have acquired such force that the whole human race would have been destroyed, did not the malady itself bring forth, with the power to reduce it to its true dimensions, natural restrictions analogous to those which prevent the infinite proliferation of the infusoria from destroying our planet, the unisexual fertilisation of plants from bringing about the extinction of the vegetable kingdom, and so forth. From time to time a virtue combines with this egoism to produce a new and disinterested force.
The combinations by which, in the course of generations, moral chemistry thus stabilises and renders inoffensive the elements that were becoming too formidable, are infinite and would give an exciting variety to family history. Moreover with these accumulated egoisms such as must have been embodied in Gilberte there coexists some charming virtue of the parents; it appears for a moment to perform an interlude by itself, to play its touching part with an entire sincerity.
No doubt Gilberte did not always go so far as when she insinuated that she was perhaps the natural daughter of some great personage, but as a rule she concealed her origin. Perhaps it was simply too painful for her to confess it and she preferred that people should learn of it from others. Perhaps she really believed that she was hiding it, with that uncertain belief which at the same time is not doubt, which reserves a possibility for what we would like to think true, of which Musset furnishes an example when he speaks of Hope in God. “I do not know her personally,” Gilberte went on. Had she after all, when she called herself Mlle. de Forcheville, a hope that people would not know that she was Swann’s daughter? Some people, perhaps, who, she hoped, would in time become everybody.
She could not be under any illusion as to their number at the moment, and knew doubtless that many people must be murmuring: “Isn’t that Swann’s daughter?” But she knew it only with that information which tells us of people taking their lives in desperation while we are going to a ball, that is
