And as we are near the people whom we picture to ourselves, as we can picture people reading their newspaper, Gilberte preferred the papers to style her Mlle. de Forcheville. It is true that with the writings for which she herself was responsible, her letters, she prolonged the transition for some time by signing herself ‘G. S. Forcheville.’ The real hypocrisy in this signature was made manifest by the suppression not so much of the other letters of the word ‘Swann’ as of those of the word ‘Gilberte.’ In fact, by reducing the innocent Christian name to a simple ‘G,’ Mlle. de Forcheville seemed to insinuate to her friends that the similar amputation applied to the name ‘Swann’ was due merely to the necessity of abbreviation. Indeed she gave a special importance to the ‘S,’ and gave it a sort of long tail which ran across the ‘G,’ but which one felt to be transitory and destined to disappear like the tail which, still long in the monkey, has ceased to exist in man.
Notwithstanding this, in her snobbishness, there remained the intelligent curiosity of Swann. I remember that, during this same afternoon, she asked Mme. de Guermantes whether she could meet M. du Lau, and that when the Duchess replied that he was an invalid and never went out, Gilberte asked what sort of man he was, for, she added with a faint blush, she had heard a great deal about him. (The Marquis du Lau had indeed been one of Swann’s most intimate friends before the latter’s marriage, and Gilberte may perhaps herself have seen him, but at a time when she was not interested in such people.) “Would M. de Bréauté or the Prince d’Agrigente be at all like him?” she asked. “Oh! not in the least,” exclaimed Mme. de Guermantes, who had a keen sense of these provincial differences and drew portraits that were sober, but coloured by her harsh, golden voice, beneath the gentle blossoming of her violet eyes. “No, not in the least. Du Lau was the gentleman from the Périgord, charming, with all the good manners and the absence of ceremony of his province. At Guermantes, when we had the King of England, with whom du Lau was on the friendliest terms, we used to have a little meal after the men came in from shooting… It was the hour when du Lau was in the habit of going to his room to take off his boots and put on big woollen slippers.
Very well, the presence of King Edward and all the Grand Dukes did not disturb him in the least, he came down to the great hall at Guermantes in his woollen slippers, he felt that he was the Marquis du Lau d’Ollemans who had no reason to put himself out for the King of England. He and that charming Quasimodo de Breteuil, they were the two that I liked best. They were, for that matter, great friends of…” (she was about to say “your father” and stopped short). “No, there is no resemblance at all, either to Gri-gri, or to Bréauté. He was the genuine nobleman from the Périgord. For that matter, Même quotes a page from Saint-Simon about a Marquis d’Ollemans, it is just like him.” I repeated the opening words of the portrait: “M. d’Ollemans who was a man of great distinction among the nobility of the Périgord, from his own birth and from his merit, and was regarded by every soul alive there as a general arbiter to whom each had recourse because of his probity, his capacity and the suavity of his manners, as it were the cock of his province.” “Yes, he’s like that,” said Mme. de Guermantes, “all the more so as du Lau was always as red as a cock.” “Yes, I remember hearing that description quoted,” said Gilberte, without adding that it had been quoted by her father, who was, as we know, a great admirer of Saint-Simon.
She liked also to speak of the Prince d’Agrigente and of M. de Bréauté, for another reason. The Prince d’Agrigente was prince by inheritance from the House of Aragon, but his Lordship was Poitevin. As for his country house, the house that is to say in which he lived, it was not the property of his own family, but had come to him from his mother’s former husband, and was situated almost halfway between Martinville and Guermantes. And so Gilberte spoke of him and of M. de Bréauté as of neighbours in the country who reminded her of her old home. Strictly speaking there was an element of falsehood in this attitude, since it was only in Paris, through the Comtesse Molé, that she had come to know M. de Bréauté, albeit he had been an old friend of her father. As for her pleasure in speaking of the country round Tansonville, it may have been sincere. Snobbishness is, with certain people, analogous to those pleasant beverages with which they mix nutritious substances. Gilberte took an interest in some lady of fashion because she possessed priceless books and portraits by Nattier which my former friend would probably not have taken the trouble to inspect in the National Library or at the Louvre, and I imagine that notwithstanding the even greater proximity, the magnetic influence of Tansonville would have had less effect in drawing Gilberte towards Mme. Sazerat or Mme. Goupil than towards M. d’Agrigente.
“Oh! poor Babal and poor Gri-gri,” said Mme. de Guermantes, “they are in a far worse state than du Lau, I’m afraid they haven’t long to live, either of them.”
When M. de Guermantes had finished reading my article, he paid me compliments which however he took care to qualify. He regretted the slightly hackneyed form of a style in which there were ‘emphasis, metaphors as in the antiquated prose of Chateaubriand’; on the other hand he congratulated me without reserve upon my ‘occupying myself: “I like a man to do something with his ten fingers. I do not like the useless creatures who are always self-important or agitators. A fatuous breed!”
Gilberte, who was acquiring with extreme rapidity the ways of the world of fashion, announced how proud she would be to say that she was the friend of an author. “You can imagine that I shall tell people that I have the pleasure, the honour of your acquaintance.”
“You wouldn’t care to come with us, to-morrow, to the Opéra-Comique?” the Duchess asked me; and I thought that it would be doubtless in that same box in which I had first beheld her, and which had seemed to me then as inaccessible as the submarine realm of the Nereids. But I replied in a melancholy tone: “No, I am not going to the theatre just now; I have lost a friend to whom I was greatly attached.” The tears almost came to my eyes as I said this, and yet, for the first time, I felt a sort of pleasure in speaking of my bereavement. It was from this moment that I began to write to all my friends that I had just experienced great sorrow, and to cease to feel it.
When Gilberte had gone, Mme. de Guermantes said to me: “You did not understand my signals, I was trying to hint to you not to mention Swann.” And, as I apologised: “But I quite understand. I was on the point of mentioning him myself, I stopped short just in time, it was terrible, fortunately I bridled my tongue. You know, it is a great bore,” she said to her husband, seeking to mitigate my own error by appearing to believe that I had yielded to a propensity common to everyone, and difficult to resist. “What do you expect me to do,” replied the Duke. “You have only to tell them to take those drawings upstairs again, since they make you think about Swann. If you don’t think about Swann, you won’t speak about him.”
On the following day I received two congratulatory letters which surprised me greatly, one from Mme. Goupil whom I had not seen for many years and to whom, even at Combray, I had not spoken more than twice. A public library had given her the chance of seeing the Figaro. Thus, when anything occurs in our life which makes some stir, messages come to us from people situated so far outside the zone of our acquaintance, our memory of whom is already so remote that these people seem to be placed at a great distance, especially in the dimension of depth. A forgotten friendship of our school days, which has had a score of opportunities of recalling itself to our mind, gives us a sign of life, not that there are not negative results also. For example, Bloch, from whom I would have been so glad to learn what he thought of my article, did
