At last I realised that a huge, extremely tall and strong man with snow-white hair, whom I met everywhere but whose name I never knew, was the husband of Mme de Sainte-Euverte and had died the year before. As to the niece, I never discovered whether she lay extended on the sofa listening to the music without moving for anyone because of some stomach trouble or because of her nerves or phlebitis or a coming accouchement or a recent one which had gone wrong. The likely explanation was that she thought she might as well play the part of a Récamier figure on her couch in that shimmering red dress. She little knew that she had: given birth to a new development of that name of Sainte-Euverte which, at so many intervals, marked the distance and continuity of Time. It was Time she was rocking in that cradle where the name of Sainte-Euverte flowered in a fuchsia-red silk in the Empire style. Mme de Guer-mantes declared that she had always detested Empire style; that meant, she detested it now, which was true, because she followed the fashions though not closely. Without complicating the matter by alluding to David of whose work she knew something, when she was a girl she considered Ingres the most boring of draughtsmen, then suddenly the most beguiling of new masters, so much so that she detested Delacroix. By what process she had returned to this creed of reprobation matters little, since such shades of taste are reflected by art-critics ten years before these superior women talk about them.
After criticising the Empire style, she excused herself for talking about such insignificant people as the Sainte-Euvertes and of rubbish like Bréauté’s provincialism for she was as far from realising the interest they had for me as Mme de Sainte-Euverte de la Rochefoucauld looking after her stomach or her Ingres pose, was from suspecting that her name was my joy, her husband’s name, not the far more famous one of her family, and that to me it represented the function of cradling time in that room full of temporal associations. “How can all this nonsense interest you?” the Duchesse remarked. She uttered these words under her breath and nobody could have caught what she said. But a young man (who was to be of interest to me later because of a name much more familiar to me formerly than Sainte-Euverte) rose with an exaggerated air of being disturbed and went further away to listen in greater seclusion. They were playing the Kreutzer Sonata but he, having read the programme wrong, believed it was a piece by Ravel which he had been told was as beautiful as Palestrina but difficult to understand. In his abrupt change of place, he knocked, owing to the half darkness, against a tea-table which made a number of people turn their heads and thus afforded them an agreeable diversion from the suffering they were undergoing in listening religiously to the Kreutzer Sonata.
And Mme de Guermantes and I who were the cause of this little scene, hastened into another room. “Yes,” she continued, “how can such nonsense interest a man with your talent? Like just now when I saw you talking to Gilberte de Saint-Loup, it isn’t worthy of you. For me that woman is just nothing, she isn’t even a woman; she’s unimaginably pretentious and bourgeoise,” for the Duchesse mixed up her aristocratic prejudices with her championship of truth. “Indeed, ought you to come to places like this? To-day, after all, it may be worth while because of Rachel’s recitation. But, well as she did it, she doesn’t extend herself before such an audience. You must come and lunch alone with her and then you’ll see what a wonderful creature she is. She’s a hundred times superior to everyone here. And after luncheon she shall recite Verlaine to you and you’ll tell me what you think of it.” She boasted to me specially about these luncheon parties to which X and Y always came. For she had acquired the characteristic that distinguishes the type of woman who has a “Salon” whom she formerly despised (though she denied it to-day), the chief sign of whose superior eclecticism is to have “all the men” at their houses. If I told her that a certain great lady who went in for a “salon” spoke ill of Mme Rowland, the Duchesse burst out laughing at my simplicity and said: “Of course, she had ‘all the men’ at her house and the other tried to take them away from her.” Mme de Guermantes continued: “It passes my comprehension that you can come to this sort of thing—unless it’s for studying character,” she added the last words doubtfully and suspiciously, afraid to go too far because she was not sure what that strange operation consisted of.
“Don’t you think,” I asked her, “it’s painful for Mme de Saint-Loup to have to listen, as she did just now, to her husband’s former mistress?” I observed that oblique expression coming over Mme de Guermantes’ face which connects what someone has said with unpleasant factors. These may remain unspoken but words with serious implications do not always receive verbal or written answers. Only fools solicit twice an answer to a foolish letter which was a gaffe; for such letters are only answered by acts and the correspondent whom the fool thinks careless, will call him Monsieur the next time he meets him instead of by his first name. My allusion to Saint-Loup’s liaison with Rachel was not so serious and could not have displeased Mme de Guermantes more than a second by reminding her that I had been Robert’s friend, perhaps his confidant about the mortification he had been caused when he obtained the Duchesse’s permission to let Rachel appear at her evening party. Mme de Guermantes’ face did not remain clouded and she answered my question about Mme Saint-Loup: “I may tell you that I believe it to be a matter of indifference to her, for Gilberte never loved her husband. She is a horrible little creature. All she wanted was the position, the name, to be my niece, to get out of the slime to which her one idea now is to return.
I can assure you all that pained me deeply for poor Robert’s sake because though he may not have been an eagle, he saw it all and a good many things besides. Perhaps I ought not to say so because, after all, she’s my niece and I’ve no proof that she was unfaithful to him, but there were all sorts of stories about her. But supposing I tell you that I know Robert wanted to fight a duel with an officer of Méséglise. And it was on account of all that that Robert joined up. The war was a deliverance from his family troubles and if you care for my opinion, he was not killed, he took care to get himself killed. She feels no sort of sorrow, she even astonishes me by the cynicism with which she displays her indifference, and that greatly pains me because I was very fond of Robert. It may perhaps surprise you because people don’t know me, but I still think of him. I forget no one. He told me nothing but he knew I guessed it all. But, dear me, if she loved her husband ever so little, could she bear with such complete indifference being in the same drawing-room with a woman whose passionate lover he was for years, indeed one might say always, for I know for certain it went on even during the war. Why, she would spring at her throat,” the Duchesse cried, quite forgetting that she herself had acted cruelly by inviting Rachel and staging the scene she regarded as inevitable if Gilberte loved Robert. “No!” she concluded, “that woman is a pig.” Such an expression was possible in the mouth of Mme de Guermantes owing to her easy and gradual descent from the Guermantes environment to the society of actresses and with this she affected an eighteenth century manner she considered refreshing on the part of one who could afford herself any liberty she chose.
But the expression was also inspired by her hatred of Gilberte, by the need of striking her in effigy in default of physically. And she thought she was thereby equally justifying her action towards Gilberte or rather against her, in society, in the family, even in connection with her interest in Robert’s inheritance. But sometimes facts of which we are ignorant and which we could not imagine supply an apparent justification of our judgments. Gilberte, who doubtless inherited some of her mother’s traits (and I dare say I had unconsciously surmised this when I asked her to introduce me to girls) after reflecting on my request and so that any profits that might accrue should not go out of the family, a conclusion the effrontery of which was greater than I could have imagined, came up to me presently and said: “If you’ll allow me, I’ll fetch my young daughter, she’s over there with young Mortemart and other youngsters of no importance. I’m sure she’ll be a charming little friend for you.” I asked her if Robert had been pleased to have a daughter. “Oh, he was very proud of her but, of course, it’s my belief, seeing what his tastes were,” Gilberte naïvely added, “he would have preferred a boy.” This girl, whose name and fortune doubtless led her
