“Oriane,” began the Princesse de Parme, “I had a visit the other day from your cousin Heudicourt; of course she’s a highly intelligent woman; she’s a Guermantes, one can say no more, but they tell me she has a spiteful tongue.” The Duke fastened on his wife a slow gaze of deliberate stupefaction. Mme. de Guermantes began to smile. Gradually the Princess became aware of their pantomime. “But … do you mean to say … you don’t agree with me?” she stammered with growing uneasiness. “Really, Ma’am, it’s too good of you to pay any attention to Basin’s faces. Now, Basin, you’re not to hint nasty things about our cousins.” “He thinks her too wicked?” inquired the Princess briskly. “Oh, dear me, no!” replied the Duchess. “I don’t know who told your Highness that she was spiteful. On the contrary, she’s an excellent creature who never said any harm of anyone, or did any harm to any one.” “Ah!” sighed Mme. de Parme, greatly relieved. “I must say I never noticed anything myself. But I know it’s often difficult not to be a little spiteful when one is so full of wit….” “Ah! Now that is a quality of which she has even less.” “Less wit?” asked the stupefied Princess. “Come now, Oriane,” broke in the Duke in a plaintive tone, casting to right and left of him a glance of amusement, “you heard the Princess tell you that she was a superior woman.” “But isn’t she?” “Superior in chest measurement, at any rate.” “Don’t listen to him, Ma’am, he’s not sincere; she’s as stupid as a (h’m) goose,” came in a loud and 245rasping voice from Mme. de Guermantes, who, a great deal more “old French” even than the Duke when he was not trying, did often deliberately seek to be, but in a manner the opposite of the lace-neckcloth, deliquescent style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, by a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil. “But she’s the best woman in the world. Besides, I don’t really know that one can call it stupidity when it’s carried to such a point as that. I don’t believe I ever met anyone quite like her; she’s a case for a specialist, there’s something pathological about her, she’s a sort of ‘innocent’ or ‘cretin’ or an ‘arrested development’, like the people you see in melodramas, or in L’Arlésienne. I always ask myself, when she comes to see me, whether the moment may not have arrived at which her intelligence is going to dawn, which makes me a little nervous always.” The Princess was lost in admiration of these utterances but remained stupefied by the preceding verdict. “She repeated to me—and so did Mme. d’Epinay—what you said about ‘Teaser Augustus.’ It’s delicious,” she put in.
M. de Guermantes explained the joke to me. I wanted to tell him that his brother, who pretended not to know me, was expecting me that same evening at eleven o’clock. But I had not asked Robert whether I might mention this engagement, and as the fact that M. de Charlus had practically fixed it with me himself directly contradicted what he had told the Duchess I judged it more tactful to say nothing. “‘Teaser Augustus’ was not bad,” said M. de Guermantes, “but Mme. d’Heudicourt probably did not tell you a far better thing that Oriane said to her the other day in reply to an invitation to luncheon.” “No, 246indeed! Do tell me!” “Now Basin, you keep quiet; in the first place, it was a stupid remark, and it will make the Princess think me inferior even to my fool of a cousin. Though I don’t know why I should call her my cousin. She’s one of Basin’s cousins. Still, I believe she is related to me in some sort of way.” “Oh!” cried the Princesse de Parme, at the idea that she could possibly think Mme. de Guermantes stupid, and protesting helplessly that nothing could ever lower the Duchess from the place she held in her estimation. “Besides we have already subtracted from her the quality of wit; as what I said to her tends to deny her certain other good qualities also, it seems to me inopportune to repeat it.” “‘Deny her!’ ‘Inopportune!’ How well she expresses herself!” said the Duke with a pretence of irony, to win admiration for the Duchess. “Now, then, Basin, you’re not to make fun of your wife.” “I should explain to your Royal Highness,” went on the Duke, “that Oriane’s cousin may be superior, good, stout, anything you like to mention, but she is not exactly—what shall I say—lavish.” “No, I know, she’s terribly close-fisted,” broke in the Princess. “I should not have ventured to use the expression, but you have hit on exactly the right word. You can see it in her house-keeping, and especially in the cooking, which is excellent, but strictly rationed.” “Which leads to some quite amusing scenes,” M. de Bréauté interrupted him. “For instance, my dear Basin, I was down at Heudicourt one day when you were expected, Oriane and yourself. They had made the most elaborate preparations when, during the afternoon, a footman brought in a telegram to say that you weren’t coming.” “That doesn’t surprise me!” said the Duchess, who not only was difficult to 247secure, but liked people to know as much. “Your cousin read the telegram, was duly distressed, then immediately, without losing her head, telling herself that there was no point in going to unnecessary expense for so unimportant a gentleman as myself, called the footman back. ‘Tell the cook not to put on the chicken!’ she shouted after him. And that evening I heard her asking the butler: ‘Well? What about the beef that was left over yesterday? Aren’t you going to let us have that?’” “All the same, one must admit that the cheer you get there is of the very best,” said the Duke, who fancied that in using this language he shewed himself to belong to the old school. “I don’t know any house where one gets better food.” “Or less,” put in the Duchess. “It is quite wholesome and quite enough for what you would call a vulgar yokel like myself,” went on the Duke, “one keeps one’s appetite.” “Oh, if it’s to be taken as a cure, it’s certainly more hygienic than sumptuous. Not that it’s as good as all that,” added Mme. de Guermantes, who was not at all pleased that the title of “best table in Paris” should be awarded to any but her own. “With my cousin it’s just the same as with those costive authors who hatch out every fifteen years a one-act play or a sonnet. The sort of thing people call a little masterpiece, trifles that are perfect gems, in fact the one thing I loathe most in the world. The cooking at Zénaïde’s is not bad, but you would think it more ordinary if she was less parsimonious. There are some things her cook does quite well, and others that he spoils. I have had some thoroughly bad dinners there, as in most houses, only they’ve done me less harm there because the stomach is, after all, more sensitive to quantity than to quality.” “Well, to get on with the 248story,” the Duke concluded, “Zénaïde insisted that Oriane should go to luncheon there, and as my wife is not very fond of going out anywhere she resisted, wanted to be sure that under the pretence of a quiet meal she was not being trapped into some great banquet, and tried in vain to find out who else were to be of the party. ‘You must come,’ Zénaïde insisted, boasting of all the good things there would be to eat. ‘You are going to have a purée of chestnuts, I need say no more than that, and there will be seven little bouchées à la reine.’ ‘Seven little bouchées!’ cried Oriane, ‘that means that we shall be at least eight!’” There was silence for a few seconds, and then the Princess having seen the point let her laughter explode like a peal of thunder. “Ah! ‘Then we shall be eight,’—it’s exquisite. How very well phrased!” she said, having by a supreme effort recaptured the expression she had heard used by Mme. d’Epinay, which this time was more appropriate. “Oriane, that was very charming of the Princess, she said your remark was well phrased.” “But, my dear, you’re telling me nothing new. I know how clever the Princess is,” replied Mme. de Guermantes, who readily assimilated a remark when it was uttered at once by a Royal Personage and in praise of her own wit. “I am very proud that Ma’am should appreciate my humble phrasings. I don’t remember, though, that I ever did say such a thing, and if I did it must have been to flatter my cousin, for if she had ordered seven ‘mouthfuls’, the mouths, if I may so express myself, would have been a round dozen if not more.”
“She used to have all M. de Bornier’s manuscripts,” went on the Princess, still speaking of Mme. d’Heudicourt, and anxious to make the most of the excellent reasons 249she might have for associating with that lady. “She must have dreamed it, I don’t believe she ever even knew him,” said the Duchess. “What is really interesting about him is that he kept up a correspondence with people of different nationalities at the same time,” put
