or as though the Duc de Guastalla’s sallies were recurring to her mind as she spoke. “Anyway, as he never goes anywhere, he can’t have much field for his snobbishness,” she wound up, forgetting that this was hardly encouraging the Princesse de Parme to make overtures. “I cannot help wondering what the Prince de Guermantes, who calls her Mme. Iéna, will say if he hears that I’ve been to see her.” “What!” cried the Duchess with extraordinary vivacity. “Don’t you know that it was we who gave up to Gilbert” (she bitterly regretted that surrender now) “a complete card-room done in the Empire style which came to us from Quiou-Quiou, and is an absolute marvel! There was no room for it here, though I think it would look better here than it does with him. It’s a thing of sheer beauty, half Etruscan, half Egyptian….” “Egyptian?” queried the Princess, to whom the word Etruscan conveyed little. “Well, really, you know, a little of both. Swann told us that, he explained it all to me, only you know I’m such a dunce. But then, Ma’am, what one has to bear in mind is that the Egypt of the Empire cabinetmakers has nothing to do with the historical Egypt, nor their Roman with the Romans nor their Etruria….” “Indeed,” said the Princess. “No, it’s like what they used to call a Louis XV costume under the Second Empire, when Anna de Monchy and dear Brigode’s mother were girls. Basin was talking to you just now about Beethoven. We heard a thing of his played the other day which was really quite good, though a little stiff, with a Russian theme in it. It’s pathetic to think that he believed it to be Russian. In the same way as the Chinese painters believed they were copying Bellini. Besides, even in the same country, whenever anybody begins to look at things in a way that is slightly novel, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are totally incapable of seeing what he puts before them. It takes at least forty years before they can manage to make it out.” “Forty years!” the Princess cried in alarm. “Why, yes,” went on the Duchess, adding more and more to her words (which were practically my own, for I had just been expressing a similar idea to her), thanks to her way of pronouncing them, the equivalent of what on the printed page is called italics: “it’s like a sort of first isolated individual of a species which does not yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an individual endowed with a kind of sense which the human race of his generation does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance because I, on the contrary, have always loved any interesting production from the very start, however novel it might be. But really, the other day I was with the Grand Duchess in the Louvre and we happened to pass before Manet’s Olympia. Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many spears I’ve had to break for that picture, which I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody.” “And is the Grand Duchess well?” inquired the Princesse de Parme, to whom the Tsar’s aunt was infinitely more familiar than Manet’s model. “Yes; we talked about you. After all,” she resumed, clinging to her idea, “the fact of the matter is, as my brother-in-law Palamède always says, that one has between oneself and the rest of the world the barrier of a strange language. Though I admit that there’s no one it’s quite so true of as Gilbert. If it amuses you to go to the Iénas’, you have far too much sense to let your actions be governed by what that poor fellow may think, who is a dear, innocent creature, but really lives in a different world. I feel myself nearer, more akin to my coachman, my horses even, than to a man who keeps on harking back to what people would have thought under Philip the Bold or Louis the Fat. Just fancy, when he goes for a walk in the country, he takes a stick to drive the peasants out of his way, quite in a friendly spirit, saying: ‘Get on, clowns!’ Really, I’m just as much surprised when he speaks to me as if I heard myself addressed by one of the ‘recumbents’ on the old gothic tombs. It’s all very well that animated gravestone’s being my cousin; he frightens me, and the only idea that comes into my head is to let him stay in his Middle Ages. Apart from that, I quite admit that he’s never assassinated anyone.” “I’ve just been seeing him at dinner at Mme. de Villeparisis’s,” said the General, but without either smiling at or endorsing the Duchess’s pleasantries. “Was M. de Norpois there?” asked Prince Von, whose mind still ran on the Academy of Moral Sciences. “Why, yes;” said the General. “In fact, he was talking about your Emperor.” “It seems, the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he does not care for Elstir’s painting. Not that I’m saying this against him,” said the Duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s a remarkable piece of work. He is interesting while one’s sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman It’s after the style of the Regents of the Hospital, by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow my nephew’s favourite expression,” the Duchess turned to myself, gently flapping her fan of black feathers. More than erect on her chair, she flung her head nobly backwards, for, while always a great lady, she was a trifle inclined to play the great lady also. I said that I had been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that to avoid confusing my mind, as my time was limited, I had left out Haarlem. “Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!” cried M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s Street in Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a tone of sufficiency, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen. “If it’s to be seen, I saw it!” “What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haarlem!” cried the Duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of an hour to spend in the place, they’re an extraordinary thing to have seen, those Halses. I don’t mind saying that a person who only caught a passing glimpse of them from the top of a tramway-car without stopping, supposing they were hung out to view in the street, would open his eyes pretty wide.” This utterance shocked me as indicating a misconception of the way in which artistic impressions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to imply that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine which takes instantaneous photographs.
M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me with so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me, gazed at the illustrious bearing of his wife, listened to what she was saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She rides rough-shod over everything! Our young friend can go home and say that he’s had before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere to-day.” Thus I beheld the pair of them, withdrawn from that name Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women, lingering, only, behind their contemporaries a little way, and that not evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg, where the wife has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband the misfortune to come down to the pinchbeck age of history, she remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-Philippe. That Mme. de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction and with all these good wines to help, almost a miracle. A Don John of Austria, an Isabella d’Esté, situated for us in the world of names, have as little communication with the great pages of history as the Méséglise way had with the Guermantes. Isabella d’Esté was no doubt in reality a very minor Princess, similar to those who under Louis XIV obtained no special place at Court. But seeming to us to be of a unique and therefore incomparable essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less in greatness, so that a supper-party with Louis XIV would appear to us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este we should find ourselves, were we to meet her, gazing with our own eyes on a supernatural heroine of romance. Well, after we have, in studying Isabella d’Esté, in transplanting her patiently from this world of fairyland into that of history, established the fact that her life, her thought contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness which had been suggested to us by her name, once this disappointment is complete we