Mme. de Villeparisis gave vent to a confused growl, from which emerged: “I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the night before last. Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me about it, and was quite amusing, I must say.”
“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,” said Mme. de Guermantes who, in view of her close friendship with M. de Bréauté-Consalvi, felt that she must advertise their intimacy by the use of this abbreviation. “I mean M. Bergotte.”
I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty; in fact, I thought of him always as mingling with the intellectual section of humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that mysterious realm of which I had caught a glimpse through the purple hangings of a theatre box, behind which, making the Duchess smile, M. de Bréauté was holding with her, in the language of the gods, that unimaginable thing, a conversation between people 288of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I was stupefied to see the balance upset, and Bergotte rise above M. de Bréauté. But above all I was dismayed to think that I had avoided Bergotte on the evening of Phèdre, that I had not gone up and spoken to him, when I heard Mme. de Guermantes say to Mme. de Villeparisis:
“He is the only person I have any wish to know,” went on the Duchess, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness. “It would be such a pleasure.”
The presence of Bergotte by my side, which it would have been so easy for me to secure but which I had thought liable to give Mme. de Guermantes a bad impression of myself, would no doubt, on the contrary, have had the result that she would have signalled to me to join her in her box, and would have invited me to bring the eminent writer, one day, to luncheon.
“I gather that he didn’t behave very well, he was presented to M. de Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” said Mme. de Guermantes, dwelling on this odd characteristic as she might have recounted that a Chinaman had blown his nose on a sheet of paper. “He never once said ‘Monseigneur’ to him,” she added, with an air of amusement at this detail, as important to her mind as the refusal of a Protestant, during an audience with the Pope, to go on his knees before his Holiness.
Interested by these idiosyncrasies of Bergotte, she did not, however, appear to consider them reprehensible, and seemed rather to find a certain merit in them, though she would have been put to it to say of what sort. Despite this unusual mode of appreciating Bergotte’s originality, 289it was a fact which I was later on not to regard as wholly negligible that Mme. de Guermantes, greatly to the surprise of many of her friends, did consider Bergotte more witty than M. de Bréauté. Thus it is that such judgments, subversive, isolated, and yet after all just, are delivered in the world of fashion by those rare minds that are superior to the rest. And they sketch then the first rough outlines of the hierarchy of values as the next generation will establish it, instead of abiding eternally by the old standards.
The Comte d’Argencourt, Chargé d’Affaires at the Belgian Legation and a remote connexion of Mme. de Villeparisis, came limping in, followed presently by two young men, the Baron de Guermantes and H. H. the Duc de Châtellerault, whom Mme. de Guermantes greeted with: “How d’ye do, young Châtellerault,” in a careless tone and without moving from her tuffet, for she was a great friend of the young Duke’s mother, which had given him a deep and lifelong respect for her. Tall, slender, with golden hair and sunny complexions, thoroughly of the Guermantes type, these, two young men looked like a condensation of the light of the spring evening which was flooding the spacious room. Following a custom which was the fashion at that time they laid their silk hats on the floor, by their feet. The historian of the Fronde thought that they were embarrassed, like a peasant coming into the mayor’s office and not knowing what to do with his hat. Feeling that he ought in charity to come to the rescue of the awkwardness and timidity which he ascribed to them:
“No, no,” he said, “don’t leave them on the floor, they’ll be trodden on.”
290A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing azure which froze the well-meaning historian.
“What is that person’s name?” I was asked by the Baron, who had just been introduced to me by Mme. de Villeparisis.
“M. Pierre,” I whispered.
“Pierre what?”
“Pierre: it’s his name, he’s a historian, a most distinguished man.”
“Really? You don’t say so.”
“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme. de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves his in the hall. I tell him when I see him come in that he looks just like a clockmaker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”
“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Molé’s hat; we shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme. de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one but myself overheard him.
“She really is astonishing, the little Duchess,” said M. d’Argencourt, pointing to Mme. de Guermantes who was talking to G——. “Whenever there’s a famous man in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t always be M. de Borelli, of course, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel. But then it’s bound to be M. 291Pierre Loti or M. Edmond Rostand. Yesterday evening at the Doudeauvilles’, where by the way she was looking splendid in her emerald tiara and a pink dress with a long train, she had M. Deschanel on one side and the German Ambassador on the other: she was holding forth to them about China; the general public, at a respectful distance where they couldn’t hear what was being said, were wondering whether there wasn’t going to be war. Really, you’d have said she was a Queen, holding her circle.”
Everyone had gathered round Mme. de Villeparisis to watch her painting.
“Those flowers are a truly celestial pink,” said Legrandin, “I should say sky-pink. For there is such a thing as sky-pink just as there is sky-blue. But,” he lowered his voice in the hope that he would not be heard by anyone but the Marquise, “I think I shall still give my vote to the silky, living flesh tint of your rendering of them. You leave Pisanello and Van Huysun a long way behind, with their laborious, dead herbals.”
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.
“What makes you think that is that they painted the flowers of their period, which we don’t have now, but they did it with great skill.”
“Ah! The flowers of their period! That is a most ingenious theory,” exclaimed Legrandin.
“I see you’re painting some fine cherry blossoms—or are they mayflowers?” began the historian of the Fronde, not without hesitation as to the flower, but with a note of confidence in his voice, for he was beginning to forget 292the incident of the hats.
“No; they’re apple blossom,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, addressing her aunt.
“Ah! I see you’re a good countrywoman like me; you can tell one flower from another.”
“Why yes, so they are! But I thought the season for apple blossom was over now,” said the historian, seeking wildly to cover his mistake.
“Oh dear, no; far from it, it’s not out yet; the trees won’t be in blossom for another fortnight, not for three weeks perhaps,” said the librarian who, since he helped with the management of Mme. de Villeparisis’s estates, was better informed upon country matters.
“At least three weeks,” put in the Duchess; “even round Paris, where they’re very far forward. Down in Normandy, don’t you know, at his father’s place,” she went on, pointing to the young Duc de Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple trees close to the seashore, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until after the twentieth of May.”
“I never see them,” said the young Duke, “because they give me hay fever. Such a bore.”
“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.
“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the librarian informed him.
“That all depends, you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good year for apples. You know Le Normand’s saying: ‘When it’s a good year for apples …’,” put in M. d’Argencourt who,
