“Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me with a knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my own which he had inadvertently taken. “You shewed me a somewhat laboured little thing in which you went in for a good deal of hair-splitting. I gave you my opinion quite frankly; what you had written was literally not worth the trouble of putting it on paper. Are you thinking of letting us have anything else? You were greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re not to say anything against Bergotte,” put in the Duchess. “I don’t dispute his talent as a painter; no one would, Duchess. He understands all about etching, if not brush-work on a large scale like 304M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to me that in these days we have a tendency to confuse the arts, and forget that the novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing your father on Sunday at our good friend A. J.’s,” he went on, turning again to myself.
I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme. de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme. Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that admirable Bunch of Radishes which I remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece that is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I should have named this Bunch of Radishes. “A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it is merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece’, what have you got to say about Hébert’s Virgin or Dagnan-Bouveret?”
“I heard you refusing to let him bring Robert’s woman,” said Mme. de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much, she’s a perfect horror, as you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.”
“Do you mean to say, you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.
305“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before the whole of Paris, not that that’s anything for me to be proud of,” explained Mme. de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless, since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she herself had had the first fruits of her foolishness. “Hallo, I suppose I ought to be going now,” she added, without moving.
She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a call together, like a newly married couple, rather than to the often strained relations that existed between her and the enormous fellow she had married, who, despite his increasing years, still led the life of a gay bachelor. Ranging over the considerable party that was gathered round the tea-table the genial, cynical gaze—dazzled a little by the brightness of the setting sun—of the little round pupils lodged in the exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the excellent marksman that he was could always hit with such perfect aim and precision, the Duke came forward with a bewildered cautious slowness as though, alarmed by so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile—suggesting a “Good King of Yvetot”—slightly pompous, a half-open hand floating like a shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be vaguely clasped by his old friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled him, without his having to make a single movement, or to interrupt his genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the assiduity of them all by simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear friend; charmed, Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt;” and, 306on coming to myself, who was the most highly favoured, when he had been told my name: “How do, my young neighbour, how’s your father? What a splendid fellow he is!” He made no great demonstration except to Mme. de Villeparisis, who gave him good-day with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her little apron.
Being formidably rich in a world where everyone was steadily growing poorer, and having secured the permanent attachment to his person of the idea of this enormous fortune, he displayed all the vanity of the great nobleman reinforced by that of the man of means, the refinement and breeding of the former just managing to control the latter’s self-sufficiency. One could understand, moreover, that his success with women, which made his wife so unhappy, was not due merely to his name and fortune, for he was still extremely good looking, and his profile retained the purity, the firmness of outline of a Greek god’s.
“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?” M. d’Argencourt asked the Duchess.
“Well, don’t you see, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies in her hand, and more lilies on her dwess.” Mme. de Guermantes shared her aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an exceedingly rustic fashion, but never rolled her ‘r’s like Mme. de Villeparisis.
Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had taken Bloch into the little recess where they could talk more freely, I went up to the old diplomat for a moment and put in a word about my father’s Academic chair. He tried first of all to postpone the conversation to another day. I pointed out that I was going to Balbec. “What? Going again to Balbec? Why, you’re a regular 307globe-trotter.” He listened to what I had to say. At the name of Leroy-Beaulieu, he looked at me suspiciously. I conjectured that he had perhaps said something disparaging to M. Leroy-Beaulieu about my father and was afraid of the economist’s having repeated it to him. All at once he seemed animated by a positive affection for my father. And after one of those opening hesitations out of which suddenly a word explodes as though in spite of the speaker, whose irresistible conviction prevails over his half-hearted efforts at silence: “No, no,” he said to me with emotion, “your father must not stand. In his own interest he must not; it is not fair to himself; he owes a certain respect to his own really great merits, which would be compromised by such an adventure. He is too big a man for that. If he should be elected, he will have everything to lose and nothing to gain. He is not an orator, thank heaven. And that is the one thing that counts with my dear colleagues, even if you only talk platitudes. Your father has an important goal in life; he should march straight ahead towards it, and not allow himself to turn aside to beat bushes, even the bushes (more thorny for that matter than flowery) of the grove of Academe. Besides, he would not get many votes. The Academy likes to keep a postulant waiting for some time before taking him to its bosom. For the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I don’t say. But he must wait until the Society itself comes in quest of him. It makes a practice, not a very fortunate practice, a fetish rather, of the farà da sè of our friends across the Alps. Leroy-Beaulieu spoke to me about all this in a way I did not at all like. I pointed out to him, a little sharply perhaps, that a man accustomed as he is to dealing with colonial imports and 308metals could not be expected to understand the part played by the imponderables, as Bismarck used to say. But, whatever happens, your father must on no account put himself forward as a candidate. Principis obsta. His friends would find themselves placed in a delicate position if he suddenly called upon them for their votes. Indeed,” he broke forth, with an air of candour, fixing his blue eyes on my face, “I am going to say a thing that you will be surprised to hear coming from me, who am so fond of your father. Well, simply because I am fond of him (we are known as the inseparables—Arcades ambo), simply because I know the immense service that he can still render to his country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I should not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to understand that I should not.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members the type
