346“Listen,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to the Duchesse de Guermantes, “I’m expecting a woman at any moment whom you don’t wish to know. I thought I’ld better warn you, to avoid any unpleasantness. But you needn’t be afraid, I shall never have her here again, only I was obliged to let her come to-day. It’s Swann’s wife.”
Mme. Swann, seeing the dimensions that the Dreyfus case had begun to assume, and fearing that her husband’s racial origin might be used against herself, had besought him never again to allude to the prisoner’s innocence. When he was not present she went farther and used to profess the most ardent Nationalism; in doing which she was only following the example of Mme. Verdurin, in whom a middle-class anti-semitism, latent hitherto, had awakened and grown to a positive fury. Mme. Swann had won by this attitude the privilege of membership in several of the women’s leagues that were beginning to be formed in anti-semitic society, and had succeeded in making friends with various members of the aristocracy. It may seem strange that, so far from following their example, the Duchesse de Guermantes, so close a friend of Swann, had on the contrary always resisted his desire, which he had not concealed from her, to introduce to her his wife. But we shall see in due course that this arose from the peculiar nature of the Duchess, who held that she was not “bound to” do things, and laid down with despotic force what had been decided by her social “free will”, which was extremely arbitrary.
“Thank you for telling me,” said the Duchess. “It would indeed be most unpleasant. But as I know her by sight I shall be able to get away in time.”
“I assure you, Oriane, she is really quite nice; an 347excellent woman,” said Mme. de Marsantes.
“I have no doubt she is, but I feel no need to assure myself of it.”
“Have you been invited to Lady Israels’s?” Mme de Villeparisis asked the Duchess, to change the conversation.
“Why, thank heaven, I don’t know the woman,” replied Mme. de Guermantes. “You must ask Marie-Aynard. She knows her. I never could make out why.”
“I did indeed know her at one time,” said Mme. de Marsantes. “I confess my faults. But I have decided not to know her any more. It seems she’s one of the very worst of them, and makes no attempt to conceal it. Besides, we have all been too trusting, too hospitable. I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we had old friends, country cousins, people of our own flesh and blood on whom we shut our doors, we threw them open to Jews. And now we see what thanks we get from them. But I’ve no right to speak; I have an adorable son, and, like a young fool, he says and does all the maddest things you can imagine,” she went on, having caught some allusion by M. d’Argencourt to Robert. “But, talking of Robert, haven’t you seen him?” she asked Mme. de Villeparisis; “being Saturday, I thought he’ld be coming to Paris on leave, and in that case he would be sure to pay you a visit.”
As a matter of fact Mme. de Marsantes thought that her son would not obtain leave that week; but knowing that, even if he did, he would never dream of coming to see Mme. de Villeparisis, she hoped, by making herself appear to have expected to find him in the room, to procure his forgiveness from her susceptible aunt for all the visits that he had failed to pay her.
348“Robert here! But I have never had a single word from him; I don’t think I’ve seen him since Balbec.”
“He is so busy; he has so much to do,” pleaded Mme. de Marsantes.
A faint smile made Mme. de Guermantes’s eyelashes quiver as she studied the circle which, with the point of her sunshade, she was tracing on the carpet. Whenever the Duke had been too openly unfaithful to his wife, Mme. de Marsantes had always taken up the cudgels against her own brother on her sister-in-law’s behalf. The latter had a grateful and bitter memory of this protection, and was not herself seriously shocked by Robert’s pranks. At this point the door opened again and Robert himself entered the room.
“Well, talk of the Saint!” said Mme. de Guermantes.
Mme. de Marsantes, who had her back to the door, had not seen her son come in. When she did catch sight of him, her motherly bosom was convulsed with joy, as by the beating of a wing, her body half rose from her seat, her face quivered and she fastened on Robert eyes big with astonishment:
“What! You’ve come! How delightful! What a surprise!”
“Ah! Talk of the Saint!—I see,” cried the Belgian diplomat, with a shout of laughter.
“Delicious, ain’t it?” came tartly from the Duchess, who hated puns, and had ventured on this one only with a pretence of making fun of herself.
“Good afternoon, Robert,” she said, “I believe he’s forgotten his aunt.”
They talked for a moment, probably about myself, for as Saint-Loup was leaving her to join his mother 349Mme. de Guermantes turned to me:
“Good afternoon; how are you?” was her greeting.
She allowed to rain on me the light of her azure gaze, hesitated for a moment, unfolded and stretched towards me the stem of her arm, leaned forward her body which sprang rapidly backwards like a bush that has been pulled down to the ground and, on being released, returns to its natural position. Thus she acted under the fire of Saint-Loup’s eyes, which kept her under observation and were making frantic efforts to obtain some further concession still from his aunt. Fearing that our conversation might fail altogether, he joined in, to stimulate it, and answered for me:
“He’s not very well just now, he gets rather tired; I think he would be a great deal better, by the way, if he saw you more often, for I can’t help telling you that he admires you immensely.”
“Oh, but that’s very nice of him,” said Mme. de Guermantes in a deliberately casual tone, as if I had brought her her cloak. “I am most flattered.”
“Look, I must go and talk to my mother for a minute; take my chair,” said Saint-Loup, thus forcing me to sit down next to his aunt.
We are both silent.
“I see you sometimes in the morning,” she said, as though she were telling me something that I did not know, and I for my part had never seen her. “It’s so good for one, a walk.”
“Oriane,” began Mme. de Marsantes in a low tone, “you said you were going on to Mme. de Saint-Ferréol’s; would you be so very kind as to tell her not to expect me to dinner, I shall stay at home now that I’ve got 350Robert. And one other thing, but I hardly like to ask you, if you would leave word as you pass to tell them to send out at once for a box of the cigars Robert likes. ‘Corona’, they’re called. I’ve none in the house.”
Robert came up to us; he had caught only the name of Mme. de Saint-Ferréol.
“Who in the world is Mme. de Saint-Ferréol?” he inquired, in a surprised but decisive tone, for he affected a studied ignorance of everything to do with society.
“But, my dear boy, you know quite well,” said his mother, “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she gave you that nice billiard table you liked so much.”
“What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea of that. Really, my family are amazing,” he went on, turning so as to include me in the conversation and adopting unconsciously Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed his ideas, “they know the most unheard-of people, people called Saint-Ferréol” (emphasising the final consonant of each word) “and names like that; they go to balls, they drive in victorias, they lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”
Mme. de Guermantes made in her throat a slight, short, sharp sound, as of an involuntary laugh which one chokes back, meaning thereby to shew that she paid just as much tribute as the laws of kinship imposed on her to her nephew’s wit. A servant came in to say that the Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen had sent word to M. de Norpois that he was waiting.
“Bring him in, sir,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to the old Ambassador, who started in quest of the German Minister.
“Stop, sir; do you think I ought to shew him the 351miniature of the Empress Charlotte?”
“Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the Ambassador in a tone of conviction, and as though he were envying the fortunate Minister the favour that was in store for him.
“Oh, I know he’s very sound,” said Mme. de Marsantes, “and that is so rare among foreigners. But I’ve found out all about him. He is anti-semitism personified.”
The Prince’s name preserved in the boldness with which its opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the impulse, the mannered simplicity, the heavy delicacies of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “heim” of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which
