In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [153]
And if Swann asked her what she meant by that, she would answer with a touch of contempt: “Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy, at your age, having to be told what the smart places are! Well, on Sunday mornings there’s the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and round the lake at five o’clock, and on Thursdays, the Eden Théâtre, and the Races on Fridays; then there are the balls …”
“What balls?”
“Why, silly, the balls people give in Paris; the smart ones, I mean. For instance, Herbinger, you know who I mean, the fellow who’s in one of the jobbers’ offices. Yes, of course you must know him, he’s one of the best-known men in Paris, that great big fair-haired boy who’s such a toff—always has a flower in his buttonhole, a parting at the back, light-coloured overcoats. He goes about with that old frump, takes her to all the first-nights. Well, he gave a ball the other night, and all the smart people in Paris were there. I should have loved to go! But you had to show your invitation at the door, and I couldn’t get one anywhere. Still, I’m just as glad, now, that I didn’t go; I should have been killed in the crush, and seen nothing. It’s really just to be able to say you’ve been to Herbinger’s ball. You know what a braggart I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the people who tell you they were there are lying … But I’m surprised you weren’t there, a regular ‘swell’ like you.”
Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashionable life; feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous and trivial, he saw no point in imparting it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except as a means of obtaining tickets for the paddock at race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre. She hoped that he would continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances, but in other respects she was inclined to regard them as anything but smart, ever since she had passed the Marquise de Villeparisis in the street, wearing a black woollen dress and a bonnet with strings.
“But she looks like an usherette, like an old concierge, darling! A marquise, her! Goodness knows I’m not a marquise, but you’d have to pay me a lot of money before you’d get me to go round Paris rigged out like that!”
Nor could she understand Swann’s continuing to live in his house on the Quai d’Orleans, which, though she dared not tell him so, she considered unworthy of him.
It was true that she claimed to be fond of “antiques,” and used to assume a rapturous and knowing air when she confessed how she loved to spend the whole day “rummaging” in curio shops, hunting for “bric-à-brac” and “period” things. Although it was a point of honour to which she obstinately clung, as though obeying some old family precept, that she should never answer questions or “account for” how she spent her days, she spoke to Swann once about a friend to whose house she had been invited, and had found that everything in it was “of the period.” Swann could not get her to tell him what the period was. But after thinking the matter over she replied that it was “mediaeval”; by which she meant that the walls were panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and added, in the hesitant tone and with the knowing air one adopts in referring to a person one has met at dinner the night before and of whom one had never heard until then, but whom one’s hosts seemed to regard as someone so celebrated and important that one hopes that one’s listener will know who is meant and be duly impressed: “Her dining-room … is … eighteenth century!” She herself had thought it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She mentioned it again, a third time, when she showed Swann a card with the name and address