In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [210]
“You think not, eh! She’s a regular little peach, though,” said the General, whose eyes never strayed from Mme de Cambremer. “Don’t you agree with me, Princess?”
“She thrusts herself forward too much. I think, in so young a woman, that’s not very nice—for I don’t suppose she’s my generation,” replied Mme des Laumes (this expression being common, it appeared, to Gallardon and Guermantes). And then, seeing that M. de Froberville was still gazing at Mme de Cambremer, she added, half out of malice towards the latter, half out of amiability towards the General: “Not very nice … for her husband! I’m sorry I don’t know her, since you’ve set your heart on her—I might have introduced you to her,” said the Princess, who, if she had known the young woman, would probably have done nothing of the sort. “And now I must say good night, because one of my friends is having a birthday party, and I must go and wish her many happy returns,” she explained in a tone of modest sincerity, reducing the fashionable gathering to which she was going to the simple proportions of a ceremony which would be boring in the extreme but which it was obligatory and touching to attend. “Besides, I must pick up Basin who while I’ve been here has gone to see those friends of his—you know them too I believe—who are called after a bridge—oh, yes, the Iénas.”
“It was a victory before it was a bridge, Princess,” said the General. “I mean to say, to an old soldier like me,” he went on, wiping his monocle and replacing it, as though he were laying a fresh dressing on the raw wound beneath, while the Princess instinctively looked away, “that Empire nobility, well of course it’s not the same thing, but, after all, taking it for what it is, it’s very fine of its kind—they were people who really did fight like heroes.”
“But I have the deepest respect for heroes,” the Princess assented with a faint trace of irony. “If I don’t go with Basin to see this Princess d’Iéna, it isn’t at all because of that, it’s simply because I don’t know them. Basin knows them, and is deeply attached to them. Oh, no, it’s not what you think, it’s not a flirtation. I’ve no reason to object. Besides, what good has it ever done when I have objected,” she added in a melancholy voice, for the whole world knew that, ever since the day when the Prince des Laumes had married his ravishing cousin, he had been consistently unfaithful to her. “Anyhow, it isn’t that at all. They’re people he has known for a long time, he takes advantage of them, and that suits me down to the ground. In any case, what he’s told me about their house is quite enough. Can you imagine it, all their furniture is ‘Empire’!”
“But, my dear Princess, that’s only natural; it belonged to their grandparents.”
“I don’t say it didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less ugly. I quite understand that people can’t always have nice things, but at least they needn’t have things that are merely grotesque. I’m sorry, but I can think of nothing more pretentious and bourgeois than that hideous style—cabinets with swans’ heads, like baths!”
“But I believe, all the same, that they’ve got some fine things; why, they must have that famous mosaic table on which the Treaty of …”
“Oh, I don’t deny they may have things that are interesting enough from the historic point of view. But things like that can’t ever be beautiful … because they’re simply horrible! I’ve got things like that myself, that came to Basin from the Montesquious. Only, they’re up in the attics at Guermantes, where nobody ever sees them. But in any case that’s not the point, I would rush round to see them with Basin, I’d even go to see them among all their sphinxes and brasses if I knew them, but—I don’t know them! D’you know, I was always taught when I was a little girl that it wasn’t polite to call on people one didn’t know.” She assumed a tone of childish gravity. “And so I’m just doing what I was taught to do. Can’t you see those good people, with a totally strange