In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [211]
And she coquettishly enhanced the charm of the smile which that supposition had brought to her lips, by giving to her blue eyes, which were fixed on the General, a gentle, dreamy expression.
“My dear Princess, you know that they’d be simply wild with joy.”
“No, why?” she inquired with the utmost vivacity, either to give the impression of being unaware that it would be because she was one of the first ladies in France, or in order to have the pleasure of hearing the General tell her so. “Why? How can you tell? Perhaps they might find it extremely disagreeable. I don’t know, but if they’re anything like me, I find it quite boring enough to see the people I do know, and I’m sure if I had to see people I didn’t know as well, even if they had ‘fought like heroes,’ I should go stark mad. Besides, except when it’s an old friend like you, whom one knows quite apart from that, I’m not sure that heroism takes one very far in society. It’s often quite boring enough to have to give a dinner-party, but if one had to offer one’s arm to Spartacus to go into dinner … Really, no, it would never be Vercingetorix I should send for to make a fourteenth. I feel sure I should keep him for grand receptions. And as I never give any …”
“Ah! Princess, it’s easy to see you’re not a Guermantes for nothing. You have your share of it, all right, the wit of the Guermantes!”
“But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes in the plural. I never could make out why. Do you really know any others who have it?” she rallied him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features concentrated, yoked to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such observations—even if the Princess had to make them herself—as were in praise of her wit or of her beauty. “Look, there’s Swann talking to your Cambremer; over there, beside old mother Saint-Euverte, don’t you see him? Ask him to introduce you. But hurry up, he seems to be just going!”
“Did you notice how dreadfully ill he’s looking?” asked the General.
“My precious Charles? Ah, he’s coming at last. I was beginning to think he didn’t want to see me!”
Swann was extremely fond of the Princesse des Laumes, and the sight of her reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, and all that country which he so dearly loved and had ceased to visit in order not to be separated from Odette. Slipping into the manner, half-artistic, half-amorous, with which he could always manage to amuse the Princess—a manner which came to him quite naturally whenever he dipped for a moment into the old social atmosphere—and wishing also to express in words, for his own satisfaction, the longing that he felt for the country:
“Ah!” he began in a declamatory tone, so as to be audible at once to Mme de Saint-Euverte, to whom he was speaking, and to Mme des Laumes, for whom he was speaking, “Behold our charming Princess! Look, she has come up on purpose from Guermantes to hear Saint Francis preach to the birds, and has only just had time, like a dear little titmouse, to go and pick a few little hips and haws and put them in her hair; there are even some drops of dew upon them still, a little of the hoar-frost which must be making the Duchess shiver. It’s very pretty indeed, my dear Princess.”
“What! The Princess came up on purpose from Guermantes? But that’s too wonderful! I never knew; I’m quite overcome,” Mme de Saint-Euverte protested with quaint simplicity, being but little accustomed to Swann’s form of wit. And then, examining the Princess’s headdress, “Why, you’re quite right; it is copied from … what shall I say, not chestnuts, no—oh, it’s a delightful idea, but how can the Princess have known what was going to be on my programme? The musicians didn’t tell me, even.”
Swann, who was accustomed, when he was with a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in terms of gallantry, to pay her delicate compliments which most society people were incapable of understanding,