In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [106]
“You, ignorant!” cried Mme Bontemps. “Then I wonder what you’d say of the official world, all those wives of Excellencies who can talk of nothing but their frocks . . . Just imagine, not more than a week ago I happened to mention Lohengrin to the Education Minister’s wife. She stared at me and said ‘Lohengrin? Oh, yes, the new review at the Folies-Bergère. I hear it’s a perfect scream!’ Well, I ask you! When people say things like that it makes your blood boil. I could have hit her. Because I have a bit of a temper of my own. What do you say, Monsieur,” she added, turning to me, “was I not right?”
“But still,” said Mme Cottard, “it’s forgivable to be a little off the mark when you’re asked a thing like that point blank, without any warning. I know something about it, because Mme Verdurin also has a habit of putting a pistol to your head.”
“Speaking of Mme Verdurin,” Mme Bontemps asked Mme Cottard, “do you know who will be there on Wednesday? Oh, I’ve just remembered that we’ve accepted an invitation for next Wednesday. You wouldn’t care to dine with us on Wednesday week? We could go on together to Mme Verdurin’s. I should never dare to go there by myself. I don’t know why it is, that great lady always terrifies me.”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” replied Mme Cottard, “that frightens you about Mme Verdurin: it’s her voice. But you see everyone can’t have such a charming voice as Mme Swann. Once you’ve found your tongue, as the Mistress says, the ice will soon be broken. For she’s a very easy person, really, to get on with. But I can quite understand what you feel; it’s never pleasant to find oneself for the first time in strange surroundings.”
“Won’t you dine with us, too?” said Mme Bontemps to Mme Swann. “After dinner we could all go to the Verdurins’ together, ‘do a Verdurin’; and even if it means that the Mistress will glare at me and never ask me to the house again, once we are there we’ll just sit by ourselves and have a quiet talk, I’m sure that’s what I should like best.” But this assertion can hardly have been quite truthful, for Mme Bontemps went on to ask: “Who do you think will be there on Wednesday week? What will be happening? There won’t be too big a crowd, I hope!”
“I certainly shan’t be there,” said Odette. “We’ll just put in a brief appearance on the last Wednesday of all. If you don’t mind waiting till then . . .” But Mme Bontemps did not appear to be tempted by the proposal.
Granted that the intellectual distinction of a salon and its elegance are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio, one must suppose, since Swann found Mme Bontemps agreeable, that any forfeiture of position once accepted has the consequence of making people less particular with regard to those among whom they have resigned themselves to move, less particular with regard to their intelligence as to everything else about them. And if this is true, men, like nations, must see their culture and even their language disappear with their independence. One of the effects of this indulgence is to aggravate the tendency people have after a certain age to derive pleasure from words that are a homage to their own turn of mind, to their weaknesses, and an encouragement to them to yield to them; that is the age at which a great artist prefers to the company of original minds that of pupils who have nothing in common with him save the letter of his doctrine, who listen to him and offer incense; at which a man or woman of distinction who lives exclusively for love will think the most intelligent person in a gathering the one who, however inferior, has shown by some remark that he can understand and approve an existence devoted to gallantry, and has thus pleasantly flattered the voluptuous instincts of the lover or mistress; it was the age, too, at which Swann, inasmuch as he had become the husband of Odette, enjoyed hearing Mme Bontemps say how silly it was to have nobody in one’s house but duchesses (concluding from that, contrary to what he would have