In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [155]
She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel or who came there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; indeed, I noticed that he gave her no greeting one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an invitation to lunch with the president, who, intoxicated with the honour of having the nobleman at his table, avoided his habitual friends and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his signal could not be interpreted as an invitation to join the party.
“Well, I hope you’ve done yourself proud, I hope you feel smart enough,” the judge’s wife said to him that evening.
“Smart? Why should I?” asked the president, concealing his rapture in an exaggerated astonishment. “Because of my guests, do you mean?” he went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. “But what is there smart about having a few friends to lunch? After all, they must feed somewhere!”
“Of course it’s smart! They were the de Cambremers, weren’t they? I recognised them at once. She’s a Marquise. And quite genuine, too. Not through the females.”
“Oh, she’s a very simple soul, she’s charming, no standoffishness about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals to you . . . I would have introduced you!” he asserted, tempering with a hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he says to Esther: “Of all my Kingdom must I give you half?”
“No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet.”
“But you were quite wrong, I assure you,” replied the president emboldened now that the danger point was passed. “They weren’t going to eat you. I say, aren’t we going to have our little game of bezique?”
“Why, of course! We didn’t dare suggest it, now that you go about entertaining marquises.”
“Oh, get along with you; there’s nothing so very wonderful about them. Why, I’m dining there tomorrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I mean it. Honestly, I’d just as soon stay here.”
“No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a reactionary,” cried the senior judge, laughing till the tears came to his eyes at his own joke. “But you go to Féterne too, don’t you?” he went on, turning to the notary.
“Oh, I go there on Sundays—in one door and out the other. But they don’t come and have lunch with me as they do with the president.”
M. de Stermaria was not at Balbec that day, to the president’s great regret. But he managed to say a word in season to the head waiter:
“Aimé, you can tell M. de Stermaria that he’s not the only nobleman you’ve had in here. You saw the gentleman who was with me today at lunch? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well, that was the Marquis de Cambremer!”
“Was it indeed? I’m not surprised to hear it.”
“That will show him that he’s not the only man who’s got a title. That’ll teach him! It’s not a bad thing to take ‘em down a peg or two, those noblemen. I say, Aimé, don’t say anything to him unless you want to. I mean to say, it’s no business of mine; besides, they know each other already.”
And next day M. de Stermaria, who remembered that the president had once represented one of his friends, came up and introduced himself.
“Our friends in common, the de Cambremers, were anxious that we should meet, the days didn’t fit—I don’t know quite what went wrong,” said the president who, like most liars, imagined that other people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail which, for all