In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [161]
“But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you eating oysters,” she said to us one day (increasing the sense of disgust which I felt at that moment, for the living flesh of oysters revolted me even more than the viscosity of the stranded jelly-fish defiled the Balbec beach for me). “They’re quite delicious down here! Oh, let me tell my maid to fetch your letters when she goes for mine. What, your daughter writes to you every day? But what on earth can you find to say to each other?”
My grandmother was silent, but it may be assumed that her silence was due to disdain, for she used to repeat, when she wrote to Mamma, the words of Mme de Sévigné: “As soon as I have received a letter, I want another at once; I sigh for nothing else. There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel.” And I was afraid that she might apply to Mme de Villeparisis the conclusion: “I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.” She fell back upon praise of the fruit which Mme de Villeparisis had sent us the day before. And it had indeed been so fine that the manager, in spite of the jealousy aroused by our neglect of his official offerings, had said to me: “I am like you; I am sweeter for fruit than any other kind of dessert.” My grandmother told her friend that she had enjoyed them all the more because the fruit which we got in the hotel was generally horrid. “I cannot,” she went on, “say with Mme de Sévigné that if we should take a sudden fancy for bad fruit we should be obliged to order it from Paris.” “Oh yes, of course, you read Mme de Sévigné. I’ve seen you with her letters ever since the day you came.” (She forgot that she had never officially seen my grandmother in the hotel before meeting her in that doorway.) “Don’t you find it rather exaggerated, her constant anxiety about her daughter? She refers to it too often to be really sincere. She’s not very natural.” My grandmother felt that any discussion would be futile, and so as not to be obliged to speak of the things she loved to a person incapable of understanding them, concealed the Mémoires de Madame de Beausergent by laying her bag upon them.
Were she to encounter Françoise at the moment (which Françoise called “the noon”) when, wearing her fine cap and surrounded with every mark of respect, she was coming downstairs to “feed with the service,” Mme Villeparisis would stop her to ask after us. And Françoise, when transmitting to us the Marquise’s message: “She said to me, ‘You’ll be sure and bid them good day,’ she said,” would counterfeit the voice of Mme de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be quoting textually, whereas in fact she was distorting them no less than Plato distorts the words of Socrates or St John the words of Jesus. Françoise was naturally deeply touched by these attentions. Only she did not believe my grandmother, but supposed that she must be lying in the interests of class (the rich always supporting one another) when she assured us that Mme de Villeparisis had been lovely as a young woman. It was true that of this loveliness only the faintest trace remained, from which no one—unless he happened to be a great deal more of an artist than Françoise—would have been able to reconstitute her ruined beauty. For in order to understand how beautiful an elderly woman may once have been one must not only study but translate every line of her face.
“I must remember some time to ask her whether I’m not right, after all, in thinking that there’s some connexion with the Guermantes,” said my grandmother, to my great indignation. How could I be expected to believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience, the other by the golden gate of imagination?
We had several times, in the last few days, seen driving past us in a stately equipage, tall, red-haired, handsome, with a rather prominent nose, the Princesse de