concealing her thorough understanding of the things to which she referred. She appeared to seek an excuse for this erudition in the fact that one of her father’s country houses, the one in which she had lived as a girl, was situated in a region where there were churches similar in style to those round Balbec, so that it would have been shameful if she had not acquired a taste for architecture, this house being, incidentally, one of the finest examples of that of the Renaissance. But as it was also a regular museum, as moreover Chopin and Liszt had played there, Lamartine recited poetry, all the most famous artists for fully a century written thoughts, dashed off melodies, made sketches in the family album, Mme de Villeparisis ascribed, whether from delicacy, good breeding, true modesty or want of speculative intelligence, only this purely material origin to her acquaintance with all the arts, and had seemingly come to regard painting, music, literature, and philosophy as the appanage of a young lady brought up on the most aristocratic lines in an historic building that was classified and starred. One got the impression that for her there were no other pictures than those that have been inherited. She was pleased that my grandmother liked a necklace which she wore, and which hung over her dress. It appeared in the portrait of an ancestress of hers, by Titian, which had never left the family. So that one could be certain of its being genuine. She would not hear a word about pictures bought, heaven knew where, by a Croesus; she was persuaded in advance that they were fakes, and had no desire to see them. We knew that she herself painted flowers in water-colour, and my grandmother, who had heard these praised, spoke to her of them. Mme de Villeparisis modestly changed the subject, but without showing any more surprise or pleasure than would an artist of established reputation to whom compliments mean nothing. She said merely that it was a delightful pastime because, even if the flowers that sprang from the brush were nothing wonderful, at least the work made you live in the company of real flowers, of the beauty of which, especially when you were obliged to study them closely in order to draw them, you could never grow tired. But at Balbec Mme de Villeparisis was giving herself a holiday, in order to rest her eyes.
We were astonished, my grandmother and I, to find how much more “liberal” she was than even the majority of the middle class. She did not understand how anyone could be scandalised by the expulsion of the Jesuits, saying that it had always been done, even under the Monarchy, in Spain even. She defended the Republic, reproaching it for its anti-clericalism only to this extent: “I should find it just as bad to be prevented from going to mass when I wanted to, as to be forced to go to it when I didn’t!” and even startled us with such remarks as: “Oh! the aristocracy in these days, what does it amount to?” or, “To my mind, a man who doesn’t work doesn’t count!”—perhaps only because she sensed how much they gained in spice and piquancy, how memorable they became, on her lips.
When we heard these advanced opinions—though never so far advanced as to amount to socialism, which Mme de Villeparisis held in abhorrence—expressed so frequently and with so much frankness precisely by one of those people in consideration of whose intelligence our scrupulous and timid impartiality would refuse to condemn outright the ideas of conservatives, we came very near, my grandmother and I, to believing that in the pleasant companion of our drives was to be found the measure and the pattern of truth in all things. We took her word for it when she pronounced judgment on her Titians, the colonnade of her country house, the conversational talent of Louis-Philippe. But—like those learned people who hold us spellbound when we get them on to Egyptian painting or Etruscan inscriptions, and yet talk so tritely about modern work that we wonder whether we have not overestimated the interest of the sciences in which they are versed since they do not