In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [50]
“I should think it did ‘mean a lot’!” exclaimed Swann, who preferred to this modesty, which might have left me in doubt, a more explicit parlance. “Why it means simply that he’s the first man after the Minister. In fact, he’s more important than the Minister, because it’s he who does all the work. Besides, it appears that he’s immensely able, a man quite of the first rank, a most distinguished individual. He’s an Officer of the Legion of Honour. A delightful man, and very good-looking too.”
(This man’s wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone’s wishes and advice because he was a “charming creature.” He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, bad breath, and a glass eye.)
“I may tell you,” he added, turning to me, “that I’m greatly amused to see that lot serving in the present government, because they are Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, typical of the old-fashioned bourgeoisie, reactionary, clerical, tremendously straitlaced. Your grandfather knew quite well, at least by name and by sight, old Chenut, the father, who never tipped cabmen more than a sou, though he was a rich man for those days, and the Baron Bréau-Chenut. All their money went in the Union Générale smash—you’re too young to remember that, of course—and, gad! they’ve had to get it back as best they could.”
“He’s the uncle of a girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine.’ She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but meanwhile she’s an odd fish.”
“She is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone.”
“I don’t know her. I only used to see her about, and hear them calling ‘Albertine’ here and ‘Albertine’ there. But I do know Mme Bontemps, and I don’t like her much either.”
“You are quite wrong; she’s charming, pretty, intelligent. She’s even quite witty. I shall go in and say how d’ye do to her, and ask her if her husband thinks we’re going to have a war, and whether we can rely on King Theodosius. He’s bound to know, don’t you think, since he’s in the counsels of the gods.”
It was not thus that Swann used to talk in days gone by; but which of us cannot call to mind some quite unpretentious royal princess who has let herself be carried off by a footman, and then, ten years later, trying to get back into society and sensing that people are not very willing to call on her, spontaneously adopts the language of all the old bores, and, when a fashionable duchess is mentioned, can be heard to say: “She came to see me only yesterday,” or “I live a very quiet life”? Thus it is superfluous to make a study of social mores, since we can deduce them from psychological laws.
The Swanns shared this failing of people who are not much sought after; a visit, an invitation, a mere friendly word from anyone at all prominent was for them an event to which they felt the need to give full publicity. If bad luck would have it that the Verdurins were in London when Odette gave a rather smart dinner-party, it would be arranged for some common friend to cable a report to them across the Channel. The Swanns were incapable even of keeping to themselves the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette. They spoke of them to their friends, passed them from hand to hand. Thus the Swanns’ drawing-room was reminiscent of a seaside hotel where telegrams are posted up on a board.
Moreover, people who had known the old Swann not merely outside society, as I had, but in society, in that Guermantes set which, with certain concessions to Highnesses and Duchesses, was infinitely exacting in the matter of wit and charm, from which banishment was sternly decreed for men of real eminence whom its members found boring or vulgar,—such people might have been astonished to observe that