In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [69]
The Princess gathered up the train that flowed out behind her, and Mme Swann gazed at it with admiring eyes. “Yes, as it happens, it’s a fur that the Emperor of Russia sent me,” she explained, “and as I’ve just been to see him I put it on to show him that I’d managed to have it made up as a coat.” “I hear that Prince Louis has joined the Russian Army; the Princess will be very sad at losing him,” went on Mme Swann, not noticing her husband’s signs of impatience. “He would go and do that! As I said to him, ‘Just because there’s been a soldier in the family there’s no need to follow suit,’ ” replied the Princess, alluding with this abrupt simplicity to Napoleon the Great.
But Swann could hold out no longer: “Ma’am, it is I that am going to play the Royal Highness and ask your permission to retire; but you see, my wife hasn’t been too well, and I don’t like her to stand around for too long.” Mme Swam curtseyed again, and the Princess conferred upon us all a celestial smile, which she seemed to have summoned out of the past, from among the graces of her girlhood, from the evenings at Compiègne, a smile which stole, sweet and unbroken, over her hitherto surly face. Then she went on her way, followed by the two ladies in waiting, who had confined themselves, in the manner of interpreters, of children’s or invalids’ nurses, to punctuating our conversation with meaningless remarks and superfluous explanations. “You should go and write your name in her book one day this week,” Mme Swam counselled me. “One doesn’t leave cards upon these ‘Royalties,’ as the English call them, but she will invite you to her house if you put your name down.”
Sometimes in those last days of winter, before proceeding on our expedition we would go into one of the small picture-shows that were beginning to open and where Swann, as a collector of note, was greeted with special deference by the dealers in whose galleries they were held. And in that still wintry weather the old longing to set out for the South of France and Venice would be reawakened in me by those rooms in which a springtime, already well advanced, and a blazing sun cast violet shadows upon the roseate Alpilles and gave the intense transparency of emeralds to the Grand Canal. If the weather was bad, we would go to a concert or a theatre, and afterwards to one of the fashionable tea-rooms. There, whenever Mme Swann had anything to say to me which she did not wish the people at the next table or even the waiters who brought our tea to understand, she would say it in English, as though that had been a secret language known to our two selves alone. As it happened everyone in the place knew English—I alone had not yet learned the language, and was obliged to say so to Mme Swann in order that she might cease to make, about the people who were drinking tea or serving us with it, remarks which I guessed to be uncomplimentary without either my understanding or the person referred to missing a single word.
Once, in connexion with a matinée at the theatre, Gilberte gave me a great surprise. It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me in advance, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather’s death. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, to hear selections from an opera, and Gilberte had dressed with a view to attending this performance, wearing the air of indifference with which she was in the habit of treating whatever we might be going to do, saying that it might be anything in the world, no matter what, provided that it amused me and had her parents’ approval. Before lunch, her mother drew us aside to tell her that her father was vexed at the thought of our going to a concert on that particular day. This seemed to be only natural. Gilberte remained impassive, but grew pale with an anger