In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [105]
These incidents, particularly the one that was weighing most on his mind, seemed to have prompted in Robert a desire to be left alone for a while. For after a time he asked me to leave him, and go by myself to call on Mme de Villeparisis. He would join me there, but preferred that we should not go in together, so that he might appear to have only just arrived in Paris instead of having spent half the day already with me.
As I had supposed before making the acquaintance of Mme de Villeparisis at Balbec, there was a vast difference between the world in which she lived and that of Mme de Guermantes. Mme de Villeparisis was one of those women who, born of an illustrious house, entering by marriage into another no less illustrious, do not for all that enjoy any great position in the social world, and, apart from a few duchesses who are their nieces or sisters-in-law, perhaps even a crowned head or two, old family connexions, have their drawing-rooms patronised only by third-rate people, drawn from the middle classes or from a nobility either provincial or tainted in some way, whose presence there has long since driven away all such smart and snobbish folk as are not obliged to come to the house by ties of blood or the claims of a friendship too old to be ignored. Certainly I had no difficulty after the first few minutes in understanding how Mme de Villeparisis, at Balbec, had come to be so well informed, better than ourselves even, as to the smallest details of the tour through Spain which my father was then making with M. de Norpois. It was impossible, for all that, to entertain the theory that the intimacy—of more than twenty years’ standing—between Mme de Villeparisis and the Ambassador could have been responsible for the lady’s loss of caste in a world where the smartest women boasted lovers far less respectable than him, quite apart from the fact that it was probably years since he had been anything more to the Marquise than an old friend. Had Mme de Villeparisis then had other adventures in the past? Being then of a more passionate temperament than now, in a calm and pious old age which nevertheless owed some of its mellow colouring to those ardent, vanished years, had she somehow failed, in the country neighbourhood where she had lived for so long, to avoid certain scandals unknown to a younger generation which merely noted their effect in the mixed and defective composition of a visiting list bound otherwise to have been among those least tarnished by any base alloy? Had that “sharp tongue” which her nephew ascribed to her made her enemies in those far-off days? Had it driven her into taking advantage of certain successes with men to avenge herself upon women? All this was possible; nor could the exquisitely sensitive way in which—modulating so delicately her choice of words as well as her tone of voice—Mme de Villeparisis spoke of modesty or kindness be held to invalidate this supposition; for the people who not only speak with approval of certain virtues but actually feel their charm and understand them admirably (who will be capable of painting a worthy picture of them in their memoirs) are often sprung from, but do not themselves belong to, the inarticulate, rough-hewn, artless generation which practised them. That generation is reflected but not continued in them. Instead of the character which it possessed, one finds a sensibility, an intelligence which are not conducive to action. And whether or not there had been in the life of Mme de Villeparisis any of those scandals which the lustre of her name had expunged, it was this intelligence, resembling rather that of a writer of the second rank than that of a woman of position, that was undoubtedly the cause of her social decline.
It is true that the qualities,