In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [119]
these eminent men used to see at the Guermantes’ the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Sagan (whom Françoise, hearing her constantly mentioned, had taken to calling, in the belief that this feminine ending was required by the laws of accidence, “the Sagante”), and plenty more, but their presence was accounted for by the explanation that they were relations, or such very old friends that it was impossible to exclude them. Whether or not they were convinced by the explanations which the Duc de Guermantes had given of the singular malady that made it impossible for the Duchess to associate with other women, the great men duly transmitted them to their wives. Some of these thought that the malady was only an excuse to cloak her jealousy, because the Duchess wished to reign alone over a court of worshippers. Others more simple still thought that perhaps the Duchess had some peculiar habit, or even a scandalous past, so that women did not care to go to her house and that she gave the name of a whim to what was stern necessity. The better among them, hearing their husbands expatiate on the Duchess’s wit, assumed that she must be so far superior to the rest of womankind that she found their society boring since they could not talk intelligently about anything. And it was true that the Duchess was bored by other women, if their princely rank did not give them an exceptional interest. But the excluded wives were mistaken when they imagined that she chose to entertain men only in order to be able to discuss with them literature, science, and philosophy. For she never spoke of these, at least with the great intellectuals. If, by virtue of a family tradition such as makes the daughters of great soldiers preserve a respect for military matters in the midst of their most frivolous distractions, she felt, as the granddaughter of women who had been on terms of friendship with Thiers, Mérimée and Augier, that a place must always be kept in her drawing-room for men of intellect, she had at the same time derived from the manner, at once condescending and familiar, in which those famous men had been received at Guermantes, the foible of looking on men of talent as family friends whose talent does not dazzle one, to whom one does not speak of their work, and who would not be at all interested if one did. Moreover the type of mind illustrated by Mérimée and Meilhac and Halévy, which was also hers, led her, by contrast with the verbal sentimentality of an earlier generation, to a style of conversation that rejects everything to do with fine language and the expression of lofty thoughts, so that she made it a sort of point of good breeding when she was with a poet or a musician to talk only of the food that they were eating or the game of cards to which they would afterwards sit down. This abstention had, on a third person not conversant with her ways, a disturbing effect which amounted to mystification. Mme de Guermantes having asked him if he would like to be invited with this or that famous poet, devoured by curiosity he arrived at the appointed hour. The Duchess would talk to the poet about the weather. They sat down to lunch. “Do you like this way of doing eggs?” she would ask the poet. On hearing his approval, which she shared, for everything in her own house appeared to her exquisite, down to a horrible cider which she imported from Guermantes: “Give Monsieur some more eggs,” she would tell the butler, while the anxious fellow-guest sat waiting for what must surely have been the object of the occasion, since they had arranged to meet, in spite of every sort of difficulty, before the Duchess, the poet and he himself left Paris. But the meal went on, one after another the courses would be cleared away, not without having provided Mme de Guermantes with opportunities for clever witticisms or well-judged anecdotes. Meanwhile the poet went on eating without either the Duke or Duchess showing any sign of remembering that he was a poet. And presently the luncheon came to an end and the party broke up, without a word having been said about poetry