In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [121]
“I thought I should find Basin here. He was meaning to come and see you today,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt.
“I haven’t set eyes on your husband for some days,” replied Mme de Villeparisis in a somewhat nettled tone. “In fact, I haven’t seen him—well, perhaps once—since that charming joke he played on me of having himself announced as the Queen of Sweden.”
Mme de Guermantes formed a smile by contracting the corners of her mouth as though she were biting her veil.
“We met her at dinner last night at Blanche Leroi’s. You wouldn’t know her now, she’s positively enormous. I’m sure she must be ill.”
“I was just telling these gentlemen that you said she looked like a frog.”
Mme de Guermantes emitted a sort of raucous noise which meant that she was laughing for form’s sake.
“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of the ox. Or rather, it isn’t quite that, because all her swelling is concentrated in her stomach: she’s more like a frog in an interesting condition.”
“Ah, I do find that funny,” said Mme de Villeparisis, secretly proud that her guests should be witnessing this display of her niece’s wit.
“It is purely arbitrary, though,” answered Mme de Guermantes, ironically detaching this selected epithet, as Swann would have done, “for I must admit I never saw a frog in the family way. Anyhow, the frog in question, who, by the way, does not require a king, for I never saw her so skittish as she’s been since her husband died, is coming to dine with us one day next week. I promised I’d let you know just in case.”
Mme de Villeparisis gave vent to an indistinct growl, from which emerged: “I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the night before last. Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me about it, quite amusingly, I must say.”
“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,” said Mme de Guermantes who, intimate though she was with M. de Bréauté-Consalvi, felt the need to advertise the fact by the use of this diminutive. “I mean M. Bergotte.”
I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty; moreover, I thought of him always as part of the intellectual section of humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that mysterious realm of which I had caught a glimpse through the purple hangings of a theatre box behind which, making the Duchess laugh, M. de Bréauté had been holding with her, in the language of the gods, that unimaginable thing, a conversation between people of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I was distressed to see the balance upset and Bergotte rise above M. de Bréauté. But above all I was dismayed to think that I had avoided Bergotte on the evening of Phèdre, that I had not gone up and spoken to him, when I heard Mme de Guermantes, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness, say to Mme de Villeparisis: “He’s the only person I have any wish to know. It would be such a pleasure.”
The presence of Bergotte by my side, which it would have been so easy for me to secure but which I should have thought liable to give Mme de Guermantes a bad impression of me, would no doubt, on the contrary, have resulted in her signalling to me to join her in her box, and inviting me to bring the eminent writer to lunch one day.
“I gather that he didn’t behave very well. He was presented to M. de Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” Mme de Guermantes went on, dwelling on this odd fact as she might have recounted that a Chinese had blown his nose on a sheet of paper. “He never once said ‘Your Royal Highness’ to him,” she added, with an air of amusement at this detail, as important to her mind as the refusal of a Protestant, during an audience with the Pope, to go on his knees before His Holiness.