In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [123]
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.
“What gives you that impression is that they painted flowers of their time which we no longer know, but they did it with great skill.”
“Ah! Flowers of their time! That is a most ingenious theory,” exclaimed Legrandin.
“I see you’re painting some fine cherry blossoms—or are they mayflowers?” began the historian of the Fronde, in some doubt as to the flower, but with a note of confidence in his voice, for he was beginning to forget the incident of the hats.
“No, they’re apple blossom,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, addressing her aunt.
“Ah! I see you’re a good countrywoman like me; you can tell one flower from another.”
“Why yes, so they are! But I thought the season for apple blossom was over now,” hazarded the historian, to cover his mistake.
“Not at all; on the contrary it’s not out yet; it won’t be out for another fortnight, or three weeks perhaps,” said the archivist who, since he helped with the management of Mme de Villeparisis’s estates, was better informed upon country matters.
“Yes, even round Paris, where they’re very far forward,” put in the Duchess. “Down in Normandy, don’t you know, at his father’s place,” she pointed to the young Duc de Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple-trees close to the sea, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until after the twentieth of May.”
“I never see them,” said the young Duke, “because they give me hay fever. Such a bore.”
“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.
“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the archivist informed him.
“It all depends: you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good year for apples. You know the Norman saying: ‘When it’s a good year for apples . . .’,” put in M. d’Argencourt who, not being quite French, was always trying to give himself a Parisian air.
“You’re quite right,” Mme de Villeparisis said to her niece, “these are from the South. It was a florist who sent them round and asked me to accept them as a present. You’re surprised, I dare say, Monsieur Vallenères,” she turned to the archivist, “that a florist should make me a present of apple blossom. Well, I may be an old woman, but I’m not quite on the shelf yet, I still have a few friends,” she went on with a smile that might have been taken as a sign of her simplicity but meant rather, I could not help feeling, that she thought it intriguing to pride herself on the friendship of a mere florist when she had such grand connexions.
Bloch rose and in his turn came over to look at the flowers which Mme de Villeparisis was painting.
“Never mind, Marquise,” said the historian, sitting down again, “even if we were to have another of those revolutions which have stained so many pages of our history with blood—and, upon my soul, in these days one can never tell,” he added with a circular and circumspect glance, as if to make sure that there were no “dissidents” in the room, though he did not suppose there were any, “with a talent like yours and your five languages you would be certain to get on all right.”
The historian of the Fronde was feeling quite refreshed, for he had forgotten his insomnia. But he suddenly remembered that he had not slept for six nights, whereupon a crushing weariness, born of his mind, took hold of his legs and bowed his shoulders, and his melancholy face began to droop like an old man’s.
Bloch wanted to express his admiration in an appropriate gesture, but only succeeded in knocking over the glass containing the spray of apple blossom with his elbow, and all the water was spilled on the carpet.
“You really have a fairy’s touch,” the historian said to the Marquise; having his back turned to me at that moment, he had not noticed