In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [128]
I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that admirable Bunch of Radishes which I remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece it is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I should have named this Bunch of Radishes.
“A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it’s merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece,’ what will you say about Hébert’s Virgin or Dagnan-Bouveret?”
“I heard you refusing to have Robert’s woman,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much: she’s a perfect horror, you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.”
“Do you mean to say you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.
“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before anyone else’s—not that that’s anything to be proud of,” replied Mme de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless, since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she herself had had the first taste of her absurdities. “Hallo, I suppose I ought to go now,” she added, without moving.
She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a call together like a newly married couple, rather than to the often strained relations that existed between her and the strapping individual she had married, who, despite his advancing years, still led the life of a gay bachelor. Casting over the considerable party that was gathered round the tea-table the affable, waggish gaze—dazzled a little by the slanting rays of the setting sun—of the little round pupils lodged in the exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the excellent marksman that he was could always target with such perfect precision, the Duke advanced with a wondering, gingerly deliberation as though, alarmed by so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile suggesting a slightly tipsy “Good King Wenceslas,” and a half-open hand floating like a shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be clasped indiscriminately by his old friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled him, without having to make a single movement, or to interrupt his genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the alacrity of them all by simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear fellow; charmed, Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt”; and, on coming to myself, who was the most favoured of all when he had been told my name: “How do, young neighbour, how’s your father? What an admirable man!” He made no great demonstration except to Mme de Villeparisis, who greeted him with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her little apron.
Being formidably rich in a world where people were becoming steadily less so, and having adapted himself long since to