In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [133]
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mistaken, was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a Grandin de l’Eprevier.”
“No,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’d be only too glad to be Grandins of anything you choose to name. This one has a sister called Mme de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who my aunt means,” cried the Duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great graminivorous creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I’d go mad. But I began by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person I didn’t know come browsing into the room looking exactly like a cow.”
“Look here, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at home; I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do exaggerate so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plaintive tone, though not without a furtive smiling glance round the audience.
He knew that his wife’s conversational zest needed the stimulus of contradiction, the contradiction of common sense which protests that one cannot, for instance, mistake a woman for a cow. It was in this way that Mme de Guermantes, improving on a preliminary notion, had been inspired to produce many of her wittiest sallies. And the Duke would come forward with feigned naïvety to help her to bring off her effects, like the unacknowledged partner of a three-card trickster in a railway carriage.
“I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like several,” exclaimed Mme de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know what to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my drawing-room in a hat and asking me how I was. I had half a mind to say: ‘Please, herd of cattle, you must be making a mistake, you can’t possibly know me, because you’re a herd of cattle,’ but after racking my brains I came to the conclusion that your Cambremer woman must be the Infanta Dorothea, who had said she was coming to see me one day and who is rather bovine too, so that I was just on the point of saying ‘Your Royal Highness’ and using the third person to a herd of cattle. She’s also got the same sort of dewlap as the Queen of Sweden. But actually this mass attack had been prepared for by long-range artillery fire, according to all the rules of war. For I don’t know how long before, I was bombarded with her cards; I used to find them lying about all over the house, on all the tables and chairs, like prospectuses. I couldn’t think what they were supposed to be advertising. You saw nothing in the house but ‘Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer’ with some address or other which I’ve forgotten and which you may be quite sure I shall never make use of.”
“But it’s very flattering to be taken for a queen,” said the historian of the Fronde.
“Good God, sir, kings and queens don’t amount to much these days,” said M. de Guermantes, partly because he liked to be thought broad-minded and modern, and also so as not to seem to attach any importance to his own royal connexions, which he valued highly.
Bloch and M. de Norpois had risen and were now in our vicinity.
“Well, Monsieur,” asked Mme de Villeparisis, “have you been talking to him about the Dreyfus case?”
M. de Norpois raised his eyes to the ceiling, but with a smile, as though calling on heaven to witness the enormity of the whims to which his Dulcinea compelled him to submit. Nevertheless he spoke to Bloch with great affability of the terrible, perhaps fatal period through which France was passing. As this presumably meant that M. de Norpois (to whom Bloch had confessed his belief in the innocence of Dreyfus) was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, the Ambassador