In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [144]
Mme de Marsantes attended Brunetière’s lectures. She inspired the Faubourg Saint-Germain with enthusiasm and, by her saintly life, edified it as well. But the morphological link of handsome nose and piercing gaze none the less led me to classify Mme de Marsantes in the same intellectual and moral family as her brother the Duke. I could not believe that the mere fact of her being a woman, and perhaps of her having had an unhappy life and won everyone’s high opinion, could make a person so different from the rest of her family, as in the mediaeval romances where all the virtues and graces are combined in the sister of wild and lawless brothers. It seemed to me that nature, less unfettered than the old poets, must make use almost exclusively of the elements common to the family, and I was unable to credit her with enough power of invention to construct, out of materials analogous to those that composed a fool and a lout, a lofty mind without the least strain of foolishness, a saint without the least taint of brutality. Mme de Marsantes was wearing a gown of white surah embroidered with large palms, on which stood out flowers of a different material, these being black. This was because, three weeks earlier, she had lost her cousin M. de Montmorency, a bereavement which did not prevent her from paying calls or even from going to small dinners, but always in mourning. She was a great lady. Atavism had filled her with the frivolity of generations of life at court, with all the superficial and rigorous duties that that implies. Mme de Marsantes had not had the strength to mourn her father and mother for any length of time, but she would not for anything in the world have appeared in colours in the month following the death of a cousin. She was more than friendly to me, both because I was Robert’s friend and because I did not move in the same world as he. This friendliness was accompanied by a pretence of shyness, by a sort of intermittent withdrawal of the voice, the eyes, the mind, as though she were drawing in a wayward skirt, so as not to take up too much room, to remain stiff and erect even in her suppleness, as good breeding demands—a good breeding that must not, however, be taken too literally, many of these ladies lapsing very swiftly into moral licentiousness without ever losing the almost childlike correctness of their manners. Mme de Marsantes was a trifle irritating in conversation since, whenever she had occasion to speak of a commoner, as for instance Bergotte or Elstir, she would say, isolating the word, giving it its full value, intoning it on two different notes with a modulation peculiar to the Guermantes: “I have had the honour, the great hon-our of meeting Monsieur Bergotte,” or “of making the acquaintance of Monsieur Elstir,” either in order that her hearers might marvel at her humility, or from the same tendency evinced by M. de Guermantes to revert to obsolete forms as a protest against the slovenly usages of the present day, in which people never professed themselves sufficiently “honoured.” Whichever of these was the true reason, one felt that when Mme de Marsantes said: “I have had the honour, the great hon-our,” she felt she was fulfilling an important role and showing that she could take in the names of distinguished men as she would have welcomed the men themselves at her country seat had they happened to be in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, as her family was large, as she was devoted to all her relations, as, slow of speech and fond of explaining things at length, she was always trying to make clear the exact degrees of kinship, she found herself (without any desire to create an effect and while genuinely preferring to talk only about touching peasants and sublime