In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [158]
I guessed at once that this was Legrandin. M. de Norpois smiled with a slight quiver of the eyelid, as though he felt that such a remark had been prompted by a concupiscence so natural that one could not feel any resentment against the person who had felt it, almost as though it were the beginning of a romance which he was prepared to forgive, even to encourage, with the perverse tolerance of a Voisenon or a Crébillon fils.
“Many young women’s hands would be incapable of doing what I see there,” said the Prince, pointing to Mme de Villeparisis’s unfinished water-colours. And he asked her whether she had seen the flower paintings by Fantin-Latour which had recently been exhibited.
“They are first class, the work, as they say nowadays, of a fine painter, one of the masters of the palette,” declared M. de Norpois. “Nevertheless, in my opinion, they cannot stand comparison with those of Mme de Villeparisis, which give a better idea of the colouring of the flower.”
Even supposing that the partiality of an old lover, the habit of flattery, the prevailing opinions in a social circle, had dictated these words to the ex-Ambassador, they nevertheless proved on what a negation of true taste the judgment of society people is based, so arbitrary that the smallest trifle can make it rush to the wildest absurdities, on the way to which it comes across no genuinely felt impression to arrest it.
“I claim no credit for knowing about flowers, since I’ve lived all my life in the fields,” replied Mme de Villeparisis modestly. “But,” she added graciously, turning to the Prince, “if, when I was very young, I had some rather more serious notions about them than other country children, I owe it to a distinguished fellow-countryman of yours, Herr von Schlegel. I met him at Broglie, where I was taken by my aunt Cordelia (Marshal de Castellane’s wife, don’t you know?). I remember so well M. Lebrun, M. de Salvandy, M. Doudan, getting him to talk about flowers. I was only a little girl, and I couldn’t understand all he said. But he liked playing with me, and when he went back to your country he sent me a beautiful botany book to remind me of a drive we took together in a phaeton to the Val Richer, when I fell asleep on his knee. I’ve always kept the book, and it taught me to observe many things about flowers which I should not have noticed otherwise. When Mme de Barante published some of Mme de Broglie’s letters, charming and affected like herself, I hoped to find among them some record of those conversations with Herr von Schlegel. But she was a woman who only looked to nature for arguments in support of religion.”
Robert called me away to the far end of the room where he and his mother were.
“How very nice you’ve been,” I said to him, “I don’t know how to thank you. Can we dine together tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? Yes, if you like, but it will have to be with Bloch. I met him just now on the doorstep. He was rather stiff with me at first because I had quite forgotten to answer his last two letters (he didn’t tell me that was what had offended him, but I guessed it), but after that he was so friendly to me that I simply can’t disappoint him. Between ourselves, on his side at least, I feel it’s a friendship for life.”
I do not think that Robert was altogether mistaken. Furious detraction was often, with Bloch, the effect of a keen affection which he had supposed to be unrequited. And as he made little effort to imagine other people’s lives, and never dreamed that one might have been ill, or away from home, or otherwise occupied, a week’s silence was at once interpreted by him as arising from deliberate coldness. And so I never believed that his most violent outbursts as a friend, or in later years as a writer, went very deep. They were exacerbated if one replied to them with an icy dignity, or with a platitude which encouraged him to