In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [195]
while he was composing a grave face. I had no alternative but to effect the introduction, which triggered off a series of bowings and scrapings: he was about to begin the complete ritual of salutation, and even proposed to enter into conversation, but my mother, beside herself with grief, told me to come at once and did not reply to the speeches of M. de Guermantes who, expecting to be received as a visitor and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would have been obliged to leave had he not at that moment caught sight of Saint-Loup who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us in haste to ask for news. “I say, this is a piece of luck!” cried the Duke joyfully, grabbing his nephew by a button which he nearly tore off, regardless of the presence of my mother who was again crossing the hall. Saint-Loup was not, I think, despite his genuine sympathy, altogether sorry to avoid seeing me, considering his attitude towards me. He left, dragged off by his uncle who, having had something very important to say to him and having very nearly gone down to Doncières on purpose to say it, was beside himself with joy at being able to save himself the trouble. “Upon my soul, if anybody had told me I had only to cross the courtyard to find you here, I should have thought they were pulling my leg. As your friend M. Bloch would say, it’s rather droll.” And as he disappeared down the stairs with his arm round Robert’s shoulder: “All the same,” he went on, “it’s quite clear I must have touched the hangman’s rope or something; I do have the devil’s own luck.” It was not that the Duc de Guermantes was bad-mannered; far from it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others, who resemble in that respect undertakers and the majority of doctors, and who, after having composed their faces and said “This is a very painful occasion,” having embraced you at a pinch and advised you to rest, cease to regard a deathbed or a funeral as anything but a social gathering of a more or less restricted kind at which, with a joviality that has been checked for a moment only, they scan the room in search of the person whom they can talk to about their own little affairs, or ask to introduce them to someone else, or offer a lift in their carriage when it is time to go home. The Duc de Guermantes, while congratulating himself on the “good wind” that had blown him into the arms of his nephew, was still so surprised at the reception—natural as it was—that he had had from my mother that he declared later on that she was as disagreeable as my father was civil, that she had “aberrations” during which she seemed literally not to hear a word you said to her, and that in his opinion she was out of sorts and perhaps even not quite “all there.” At the same time he was prepared (according to what I was told) to put it down partly at least to the “circumstances” and to aver that my mother had seemed to him greatly “affected” by the sad event. But his limbs were still twitching with all the residue of bows and heel-clickings and backings-out which he had been prevented from using up, and he had so little idea of the real nature of Mamma’s grief that he asked me, the day before the funeral, if I was doing anything to distract her.
A brother-in-law of my grandmother’s, who was a monk, and whom I had never seen, had telegraphed to Austria, where the head of his order was, and having as a special dispensation received permission, arrived that day. Bowed down with grief, he sat by the bedside reading prayers and meditations without, however, taking his gimlet eyes from the invalid’s face. At one point when my grandmother was unconscious, the sight of the priest’s grief began to upset me, and I looked at him tenderly. He appeared surprised by my pity, and then an odd thing happened. He joined his hands in front of his face like a man absorbed in sorrowful meditation, but, on the assumption that I would then cease to watch him, left, as I observed, a tiny chink between his fingers. And just as I was looking away, I saw