In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [205]
Similarly, wishing to say of the Fontainebleau golf club that it was smart, she declared: “It’s really quite a selection.”
Speaking of a duel I had fought, she said of my seconds: “What very choice seconds,” and looking at my face confessed that she would like to see me “sport a moustache.” She even went so far (and at this point my chances appeared to me very great) as to announce, in a phrase of which I would have sworn that she was ignorant a year earlier, that since she had last seen Gisèle there had passed a certain “lapse of time.” This was not to say that Albertine had not already possessed, when I was at Balbec, a quite adequate assortment of those expressions which reveal at once that one comes of a well-to-do family and which, year by year, a mother passes on to her daughter just as she gradually bestows on her, as the girl grows up, her own jewels on important occasions. It was evident that Albertine had ceased to be a little girl when one day, to express her thanks for a present which a strange lady had given her, she had said: “I’m quite overcome.” Mme Bontemps had been unable to refrain from looking across at her husband, whose comment was: “Well, well, and she’s only fourteen.”
Her more pronounced nubility had struck home when Albertine, speaking of another girl whom she considered ill-bred, said: “One can’t even tell whether she’s pretty, because she paints her face a foot thick.” Finally, though still only a girl, she already displayed the manner of a grown woman of her upbringing and station when she said, of someone whose face twitched: “I can’t look at him, because it makes me want to do the same,” or, if someone else were being imitated: “The absurd thing about it is that when you imitate her voice you look exactly like her.” All this is drawn from the social treasury. But the point was that it did not seem to me possible that Albertine’s natural environment could have supplied her with “distinguished” in the sense in which my father would say of a colleague whom he had not actually met but whose intellectual attainments he had heard praised: “It appears he’s a very distinguished person.” “Selection,” even when used of a golf club, struck me as being as incompatible with the Simonet family as it would be, if preceded by the adjective “natural,” with a text published centuries before the researches of Darwin. “Lapse of time” seemed to me to augur better still. Finally there appeared the evidence of certain upheavals, the nature of which was unknown to me, but sufficient to justify me in all my hopes, when Albertine observed, with the self-satisfaction of a person whose opinion is by no means to be despised:
“To my mind, that is the best thing that could possibly happen. I regard it as the best solution, the stylish way out.”
This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit leading one to suspect such capricious wanderings over ground hitherto unknown to her, that on hearing the words “to my mind” I drew Albertine towards me, and at “I regard” sat her down on my bed.
No doubt it happens that women of moderate culture, on marrying well-read men, receive such expressions as part of their dowry. And shortly after the metamorphosis which follows the wedding night, when they start paying calls and are stand-offish with their old friends, one notices with surprise that they have turned into matrons if, in decreeing that some person is intelligent, they sound both “1”s in the word; but that is precisely the sign of a change of state, and it seemed to me that there was a world of difference between the new expressions and the vocabulary of the Albertine I had known of old—a vocabulary in which the most daring flights were to say of any unusual person: “He’s a type,” or, if you suggested a game of cards to her: “I don’t have money to burn,” or again, if any of her friends were to reproach her in terms which she felt to be unjustified: “You really are the limit!”—expressions dictated in