In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [246]
me her hand, but took mine in a familiar clasp, and spoke to me exactly as though I had been as aware as she was of the pleasant memories to which her mind reverted. She told me how sorry Albert (who I gathered was her son) would be to have missed seeing me. I tried to remember which of my schoolfriends had been called Albert, and could think only of Bloch, but this could not be Bloch’s mother since she had been dead for many years. In vain I struggled to identify the past experience common to herself and me to which her thoughts had been carried back. But I could no more distinguish it through the translucent jet of her large, soft pupils which allowed only her smile to pierce their surface than one can distinguish a landscape that lies on the other side of a pane of smoked glass even when the sun is blazing on it. She asked me whether my father was not working too hard, if I would like to come to the theatre some evening with Albert, if my health was better, and as my replies, stumbling through the mental darkness in which I was plunged, became distinct only to explain that I was not feeling well that evening, she pushed forward a chair for me herself, putting herself out in a way to which I had never been accustomed by my parents’ other friends. At length the clue to the riddle was furnished me by the Duke: “She thinks you’re charming,” he murmured in my ear, which felt somehow that it had heard these words before. They were the words Mme de Villeparisis had spoken to my grandmother and myself after we had made the acquaintance of the Princesse de Luxembourg. Everything was now clear; the present lady had nothing in common with Mme de Luxembourg, but from the language of the man who served her up to me I could discern the nature of the beast. She was a royal personage. She had never before heard of either my family or myself, but, a scion of the noblest race and endowed with the greatest fortune in the world (for, a daughter of the Prince de Parme, she had married an equally princely cousin), she sought always, in gratitude to her Creator, to testify to her neighbour, however poor or lowly he might be, that she did not look down upon him. And indeed I ought to have guessed this from her smile, for I had seen the Princesse de Luxembourg buy little rye-cakes on the beach at Balbec to give to my grandmother, as though to a caged deer in the zoo. But this was only the second princess of the blood royal to whom I had been presented, and I might be excused my failure to discern in her the generic features of the affability of the great. Besides, had not they themselves gone out of their way to warn me not to count too much on this affability, since the Duchesse de Guermantes, who had waved me so effusive a greeting with her gloved hand at the Opéra, had appeared furious when I bowed to her in the street, like the people who, having once given somebody a sovereign, feel that this has released them from any further obligation towards him. As for M. de Charlus, his ups and downs were even more sharply contrasted. And I was later to know, as the reader will learn, highnesses and majesties of another sort altogether, queens who play the queen and speak not after the conventions of their kind but like the queens in Sardou’s plays.
If M. de Guermantes had been in such haste to present me, it was because the presence at a gathering of anyone not personally known to a royal personage is an intolerable state of things which must not be prolonged for a single instant. It was similar to the haste which Saint-Loup had shown to be introduced to my grandmother. By the same token, in a fragmentary survival of the old life of the court which is called social etiquette and is by no means superficial, wherein, rather, by a sort of outside-in reversal, it is the surface that becomes essential and profound, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes regarded as a duty more essential and more inflexible than those (all too often neglected by one at least of the pair) of charity, chastity, pity and justice, that of rarely addressing the Princesse de Parme