In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [249]
who had recently come into prominence by the discovery of a new cure for something or the production of a masterpiece. The Faubourg Saint-Germain had not yet recovered from the shock of learning that the Duchess had not been afraid to invite M. Detaille22 to the reception which she had given to meet the King and Queen of England. The clever women of the Faubourg were not easily consolable for not having been invited, so deliciously thrilling would it have been to come into contact with that strange genius. Mme de Courvoisier averred that M. Ribot had been there as well, but this was a pure invention designed to make people believe that Oriane was aiming at an embassy for her husband. To cap it all, M. de Guermantes, with a gallantry that would have done credit to Marshal Saxe, had presented himself at the stage door of the Comédie-Française and had persuaded Mlle Reichenberg to come and recite before the King, something that constituted an event without precedent in the annals of routs. Remembering all these unexpected happenings, which moreover had his entire approval, his own presence being both an ornament to and, in the same way as that of the Duchesse de Guermantes but in the masculine gender, an endorsement for any salon, M. de Bréauté, when he asked himself who I could be, felt that the field of inquiry was very wide. For a moment the name of M. Widor flashed before his mind, but he decided that I was too young to be an organist, and M. Widor not prominent enough to be “received.” It seemed on the whole more plausible to regard me simply as the new attaché at the Swedish Legation of whom he had heard, and he was preparing to ask me for the latest news of King Oscar, by whom he had several times been very hospitably received; but when the Duke, in introducing me, had mentioned my name to M. de Bréauté, the latter, finding the name to be completely unknown to him, had no longer any doubt that, since I was there, I must be a celebrity of some sort. It was absolutely typical of Oriane, who had the knack of attracting to her salon men who were in the public eye, in a ratio that of course never exceeded one in a hundred, otherwise she would have lowered its tone. Accordingly M. de Bréauté began to lick his chops and to sniff the air greedily, his appetite whetted not only by the good dinner he could count on, but by the character of the party, which my presence could not fail to make interesting and which would furnish him with an intriguing topic of conversation next day at the Duc de Chartres’s luncheon-table. He was not yet enlightened as to whether I was the man who had just been making those experiments with a serum against cancer, or the author of the new “curtain-raiser” then in rehearsal at the Théâtre-Français; but, a great intellectual, a great collector of “travellers’ tales,” he lavished on me an endless series of bows, signs of mutual understanding, smiles filtered through the glass of his monocle, either in the misapprehension that a man of standing would esteem him more highly if he could manage to instil into me the illusion that for him, the Comte de Bréauté-Consalvi, the privileges of the mind were no less deserving of respect than those of birth, or simply from the need to express and the difficulty of expressing his satisfaction, in his ignorance of the language in which he ought to address me, precisely as if he had found himself face to face with one of the “natives” of an undiscovered country on which his raft had landed, from whom, in the hope of ultimate profit, he would endeavour, observing with interest the while their quaint customs and without interrupting his demonstrations of friendship or forgetting to utter loud cries of benevolence like them, to obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for glass beads. Having responded as best I could to his joy, I shook hands with the Duc de Châtellerault, whom I had already met at Mme de Villeparisis’s and who observed that she was “a sharp customer.” He was typically Guermantes with his fair hair, his aquiline profile, the points where the skin of