In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [286]
On a branch that is still too feeble to bear it.
Or again:
The dead last so short a time . . .
Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust,
Less quickly than in our hearts!”
And, while a smile of disillusionment puckered her sorrowful lips with a graceful sinuosity, the Duchess fastened on Mme d’Arpajon the dreamy gaze of her lovely clear blue eyes. I was beginning to know them, as well as her voice, with its heavy drawl, its harsh savour. In those eyes and in that voice, I recognised much of the life of nature round Combray. Certainly, in the affectation with which that voice betrayed at times a rudeness of the soil, there was more than one element: the wholly provincial origin of one branch of the Guermantes family, which had for long remained more localised, more hardy, wilder, more combative than the rest; and then the ingrained habit of really distinguished people and people of intelligence who know that distinction does not lie in mincing speech, and the habit of nobles who fraternise more readily with their peasants than with the middle classes; peculiarities all of which the regal position of Mme de Guermantes enabled her to display more freely, to bring out in full fig. It appears that the same voice existed also in some of her sisters, whom she detested, and who, less intelligent than herself and almost humbly married, if one may use this adverb to speak of unions with obscure noblemen, holed up on their provincial estates, or, in Paris, in one of the dimmer reaches of Faubourg society, possessed this voice also but had curbed it, corrected it, softened it so far as lay in their power, just as it is very rarely that any of us has the courage of his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to resembling the most approved models. But Oriane was so much more intelligent, so much richer, above all, so much more in vogue than her sisters, she had, when Princesse des Laumes, cut so successful a figure in the company of the Prince of Wales, that she had realised that this discordant voice was an attraction, and had made it, in the social sphere, with the courage of originality rewarded by success, what in the theatrical sphere a Réjane or a Jeanne Granier (which implies no comparison, naturally, between the respective merits and talents of those two actresses) had made of theirs, something admirable and distinctive which possibly certain Réjane and Granier sisters, whom no one has ever known, strove to conceal as a defect.
To all these reasons for displaying her local originality, Mme de Guermantes’s favourite writers—Mérimée, Meilhac and Halévy—had brought in addition, together with a respect for “naturalness,” a feeling for the prosaic by which she attained to poetry and a purely society spirit which called up distant landscapes before my eyes. Besides, the Duchess was fully capable, adding to these influences an artful refinement of her own, of having chosen for the majority of her words the pronunciation that seemed to her most “Ile-de-France,” most “Champenoise,” since, if not quite to the same extent as her sister-in-law Marsantes, she rarely strayed beyond the pure vocabulary that might have been used by an old French writer. And when one was tired of the composite patchwork of modern speech, it was very restful to listen to Mme de Guermantes’s talk, even though one knew it could express far fewer things—almost as restful, if one was alone with her and she restrained and clarified the flow of her speech still further, as listening to an old song. Then, as I looked at and listened to Mme de Guermantes, I could see, imprisoned in the perpetual afternoon of her eyes, a sky of the Ile-de-France or of Champagne spread itself, grey-blue, oblique, with the same angle of inclination as in the eyes of Saint-Loup.
Thus, through these diverse influences, Mme de Guermantes expressed at once the most ancient aristocratic France, then, much later, the manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie might have enjoyed and found fault with Victor Hugo under the July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen taste for