In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [289]
“Why, yes,” answered the Duchess with a laugh, entranced by this display of suffocation. “Your Highness must have remarked how he magnifies everything he touches. You will tell me that he only touches . . . what brings luck! But he makes it into something colossal. His is the epic dungheap! He is the Homer of the sewers! He hasn’t enough capital letters to write the mot de Cambronne.”29
Despite the extreme exhaustion which she was beginning to feel, the Princess was enchanted; never had she felt better. She would not have exchanged for an invitation to Schönbrunn, although that was the one thing that really flattered her, these divine dinner-parties at Mme de Guermantes’s, made invigorating by so liberal a dose of Attic salt.
“He writes it with a big ‘C’,” exclaimed Mme d’Arpajon.
“Surely with a big ‘M’, I think, my dear,” replied Mme de Guermantes, exchanging first with her husband a merry glance which implied: “Did you ever hear such an idiot?”
“Wait a minute, now,” Mme de Guermantes turned to me, fixing on me a tender, smiling gaze, because, as an accomplished hostess, she was anxious to display her own knowledge of the artist who interested me particularly and to give me, if need be, an opportunity to exhibit mine, “wait now,” she said, gently waving her feather fan, so conscious was she at this moment that she was exercising to the full the duties of hospitality, and, that she might be found wanting in none of them, making a sign also to the servants to help me to more of the asparagus with mousseline sauce, “wait now, I do believe that Zola has actually written an essay on Elstir, the painter whose paintings you were looking at just now—the only ones of his I care for, incidentally.”
As a matter of fact she hated Elstir’s work, but found a unique quality in anything that was in her own house. I asked M. de Guermantes if he knew the name of the gentleman in the tall hat who figured in the picture of the crowd and whom I recognised as the same person whose formal portrait the Guermantes also had and had hung beside the other, both dating more or less from the same early period in which Elstir’s personality had not yet completely emerged and he modelled himself a little on Manet.
“Oh, heavens!” he replied, “I know it’s a fellow who is quite well-known and no fool either in his own line, but I have no head for names. I have it on the tip of my tongue, Monsieur . . . Monsieur . . . oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I’ve forgotten. Swann would be able to tell you. It was he who made Mme de Guermantes buy all that stuff. She’s always too good-natured, afraid of hurting people’s feelings if she refuses to do things; between ourselves, I believe he’s landed us with a lot of daubs. What I can tell you is that the gentleman you mean has been a sort of Maecenas to M. Elstir—he launched him and has often helped him out of difficulties by commissioning pictures from him. As a compliment to this man—if you call it a compliment, it’s a matter of taste—he painted him standing about among that crowd, where with his Sunday-go-to-meeting look he creates a distinctly odd effect. He may be no end of a pundit but he’s evidently not aware of the proper time and place for a top hat. With that thing on his head, among all those bare-headed girls, he looks like a little country lawyer on the spree. But tell me, you seem quite gone on his pictures. If I’d only known, I should have had it all at my fingertips. Not that there’s much need to rack one’s brains to get to the bottom of M. Elstir’s work, as there would be for Ingres’s Source or the Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche. What one appreciates in his work is that it’s shrewdly observed, amusing, Parisian, and then one passes on to the next thing. One doesn’t need to be an expert to look at that sort of thing. I know of course that they’re merely sketches, but still, I don’t feel myself that he puts enough work into them. Swann had the nerve to