In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [290]
“I don’t know why you should say that, Basin,” interrupted the Duchess, who did not like to hear people run down anything that her rooms contained. “I’m by no means prepared to admit that there’s no distinction in Elstir’s painting. You have to take it or leave it. But it’s not always lacking in talent. And you must admit that the ones I bought are remarkably beautiful.”
“Well, Oriane, in that style of thing I’d infinitely prefer to have the little study by M. Vibert we saw at the water-colour exhibition. There’s nothing much in it, if you like, you could hold it in the palm of your hand, but you can see the man’s got wit to the tips of his fingers: that shabby scarecrow of a missionary standing in front of the sleek prelate who is making his little dog do tricks, it’s a perfect little poem of subtlety, and even profundity.”
“I believe you know M. Elstir,” the Duchess said to me. “As a man, he’s quite pleasant.”
“He’s intelligent,” said the Duke. “You’re surprised, when you talk to him, that his paintings should be so vulgar.”
“He’s more than intelligent, he’s really quite witty,” said the Duchess in the judicious, appraising tone of a person who knew what she was talking about.
“Didn’t he once start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Princesse de Parme.
“Yes, in shrimp pink,” replied Mme de Guermantes, “but that’s not going to make his name live for posterity. It’s a ghastly thing; Basin wanted to have it destroyed.”
This last statement was one which Mme de Guermantes often made. But at other times her appreciation of the picture was different: “I don’t care for his painting, but he did once do a good portrait of me.” The first of these judgments was addressed as a rule to people who spoke to the Duchess of her portrait, the other to those who did not refer to it and whom therefore she was anxious to inform of its existence. The first was inspired in her by coquetry, the second by vanity.
“Make a portrait of you look ghastly! Why, then it can’t be a portrait, it’s a lie. I don’t know one end of a brush from the other, but I’m sure if I were to paint you, merely putting you down as I see you, I should produce a masterpiece,” said the Princesse de Parme ingenuously.
“He probably sees me as I see myself, bereft of allurements,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, with the look, at once melancholy, modest and winning, which seemed to her best calculated to make her appear different from what Elstir had portrayed.
“That portrait ought to appeal to Mme de Gallardon,” said the Duke.
“Because she knows nothing about pictures?” asked the Princesse de Parme, who knew that Mme de Guermantes had an infinite contempt for her cousin. “But she’s a very kind woman, isn’t she?”
The Duke assumed an air of profound astonishment.
“Why, Basin, don’t you see the Princess is making fun of you?” (The Princess had never dreamed of doing such a thing.) “She knows as well as you do that Gallardonette is a poisonous crone,” went on Mme de Guermantes, whose vocabulary, habitually limited to all these old expressions, was as richly flavoured as those dishes which it is possible to come across in the delicious books of Pampille, but which have in real life become so rare, dishes in which the jellies, the butter, the gravy, the quenelles are all genuine and unalloyed, in which even the salt is brought specially from the salt-marshes of Brittany: from her accent, her choice of words, one felt that