the basis of the Duchess’s conversation came directly from Guermantes. In this way, the Duchess differed profoundly from her nephew Saint-Loup, impregnated by so many new ideas and expressions; it is difficult, when one’s mind is troubled by the ideas of Kant and the yearnings of Baudelaire, to write the exquisite French of Henri IV, so that the very purity of the Duchess’s language was a sign of limitation and that, in her, both intelligence and sensibility had remained closed against innovation. Here again, Mme de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was precisely the substance of my own thoughts) and everything which, by virtue of that exclusion, it had been able to preserve, that seductive vigour of supple bodies which no exhausting reflexion, no moral anxiety or nervous disorder has deformed. Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the gait and the bearing of the girls of the little band along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and subdued by civility, by respect for intellectual values, all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, had tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, instead of having remained a pillar of virtue, might equally well have been, a good few years ago now, so much did she have the same dashing style, the most brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan. But she was incapable of understanding what I had looked for in her—the charm of her historic name—and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes. Our relations were based on a misunderstanding which could not fail to become manifest as soon as my homage, instead of being addressed to the relatively superior woman she believed herself to be, was diverted to some other woman of equal mediocrity and exuding the same unconscious charm. A misunderstanding that is entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer and a society woman, but nevertheless profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature of his imaginative faculties and has not yet resigned himself to the inevitable disappointments he is destined to find in people, as in the theatre, in travel and indeed in love.
M. de Guermantes having declared (following upon Elstir’s asparagus and those that had just been served after the chicken financière) that green asparagus grown in the open air, which, as has been so quaintly said by the charming writer who signs herself E. de Clermont-Tonnerre, “have not the impressive rigidity of their sisters,” ought to be eaten with eggs. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as they say,” replied M. de Bréauté. “In the province of Canton, in China, the greatest delicacy that can be set before one is a dish of completely rotten ortolan’s eggs.” M. de Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons which had appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, moved in none but the most aristocratic circles, but among these only such as had a certain reputation for intellect, with the result that from his presence, if it was at all regular, in a woman’s house, one could tell that she had a “salon.” He claimed to loathe society, and assured each of his duchesses in turn that it was for the sake of her wit and beauty that he came to see her. They all believed him. Whenever he resigned himself, with a heavy heart, to attending a big reception at the Princesse de Parme’s, he collected them all around him to keep up his courage, and thus appeared only to be moving in the midst of an intimate circle. So that his reputation as an intellectual might survive his social activity, applying certain maxims of the Guermantes spirit, he would set out with the ladies of fashion on long scientific expeditions at the height of the dancing season, and when a snobbish person, in other words a person not yet socially secure, began to be seen everywhere, he would be ferociously