In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [292]
“Babal always knows everything,” exclaimed the Duchesse de Guermantes. “I think it must be charming, a country where you can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you with really rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet. I can just see myself dipping my bread and butter in them. I may say that it sometimes happens at aunt Madeleine’s” (Mme de Villeparisis’s) “that things are served in a state of putrefaction, eggs included.” Then, as Mme d’Arpajon protested, “But my dear Phili, you know it as well as I do. You can see the chicken in the egg. In fact I can’t think how they can be so well behaved as to stay in. It’s not an omelette you get there, it’s a regular hen-house, but at least it isn’t marked on the menu. You were so wise not to come to dinner there the day before yesterday, there was a brill cooked in carbolic! I assure you, it wasn’t hospitality so much as a hospital for contagious diseases. Really, Norpois carries loyalty to the pitch of heroism: he had a second helping!”
“I believe I saw you there the time she lashed out at M. Bloch” (M. de Guermantes, perhaps to give a Jewish name a more foreign sound, pronounced the “ch” in Bloch not like a “k” but as in the German “hoch”) “when he said about some poit” (poet) “or other that he was sublime. Châtellerault did his best to break M. Bloch’s shins, but the fellow didn’t understand and thought my nephew’s kicks were aimed at a young woman sitting next to him.” (At this point M. de Guermantes coloured slightly.) “He didn’t realise that he was irritating our aunt with his ‘sublimes’ chucked about all over the place like that. Anyhow, aunt Madeleine, who’s never at a loss for words, turned on him with: ‘Indeed, sir, and what epithet are you going to keep for M. de Bossuet?’ ” (M. de Guermantes thought that, when one mentioned a famous name, the use of “Monsieur” and a particle was eminently “old school.”) “It was absolutely killing.”
“And what answer did this M. Bloch make?” came in a careless tone from Mme de Guermantes, who, running short for the moment of original ideas, felt that she must copy her husband’s Teutonic pronunciation.
“Ah! I can assure you M. Bloch didn’t wait for any more, he fled.”
“Yes, I remember very well seeing you there that evening,” said Mme de Guermantes with emphasis, as though there must be something highly flattering to myself in this remembrance on her part. “It’s always so interesting at my aunt’s. At that last party, where I met you, I meant to ask you whether that old gentleman who went past us wasn’t François Coppée. You must know who everyone is,” she went on, sincerely envious of my relations with poets and poetry, and also out of amiability towards me, the wish to enhance the status, in the eyes of her other guests, of a young man so well versed in literature. I assured the Duchess that I had not observed any celebrities at Mme de Villeparisis’s party. “What!” she exclaimed unguardedly, betraying the fact that her respect for men of letters and her contempt for society were more superficial than she said, perhaps even than she thought, “what, no famous authors there! You astonish me! Why, I saw all sorts of quite impossible-looking people!”
I remembered the evening very well on account of an entirely trivial incident. Mme de Villeparisis had introduced Bloch to Mme Alphonse de Rothschild, but my friend had not caught the name and, thinking he was talking to an old English lady who was a trifle mad, had replied only in monosyllables to the garrulous conversation of the historic beauty, when Mme de Villeparisis, introducing her to someone else, had pronounced, quite distinctly this time: “The Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild.” Thereupon so many ideas of millions and of glamour, which it would have been more prudent to subdivide and separate, had suddenly and simultaneously coursed