In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [294]
“What you say is absurd,” M. de Guermantes broke in sharply. “There’s nothing effeminate about Mémé. Nobody could be more manly than he is.”
“But I’m not suggesting for a moment that he’s the least bit effeminate. Do at least take the trouble to understand what I say,” retorted the Duchess. “He’s always like that the moment he thinks one’s getting at his brother,” she added, turning to the Princesse de Parme.
“It’s very charming, it’s a pleasure to hear him. There’s nothing so nice as two brothers who are fond of each other,” replied the Princess, as many a humbler person might have replied, for it is possible to belong to a princely family by blood and a very plebeian family by intellect.
“While we’re on the subject of your family, Oriane,” said the Princess, “I saw your nephew Saint-Loup yesterday. I believe he wants to ask you a favour.”
The Duc de Guermantes knitted his Olympian brow. When he did not care to do someone a favour, he preferred that his wife should not undertake to do so, knowing that it would come to the same thing in the end and that the people to whom she would be obliged to apply would put it down to the common account of the household, just as much as if it had been requested by the husband alone.
“Why didn’t he ask me himself?” said the Duchess, “he was here yesterday and stayed a couple of hours, and I can’t tell you how boring he was. He would be no stupider than anyone else if he had only had the sense, like many people we know, to remain a fool. It’s his veneer of knowledge that’s so terrible. He wants to have an open mind—open to all the things he doesn’t understand. The way he goes on about Morocco, it’s frightful.”
“He doesn’t want to go back there, because of Rachel,” said the Prince de Foix.
“But I thought they’d broken it off,” interrupted M. de Bréauté.
“So far from breaking it off, I found her a couple of days ago in Robert’s rooms, and they didn’t look at all like people who’d quarrelled, I can assure you,” replied the Prince de Foix, who liked to spread every rumour that could damage Robert’s chances of marrying, and who might, moreover, have been misled by one of the intermittent resumptions of a liaison that was practically at an end.
“That Rachel was speaking to me about you. I run into her occasionally in the morning in the Champs-Elysées. She’s somewhat flighty as you say, what you call unbuttoned, a kind of ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ figuratively speaking, of course.” (This speech was addressed to me by Prince Von, who liked always to appear conversant with French literature and Parisian refinements.)
“Why, that’s just what it was—Morocco!” exclaimed the Princess, flinging herself into this opening.
“What on earth can he want in Morocco?” asked M. de Guermantes sternly. “Oriane can do absolutely nothing for him there, as he knows perfectly well.”
“He thinks he invented strategy,” Mme de Guermantes pursued the theme, “and then he uses impossible words for the simplest thing, which doesn’t prevent him from making blots all over his letters. The other day he announced that he’d been given some sublime potatoes, and that he’d taken a sublime stage box.”
“He speaks Latin,” the Duke went one better.
“What! Latin?” the Princess gasped.
“On my word of honour! Your Highness can ask Oriane if I’m not telling the truth.”
“Why, yes, Ma’am; the other day he said to us straight out, without stopping to think: ‘I know of no more touching example of sic transit gloria mundi.’ I can repeat the phrase now to your Highness because, after endless inquiries and by appealing to linguists, we succeeded in reconstructing it, but Robert flung it out without pausing for breath, one could hardly make out that there was Latin in it, he was just like a character in the Malade Imaginaire. And it was