In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [297]
stewed cherries or stewed pears. I took a dislike on this account to the Prince d’Agrigente, who was like all those people who, lacking in imagination but not in covetousness, take a keen interest in what one is drinking and ask if they may taste a little of it themselves. Which meant that, every time, M. d’Agrigente, by diminishing my ration, spoiled my pleasure. For this fruit juice can never be provided in sufficient quantities to quench one’s thirst. Nothing is less cloying than that transmutation into flavour of the colour of a fruit, which, when cooked, seems to have travelled backwards to the season of its blossoming. Blushing like an orchard in spring, or else colourless and cool like the zephyr beneath the fruit-trees, the juice can be sniffed and gloated over drop by drop, and M. d’Agrigente prevented me, regularly, from taking my fill of it. Despite these distillations, the traditional orangeade persisted like the lime-blossom tea. In these humble kinds, the social communion was none the less celebrated. In this respect, doubtless, the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes had after all, as I had originally imagined them, remained more different from the rest of humanity than their disappointing exterior might have misled me into supposing. Numbers of elderly men came to receive from the Duchess, together with the invariable drink, a welcome that was often far from warm. Now this could not have been due to snobbishness, they themselves being of a rank to which there was none superior; nor to love of luxury: they did love it perhaps, but, in less exalted social conditions, might have been enjoying a glittering example of it, for on those same evenings the charming wife of a colossally rich financier would have given anything in the world to have them among the brilliant shooting-party she was giving for a couple of days for the King of Spain. They had nevertheless declined her invitation, and had come round without fail to see whether Mme de Guermantes was at home. They were not even certain of finding there opinions that conformed entirely with their own, or sentiments of any great cordiality; Mme de Guermantes would throw out from time to time—on the Dreyfus case, on the Republic, on the anti-religious laws, or even, in an undertone, on themselves, their weaknesses, the dullness of their conversation—comments which they had to appear not to notice. No doubt, if they kept up their habit of coming there, it was owing to their consummate training as epicures in things worldly, to their clear consciousness of the prime and perfect quality of the social pabulum, with its familiar, reassuring, sapid flavour, free of admixture or adulteration, with the origin and history of which they were as well acquainted as she who served them with it, remaining more “noble” in this respect than they themselves imagined. Now, on this occasion, among the visitors to whom I was introduced after dinner, it so happened that there was that General de Monserfeuil of whom the Princesse de Parme had spoken and whom Mme de Guermantes, of whose drawing-room he was one of the regular frequenters, had not expected that evening. He bowed before me, on hearing my name, as though I had been the President of the Supreme War Council. I had supposed it to be simply from some deep-rooted unwillingness to oblige, in which the Duke, as in wit if not in love, was his wife’s accomplice, that the Duchess had practically refused to recommend her nephew to M. de Monserfeuil. And I saw in this an indifference all the more blameworthy in that I seemed to have gathered from a few words which the Princess had let fall that Robert was in a post of danger from which it would be prudent to have him removed. But it was by the genuine malice of Mme de Guermantes that I was revolted when, the Princesse de Parme having timidly suggested that she might say something herself and on her own initiative to the General, the Duchess did everything in her power to dissuade her.
“But Ma’am,” she cried, “Monserfeuil has no sort of standing or influence whatever with the new Government.