In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [301]
The Princesse de Parme, who did not know so much as the painter’s name, nodded her head vehemently and smiled ardently, in order to manifest her admiration for this picture. But the intensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light which is absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what people are talking to us about.
“A good-looking boy, I believe?” she asked.
“No, he’s just like a tapir. The eyes are a little those of a Queen Hortense on a lamp-shade. But he probably came to the conclusion that it would be rather absurd for a man to develop such a resemblance, and so it’s lost in the encaustic surface of his cheeks which give him really rather a Mameluke appearance. You feel that the polisher must call round every morning. Swann,” she went on, reverting to the young duke’s bed, “was struck by the resemblance between that Siren and Gustave Moreau’s Death. But in fact,” she added, in a more rapid but still serious tone of voice, in order to provoke more laughter, “there was nothing really to get worked up about, for it was only a cold in the head, and the young man is now as fit as a fiddle.”
“They say he’s a snob?” put in M. de Bréauté, with a malicious twinkle, expecting to be answered with the same precision as though he had said: “They tell me that he has only four fingers on his right hand; is that so?”
“G—ood g—racious, n—o,” replied Mme de Guermantes with a smile of benign tolerance. “Perhaps just the least little bit of a snob in appearance, because he’s extremely young, but I should be surprised to hear that he was in reality, for he’s intelligent,” she added, as though there were to her mind some absolute incompatibility between snobbishness and intelligence. “He has wit, too, I’ve known him to be quite amusing,” she said again, laughing with the air of an epicure and expert, as though the act of declaring that a person could be amusing demanded a certain expression of merriment from the speaker, or as though the Duc de Guastalla’s sallies were recurring to her mind as she spoke. “Anyway, as he is never invited anywhere, he can’t have much scope for his snobbishness,” she wound up, oblivious of the fact that this was hardly an encouragement to the Princesse de Parme.
“I cannot help wondering what the Prince de Guermantes, who calls her Mme Iéna, will say if he hears that I’ve been to see her.”
“What!” cried the Duchess with extraordinary vivacity. “Don’t you know that it was we who gave up to Gilbert” (she bitterly regretted that surrender now) “a complete card-room done in the Empire style which came to us from Quiou-Quiou and is an absolute marvel! There was no room for it here, though I think it would look better here than it does in his house. It’s a thing of sheer beauty, half Etruscan, half Egyptian . . .”
“Egyptian?” queried the Princess, to whom the word Etruscan conveyed little.
“Well, you know, a little of both. Swann told us that, he explained it all to me, only you know I’m such a dunce. But then, Ma’am, what one has to bear in mind is that the Egypt of the Empire cabinet-makers has nothing to do with the historical Egypt, nor their Romans with the Romans nor their Etruria . . .”
“Indeed,” said the Princess.
“No, it’s like what they used to call a Louis XV costume under the Second Empire, when Anna de Mouchy and dear Brigode’s mother were girls. Basin was talking to you just now about Beethoven. We heard a thing of his played the other day which was really rather fine, though a little