In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [302]
“Forty years!” the Princess cried in alarm.
“Why, yes,” went on the Duchess, adding more and more to her words (which were practically my own, for I had just been expressing a similar idea to her), thanks to her way of pronouncing them, the equivalent of what on the printed page are called italics, “it’s like a sort of first isolated individual of a species which does not yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an individual endowed with a kind of sense which the human race of his generation does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance because I, on the contrary, have always loved any interesting artistic offering from the very start, however novel it might be. But anyway the other day I was with the Grand Duchess in the Louvre and we happened to pass Manet’s Olympia. Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven knows how I had to take up the cudgels on behalf of that picture, which I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody. Perhaps the Louvre isn’t quite the place for it.”
“And is the Grand Duchess well?” inquired the Princesse de Parme, to whom the Tsar’s aunt was infinitely more familiar than Manet’s model.
“Yes; we talked about you. After all,” she resumed, clinging to her idea, “the fact of the matter is, as my brother-in-law Palamède always says, that one has between oneself and the rest of the world the barrier of a strange language.* Though I admit that there’s no one it’s quite so true of as Gilbert. If it amuses you to go to the Iénas’, you have far too much sense to let your actions be governed by what that poor fellow may think—he’s a dear, innocent creature, but he really lives in another world. I feel nearer, more akin to my coachman, my horses even, than to a man who keeps on harking back to what people would have thought under Philip the Bold or Louis the Fat. Just fancy, when he goes for a walk in the country, he waves the peasants out of his way with his stick, quite affably, saying ‘Get along there, churls!’ In fact I’m as amazed when he speaks to me as if I heard myself addressed by a recumbent figure on an old Gothic tomb. It’s all very well that animated gravestone’s being my cousin; he frightens me, and the only idea that comes into my head is to let him stay in his Middle Ages. Apart from that, I quite admit that he’s never murdered anyone.”
“I’ve just been seeing him at dinner at Mme de Villeparisis’s,” said the General, but without either smiling at or endorsing the Duchess’s pleasantries.
“Was M. de Norpois there?” asked Prince Von, whose mind still ran on the Academy of Moral Sciences.
“Yes,” said the General. “In fact he was talking about your Emperor.”
“It seems the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he doesn’t care for Elstir’s painting. Not that that’s anything against him,” said the Duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s an intriguing piece of work. He’s most interesting while one’s sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman. It’s modelled on The Women Regents of the Hospice, by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow one of my nephew’s favourite expressions,” the Duchess turned to me, gently flapping her black feather fan. More than erect on her chair, she flung her head nobly backwards, for, while always a great lady, she was a trifle inclined to act the part of the great lady too. I said that I had been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that to avoid getting everything muddled up, since my