In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [305]
I scarcely listened to these stories, of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my favourite trains of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I lived on the surface, my hair well brushed, my shirt-front starched, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life.
“Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme de Guermantes, who felt that the German prince was wanting in tact, “I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world.”
“But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Prince, who was losing his temper and unable to see that he was giving offence, “you must admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is charming, excessively gentle and dim-witted. But still, there’s something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria . . .”
“He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess, “he’s a witty fellow.”
“He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good man on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends with, it’s the Kaiser’s dearest wish, but he insists on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-French rapprochement M. de Norpois preaches.”*
“You know him, of course,” said the Duchess, turning to me, so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand, and thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on the contrary, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me.
“You’re quite mistaken,” replied the Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we’ve never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke about you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.”
M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious