In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [334]
“Why, no,” he replied with the air of a connoisseur. “I know the name you mention, from having seen it in club directories—it isn’t at all the type of person who goes to Gilbert’s. You’ll see nobody there who is not excessively well-bred and intensely boring, duchesses bearing titles which one thought were extinct years ago and which have been trotted out for the occasion, all the ambassadors, heaps of Coburgs, foreign royalties, but you mustn’t expect even the ghost of a Stermaria. Gilbert would be taken ill at the mere thought of such a thing. Wait now, you’re fond of painting, I must show you a superb picture I bought from my cousin, partly in exchange for the Elstirs, which frankly didn’t appeal to us. It was sold to me as a Philippe de Champaigne, but I believe myself that it’s by someone even greater. Would you like to know what I think? I think it’s a Velázquez, and of the best period,” said the Duke, looking me boldly in the eyes, either to ascertain my impression or in the hope of enhancing it. A footman came in.
“Mme la Duchesse wishes to know if M. le Duc will be so good as to see M. Swann, as Mme la Duchesse is not quite ready.”
“Show M. Swann in,” said the Duke, after looking at his watch and seeing that he himself still had a few minutes before he need go to dress. “Naturally my wife, who told him to come, isn’t ready. No point in saying anything in front of Swann about Marie-Gilbert’s party,” said the Duke. “I don’t know whether he’s been invited. Gilbert likes him immensely, because he believes him to be the natural grandson of the Duc de Berry, but that’s a long story. (Otherwise you can imagine!—my cousin, who has a fit if he sees a Jew a mile off.) But now of course the Dreyfus case has made things more serious. Swann ought to have realised that he more than anyone must drop all connexion with those fellows, instead of which he says the most regrettable things.”
The Duke called back the footman to know whether the man who had been sent to inquire at cousin Osmond’s had returned. His plan was as follows: since he rightly believed that his cousin was dying, he was anxious to obtain news of him before his death, that is to say before he was obliged to go into mourning. Once covered by the official certainty that Amanien was still alive, he would sneak off to his dinner, to the Prince’s reception, to the midnight revel where he was to appear as Louis XI and where he had a most tantalising assignation with a new mistress, and would make no more inquiries until the following day, when his pleasures would be over. Then he would put on mourning if the cousin had passed away in the night. “No, M. le Duc, he is not back yet.” “Hell and damnation! Nothing is ever done in this house till the last minute,” cried the Duke, at the thought that Amanien might still be in time to “croak” for an evening paper, and to make him miss his revel. He sent for Le Temps, in which there was nothing.
I had not seen Swann for a long time, and found myself wondering momentarily whether in the old days he used to clip his moustache, or whether his hair had not been en brosse, for I found him somehow changed. It was simply that he was indeed greatly “changed” because he was very ill, and illness produces in the face modifications as profound as are created by growing a beard or by changing one’s parting. (Swann’s illness was the same that had killed his mother, who had been struck down by it at precisely the age which he had now reached. Our lives are in truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if sorcerers really existed. And just as there is