In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [95]
“Anything specially interesting about that waiter, Zézette?” he inquired, after sharply dismissing Aimé. “One would think you were making a study of him.”
“There we go again; I knew it would happen!”
“You knew what would happen, my dear girl? If I was mistaken, I’m quite prepared to take it all back. But I have after all the right to warn you against that flunkey whom I know all about from Balbec (otherwise I shouldn’t give a damn), and who is the biggest scoundrel that ever walked the face of the earth.”
She seemed anxious to pacify Robert and began to engage me in a literary conversation in which he joined. I did not find her boring to talk to, for she had a thorough knowledge of the works I admired, and her opinion of them agreed more or less with mine; but since I had heard Mme de Villeparisis declare that she had no talent, I attached little importance to this evidence of culture. She discoursed wittily on all manner of topics, and would have been genuinely entertaining had she not affected to an irritating degree the jargon of the coteries and studios. She extended it, moreover, to everything under the sun; for instance, having acquired the habit of saying of a picture, if it were Impressionist, or an opera, if Wagnerian, “Ah! that’s good,” one day when a young man had kissed her on the ear, and, touched by her pretence of being thrilled, had affected modesty, she said: “But really, as a sensation I call it distinctly good.” But what most surprised me was that the expressions peculiar to Robert (which in any case had probably come to him from literary men whom she knew) were used by her to him and by him to her as though they had been a necessary form of speech, and without any conception of the pointlessness of an originality that is universal.
She was so clumsy with her hands when eating that one felt she must appear extremely awkward on the stage. She recovered her dexterity only when making love, with that touching prescience of women who love the male so intensely that they immediately guess what will give most pleasure to that body which is yet so different from their own.
I ceased to take part in the conversation when it turned upon the theatre, for on that topic Rachel was too malicious for my liking. She did, it was true, take up in a tone of commiseration—against Saint-Loup, which proved that he was accustomed to hearing Rachel attack her—the defence of Berma, saying: “Oh, no, she’s a remarkable woman really. Of course, the things she does no longer appeal to us, they don’t correspond quite to what we’re after, but one must think of her at the time when she made her first appearance; we owe her a great deal. She has done good work, you know. And, besides she’s such a splendid woman, she has such a good heart. Naturally she doesn’t care about the things that interest us, but in her time she had, as well as a rather moving face, quite a shrewd intelligence.” (Our fingers, by the way, do not play the same accompaniment to all our aesthetic judgments. If it is a picture that is under discussion, to show that it is a fine piece of work, painted with a full brush, it is enough to stick out one’s thumb. But the “shrewd intelligence” is more exacting. It requires two fingers, or rather two fingernails, as though one were trying to flick away a particle of dust.) But, with this single exception, Saint-Loup’s mistress spoke of the best-known actresses in a tone of ironical superiority which annoyed me because I believed—quite mistakenly, as it happened—that it was she who was inferior to them. She was clearly aware that I must regard her as an indifferent actress and conversely have a great regard for those she despised. But she showed no resentment, because there is in all