I might in the warmth of that fine afternoon devour my fill of that rich honey cake which the young Mme de Cambremer so rarely was and which took the place of the dish of pastries that it had not occurred to me to offer my guests. But the name of Poussin, without altering the amenity of the society lady, aroused the protests of the connoisseur. On hearing that name, she produced six times in almost continuous succession that little smack of the tongue against the lips which serves to convey to a child who is misbehaving at once a reproach for having begun and a warning not to continue. “In heaven’s name, after a painter like Monet, who is quite simply a genius, don’t go and mention an old hack without a vestige of talent, like Poussin. I don’t mind telling you frankly that I find him the deadliest bore. I mean to say, you can’t really call that sort of thing painting. Monet, Degas, Manet, yes, there are painters if you like! It’s a curious thing,” she went on, fixing a searching and ecstatic gaze upon a vague point in space where she could see what was in her mind, “it’s a curious thing, I used at one time to prefer Manet. Nowadays I still admire Manet, of course, but I believe I like Monet even more. Ah, the cathedrals!” She was as scrupulous as she was condescending in informing me of the development of her taste. And one felt that the phases through which that taste had evolved were not, in her eyes, any less important than the different manners of Monet himself. Not that I had any reason to feel flattered by her confiding her enthusiasms to me, for even in the presence of the most dim-witted provincial lady, she could not remain for five minutes without feeling the need to confess them. When a noble lady of Avranches, who would have been incapable of distinguishing between Mozart and Wagner, said in the young Mme de Cambremer’s hearing: “We saw nothing new of any interest while we were in Paris. We went once to the Opéra-Comique, they were doing Pelléas et Mélisande, it’s dreadful stuff,” Mme de Cambremer not only boiled with rage but felt obliged to exclaim: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” and to “argue the point.” It was perhaps a Combray habit which she had picked up from my grandmother’s sisters, who called it “fighting the good fight,” and loved the dinner-parties at which they knew all through the week that they would have to defend their idols against the Philistines. Similarly, Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin enjoyed “getting worked up” and having “a good set-to” about art, as other people do about politics. She stood up for Debussy as she would have stood up for a woman friend whose conduct had been criticised. She must however have known very well that when she said: “Not at all, it’s a little gem,” she could not improvise, for the person whom she was putting in her place, the whole progression of artistic culture at the end of which they would have reached agreement without any need of discussion. “I must ask Le Sidaner what he thinks of Poussin,” the barrister remarked to me. “He’s a regular recluse, never opens his mouth, but I know how to winkle things out of him.”
“Anyhow,” Mme de Cambremer went on, “I have a horror of sunsets, they’re so romantic, so operatic. That is why I can’t abide my mother-in-law’s house, with its tropical plants. You’ll see, it’s just like a public garden at Monte-Carlo. That’s why I prefer your coast here. It’s more sombre, more sincere. There’s a little lane from which one doesn’t see the sea. On rainy days, there’s nothing but mud, it’s a little world apart. It’s just the same at Venice, I detest the Grand Canal and I don’t know anything so touching as the little alleys. But it’s all a question of atmosphere.”
“But,” I remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in her eyes was to inform her that he was once more in fashion, “M. Degas affirms that he knows nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly.”
“Really? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly,” said Mme de Cambremer, who had no wish to differ from Degas, “but I can speak about the ones in the