In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [124]
“He admires them immensely too.”
“I must look at them again. My memory of them is a bit hazy,” she replied after a moment’s silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was certain to form of Poussin before very long would depend, not upon the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the supplementary and this time definitive examination that she intended to make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to change her mind.
Contenting myself with what was a first step towards retraction, since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep her on the rack any longer I told her mother-in-law how much I had heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne. In modest terms she spoke of the little presbytery garden that she had behind the house, into which in the mornings, by simply pushing open a door, she went in her dressing-gown to feed her peacocks, hunt for newlaid eggs, and gather the zinnias or roses which, on the sideboard, framing the creamed eggs or fried fish in a border of flowers, reminded her of her garden paths. “It’s true, we have a great many roses,” she told me, “our rose garden is almost too near the house, there are days when it makes my head ache. It’s nicer on the terrace at La Raspelière where the breeze wafts the scent of the roses, but not so headily.”
I turned to her daughter-in-law: “It’s just like Pelléas,” I said to her, to gratify her taste for the modern, “that scent of roses wafted up to the terraces. It’s so strong in the score that, as I suffer from hay-fever and rose-fever, it sets me sneezing every time I listen to that scene.”
“What a marvellous thing Pelléas is,” cried the young Mme de Cambremer, “I’m mad about it”; and, drawing closer to me with the gestures of a wild woman seeking to captivate me, picking out imaginary notes with her fingers, she began to hum something which I took to represent for her Pelléas’s farewell, and continued with a vehement insistency as though it were important that she should at that moment remind me of that scene, or rather should prove to me that she remembered it. “I think it’s even finer than Parsifal,” she added, “because in Parsifal the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodic phrases, outworn by the very fact of being melodic.”
“I know you are a great musician, Madame,” I said to the dowager. “I should so much like to hear you play.”
Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin gazed at the sea so as not to be drawn into the conversation. Being of the opinion that what her mother-in-law liked was not music at all, she regarded the talent, bogus according to her, but in reality of the very highest order, that the other was acknowledged to possess as a technical accomplishment devoid of interest. It was true that Chopin’s only surviving pupil declared, and with justice, that the Master’s style of playing, his “feeling,” had been transmitted, through herself, to Mme de Cambremer alone, but to play like Chopin was far from being a recommendation in the eyes of Legrandin’s sister, who despised nobody so much as the Polish composer.
“Oh! they’re flying away,” exclaimed Albertine, pointing to the gulls which, casting aside for a moment their flowery incognito, were rising in a body towards the sun.
“Their giant wings from walking hinder them,” quoted Mme de Cambremer, confusing the seagull with the albatross.
“I do love them; I saw some in Amsterdam,” said Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”
“Ah! so you’ve been in Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin asked imperiously, in the tone in which she would have said: “You know the Guermantes?”—for snobbishness in changing its object does not change its accent. Albertine replied in the negative, thinking that they were living people. But her mistake was not apparent.
“I should be delighted to play to you,” the dowager Mme de Cambremer said to me. “But you know I only