In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [200]
I made no more impression on the Cambremers than on Mme Verdurin by my enthusiasm for their house. For the beauties they pointed out to me left me cold, whilst I was carried away by confused reminiscences; at times I even confessed to them my disappointment at not finding something correspond to what its name had made me imagine. I enraged Mme de Cambremer by telling her that I had supposed the place to be more rustic. On the other hand I broke off in an ecstasy to sniff the fragrance of a breeze that crept in through the chink of the door. “I see you like draughts,” they said to me. My praise of a piece of green lustre plugging a broken pane met with no greater success: “How frightful!” exclaimed the Marquise. The climax came when I said: “My greatest joy was when I arrived. When I heard my footsteps echoing in the gallery, I felt I had walked into some village mairie, with a map of the district on the wall.” This time, Mme de Cambremer resolutely turned her back on me.
“You didn’t find the arrangement too bad?” her husband asked her with the same compassionate anxiety with which he would have inquired how his wife had stood some painful ceremony. “They have some fine things.”
But since malice, when the hard and fast rules of a sure taste do not confine it within reasonable limits, finds fault with everything in the persons or in the houses of the people who have supplanted you, “Yes, but they are not in the right places,” replied Mme de Cambremer. “Besides, are they really as fine as all that?”
“You noticed,” said M. de Cambremer, with a melancholy that was tempered with a note of firmness, “there are some Jouy hangings that are worn away, some quite threadbare things in this drawing-room!”
“And that piece of stuff with its huge roses, like a peasant woman’s quilt,” said Mme de Cambremer, whose entirely spurious culture was confined exclusively to idealist philosophy, Impressionist painting and Debussy’s music. And, so as not to criticise merely in the name of luxury but in that of taste: “And they’ve put up draught-curtains! Such bad form! But what do you expect? These people simply don’t know, where could they possibly have learned? They must be retired tradespeople. It’s really not bad for them.”
“I thought the chandeliers good,” said the Marquis, though it was not evident why he should make an exception of the chandeliers, in the same way as, inevitably, whenever anyone spoke of a church, whether it was the Cathedral of Chartres, or of Rheims, or of Amiens, or the church at Balbec, what he would always make a point of mentioning as admirable would be: “the organ-case, the pulpit and the misericords.”
“As for the garden, don’t speak about it,” said Mme de Cambremer. “It’s sheer butchery. Those paths running all lopsided.”
I took the opportunity while Mme Verdurin was serving coffee to go and glance over the letter which M. de Cambremer had brought me and in which his mother invited me to dinner. With that faint trace of ink, the handwriting revealed an individuality which in the future I should be able to recognise among a thousand, without any more need to have recourse to the hypothesis of special pens than to suppose that rare and mysteriously blended colours are necessary to enable a painter to express his original vision. Indeed a paralytic, stricken with agraphia after a stroke and reduced to looking at the script as at a drawing without being able to read it, would have gathered that the dowager Mme de Cambremer belonged to an old family in which the zealous cultivation of literature and the arts had brought a breath of fresh air to its aristocratic traditions. He would have guessed also the period in which the Marquise had learned simultaneously to write and to play Chopin’s music. It was the time when well-bred people observed the rule of affability and what was called the rule of the three adjectives. Mme de Cambremer combined both rules. One laudatory adjective was not enough for her, she followed