In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [37]
of the fact that the Princess had already disproved this statement by telling me that she had seen her cousin for a moment and that she had promised to come. The Duke, after a protracted stare with which he proceeded to crush his wife for the space of five minutes, observed: “I told Oriane about your misgivings.” Now that she saw that they were unfounded, and that she need take no action to dispel them, she pronounced them absurd, and went on chaffing me about them. “The idea of supposing that you weren’t invited! One’s always invited! Besides, there was me. Do you think I couldn’t have got you an invitation to my cousin’s house?” I must admit that subsequently she often did things for me that were far more difficult; nevertheless, I took care not to interpret her words in the sense that I had been too modest. I was beginning to learn the exact value of the language, spoken or mute, of aristocratic affability, an affability that is happy to shed balm upon the sense of inferiority of those towards whom it is directed, though not to the point of dispelling that inferiority, for in that case it would no longer have any raison d’être. “But you are our equal, if not our superior,” the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding. Shortly after this, as it happened, I was to receive a lesson which finally enlightened me, with the most perfect accuracy, as to the extent and limits of certain forms of aristocratic affability. It was at an afternoon party given by the Duchesse de Montmorency for the Queen of England. There was a sort of royal procession to the buffet, at the head of which walked Her Majesty on the arm of the Duc de Guermantes. I happened to arrive at that moment. With his free hand the Duke conveyed to me, from a distance of nearly fifty yards, countless signs of friendly welcome, which appeared to mean that I need not be afraid to approach, that I should not be devoured alive instead of the sandwiches. But I, who was becoming word-perfect in the language of the court, instead of going even one step nearer, made a deep bow from where I was, without smiling, the sort of bow that I should have made to someone I scarcely knew, then proceeded in the opposite direction. Had I written a masterpiece, the Guermantes would have given me less credit for it than I earned by that bow. Not only did it not pass unperceived by the Duke, although he had that day to acknowledge the greetings of more than five hundred people; it also caught the eye of the Duchess, who, happening to meet my mother, told her of it, and, so far from suggesting that I had done wrong, that I ought to have gone up to him, said that her husband had been lost in admiration of my bow, that it would have been impossible for anyone to put more into it. They never ceased to find in that bow every possible merit, without however mentioning the one which had seemed the most precious of all, to wit that it had been tactful; nor did they cease to pay me compliments which I understood to be even less a reward for the past than a hint for the future, after the fashion of a hint delicately conveyed to his pupils by the head of an educational establishment: “Do not forget, my boys, that these prizes are intended not so much for you as for your parents, so that they may send you back next term.” So it was that Mme de Marsantes, when someone from a different world entered her circle, would praise in his hearing those unobtrusive people “who are there when you want them and the rest of the time let you forget their existence,” as one indirectly reminds a servant who smells that the practice of taking a bath is beneficial to the health.
While, before she had even left the entrance hall, I was talking to Mme de Guermantes, I could hear a voice of a sort which henceforth I was able to identify without the