In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [46]
The Duchess, thinking that a quiet, ingenuous tone would give a more dramatic and sincere value to her words, said in a schoolgirl voice, as though simply letting the truth fall from her lips, and merely allowing a slightly melancholy expression to becloud her eyes: “Yes, it’s true, I have no reason to conceal the fact that I did feel a sincere affection for Charles!”
“There, you see, I don’t have to make her say it. And after that, he carries his ingratitude to the point of being a Dreyfusard!”
“Talking of Dreyfusards,” I said, “it appears that Prince Von is one.”
“Ah, I’m glad you reminded me of him,” exclaimed M. de Guermantes, “I was forgetting that he had asked me to dine with him on Monday. But whether he’s a Dreyfusard or not is entirely immaterial to me, since he’s a foreigner. I don’t give two straws for his opinion. With a Frenchman it’s another matter. It’s true that Swann is a Jew. But, until today—forgive me, Froberville—I have always been foolish enough to believe that a Jew can be a Frenchman, I mean an honourable Jew, a man of the world. Now, Swann was that in every sense of the word. Well, now he forces me to admit that I was mistaken, since he has taken the side of this Dreyfus (who, guilty or not, never moved in his world, whom he wouldn’t ever have met) against a society that had adopted him, had treated him as one of its own. There’s no question about it, we were all of us prepared to vouch for Swann, I would have answered for his patriotism as for my own. And this is how he repays us! I must confess that I should never have expected such a thing from him. I thought better of him. He was a man of intelligence (in his own line, of course). I know that he had already been guilty of the aberration of that shameful marriage. And by the way, do you know someone who was really hurt by Swann’s marriage? My wife. Oriane often has what I might call an affectation of insensibility. But at heart she feels things with extraordinary keenness.” (Mme de Guermantes, delighted by this analysis of her character, listened to it with a modest air but did not utter a word, from a scrupulous reluctance to acquiesce in it but principally from fear of cutting it short. M. de Guermantes might have gone on talking for an hour on this subject and she would have sat as still, or even stiller, than if she had been listening to music.) “Well, I remember when she heard of Swann’s marriage she was genuinely hurt. She felt that it was very bad on the part of someone to whom we had shown so much friendship. She was very fond of Swann; she was deeply grieved. Am I not right, Oriane?”
Mme de Guermantes felt that she ought to reply to so direct a challenge on a point of fact which would enable her unobtrusively to confirm the tribute which she felt had come to an end. In a shy and simple tone, and with an air all the more studied in that it sought to appear “heartfelt,” she said with a meek reserve: “It’s true, Basin is quite right.”
“But still, that wasn’t quite the same thing as this. After all, love is love, although, in my opinion, it ought to confine itself within certain limits. I could excuse a young fellow, a snotty-nosed youth, for letting himself be carried away by utopian ideas. But Swann, a man of intelligence, of proved refinement, a fine judge of pictures, an intimate friend of the Duc de Chartres, of Gilbert himself!”
The tone in which M. de Guermantes said this was, incidentally, quite inoffensive, without a trace of the vulgarity which he too often showed. He spoke with a slightly indignant melancholy, but his whole manner exuded that gentle gravity which constitutes the broad and unctuous charm of certain portraits by Rembrandt, that of the Burgomaster Six, for example. One felt that for the Duke there was no question