In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [87]
She was not aware of this, and although all Mme de Guermantes’s friends were friends also of Mme d’Arpajon, whenever the latter invited Mme Swann, she would say with an air of compunction: “I’m going to Mme d’Arpajon’s, but—you’ll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, I know—it shocks me because of Mme de Guermantes” (whom, as it happened, she had never met). Elegant men thought that the fact that Mme Swann knew hardly anyone in high society meant that she must be a superior woman, probably a great musician, and that it would be a sort of extra-social distinction, as for a duke to be a Doctor of Science, to go to her house. Utterly insignificant society women were attracted towards Odette for a diametrically opposite reason; hearing that she attended the Colonne concerts and professed herself a Wagnerian, they concluded from this that she must be “rather a lark,” and were greatly excited by the idea of getting to know her. But, being themselves none too firmly established, they were afraid of compromising themselves in public if they appeared to be on friendly terms with Odette, and if they caught sight of her at a charity concert, would turn away their heads, deeming it impossible to greet, under the very nose of Mme de Rochechouart, a woman who was perfectly capable of having been to Bayreuth, which was as good as saying that she would stick at nothing.
Since everybody becomes different when a guest in another’s house—quite apart from the marvellous metamorphoses that were accomplished thus in the fairy palaces—in Mme Swann’s drawing-room M. de Bréauté, suddenly enhanced by the absence of the people with whom he was normally surrounded, by his air of self-satisfaction at finding himself there, just as if instead of going out to a party he had slipped on his spectacles to shut himself up and read the Revue des Deux Mondes, by the mystic rite that he appeared to be performing in coming to see Odette, M. de Bréauté himself seemed a new man. I would have given a great deal to see what transformations the Duchesse de Montmorency-Luxembourg would have undergone in this new environment. But she was one of the people who could never be induced to meet Odette. Mme de Montmorency, a great deal kindlier about Oriane than Oriane was about her, surprised me greatly by saying of Mme de Guermantes: “She knows some clever people, and everybody likes her. I believe that if she had had a little more persistence she would have succeeded in forming a salon. The fact is, she never bothered about it, and she’s quite right, she’s very well off as she is, sought after by everyone.” If Mme de Guermantes did not have a “salon,” what in the world could a “salon” be? The stupefaction which these words induced in me was no greater than that which I caused Mme de Guermantes when I told her that I enjoyed going to Mme de Montmorency’s. Oriane thought her an old cretin. “I go there,” she said, “because I’m forced to, she’s my aunt; but you! She doesn’t even know how to get agreeable people to come to her house.” Mme de Guermantes did not realise that agreeable people left me cold, that when she spoke to me of “the Arpajon salon” I saw a yellow butterfly, and of “the Swann salon” (Mme Swann was at home in the winter months between 6 and 7) a black butterfly with its wings powdered with snow. At a pinch this last salon, which was not one at all, she considered, although out of bounds for herself, permissible for me on account of the “clever people” to be found there. But Mme de Luxembourg! Had I already “produced” something that had attracted attention, she would have concluded that an element of snobbishness may be combined with talent. But I put the finishing touch to her disillusionment; I confessed to her that I did not go to Mme de Montmorency’s (as she supposed) to “take notes” and “make a study. ” Mme de Guermantes was in this respect no more in error than the social novelists who analyse