In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [96]
I had found pleasure even in the thought that the tedious judge was so eager to see me; I could see, on the first evening, the waves, the azure mountain ranges of the sea, its glaciers and its cataracts, its elevation and its careless majesty, merely upon smelling for the first time after so long an interval, as I washed my hands, that peculiar odour of the over-scented soap of the Grand Hotel—which, seeming to belong at once to the present moment and to my past visit, floated between them like the real charm of a particular form of existence in which one comes home only to change one’s tie. The sheets on my bed, too fine, too light, too large, impossible to tuck in, to keep in position, which billowed out from beneath the blankets in shifting whorls, would have distressed me before. Now they merely cradled upon the awkward, swelling fullness of their sails the glorious sunrise, big with hopes, of my first morning. But that sun did not have time to appear. That very night the terrible, divine presence had returned to life. I asked the manager to leave me, and to give orders that no one was to enter my room. I told him that I should remain in bed and rejected his offer to send to the chemist’s for the excellent drug. He was delighted by my refusal for he was afraid that other visitors might be bothered by the smell of the “calyptus.” It earned me the compliment: “You are in the movement” (he meant: “in the right”), and the warning: “Take care you don’t dirty yourself at the door, I’ve had the lock ‘elucidated’ with oil; if any of the servants dares to knock at your door, he’ll be beaten ‘black and white.’ And they can mark my words, for I’m not a repeater” (this evidently meant that he did not say a thing twice). “But wouldn’t you care for a drop of old wine, just to set you up; I have a pig’s head of it downstairs” (presumably hogshead). “I shan’t bring it to you on a silver dish like the head of Jonathan, and I warn you that it is not Château-Lafite, but it is virtually equivocal” (equivalent). “And as it’s quite light, they might fry you a little sole.” I declined everything, but was surprised to hear the name of the fish pronounced like that of the first king of Israel, Saul, by a man who must have ordered so many in his life.
Despite the manager’s promises, a little later I was brought a calling-card from the Marquise de Cambremer. Having come over to see me, the old lady had inquired whether I was there and when she heard that I had arrived only the day before and was unwell, had not insisted but (not without stopping, doubtless, at the chemist’s or the haberdasher’s, while the footman jumped down from the box and went in to pay a bill or to give an order) had driven back to Féterne in her old barouche upon eight springs drawn by a pair of horses. Not infrequently indeed was the rumble of the latter to be heard and its trappings admired in the streets of Balbec and of various other little places along the coast, between Balbec and Féterne. Not that these halts outside shops were the object of these excursions. It was on the contrary some tea-party or garden-party at the house of some squire or burgess, socially quite unworthy of the Marquise. But she, though completely overshadowing, by her birth and her wealth, the petty nobility of the district, was in her perfect goodness and simplicity of heart so afraid of disappointing anyone who had invited her that she would