In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [17]
To revert to the pronunciation and vocabulary of Mme de Guermantes, it is in this aspect that the nobility shows itself truly conservative, with everything that the word implies in the sense of being at once slightly puerile, slightly dangerous, stubborn in its resistance to change, but at the same time diverting to an artist. I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window.
Unfortunately, I never had time to prolong these visits indefinitely, for I was anxious, as far as possible, not to return home after Albertine. But it was only in driblets that I was able to obtain from Mme de Guermantes that information as to her clothes which was of use in helping me to order costumes similar in style, so far as it was possible for a young girl to wear them, for Albertine.
“For instance, Madame, that evening when you dined with Mme de Saint-Euverte, and then went on to the Princesse de Guermantes, you had a dress that was all red, with red shoes, you were marvellous, you reminded me of a sort of great blood-red blossom, a glittering ruby—now, what was that dress called? Is it the sort of thing that a young girl can wear?”
The Duchess, imparting to her tired features the radiant expression that the Princesse des Laumes used to wear when Swann paid her compliments years ago, glanced quizzically and delightedly, with tears of merriment in her eyes, at M. de Bréauté who was always there at that hour and who sat beaming behind his monocle with an indulgent smile for this intellectual’s rigmarole because of the physical excitement of youth which seemed to him to underlie it. The Duchess appeared to be saying: “What’s the matter with him? He must be mad.” Then turning to me with a winning expression: “I wasn’t aware that I looked like a glittering ruby or a blood-red blossom, but I do indeed remember that I had on a red dress: it was red satin, which was being worn that season. Yes, a young girl can wear that sort of thing at a pinch, but you told me that your friend never went out in the evening. It’s a full evening dress, not a thing that she can put on to pay calls.”
What is extraordinary is that of the evening in question, which after all was not so very remote, Mme de Guermantes remembered nothing but what she had been wearing, and had forgotten a certain incident which nevertheless, as we shall see presently, ought to have mattered to her greatly. It seems that among men and women of action (and society people are men and women of action on a minute, a microscopic scale, but action none the less), the mind, overtaxed by the need to attend to what is going to happen in an hour’s time, commits very little to memory. As often as not, for instance, it was not with the object of deliberately misleading and making himself appear innocent of an error of judgment that M. de Norpois, when you reminded him of the prophecies he had uttered with regard to an alliance with Germany of which nothing had ever come, would say: “You must be mistaken, I have no recollection of it whatever, it isn’t like me, for in that sort of conversation I am always most laconic, and I would never have predicted the success of one of those coups d’éclat which are often nothing more than coups de tête and habitually degenerate into coups de force. It is beyond question that in the remote future a Franco-German rapprochement might come into being and would be highly profitable to both countries; nor would France have the worse of the bargain,