In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [336]
“Ah, yes, I’m sorry too. Basin would like his sister’s son to adopt it, but it isn’t the same thing; though it would be possible, since it doesn’t have to be the eldest son, it can be passed to a younger brother. I was telling you that in those days Basin was clean-shaven. One day, at a pilgrimage—you remember, my dear,” she turned to her husband, “that pilgrimage at Paray-le-Monial—my brother-in-law Charlus, who always enjoys talking to peasants, was saying to one after another: ‘Where do you come from?’ and as he’s extremely generous, he would give them something, take them off to have a drink. For nobody was ever at the same time simpler and more haughty than Meme. You’ll see him refuse to bow to a Duchess whom he doesn’t think duchessy enough, and heap kindnesses on a kennelman. So then I said to Basin: ‘Come, Basin, say something to them too.’ My husband, who is not always very inventive …” (“Thank you, Oriane,” said the Duke, without interrupting his reading of my article in which he was immersed) “… went up to one of the peasants and repeated his brother’s question in so many words: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘I’m from Les Laumes.’ ‘You’re from Les Laumes? Why, I’m your Prince.’ Then the peasant looked at Basin’s hairless face and replied: ‘That ain’t true. You’re an English.’”28
In these little anecdotes of the Duchess’s, such great and eminent titles as that of Prince des Laumes seemed to stand out in one’s mind’s eye in their true setting, in their original state and their local colour, as in certain Books of Hours one recognises amid the mediaeval crowd the soaring steeple of Bourges.
Some visiting-cards were brought to her which a footman had just left at the door. “I can’t think what’s got into her, I don’t know her. It’s to you that I’m indebted for this, Basin. Although that sort of acquaintance hasn’t done you much good, my poor dear,” and, turning to Gilberte: “I really don’t know how to explain to you who she is, you’ve certainly never heard of her, she’s called Lady Rufus Israels.”
Gilberte flushed crimson: “No, I don’t know her,” she said (which was all the more untrue in that Lady Israels and Swann had been reconciled two years before the latter’s death and she addressed Gilberte by her Christian name), “but I know quite well, from hearing about her, who it is that you mean.”
Gilberte was becoming very snobbish. Thus a girl having one day asked her out of tactlessness or malice what the name of her real, not her adoptive father was, in her confusion and as though to euphemise the name a little, instead of pronouncing it “Souann” she said “Svann,” a change, as she soon realised, for the worse, since it made this name of English origin a German patronymic. And she had even gone on to say, abasing herself with the object of self-enhancement: “All sorts of different stories have been told about my birth, but I’m not supposed to know anything about it.”
Ashamed though Gilberte must have felt at certain moments, when she thought of her parents (for even Mme Swann represented for her, and was, a good mother), of such a way of looking at life, it must alas be borne in mind that its elements were doubtless borrowed from her parents, for we do not create ourselves of our own accord out of nothing. But to a certain quantity of egoism which exists in the mother, a different egoism, inherent in the father’s family, is admixed, which does not invariably mean that it is superadded, nor even precisely that it serves as a multiple, but rather that it creates a fresh egoism infinitely stronger and more redoubtable. And ever since the world began, ever since families in which some defect exists in one form have been intermarrying with families in which the same defect exists in another, thereby creating a peculiarly complete and detestable variety of that defect in the offspring, the accumulated egoisms (to confine ourselves, for the moment, to this defect) must have acquired such