• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1930 0

(The Marquis du Lau had in fact been one of Swann’s most intimate friends before the latter’s marriage, and Gilberte may perhaps even have caught a glimpse of him, but at a time when she was not interested in such people.) “Would M. de Bréauté or the Prince d’Agrigente be at all like him?” she asked. “Oh! not in the least,” exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, who had a keen sense of these provincial differences and drew portraits that were sober and restrained but coloured by her husky, golden voice, beneath the gentle efflorescence of her violet-blue eyes. “No, not in the least. Du Lau was very much the Périgord squire, full of charm, with all the good manners and informality of his province. At Guermantes, when we had the King of England with whom du Lau was on the friendliest terms, we used to have a little meal after the men came in from shooting. It was the hour when du Lau was in the habit of going to his room to take off his boots and put on big woollen slippers. Well, the presence of King Edward and all the grand-dukes didn’t disturb him in the last, he came down to the great hall at Guermantes in his woollen slippers. He felt that he was the Marquis du Lau d’Allemans who had no reason to stand on ceremony with the King of England. He and that charming Quasimodo de Breteuil, they were the two I liked best. Actually they were great friends of …” (she was about to say “your father” and stopped short). “No, there’s no resemblance at all, either to Gri-gri or to Bréauté. He was the typical nobleman from Périgord. Incidentally, Meme quotes a page from Saint-Simon about a Marquis d’Allemans, and it’s just like him.”

I recited the opening words of the portrait: “M. d’Allemans, who was a man of great distinction among the nobility of Périgord, through his own birth and through his merit, and was regarded by every soul alive there as a general arbiter to whom each had recourse because of his probity, his capacity and the suavity of his manners, as it were the cock of his province.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Mme de Guermantes, “all the more so as du Lau was always as red as a turkeycock.”

“Yes, I remember hearing that description quoted,” said Gilberte, without adding that it had been quoted by her father, who was, as we know, a great admirer of Saint-Simon.

She liked also to speak of the Prince d’Agrigente and of M. de Bréauté for another reason. The Prince d’Agrigente had inherited his title from the House of Aragon, but the family domains were in Poitou. As for his country house, the house, that is to say, in which he lived, it was not the property of his own family but had come to him from his mother’s first husband, and was situated approximately halfway between Martinville and Guermantes. And so Gilberte spoke of him and of M. de Bréauté as of country neighbours who reminded her of her old home. Strictly speaking there was an element of falsehood in this attitude, since it was only in Paris, through the Comtesse Mole, that she had come to know M. de Bréauté, albeit he had been an old friend of her father’s. As for her pleasure in speaking of the country round Tansonville, it may have been sincere. Snobbery is with certain people analogous to those beverages in which the agreeable is mixed with the beneficial. Gilberte took an interest in some lady of fashion because she possessed priceless books and portraits by Nattier which my former friend would probably not have taken the trouble to inspect in the Bibliothèque Nationale or the Louvre, and I imagine that, in spite of their even greater proximity, the magnetic influence of Tansonville would have had less effect in drawing Gilberte towards Mme Sazerat or Mme Goupil than towards M. d’Agrigente.

“Oh! poor Babal and poor Gri-gri,” said Mme de Guermantes, “they’re in a far worse state than du Lau. I’m afraid they haven’t long to live, either of them.”

When M. de Guermantes had finished reading my article, he complimented me in somewhat qualified terms. He regretted the slightly hackneyed style with its “turgid metaphors as in the antiquated prose of Chateaubriand;” on the other