when she was quite unknown and everybody thought her ridiculous. Yes, my dear boy, this will surprise you, but the first house in which she recited in public was mine! Yes, while all the so-called avant-garde, like my new cousin,” she said, pointing ironically towards the Princesse de Guermantes, who for Oriane had remained Mme Verdurin, “would have allowed her to die of hunger rather than condescend to listen to her, I had made up my mind that she was interesting and I offered her a fee to come and act in my house in front of the most distinguished audience that I could muster. I may say, though the word is rather stupid and pretentious—for the truth is that talent needs nobody to help it—that I launched her. But I am not suggesting that she needed me.” I made a vague gesture of protest, and I saw that Mme de Guermantes was quite prepared to accept the contrary thesis. “You don’t agree? You think that talent needs a support, needs someone to bring it into the light of day? Well, perhaps you are right. Curiously enough, that is exactly what Dumas used to say to me. In this case I am extremely flattered if I have done anything, however little, to promote not of course the talent but the reputation of so fine an artist.” Mme de Guermantes preferred to abandon her idea that talent, like an abscess, forces its way to the surface unaided, partly because the alternative hypothesis was more flattering for her, but also because for some time now, mixing with newcomers to the social scene and being herself fatigued, she had become almost humble, questioning others and asking them their opinion before she formed her own. “I don’t need to tell you,” she went on, “that that intelligent public which calls itself society understood absolutely nothing of her art. They booed and they tittered. It was no use my saying: ‘This is strange, interesting, something that has never been done before,’ nobody believed me, just as nobody has ever believed anything I have said. And it was exactly the same with the piece that she recited, which was a scene from Maeterlinck. Now, of course, it is very well known but in those days people merely thought it ridiculous—not I, however, I admired it. I must say I am surprised, when I think of it, that a mere peasant like myself, with no more education than all the other provincial girls around her, should from the very first moment have felt drawn to these things. Naturally I couldn’t have said why, but I liked them, I was moved—indeed, even Basin, who can hardly be called hypersensitive, was struck by the effect that they had on me. ‘I won’t have you listening to these absurdities,’ he said, ‘it makes you ill.’ And he was right, because although I’m supposed to be a woman without any feeling I’m really a bundle of nerves.”
At this moment an unexpected incident occurred. A footman came up to Rachel and told her that the daughter and son-in-law of Berma were asking to speak to her. As we have seen, Berma’s daughter had resisted the desire, to which her husband would have yielded, to ask Rachel for an invitation. But after the departure of the solitary guest the irritation of the young pair as they sat with their mother had increased. The thought that other people were enjoying themselves had become a torment to them and presently, profiting from a momentary absence of Berma, who had retired to her room spitting a little blood, they had thrown on some smarter clothes, called for a cab and come, without an invitation, to the Princesse de Guermantes’s house. Rachel, guessing what had happened and secretly flattered, put on an arrogant air and told the footman that she could not be disturbed, the visitors must write a line to explain the object of their curious procedure. Soon the footman came back with a card on which Berma’s daughter had scribbled a few words to the effect that she and her husband had not been able to resist the desire to hear Rachel—might they have her permission to come in? Rachel smiled at the naivety of the pretext and at her own triumph. She sent back a reply that she was terribly sorry