In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [214]
Princesse des Laumes, she had unexpectedly met Swann. Mme de Guermantes assured me that she had never been at this party. The Duchess had never been very truthful and now told lies more readily than ever. For her Mme de Saint-Euverte was a hostess—and one whose reputation, with the passage of time, had sunk very low indeed—whom she chose to disown. I did not insist. “No, someone you may perhaps have seen in my house—because at least he was amusing—is the husband of the woman you are talking about, but I never had anything to do with his wife.” “But she didn’t have a husband.” “That is what you imagined, because they were separated. In fact he was much nicer than she was.” At length it dawned upon me that an enormous man, of vast height and strength, with snow-white hair, whom I used to meet in various houses and whose name I had never known, was the husband of Mme de Saint-Eu verte. He had died in the previous year. As for the great-niece, I do not know whether it was owing to some malady of the stomach or the nerves or the veins, or because she was about to have or had just had a child or perhaps a miscarriage, that she lay flat on her back to listen to the music and did not budge for anyone. Very probably she was simply proud of her magnificent red silks and hoped on her chaise longue to look like Mme Récamier. She could not know that for me she was giving birth to a new efflorescence of the name of Saint-Euverte, which recurring thus after so long an interval marked both the distance travelled by Time and its continuity. Time was the infant that she cradled in her cockle-shell, where the red fuchsias of her silk dress gave an autumnal flowering to the name of Saint-Euverte and to the Empire style. The latter Mme de Guermantes declared that she had always detested, a remark which meant merely that she detested it now, which was true, for she followed the fashion, even if she did not succeed in keeping up with it. To say nothing of David, whose work she hardly knew, when she was quite young she had thought M. Ingres the most boring and academic of painters, then, by a brusque reversal—which caused her also to loathe Delacroix—the most delectable of the masters revered by art nouveau. By what gradations she had subsequently passed from this cult to a renewal of her early contempt matters little, since these are shades of taste which the writings of an art critic reflect ten years before the conversation of clever women. After having delivered herself of some strictures upon the Empire style, she apologised for having talked to me about people of as little interest as the Saint-Eu vertes and subjects as trivial as the provincial side of Bréauté’s character, for she was as far from guessing why these things could interest me as was Mme de Saint-Euverte née La Rochefoucauld, seeking in her supine pose the well-being of her stomach or an Ingresque effect, from suspecting that her name—her married name, not the infinitely more distinguished one of her own family—had enchanted me and that I saw her, in this room full of symbolic attributes, as a nymph cradling the Infant Time.
“But how can I talk to you about this nonsense, how can it possibly interest you?” exclaimed the Duchess. She had uttered these words in an undertone and nobody had been able to hear what she was saying. But a young man (who interested me later when I discovered his name, which had been much more familiar to me at one time than that of Saint-Euverte) got up with an air of exasperation and moved away from us in order to listen undisturbed. For the Kreutzer Sonata was now being played, but having lost his place in the programme the young man thought that it was a piece by Ravel, which he had been told was as beautiful as Palestrina but difficult to understand. In his haste to move to another seat, he bumped violently against an escritoire which he had not seen in the half-dark, and the noise had the effect of slewing round the heads of several people, for whom the trifling physical exertion of looking over their shoulder was a welcome interruption to the