In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [215]
torture of listening “religiously” to the Kreutzer Sonata. Mme de Guermantes and I, who had caused this unfortunate little incident, hurriedly left the room. “Yes,” she went on, “how can these inanities interest a man of your talent? That is what I asked myself just now, when I saw you talking to Gilberte de Saint-Loup. You should not waste your time on her. For me that woman is quite literally nothing—she is not even a woman, merely the most artificial and bourgeois phenomenon that I have ever encountered” (for even when she was defending intellectualism the Duchess did not divest herself of her aristocratic prejudices). “What, in any case, are you doing in a house like this? I can just see that you might want to be here today, because there was this recitation by Rachel and naturally that interests you. But wonderful though she was, she does not give of her best before a public like this. You must come and have luncheon alone with her in my house. Then you will see what an extraordinary creature she is. She is worth a hundred times more than all this riff-raff. And after luncheon she will recite Verlaine for you. You will be amazed! But otherwise your coming to a great omnium gatherum like this is something I simply cannot understand. Unless perhaps your interest is professional …” she added with a doubtful and mistrustful air and without venturing to follow this speculation too far for she had no very precise ideas as to the nature of the improbable operations to which she alluded. She went on to tempt me with the glittering prospect of her “afternoons”: every day after luncheon there was X———— and there was Y————, and I found that her views on these matters were now those of all women who preside over a salon, those women whom in the past (though she denied it today) she had despised and whose great superiority, whose sign of election lay, according to her present mode of thinking, in getting “all the men” to come to them. If I happened to say that some great lady with a salon had spoken with malice of Mme Howland when she was alive, the Duchess burst out laughing at my simplicity: “But of course, she had all the men and Mme Howland was trying to get them away from her.”
“Don’t you think,” I said to the Duchess, “that it must be painful for Mme de Saint-Loup to have to listen, as she has just been doing, to a woman who was once her husband’s mistress?” I saw form in Mme de Guermantes’s face one of those oblique bars which indicate that a train of thought is linking something a person has just heard to some disagreeable subject of reflexion. A train of thought, it is true, which usually remains unexpressed, for seldom if ever do we receive any answer to the unpleasant things that we say or write. Only a fool begs vainly ten times in succession for a reply to a letter which was a blunder and which he ought never to have written, for the only reply ever vouchsafed to this sort of letter is in the form of action: the lady whom you suppose to be merely an unpunctual correspondent addresses you as “Monsieur” when she next meets you instead of calling you by your Christian name. My reference to Saint-Loup’s liaison with Rachel was, however, not seriously unpleasant and could only cause Mme de Guermantes a moment’s annoyance by reminding her that I had been Robert’s closest friend and that he had perhaps confided in me on the subject of the snubs which Rachel had suffered when she gave her performance at the Duchess’s party. But Mme de Guermantes did not persist in these reflexions, the stormy bar faded from her face and she replied to my question concerning Mme de Saint-Loup: “Frankly, it is my belief that it can matter very little to Gilberte, since she never loved her husband. She is a quite dreadful young woman. She loved the social position and the name and being my niece and getting away from the slime where she belonged, but then having done this her one idea was to return to it. I don’t mind telling you that I suffered a great deal for poor Robert, because, though he was no genius, he saw this perfectly well, and a