Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [208]
The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their houses. Every day she would write to express her regret at having been kept away—by the sudden arrival of her husband’s mother, by an invitation from her brother-in-law, by the Opera, by some excursion to the country—from some party to which she would never have dreamed of going. In this way she gave many people the satisfaction of feeling that she was on intimate terms with them, that she would gladly have come to their houses, and that she had been prevented from doing so only by some princely obstacle which they were flattered to find competing with their own humble entertainment. And then, as she belonged to that witty Guermantes set in which there survived something of the mental briskness, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments, which goes back to Mérimée and has found its final expression in the plays of Meilhac and Halévy, she adapted it even for the purposes of her social relations, transposed it into the form of politeness which she favoured and which endeavoured to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to the plain truth. She would never develop at any length to a hostess the expression of her anxiety to be present at her party; she thought it more amiable to put to her a few little facts on which it would depend whether or not it was possible for her to come.
“Listen, and I’ll explain,” she said to Mme de Gallardon. “Tomorrow evening I must go to a friend of mine who has been pestering me to fix a day for ages. If she takes us to the theatre afterwards, with the best will in the world there’ll be no possibility of my coming to you; but if we just stay in the house, since I know there won’t be anyone else there, I shall be able to slip away.”
“Tell me, have you seen your friend M. Swann?”
“No! my beloved Charles! I never knew he was here. I must catch his eye.”
“It’s odd that he should come to old Saint-Euverte’s,” Mme de Gallardon went on. “Oh, I know he’s very clever,” meaning by that “very cunning,” “but that makes no difference—the idea of a Jew in the house of a sister and sister-in-law of two Archbishops!”
“I’m ashamed to confess that I’m not in the least shocked,” said the Princesse des Laumes.
“I know he’s a convert and all that, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say that the converted ones remain more attached to their religion than the practising ones, that it’s all just a pretence; is that true, d’you think?”
“I can throw no light at all on the matter.”
The pianist, who was to play two pieces by Chopin, after finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a Polonaise. But once Mme de Gallardon had informed her cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in turn without Mme des Laumes paying him the slightest attention. She belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence in any room in which she might find herself of another member of her set, even though she had nothing in particular to say to him, monopolised her attention to the exclusion of everything else. From that moment, in the hope that Swann would catch sight of her, the Princess spent her whole time (like a tame white mouse when a lump of sugar is put down before its nose and then taken away) turning her face, which was filled with countless signs of complicity, none of them with the least relevance to the sentiment underlying Chopin’s music, in the direction where Swann was standing and, if he moved, diverting accordingly the course of her magnetic smile.
“Oriane, don’t be angry with me,” resumed Mme de Gallardon, who could never restrain herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions, and the hope that she might one day dazzle the world, to the immediate, obscure and private satisfaction of saying something disagreeable, “people do