Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [212]
“Well, I’m delighted, Charles, if my little hips and haws meet with your approval. But tell me, why did you pay your respects to that Cambremer person, are you also her neighbour in the country?”
Mme de Saint-Euverte, seeing that the Princess seemed quite happy talking to Swann, had drifted away.
“But you are yourself, Princess!”
“I! Why, they must have ‘countries’ everywhere, those people! Don’t I wish I had!”
“No, not the Cambremers; her own people. She was a Legrandin, and used to come to Combray. I don’t know whether you’re aware that you are Comtesse de Combray, and that the Chapter owes you a due.”
“I don’t know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I’m touched for a hundred francs every year by the Curé, which is a due that I could do very well without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!” she said with a laugh.14
“It begins no better.” Swann took the point.
“Yes; that double abbreviation!”
“Someone very angry and very proper who didn’t dare to finish the first word.”
“But since he couldn’t stop himself beginning the second, he’d have done better to finish the first and be done with it. I must say our jokes are in really charming taste, my dear Charles … but how tiresome it is that I never see you now,” she went on in a winning tone, “I do so love talking to you. Just imagine, I couldn’t even have made that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny about the name Cambremer. Do you agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.”
Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had a similar way of looking at the little things of life, the effect—if not the cause—of which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and even of pronunciation. This similarity was not immediately striking because no two things could have been more unlike than their voices. But if one took the trouble to imagine Swann’s utterances divested of the sonority that enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one realised that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they had the style of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and the Princess had not an idea in common. But since Swann had become so melancholy, and was always in that tremulous condition which precedes the onset of tears, he felt the same need to speak about his grief as a murderer to speak about his crime. And when he heard the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, it gave him a feeling of solace as if she had spoken to him of Odette.
“Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear friend. What is so nice about you is that you’re not cheerful. We might spend an evening together.”
“By all means. Why not come down to Guermantes? My mother-in-law would be wild with joy. It’s supposed to be very ugly down there, but I must say I find the neighbourhood not at all unattractive; I have a horror of ‘picturesque spots’.”
“Yes, I know, it’s delightful!” replied Swann. “It’s almost too beautiful, too alive for me just at present; it’s a country to be happy in. It’s perhaps because I’ve lived there, but things there speak to me so. As soon as a breath of wind gets up, and the cornfields begin to stir, I feel that someone is going to appear suddenly, that I’m going to hear some news; and those little houses by the water’s edge … I should be quite wretched!”
“Oh! my dear Charles, look out, there’s that appalling Rampillon woman; she’s seen me; please hide me. Remind me what it was that happened to her; I get so confused; she’s just married off her daughter, or her lover, I don’t know which; perhaps the two of them … to each other! Oh, no,