Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [52]
“How like his mother he is,” said the lady.
“But you’ve never seen my niece except in photographs,” my uncle answered brusquely.
“I beg your pardon, dear friend, I passed her on the staircase last year when you were so ill. It’s true I only saw her for a moment, and your staircase is rather dark; but I could see well enough to admire her. This young gentleman has her beautiful eyes, and also this,” she went on, tracing a line with one finger across the lower part of her forehead. “Tell me,” she asked my uncle, “is your niece’s name the same as yours?”
“He takes most after his father,” muttered my uncle, who was no more anxious to effect an introduction by proxy by mentioning Mamma’s name than to bring the two together in the flesh. “He’s his father all over, and also like my poor mother.”
“I haven’t met his father,” said the lady in pink, bowing her head slightly, “and I never knew your poor mother. You will remember it was just after your great sorrow that we got to know one another.”
I felt somewhat disillusioned, for this young lady was in no way different from other pretty women whom I had seen from time to time at home, in particular the daughter of one of our cousins to whose house I went every New Year’s Day. Apart from being better dressed, my uncle’s friend had the same quick and kindly glance, the same frank and friendly manner. I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical expression which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead. I had difficulty in believing that she was a courtesan, and certainly I should never have believed her to be an ultra-fashionable one, had I not seen the carriage and pair, the pink dress, the pearl necklace, had I not been aware, too, that my uncle knew only those of the top flight. But I asked myself how the millionaire who gave her her carriage and her house and her jewels could find any pleasure in flinging his money away upon a woman of so simple and respectable an appearance. And yet, when I thought of what her life must be like, its immorality disturbed me more, perhaps, than if it had stood before me in some concrete and recognisable form, by being thus invisible, like the secret of some novel or some scandal which had driven out of the home of her genteel parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind, which had brought to a bright bloom of beauty and raised to fame or notoriety, this woman the play of whose features, the intonations of whose voice, reminiscent of so many others I already knew, made me regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good family, when she was no longer of any family at all.
We had moved by this time into the “study,” and my uncle, who seemed a trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
“No, thank you, my dear,” she said. “You know I only smoke the ones the grand duke sends me. I told him that they made you jealous.” And she drew from a case cigarettes covered with gilt lettering in a foreign language. “But of course,” she began again suddenly, “I must have met this young man’s father with you. Isn’t he your nephew? How on earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so exquisitely charming to me,” she added, with an air of warmth and modesty. But when I thought to myself, knowing my father’s coldness and reserve, what must actually have been the brusque greeting which she claimed to have found so charming, I was embarrassed, as though at some indelicacy on his part, by the contrast between the excessive recognition bestowed on it and his want of geniality. It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote their generosity, their talent, a disposable dream of sentimental beauty (for, like artists, they never seek to realise the value of their dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and a wealth that counts for little, to the fashioning