In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (18 page)

On either side of us, on the topmost steps, were scattered couples who were waiting for their carriages. Erect, isolated, flanked by her husband and myself, the Duchess kept to the left of the staircase, already wrapped in her Tiepolo cloak, her throat clasped in its band of rubies, devoured by the eyes of women and men alike, who sought to divine the secret of her beauty and elegance. Waiting for her carriage on the same step of the staircase as Mme de Guermantes, but at the opposite side of it, Mme de Gallardon, who had long abandoned all hope of ever receiving a visit from her cousin, turned her back so as not to appear to have seen her, and, what was more important, so as not to offer proof of the fact that the other did not greet her. Mme de Gallardon was in an extremely bad temper because some gentlemen in her company had taken it upon themselves to speak to her of Oriane: “I haven’t the slightest desire to see her,” she had replied to them, “I did notice her, as a matter of fact, just now, and she’s beginning to show her age. It seems she can’t get
over it, Basin says so himself. And I can well understand it, because, since she hasn’t any brains, is as nasty as can be, and has bad manners, she must know very well that, once her looks go, she’ll have nothing left to fall back on.”

I had put on my overcoat, for which M. de Guermantes, who dreaded chills, reproached me as we went down together, because of the heated atmosphere indoors. And the generation of noblemen who more or less passed through the hands of Mgr Dupanloup speak such bad French (except the Castellane brothers) that the Duke expressed what was in his mind thus: “It is better not to put on your coat before going out of doors, at least
as a general thesis
.” I can see all that departing crowd now; I can see, if I am not mistaken in placing him upon that staircase, a portrait detached from its frame, the Prince de Sagan, whose last appearance in society this must have been, paying his respects to the Duchess with so ample a sweep of his top hat in his white-gloved hand, harmonising with the gardenia in his buttonhole, that one was surprised that it was not a plumed felt hat of the
ancien régime
, several ancestral faces from which were exactly reproduced in the face of this noble lord. He stopped for only a short time in front of her, but his attitudes in that brief moment were sufficient to compose a complete tableau vivant and, as it were, a historical scene. Moreover, as he has since died, and as I never had more than a glimpse of him in his lifetime, he has become for me so much a character in history, social history at least, that I am sometimes astonished when I think that a woman and a man whom I know are his sister and nephew.

While we were going down the staircase, a woman who appeared to be about forty but was in fact older was climbing it with an air of lassitude that became her. This was the Princesse d’Orvillers, a natural daughter, it was said, of the Duke of Parma, whose pleasant voice rang with a vaguely Austrian accent. She advanced, tall and stooping, in a gown of white flowered silk, her exquisite bosom heaving with exhaustion beneath a harness of diamonds and sapphires. Tossing her head like a royal palfrey embarrassed by its halter of pearls, of an incalculable value but an inconvenient weight, she let fall here and there a soft and charming gaze, of an azure which, as it gradually began to fade, became more caressing still, and greeted most of the departing guests with a friendly nod. “A fine time to arrive, Paulette!” said the Duchess. “Yes, I am so sorry! But really it was a physical impossibility,” replied the Princesse d’Orvillers, who had acquired this sort of expression from the Duchesse de Guermantes, but added to it her own natural sweetness and the air of sincerity conveyed by the force of a distantly Teutonic accent in so tender a voice. She appeared to be alluding to complications of life too elaborate to be related, and not merely to parties, although she had just come on from a succession of these. But it was not they that forced her to come so late. As the Prince de Guermantes had for many years forbidden his wife to receive Mme d’Orvillers, the latter, when the ban was lifted, contented herself with replying to the other’s invitations, so as not to appear to be thirsting after them, by simply leaving cards. After two or three years of this method, she came in person, but very late, as though after the theatre. In this way she gave herself the appearance of attaching no importance to the party, nor to being seen at it, but simply of having come to pay the Prince and Princess a visit, for their own sakes, because she liked them, at an hour when, the great majority of their guests having already gone, she would “have them more to herself.”

“Oriane has really sunk very low,” muttered Mme de Gallardon. “I cannot understand Basin’s allowing her to speak to Mme d’Orvillers. I’m sure M. de Gallardon would never have allowed me.” For my part, I had recognised in Mme d’Orvillers the woman who, outside the Hôtel Guermantes, used to cast languishing glances at me, turn round, stop and gaze into shop windows. Mme de Guermantes introduced me. Mme d’Orvillers was charming, neither too friendly nor piqued. She gazed at me as at everyone else with her soft eyes . . . But I was never again, when I met her, to receive from her one of those overtures with which she had seemed to be offering herself. There is a special kind of look, apparently of recognition, which a young man receives from certain women—and from certain men—only until the day on which they have made his acquaintance and have learned that he is the friend of people with whom they too are intimate.

We were told that the carriage was at the door. Mme de Guermantes gathered up her red skirt as though to go downstairs and get into the carriage, but, seized perhaps by remorse, or by the desire to give pleasure and above all to profit by the brevity which the material obstacle to prolonging it imposed upon so boring an action, looked at Mme de Gallardon; then, as though she had only just caught sight of her, acting upon a sudden inspiration, before going down she tripped across the whole width of the step and, upon reaching her delighted cousin, held out her hand. “Such a long time,” said the Duchess, who then, so as not to have to enlarge upon all the regrets and legitimate excuses that this formula might be supposed to contain, turned with a look of alarm towards the Duke, who indeed, having gone down with me to the carriage, was storming with rage on seeing that his wife had gone over to Mme de Gallardon and was holding up the stream of carriages. “Oriane is really very beautiful still!” said Mme de Gallardon. “People amuse me when they say that we’re on bad terms; we may (for reasons which we have no need to tell other people) go for years without seeing one another, but we have too many memories in common ever to be separated, and deep down she must know that she cares far more for me than for all sorts of people whom she sees every day and who are not of her blood.” Mme de Gallardon was in fact like those scorned lovers who try desperately to make people believe that they are better loved than those whom their fair one cherishes. And (by the praises which, oblivious of how they contradicted what she had been saying shortly before, she now lavished on the Duchesse de Guermantes) she proved indirectly that the other was thoroughly conversant with the maxims that ought to guide in her career a great lady of fashion who, at the selfsame moment when her most marvellous gown is exciting envy along with admiration, must be able to cross the whole width of a staircase to disarm it. “Do at least take care not to wet your shoes” (a brief but heavy shower of rain had fallen), said the Duke, who was still furious at having been kept waiting.

On our homeward drive, in the confined space of the coupé, those red shoes were of necessity very close to mine, and Mme de Guermantes, fearing that she might actually have touched me, said to the Duke: “This young man is going to be obliged to say to me, like the person in some cartoon or other: ‘Madame, tell me at once that you love me, but don’t tread on my feet like that.’ ” My thoughts, however, were far from Mme de Guermantes. Ever since Saint-Loup had spoken to me of a young girl of good family who frequented a house of ill-fame, and of the Baroness Putbus’s chambermaid, it was in these two persons that had now become coalesced and embodied the desires inspired in me day by day by countless beauties of two classes, on the one hand the vulgar and magnificent, the majestic lady’s-maids of great houses, swollen with pride and saying “we” in speaking of duchesses, and on the other hand those girls of whom it was enough sometimes, without even having seen them go past in carriages or on foot, to have read the names in the account of a ball for me to fall in love with them and, having conscientiously searched the social directory for the country houses in which they spent the summer (as often as not letting myself be led astray by a similarity of names), to dream alternately of going to live amid the plains of the West, the dunes of the North, the pine-woods of the South. But in vain did I fuse together all the most exquisite fleshly matter to compose, after the ideal outline traced for me by Saint-Loup, the young girl of easy virtue and Mme Putbus’s maid, my two possessible beauties still lacked what I should never know until I had seen them: individual character. I was to wear myself out in vain trying to picture, during the months when my desires were focused on young girls, what the one Saint-Loup had spoken of looked like, and who she was, and during the months in which I would have preferred a lady’s-maid, the lineaments of Mme Putbus’s. But what peace of mind, after having been perpetually troubled by my restless desires for so many fugitive creatures whose very names I often did not know and who were in any case so hard to find, harder still to get to know, impossible perhaps to conquer, to have drawn from all that scattered, fugitive, anonymous beauty two choice specimens duly labelled, whom I was at least certain of being able to procure when I wished! I kept putting off the hour for getting down to this twofold pleasure, as I put off the hour for getting down to work, but the certainty of having it whenever I chose dispensed me almost from the necessity of taking it, like those sleeping tablets which one has only to have within hand’s reach to be able to do without them and to fall asleep. In the whole universe I now desired only two women, of whose faces I could not, it is true, form any picture, but whose names Saint-Loup had given me and whose compliance he had guaranteed. So that if, by what he had said this evening, he had set my imagination a heavy task, he had at the same time procured an appreciable relaxation, a prolonged rest for my will.

“Well!” said the Duchess, “aside from your parties, can I be of any use to you? Have you found a salon to which you would like me to introduce you?” I replied that I was afraid the only one that tempted me was hardly elegant enough for her. “Whose is that?” she asked in a hoarse, menacing voice, scarcely opening her lips. “Baroness Putbus.” This time she pretended to be really angry. “Ah, no, really! I believe you’re trying to make a fool of me. I don’t even know how I come to have heard the creature’s name. But she is the dregs of society. It’s as though you were to ask me for an introduction to my dressmaker. In fact worse, for my dressmaker is charming. You must be a little bit cracked, my poor boy. In any case, I beseech you to be polite to the people I’ve introduced you to, to leave cards on them, and go and see them, and not talk to them about Baroness Putbus of whom they have never heard.” I asked whether Mme d’Orvillers was not inclined to be flighty. “Oh, not in the least, you’re mixing her up with someone else. She’s rather strait-laced, if anything. Isn’t she, Basin?” “Yes, in any case I don’t think there has ever been any talk about her,” said the Duke.

“You won’t come with us to the ball?” he asked me. “I can lend you a Venetian cloak and I know someone who will be deucedly glad to see you there—Oriane for one, that goes without saying—but the Princesse de Parme. She never tires of singing your praises, and swears by you. It’s lucky for you—since she’s a trifle mature—that she is a model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have taken you on as a cicisbeo, as they used to say in my young days, a sort of
cavaliere servente
.”

I was interested not in the ball but in my rendezvous with Albertine. And so I refused. The carriage had stopped, the footman was shouting for the gate to be opened, the horses pawed the ground until it was flung apart and the carriage passed into the courtyard. “So long,” said the Duke. “I’ve sometimes regretted living so close to Marie,” the Duchess said to me, “because although I’m very fond of her, I’m not quite so fond of her company. But I’ve never regretted it so much as tonight, since it has allowed me so little of yours.” “Come, Oriane, no speechmaking.”

The Duchess would have liked me to come inside for a minute. She laughed heartily, as did the Duke, when I said that I could not because I was expecting a girl to call at any moment. “You choose a funny time to receive visitors,” she said to me.

“Come along, my sweet, there’s no time to lose,” said M. de Guermantes to his wife. “It’s a quarter to twelve, and time we were dressed . . .” He came into collision, outside his front door which they were grimly guarding, with the two ladies with the walking-sticks, who had not been afraid to descend at dead of night from their mountain-top to prevent a scandal. “Basin, we felt we must warn you, in case you were seen at that ball: poor Amanien has just died, an hour ago.” The Duke was momentarily dismayed. He saw the famous ball collapsing in ruins for him now that these accursed mountaineers had informed him of the death of M. d’Osmond. But he quickly recovered himself and flung at his cousins a retort which reflected, together with his determination not to forgo a pleasure, his incapacity to assimilate exactly the niceties of the French language: “He’s dead! No, no, they’re exaggerating, they’re exaggerating!” And without giving a further thought to his two relatives who, armed with their alpenstocks, prepared to make their nocturnal ascent, he fired off a string of questions at his valet:

“Are you sure my helmet has come?” “Yes, Monsieur le Duc.” “You’re sure there’s a hole in it I can breathe through? I don’t want to be suffocated, damn it!” “Yes, Monsieur le Duc.” “Oh, hell and damnation, everything’s going wrong this evening. Oriane, I forgot to ask Babal whether the shoes with pointed toes were for you!” “But, my dear, the dresser from the Opéra-Comique is here, he will tell us. I don’t see how they could go with your spurs.” “Let’s go and find the dresser,” said the Duke. “Good-bye, my boy, I’d ask you to come in while we are trying on our costumes—it would amuse you. But we should only waste time talking, it’s nearly midnight and we mustn’t be late in getting there or we shall spoil the show.”