In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (46 page)

“Do you shoot much, Monsieur?” said Mme Verdurin contemptuously to M. de Cambremer.

“Has Ski told you of the near shave we had today?” Cottard inquired of the Mistress.

“I shoot mostly in the forest of Chantepie,” replied M. de Cambremer.

“No, I’ve told her nothing,” said Ski.

“Does it deserve its name?” Brichot asked M. de Cambremer, after a glance at me from the corner of his eye, for he had promised me that he would introduce the topic of etymology, begging me at the same time to conceal from the Cambremers the scorn that he felt for the researches of the Combray priest.

“I’m afraid I must be very stupid, but I don’t grasp your question,” said M. de Cambremer.

“I mean: do many magpies sing in it?” replied Brichot.

Cottard meanwhile could not bear Mme Verdurin’s not knowing that they had nearly missed the train.

“Out with it,” Mme Cottard said to her husband encouragingly, “tell us about your odyssey.”

“Well, it really is rather out of the ordinary,” said the doctor, and repeated his narrative from the beginning. “When I saw that the train was in the station, I was dumbfounded. It was all Ski’s fault. You’re pretty eccentric with your information, my dear fellow! And there was Brichot waiting for us at the station!”

“I assumed,” said the scholar, casting around him what he could still muster of a glance and smiling with his thin lips, “that if you had been detained at Graincourt, it would mean that you had encountered some peripatetic siren.”

“Will you hold your tongue! What if my wife were to hear you?” said the Doctor. “This wife of mine, it is jealous.”

“Ah! that Brichot,” cried Ski, moved to traditional merriment by Brichot’s spicy witticism, “he’s always the same,” although he had no reason to suppose that the worthy academic had ever been specially lecherous. And, to embellish these time-honoured words with the ritual gesture, he made as though he could not resist the desire to pinch Brichot’s leg. “He never changes, the rascal,” Ski went on, without stopping to think of the effect, at once sad and comic, that Brichot’s semi-blindness gave to his words: “Always an eye for the ladies.”

“You see,” said M. de Cambremer, “what it is to meet a scholar. Here have I been shooting for fifteen years in the forest of Chantepie, and I’ve never even thought of what the name meant.”

Mme de Cambremer cast a stern glance at her husband; she did not like him to humiliate himself thus before Brichot. She was even more displeased when, at every “ready-made” expression that Cancan employed, Cottard, who knew the ins and outs of them all, having himself laboriously acquired them, pointed out to the Marquis, who admitted his stupidity, that they meant nothing: “Why ‘drink like a fish’? Do you suppose fish drink more than other creatures? You say: ‘mind your p’s and q’s.’ Why p’s and q’s in particular? Why ‘easy as pie’? Why ‘at sixes and sevens’? Why ‘sow one’s wild oats’?”

But at this, the defence of M. de Cambremer was taken up by Brichot, who explained the origin of each expression. Mme de Cambremer, however, was chiefly occupied in examining the changes the Verdurins had introduced at La Raspelière, so that she could criticise some and import others, or perhaps the same ones, to Féterne. “I wonder what that chandelier is that’s hanging all askew. I hardly recognise my old Raspelière,” she went on, with a familiarly aristocratic air, as she might have spoken of an old servant meaning not so much to indicate his age as to say that he had seen her in her cradle. And as she was a trifle bookish in her speech: “All the same,” she added in an undertone, “I can’t help feeling that if I were living in another person’s house I should feel some compunction about altering everything like this.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t come with them,” said Mme Verdurin to M. de Charlus and Morel, hoping that M. de Charlus was now “enrolled” and would submit to the rule that they must all arrive by the same train. “You’re sure that Chantepie means the singing magpie, Chochotte?” she went on, to show that, like the great hostess that she was, she could join in every conversation at once.

“Tell me something about this violinist,” Mme de Cambremer said to me, “he interests me. I adore music, and it seems to me that I have heard of him before. Complete my education.” She had heard that Morel had come with M. de Charlus and hoped, by getting the former to come to her house, to make friends with the latter. She added, however, so that I might not guess her reason for asking, “M. Brichot interests me too.” For, although she was highly cultivated, just as certain persons who are prone to obesity eat hardly anything and take exercise all day long without ceasing to grow visibly fatter, so Mme de Cambremer might spend her time, especially at Féterne, delving into ever more recondite philosophy, ever more esoteric music, and yet she emerged from these studies only to hatch intrigues that would enable her to break with the middle-class friends of her girlhood and to form the connexions which she had originally supposed to be part of the social life of her “in-laws” and had since discovered to be far more exalted and remote. A philosopher who was not modern enough for her, Leibniz, has said that the way is long from the intellect to the heart. It was a journey that Mme de Cambremer had been no more capable of making than her brother. Abandoning the study of John Stuart Mill only for that of Lachelier, the less she believed in the reality of the external world, the more desperately she sought to establish herself in a good position in it before she died. In her passion for realism in art, no object seemed to her humble enough to serve as a model to painter or writer. A fashionable picture or novel would have made her sick; Tolstoy’s moujiks, or Millet’s peasants, were the extreme social boundary beyond which she did not allow the artist to pass. But to cross the boundary that limited her own social relations, to raise herself to an intimate acquaintance with duchesses, this was the goal of all her efforts, so ineffective had the spiritual treatment to which she subjected herself by the study of great masterpieces proved in overcoming the congenital and morbid snobbery that had developed in her. This snobbery had even succeeded in curing certain tendencies to avarice and adultery to which in her younger days she had been inclined, just as certain peculiar and permanent pathological conditions seem to render those who are subject to them immune to other maladies. I could not however refrain, as I listened to her, from admiring, though without deriving any pleasure therefrom, the refinement of her expressions. They were those that are employed in a given period by all the people of the same intellectual range, so that the refined expression provides at once, like the arc of a circle, the means to describe and limit the entire circumference. And so the effect of these expressions is that the people who employ them bore me immediately, because I feel that I already know them, but are generally regarded as superior persons, and have often been offered me as delightful and unappreciated dinner neighbours.

“You cannot fail to be aware, Madame, that many forest regions take their name from the animals that inhabit them. Next to the forest of Chantepie, you have the wood Chantereine.”

“I don’t know who the queen may be, but you’re not very courteous to her,” said M. de Cambremer.

“Take that, Chochotte,” said Mme de Verdurin. “And otherwise, did you have a pleasant journey?”

“We encountered only vague specimens of humanity who thronged the train. But I must answer M. de Cambremer’s question;
reine
, in this instance, is not the wife of a king, but a frog. It is the name that the frog has long retained in this district, as is shown by the station Renneville, which ought to be spelt Reineville.”

“I say, that looks a fine beast,” said M. de Cambremer to Mme Verdurin, pointing to a fish. (It was one of the compliments by means of which he considered that he paid his whack at a dinner-party, and gave an immediate return of hospitality. “There’s no need to invite them back,” he would often say, in speaking to his wife of one or other couple of their acquaintance: “They were delighted to have us. It was they who thanked me for coming.”) “I may tell you, though, that I’ve been going to Renneville every day for years, and I’ve never seen any more frogs there than anywhere else. Madame de Cambremer brought over to these parts the curé of a parish where she owns a considerable property, who has very much the same turn of mind as yourself, it seems to me. He has written a book.”

“I know, I’ve read it with immense interest,” Brichot replied hypocritically.

The satisfaction that his pride received indirectly from this answer made M. de Cambremer laugh long and loud. “Ah, well, the author of, what shall I call it, this geography, this glossary, dwells at great length upon the name of a little place of which we were formerly, if I may say so, the lords, and which is called Pont-à-Couleuvre. Of course I am only an ignorant rustic compared with such a fountain of learning, but I have been to Pont-à-Couleuvre a thousand times if he’s been there once, and devil take me if I ever saw one of those beastly snakes there—I say beastly in spite of the tribute the worthy La Fontaine pays them.” (
The Man and the Snake
was one of his two fables.)

“You haven’t seen any, and you saw straight,” replied Brichot. “Undoubtedly, the writer you mention knows his subject through and through, he has written a remarkable book.”

“He has indeed!” exclaimed Mme de Cambremer. “That book, there’s no doubt about it, is a real work of scholarship.”

“No doubt he consulted various cartularies (by which we mean the lists of benefices and cures of each diocese), which may have furnished him with the names of lay patrons and ecclesiastical collators. But there are other sources. One of the most learned of my friends has delved into them. He found that the place in question was named Pont-à-Quileuvre. This odd name encouraged him to carry his researches further, to a Latin text in which the bridge that your friend supposes to be infested with snakes is styled
Pons cui aperit
: a closed bridge that was opened only upon due payment.”

“You were speaking of frogs. I, when I find myself among such learned folk, feel like the frog before the Areopagus” (this being his other fable), said Cancan who often indulged, with a hearty laugh, in this pleasantry thanks to which he imagined himself to be making at one and the same time, with a mixture of humility and aptness, a profession of ignorance and a display of learning.

Meanwhile Cottard, blocked on one side by M. de Charlus’s silence, and driven to seek an outlet elsewhere, turned to me with one of those questions which impressed his patients when it hit the mark and showed them that he could put himself so to speak inside their bodies, and if on the other hand it missed the mark, enabled him to check certain theories, to widen his previous standpoints. “When you come to a relatively high altitude, such as this where we now are, do you find that the change increases your tendency to breathlessness?” he asked me with the certainty of either arousing admiration or enlarging his own knowledge.

M. de Cambremer heard the question and smiled. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to hear that you have fits of breathlessness,” he flung at me across the table. He did not mean that it cheered him up, though in fact it did. For this worthy man could not hear any reference to another person’s sufferings without a feeling of well-being and a spasm of hilarity which speedily gave place to the instinctive pity of a kind heart. But his words had another meaning which was indicated more precisely by the sentence that followed: “I’m delighted,” he explained, “because my sister has them too.” In short, he was delighted in the same way as if he had heard me mention as one of my friends a person who was constantly coming to their house. “What a small world!” was the reflexion which he formed mentally and which I saw written upon his smiling face when Cottard spoke to me of my attacks. And these began to establish themselves, from the evening of this dinner-party, as a sort of common acquaintance, after whom M. de Cambremer never failed to inquire, if only to hand on a report to his sister.

As I answered the questions with which his wife kept plying me about Morel, my thoughts returned to a conversation I had had with my mother that afternoon. Without attempting to dissuade me from going to the Verdurins’ if there was a chance of my enjoying myself there, she had pointed out that it was a circle of which my grandfather would not have approved, which would have made him exclaim: “On guard!” Then she had gone on to say: “By the way, Judge Toureuil and his wife told me they had been to lunch with Mme Bontemps. They asked me no questions. But I seemed to gather from what was said that a marriage between you and Albertine would be the joy of her aunt’s life. I think the real reason is that they are all extremely fond of you. At the same time the style in which they imagine that you would be able to keep her, the sort of connexions they more or less know that we have—all that is not, I fancy, entirely irrelevant, although it may be a minor consideration. I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you myself, because I’m not keen on it, but as I imagine they’ll mention it to you, I thought I’d get a word in first.” “But you yourself, what do you think of her?” I asked my mother. “Well, I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage. But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I can’t say what I think of Albertine; I don’t think of her. All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sévigné: ‘She has good qualities, or so I believe. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.’ And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy.” But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to
Phèdre
and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.