In Search of Lost Time

of Vermeer of Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her conscious, she had answered me with: “I ought to explain that M. Swann was very much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn’t that so, Charles dear?” “You’re not to start saying things about Mme. de Cambremer!” Swann checked her, secretly flattered. “But I’m only repeating what I’ve been told. Besides, it seems that she’s an extremely clever woman; I don’t know her myself. I believe she’s very pushing, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she was quite mad about you; there’s no harm in repeating that.” Swann remained silent as a deaf-mute which was in a way a confirmation of what she had said, and a proof of his own fatuity. “Since what I’m playing reminds you of the Jardin d’Acclimatation,” his wife went on, with a playful semblance of being offended, “we might take him there some day in the carriage, if it would amuse him. It’s lovely there just now, and you can recapture your fond impressions! Which reminds me, talking of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, do you know, this young man thought that we were devotedly attached to a person whom I cut, as a matter of fact, whenever I possibly can, Mme. Blatin! I think it is rather crushing for us, that she should be taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr. Cottard, who never says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she’s positively contagious.” “A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for her is that she is exactly like Savonarola. She is the very image of that portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolomeo.” This mania which Swann had for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for even what we call individual expression is⁠—as we so painfully discover when we are in love and would fain believe in the unique reality of the beloved⁠—something diffused and general, which can be found existing at different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the processions of the Kings of the East, already so anachronistic when Benozzo Gozzoli introduced in their midst various Medici, would have been even more so, since they would have included the portraits of a whole crowd of men, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, subsequent, that is to say not only by fifteen centuries to the Nativity but by four more to the painter himself. There was not missing from those trains, according to Swann, a single living Parisian of any note, any more than there was from that act in one of Sardou’s plays, in which, out of friendship for the author and for the leading lady, and also because it was the fashion, all the best known men in Paris, famous doctors, politicians, barristers, amused themselves, each on a different evening, by “walking on.” “But what has she got to do with the Jardin d’Acclimatation?” “Everything!” “What? You don’t suggest that she’s got a sky-blue behind, like the monkeys?” “Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of what the Cingalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles; it really is a gem.” “Oh, it’s too silly. You know, Mme. Blatin loves asking people questions, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really overpowering.” “What our good friends on the Thames call ‘patronising,’ ” interrupted Odette. “Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where they have some blackamoors⁠—Cingalese, I think I heard my wife say; she is much ‘better up’ in ethnology than I am.” “Now, Charles, you’re not to make fun of poor me.” “I’ve no intention of making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with ‘Good morning, nigger!’⁠ ⁠…” “Oh, it’s too absurd!” “Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. ‘Me nigger,’ he shouted, (quite furious, don’t you know), to Mme. Blatin, ‘me nigger; you, old cow!’ ” “I do think that’s so delightful! I adore that story. Do say it’s a good one. Can’t you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: ‘Me nigger; you, old cow’?” I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Cingalese, one of whom had called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least. But I reflected that in going to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and again on our way home, we should pass along that Allée des Acacias in which I had loved so, once, to gaze on Mme. Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin’s mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the victoria swept by.

During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to “get ready,” was not in the room with us, M. and Mme. Swann would take delight in revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything that I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate attentions carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of causing annoyance, translated into all sorts of trifling actions which must often have meant great inconvenience to her. She had done some “work” for our stall-keeper in the Champs-Élysées, and went out in the snow to give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day. “You have no idea how kindhearted she is, she won’t let it be seen,” her father assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more sensible already than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife’s grand friends Gilberte would turn away, and remain silent, but without any air of reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that her