Unfortunately, if there was one person in the world who, more than anyone else, lived shut up in a little world of her own, it was my grandmother. She would not, indeed, have despised me, she would simply not have understood what I meant had she been told that I attached importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the persons of people the very existence of whom she had never noticed and would, when the time came to leave Balbec, retain no impression of their names. I dared not confess to her that if these same people had seen her talking to Mme. de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely gratified, because I felt that the Marquise counted for much in the hotel and that her friendship would have given us a position in the eyes of Mlle. de Stermaria. Not that my grandmother’s friend represented to me, in any sense of the word, a member of the aristocracy: I was too well used to her name, which had been familiar to my ears before my mind had begun to consider it, when as a child I had heard it occur in conversation at home: while her title added to it only a touch of quaintness—as some uncommon Christian name would have done, or as in the names of streets, among which we can see nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron, in the plebeian and even squalid Rue Rochechouart, or in the Rue Grammont than in the Rue Léonce Reynaud or the Rue Hippolyte Lebas. Mme. de Villeparisis no more made me think of a person who belonged to a special world than did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish from M. Carnot, likewise President of the Republic, or from Raspail, whose photograph Françoise had bought with that of Pius IX. It was one of my grandmother’s principles that, when away from home, one should cease to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside to meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris, that they would make one waste on being merely polite, in pointless conversation, the precious time which ought all to be spent in the open air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that this view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorised, between old friends whom chance brought face to face in the same hotel, the fiction of a mutual incognito, on hearing her friend’s name from the manager she merely looked the other way, and pretended not to see Mme. de Villeparisis, who, realising that my grandmother did not want to be recognised, looked also into the void. She went past, and I was left in my isolation like a shipwrecked mariner who has seen a vessel apparently coming towards him which has then, without lowering a boat, vanished under the horizon.
She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel, or who came there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; in fact, I noticed that he gave her no greeting, one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an invitation to take luncheon with the barrister, who drunken with the honour of having the nobleman at his table avoided his friends of every day, and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his signal could not be interpreted by them as an invitation to join the party.
“Well, I hope you’ve got on your best clothes; I hope you feel smart enough,” was the magistrate’s wife’s greeting to him that evening.
“Smart? Why should I?” asked the barrister, concealing his rapture in an exaggerated astonishment. “Because of my guests, do you mean?” he went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. “But what is there smart about having a few friends in to luncheon? After all, they must feed somewhere!”
“But it is smart! They are the de Cambremers, aren’t they? I recognised them at once. She is a Marquise. And quite genuine, too. Not through the females.”
“Oh, she’s a very simple soul, she is charming, no standoffishness about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals to you. … I would have introduced you!” he asserted, tempering with a hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he says to Esther:
Of all my Kingdom must I give you half!
“No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet.”
“But you were quite wrong, I assure you,” replied the barrister, growing bolder now that the danger point was passed. “They weren’t going to eat you. I say, aren’t we going to have our little game of bezique?”
“Why, of course! We were afraid to suggest it, now that you go about entertaining Marquises.”
“Oh, get along with you; there’s nothing so very wonderful about them. Why, I’m dining there tomorrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I mean it. Honestly, I’d just as soon stay here.”
“No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a Reactionary,” cried the chief magistrate, laughing till the tears stood in his eyes at his own joke. “But you go to Féterne too, don’t you?” he went on, turning to the solicitor.
“Oh, I go there on Sundays—in at one door and out at the other. But I don’t have them here to luncheon, like the Leader.”
M. de Stermaria was not at Balbec that day, to the barrister’s great regret. But he managed to say a word in season to the head waiter:
“Aimé, you can tell M. de Stermaria that he’s not the only nobleman you’ve had in here. You saw the gentleman who was with me today at luncheon? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well, that was the Marquis
