In Search of Lost Time, Volume II by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679641797
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

As to the coming of the Princesse de Luxembourg, whose carriage, on the day she had left the fruit, had drawn up outside the hotel, it had not passed unobserved by the little group of wives, the notary’s, the president’s and the judge’s, who had already for some time past been extremely anxious to know whether that Mme de Villeparisis whom everyone treated with so much respect—which all these ladies were burning to hear that she did not deserve—was a genuine marquise and not an adventuress. Whenever Mme de Villeparisis passed through the hall the judge’s wife, who scented irregularities everywhere, would lift her nose from her needlework and stare at the intruder in a way that made her friends die with laughter.

“Oh, well, you know,” she proudly explained, “I always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is properly married until she has shown me her birth certificate and her marriage lines. But never fear—just wait till I’ve finished my little investigation.”

And so day after day the ladies would come together and laughingly ask: “Any news?”

But on the evening of the Princesse de Luxembourg’s call the judge’s wife laid a finger on her lips.

“I’ve discovered something.”

“Oh, isn’t Mme Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw . . . But do tell us! What’s happened?”

“Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away—which only a creature like that would dare to have—came here today to call on the so-called Marquise!”

“Oh-yow-yow! Crash bang! Did you ever! Why, it must be the woman we saw—you remember, President—we said at the time we didn’t at all like the look of her, but we didn’t know that it was the ‘Marquise’ she’d come to see. A woman with a nigger-boy, you mean?”

“That’s the one.”

“You don’t say! Do you happen to know her name?”

“Yes, I made a mistake on purpose. I picked up her card. She trades under the name of the ‘Princesse de Luxembourg’! Wasn’t I right to have my doubts about her? It’s a nice thing to have to fraternise with a Baronne d’Ange like that?”10

The president quoted Mathurin Régnier’s Macette to the judge.

It must not, however, be supposed that this misunderstanding was merely temporary, like those that occur in the second act of a farce to be cleared up before the final curtain. Mme de Luxembourg, a niece of the King of England and of the Emperor of Austria, and Mme de Villeparisis, when one called to take the other for a drive, always appeared like two “old trots” of the kind one has always such difficulty in avoiding at a watering-place. Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain appear to a large section of the middle classes as crapulous paupers (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The middle classes pitch their standards in this respect too high,

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