The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust & Mark Treharne

Author:Marcel Proust & Mark Treharne [Proust, Marcel & Treharne, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Unknown, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780099362418
Google: 6oOaBeuQJE0C
Amazon: 0143039229
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 1996-12-15T23:00:00+00:00

groaning, making the blankets heave with

its convulsions. The eyelids were closed,

and it was because the one nearer me did

not shut properly, rather than because it

opened at all that it left visible a chink of

eye, misty, filmed, reflecting the dimness

both of an organic sense of vision and of a

hidden, internal pain. All this agitation

was not addressed to us, whom she neither

saw nor knew. But if this was only a beast

that was stirring there, where coulel my

grandmother be? Yes, I could recognise

the shape of her nose, which bore no

relation now to the rest of her face, but to

the corner of which a beauty spot still

adhered, and the hand that kept thrusting

the blankets aside with a gesture which

formerly would have meant that those

blankets were pressing upon her, but now

meant nothing.

Mamma asked me to go for a little

vinegar and water with which to sponge

my grandmother’s forehead. It was the

only thing that refreshed her, thought

Mamma, who saw that she was trying to

push back her hair. But now one of the

servants was signalling to me from the

doorway. The news that my grandmother

was in the last throes had spread like

wildfire through the house. One of those

‘extra helps’ whom people engage at

exceptional times to relieve the strain on

their servants (a practice which gives

deathbeds an air of being social functions)

had just opened the front door to the Duc

de Guermantes, who was now waiting in

the hall and had asked for me: I could not

escape him.

“I have just, my dear Sir, heard your

tragic news. I should like, as a mark of

sympathy, to shake hands with your

father.” I made the excuse that I could not

very well disturb him at the moment. M.

de Guermantes was like a caller who turns

up just as one is about to start on a

journey. But he felt so intensely the

importance of the courtesy he was

shewing us that it blinded him to all else,

and he insisted upon being taken into the

drawing-room. As a general rule, he made

a point of going resolutely through the

formalities with which he had decided to

honour anyone, and took little heed that the

trunks were packed or the coffin ready.

“Have you sent for Dieulafoy? No? That

was a great mistake. And if you had only

asked me, I would have got him to come,

he never refuses me anything, although he

has refused the Duchesse de Chartres

before now. You see, I set myself above a

Princess of the Blood. However, in the

presence of death we are all equal,” he

added, not that he meant to suggest that my

grandmother was becoming his equal, but

probably because he felt that a prolonged

discussion of his power over Dieulafoy

and his pre-eminence over the Duchesse

de Chartres would not be in very good

taste.

This advice did not in the least surprise

me. I knew that, in the Guermantes set, the

name of Dieulafoy was regularly quoted

(only with slightly more respect) among

those of other tradesmen who were ‘quite

the best’ in their respective lines. And the

old Duchesse de Mortemart née

Guermantes (I never could understand, by

the way, why, the moment one speaks of a

Duchess, one almost invariably says: “The

old Duchess of So-and-so” or,

alternatively, in a delicate

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