In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust Read Free Book Online Page A

reality; but I felt the need to find explanations for
it; moreover it had been fixed with the same intensity, while Berma
was on the stage, upon everything that she offered, in the
indivisibility of a living whole, to my eyes and ears; there was
nothing separate or distinct; it welcomed, accordingly, the discovery
of a reasonable cause in these tributes paid to the simplicity, to the
good taste of the actress, it attracted them to itself by its power of
absorption, seized hold of them, as the optimism of a drunken man
seizes hold of the actions of his neighbour, in each of which he finds
an excuse for emotion. "He is right!" I told myself. "What a charming
voice, what an absence of shrillness, what simple costumes, what
intelligence to have chosen Phèdre . No; I have not been disappointed!"
    The cold beef, spiced with carrots, made its appearance, couched by
the Michelangelo of our kitchen upon enormous crystals of jelly, like
transparent blocks of quartz.
    "You have a chef of the first order, Madame," said M. de Norpois, "and
that is no small matter. I myself, who have had, when abroad, to
maintain a certain style in housekeeping, I know how difficult it
often is to find a perfect master–cook. But this is a positive banquet
that you have set before us!"
    And indeed Françoise, in the excitement of her ambition to make a
success, for so distinguished a guest, of a dinner the preparation of
which had been obstructed by difficulties worthy of her powers, had
given herself such trouble as she no longer took when we were alone,
and had recaptured her incomparable Combray manner.
    "That is a thing you can't get in a chophouse,—in the best of them, I
mean; a spiced beef in which the jelly does not taste of glue and the
beef has caught the flavour of the carrots; it is admirable! Allow me
to come again," he went on, making a sign to shew that he wanted more
of the jelly. "I should be interested to see how your Vatel managed a
dish of quite a different kind; I should like, for instance, to see
him tackle a bœuf Stroganoff ."
    M. de Norpois, so as to add his own contribution to the gaiety of the
repast, entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was
in the habit of regaling his colleagues in "the career," quoting now
some ludicrous sentence uttered by a politician, an old offender,
whose sentences were always long and packed with incoherent images,
now some monumental epigram of a diplomat, sparkling with attic salt.
But, to tell the truth, the criterion which for him set apart these
two kinds of phrase in no way resembled that which I was in the habit
of applying to literature. Most of the finer shades escaped me; the
words which he repeated with derision seemed to me not to differ very
greatly from those which he found remarkable. He belonged to the class
of men who, had we come to discuss the books that I liked, would have
said: "So you understand that, do you? I must confess that I do not
understand, I am not initiated;" but I could have matched his
attitude, for I did not grasp the wit or folly, the eloquence or
pomposity which he found in a statement or a speech, and the absence
of any perceptible reason for one's being badly and the other's well
expressed made that sort of literature seem more mysterious, more
obscure to me than any other. I could distinguish only that to repeat
what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an
inferior but of a superior mind. When M. de Norpois made use of
certain expressions which were 'common form' in the newspapers, and
uttered them with emphasis, one felt that they became an official
pronouncement by the mere fact of his having employed them, and a
pronouncement which would provoke a string of comment.
    My mother was counting greatly upon the pineapple and truffle salad.
But the Ambassador, after fastening for a moment on the confection the
penetrating gaze of a trained observer, ate it with the inscrutable
discretion of a diplomat, and without