,
THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
71
Mme. de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and
uttered a last farewell to Swann: "You know, we can talk about that
another time; I don't believe a word you've been saying, but we must
discuss it quietly" . .. . She was just getting into her carriage when,
seeing her foot exposed, the Duke cried out in a terrifying voice:
"Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You've kept on
your black shoes."
The Duchess objects that they are late, the Duke answers that
the proper shoes are more important than punctuality, and while
she is changing her shoes, Swann, who is regarded as an expert by
the Duchess in questions of dress, remarks that the black shoes did
not seem unbecoming and did not offend him, and the Duke admits
that the sartorial point is not beyond dispute. Then the Duke asks
Swann to make his departure before the Duchess returns for she
may wish to resume the conversation, and she is virtually dead of
hunger, as he himself is:
" ... Besides, I tell you frankly I am dying of hunger. I had a wretched
lunch this morning when I came from the train. There was the devil
of a
btiarnaise
sauce, I admit, but in spite of that I shan't be a t all
sorry
to sit down to dinner. Five minutes to eight! 0 women, women!
She'll give us both indigestion before tomorrow. She is not nearly as
strong as people think." The Duke fe lt no compunction at speaking
thus of his wife's ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former
interested him more, appeared to him more important. And so it was
simply from good breeding and good fellowship that, after politely
shewing us out, he cried from "off stage," in a stentorian voice to
Swann, who was already in the courtyard: "You now, don't let your–
self be taken in by the doctors' nonsense, damn them. They're jackasses.
You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!"
Mr. Aldridge must also be quoted at length, for paraphrase
may quickly become misinterpretation when one is unsympathetic:
To put value back where we found it is to do nothing more than
put it where we always find it whenever we function as novelists and
critics and not as surgeons. As novelists and critics we are aware of
value only to the extent that we are able to discover it in the form it
most characteristically takes in society; and that is in the form of
social manners. Manners are the organized public manifestations of
those dogmas, codes, myths, and moral idiosyncrasies which compose
