“Pierre: it’s his name, he’s a historian, a most distinguished man.”
“Really? You don’t say so.”
“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme. de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves his in the hall. I tell him when I see him come in that he looks just like a clockmaker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”
“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Molé’s hat; we shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme. de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one but myself overheard him.
“She really is astonishing, the little Duchess,” said M. d’Argencourt, pointing to Mme. de Guermantes who was talking to G——. “Whenever[“Whenever] there’s a famous man in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t always be M. de Borelli, of course, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel. But then it’s bound to be M. Pierre Loti or M. Edmond Rostand. Yesterday evening at the Doudeauvilles’, where by the way she was looking splendid in her emerald tiara and a pink dress with a long train, she had M. Deschanel on one side and the German Ambassador on the other: she was holding forth to them about China; the general public, at a respectful distance where they couldn’t hear what was being said, were wondering whether there wasn’t going to be war. Really, you’d have said she was a Queen, holding her circle.”
Everyone had gathered round Mme. de Villeparisis to watch her painting.
“Those flowers are a truly celestial pink,” said Legrandin, “I should say sky-pink. For there is such a thing as sky-pink just as there is sky-blue. But,” he lowered his voice in the hope that he would not be heard by anyone but the Marquise, “I think I shall still give my vote to the silky, living flesh tint of your rendering of them. You leave Pisanello and Van Huysun a long way behind, with their laborious, dead herbals.”
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.
“What makes you think that is that they painted the flowers of their period, which we don’t have now, but they did it with great skill.”
“Ah! The flowers of their period! That is a most ingenious theory,” exclaimed Legrandin.