Adventures, Elisabeth de Gramont
from Adventures of the Mind, Natalie Barney
After excursions with this lunar guide, we were delighted to find ourselves in front of an abstract materiality: Tea – that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen? – brought us back gently to the Good Things of France.
Their author, by dint of epicurianism and without clamoring against poetry, is such a poet in this book – well served at table in season – that her quintessence has escaped lesser poets.
The Caille (Quail) is a complete novel, and the Nèfle (Medlar), this "sorbet of autumn," would force Francis Jammes back to his knees, that shepherd outside the flock who has become a priest outside orders, who, lacking a chair at his writing desk, had to kneel down to sketch a dedication as beautiful as a prayer to our duchesse (and isn't it necessary to have known the good things of this world to make an offering that might be worthy of a god).
Mme de Gramont's book on Proust and Montesquiou points out what the former owes the latter. It re-places these two characters, with a still-healthy originality, in an attitude of reciprocal dependence: Robert the peacock with an arrogance that affirms itself so as not to doubt itself; Proust so conscious of him that he dares to silence him in order to exude a servile politeness which deceives no one, not even Montesquiou. Because Montesquiou may have believed he was playing a role that Proust had written.
The work entitled Samuel Bernard et son temps shows us one of our own great ladies, who can efface herself in the pursuit of learning. And the Mémoires that she is publishing at present (alas! without a sufficiently major financier) will be, thanks to this quality, a uniquely authentic document on all the spheres composing our social disorder.
Placed at the intersection of many issues, she disguises her arrogance just enough to surprise the leaning of each. She conveys it without the least ill will and without envy – and why should she have any, having nothing to envy in anyone? Her communications are so exact that they alone are perhaps likely to last. Her eyes, lashed with antennae behind the small panes of her lorgnette, observe the changing group that she administers with a sure ease and, almost without seeming to, with the precision of an extreme politeness. In confidence this group gives itself over to her without her giving herself over to it.
Often untidy in her person, she is one in whose presence each one owes it to himself to look good; each takes advantage of the opportunity to take a look at himself in a neighboring mirror (a juxtaposition that the duchesse has taken care to give him) and this mirror turns out to be a trap where, sure enough, he gets caught. Because, before presenting himself to her under a chosen guise, in seeing him look at his reflection, she pins him under glass with a look that keeps him permanently in place.
Without deference and without meanness, her writings, like her presence, diffuse a genuine cheerfulness. She wins us over with the quality of the warmth and health she communicates. She makes herself hard to please and imposes a fidelity for which there is no need, because excellence is a secret tyranny that rightly exercises itself only over the privileged.
She was no doubt taught never to talk about herself, and this good piece of educational advice goes well with her slightly reserved, half Anglo-Saxon nature.
She is perhaps the only woman who, in writing, never writes about herself. One cannot imagine her writing like so many others: "Oh my eyes! Oh my hips!" She can be grasped only by stealth, so much does she show only an aspiring sensitivity, suitable for recording everything, but which does not reveal itself. She writes, not by profession, not out of set policy, but because others and their passing show amuse her. This egoism of courtly breeding supports and governs her work and her home. If all other privileged people shared so delightfully of their blessings, they would remove all pretext for revolutions. Certain heads are held high, not out of insolence or frivolity, but the better to discern the tract where our equals and our opposites struggle. Their tiara encircles the head, and its stones are all eyes, a sign of feminine majesties who owe it to themselves to be vigilant.
Mme de Gramont is connected too easily with the eighteenth century, but her true intellectual kinship dates back instead to the sixteenth century, for doesn't she have the raciness of a Rabelais, of a Montaigne, of an Henri IV? Her desires are wholesome simply because they are. I have seen her perspire with enthusiasm before a painting, an objet d'art, perhaps even a forgery!; skin her knees plucking some fruit she coveted so that she could give it away; order her river yacht going at full speed stopped to have a cow milked in order to have fresh milk for her tea; forget to pursue an enemy in order to hear the finale of a concert; in short, to be worthy in every circumstance of nature that is the talisman of true savoir-faire.
Here is one of her little-known poems:
Finistère
Between the low sky and the narrow earth, we throw the four disks of motion.
The aspects of the landscape are pulled in the wake of a mother-of-pearl profile, motionless metal, necessary fixed point, whence the wheel of glances starts out.
There is more sky than earth.
The humble soil, crushed on three sides by tempests, clutches to herself her bare heaths.
When the ocean tries to cut too deeply into her, the granite rocks heave up and stop the furious swellings of the wave.
Near a deep, blue gash in the shore, men, to make the end of migrations, have cut the peninsula's heart into blocks, a stone flock that does not move.
But over this sacred landscape the pines shed their capillary shadows.
The earth's last edges, gnawed by the winds, are enveloped in a strong softness.
The aromatic air creates a release.
With the kick of his heel, the swimmer can spurn Europe.
Source: Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind. Trans. John Spalding Gatton. NYU Press, 1992.