"Oriane," began the Princesse de Parme, "I had a visit the other day from your cousin d'Heudicourt; of course she's a highly intelligent woman; she's a Guermantes - need I say more? but they tell me she has a spiteful tongue."
The Duke fastened on his wife a slow gaze of feigned stupefaction. Mme de Guermantes began to laugh. Gradually the Princess became aware of their pantomime.
"But . . . do you mean to say . . . you don't agree with me?" she stammered with growing uneasiness.
"Really, Ma'am,' it's too good of you to pay any attention to Basin's faces. Now, Basin, you're not to hint nasty things about our cousins."
"Does he think she's too malicious?" inquired the Princess briskly.
"Oh, dear me, no!" replied the Duchess. "I don't know who told Your Highness that she was malicious. On the contrary, she's an excellent creature who never spoke ill of anyone, or did any harm to anyone."
"Ah!" sighed Mme de Parme, great relieved. "I must say I'd never noticed it either. But I know it's often difficult not to be a bit malicious when one has a great deal of wit . . . "
"Ah! now that is a quality of which she has even less."
"Less wit?" asked the stupefied Princess.
"Come now, Oriane," broke in the Duke in a plaintive tone, casting to right and left of him a glance of amusement, "you heard the Princess tell you that she was a superior woman."
"But isn't she?"
"Superior in chest measurement, at any rate?"
"Don't listen to him, Ma'am, he's having you on; she's as stupid as a (h'm) goose," came in a loud and husky voice from Mme de Guermantes, who, a great deal more "old world" even than the Duke when she wasn't trying, often deliberately sought to be, but in a manner entirely different from the deliquescent, lace jabot style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, with a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil. "But she's the best woman in the world. Besides, I don't really know that one can call it stupidity when it's carried to such a point as that. I don't believe I ever met anyone quite like her; she's a case for a specialist, there's something pathological about her, she's a sort of 'natural' or cretin or 'mental deficient,' like the people you see in melodramas, or in L'Arlesienne. I always ask myself, when she comes here, whether the moment may not have arrived at which her intelligence is going to dawn, which makes me a little nervous always."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 502-504
I don't have anything profound to say about this section, where a group of the Guermantes are dog-piling on one of their cousins, other than to point out that this qualified as locker room talk in a gentler pre-Donald Trump age.
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