He was, in fact, in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read

with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration aroused if he

could detect no difference. This state of mind is by no means to be

ignored, for, applied to political conversations, to the reading of

newspapers, it forms public opinion and thereby makes possible the

greatest events in history. An aggregation of German landlords, simply

by being impressed by a customer or a newspaper when he or it said that

France, England and Russia were “out to crush” Germany, made war, at the

time of Agadir, possible, even if no war occurred. Historians, if they

have not been wrong to abandon the practice of attributing the actions

of peoples to the will of kings, ought to substitute for the latter the

psychology of the person of no importance.

In politics the proprietor of this particular café had for some time now

concentrated his pupil-teacher’s mind on certain particular details of

the Dreyfus case. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him

in the conversation of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would

pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere. The Prince de

Foix, however, impressed him so forcibly that he barely gave him time to

finish what he was saying. “That’s right, Prince, that’s right,” (which

meant neither more nor less than “repeated without a mistake”) “that’s

exactly how it is!” he exclaimed, expanding, like people in the Arabian

Nights “to the limit of repletion”. But the Prince had by this time

vanished into the smaller room. Then, as life resumes its normal course

after even the most sensational happenings, those who had emerged from

the sea of fog began to order whatever they wanted to eat or drink;

among them a party of young men from the Jockey Club who, in view of the

abnormality of the situation, had no hesitation in taking their places

at a couple of tables in the big room, and were thus quite close to me.

So the cataclysm had established even between the smaller room and the

bigger, among all these people stimulated by the comfort of the

restaurant after their long wanderings across the ocean of fog, a

familiarity from which I alone was excluded, not unlike the spirit that

must have prevailed in Noah’s ark. Suddenly I saw the landlord’s body

whipped into a series of bows, the head waiters hurrying to support him

in a full muster which drew every eye towards the door. “Quick, send

Cyprien here, lay a table for M. le Marquis de Saint-Loup,” cried the

proprietor, for whom Robert was not merely a great nobleman possessing a

real importance even in the eyes of the Prince de Foix, but a client who

drove through life four-in-hand, so to speak, and spent a great deal of

money in this restaurant. The customers in the big room looked on with

interest, those in the small room shouted simultaneous greetings to

their friend as he finished wiping his shoes. But just as he was about

to make his way into the small room he caught sight of me in the big

one. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “what on earth are you doing there? And

with the door wide open too?” he went on, with an angry glance at the

proprietor, who ran to shut it, throwing the blame on his staff: “I’m

always telling them to keep it shut.”

I had been obliged to shift my own table and to disturb others which

stood in the way in order to reach him. “Why did you move? Would you

sooner dine here than in the little room? Why, my poor fellow, you’re

freezing. You will oblige me by keeping that door locked;” he turned to

the proprietor. “This very instant, M. le Marquis; the gentlemen will

have to go out of this room through the other, that is all.” And the

better to shew his zeal he detailed for this operation a head waiter and

several satellites, vociferating the most terrible threats of punishment

were it not properly carried out. He began to shew me exaggerated marks

of respect, so as to make me forget that these had begun not upon my

arrival but only after that of Saint-Loup, while, lest I should think

them to have been prompted by the friendliness shewn me by his rich and

noble client, he gave me now and again a surreptitious little smile

which seemed to indicate a regard that was wholly personal.

Something said by one of the diners behind me made me turn my head for a

moment. I had caught, instead of the words: “Wing of chicken, excellent;

and a glass of champagne, only not too dry,” the unexpected: “I should

prefer glycerine. Yes, hot, excellent.” I wanted to see who the ascetic

was that was inflicting upon himself such a diet. I turned quickly back

to Saint-Loup so as not to be recognised by the man of strange appetite.

It was simply a doctor, whom I happened to know; and of whom another

customer, taking advantage of the fog to buttonhole him here in the

café, was asking his professional advice. Like stockbrokers, doctors

employ the first person singular.

Meanwhile I was studying Saint-Loup, and my thoughts took a line of

their own. There were in this café, I had myself known at other times

plenty of foreigners, intellectuals, budding geniuses of all sorts,

resigned to the laughter excited by their pretentious capes, their 1830

neckties and still more by the clumsiness of their movements, going so

far as to provoke that laughter in order to shew that they paid no heed

to it, who yet were men of real intellectual and moral worth, of an

extreme sensibility. They repelled—the Jews among them principally, the

unassimilated Jews, that is to say, for with the other kind we are not

concerned—those who could not endure any oddity or eccentricity of

appearance (as Bloch repelled Albertine). Generally speaking, one

realised afterwards that if they had against them hair worn too long,

noses and eyes that were too big, stilted theatrical gestures, it was

puerile to judge them by these only, they had plenty of intelligence and

spirit and were men to whom, in the long run, one could become closely

attached. Among the Jews especially there were few whose parents and

kinsfolk had not a warmth of heart, a breadth of mind in comparison with

which Saint-Loup’s mother and the Duc de Guermantes cut the poorest of

figures by their sereness, their skin-deep religiosity which denounced

only the most open scandals, their apology for a Christianity which led

invariably (by the unexpected channel of a purely calculating mind) to

an enormously wealthy marriage. But in Saint-Loup, when all was said,

however the faults of his relatives might be combined in a fresh

creation of character, there reigned the most charming openness of mind

and heart. And whenever (it must be frankly admitted, to the undying

glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely

French, be he noble or plebeian, they flower—flourish would be too

strong a word, for a sense of proportion persists and also a certain

restraint—with a grace which the foreign visitor, however estimable he

may be, does not present to us. Of these intellectual and moral

qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and if we have first to

overcome what repels us and what makes us smile they remain no less

precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is

perhaps exclusively French that what is fine from the standpoint of

equity, what is of value to the heart and mind should be first of all

attractive to the eyes, charmingly coloured, consummately chiselled,

should express outwardly as well in substance as in form an inward

perfection. I studied Saint-Loup’s features and said to myself that it

is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of bodily grace to

prepare one for the graces within, and when the winged nostrils are

spread as delicately and with as perfect a design as the wings of the

little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray; and

that the true _opus francigenum_, the secret of which was not lost in

the thirteenth century, the beauty of which would not be lost with the

destruction of our churches, consists not so much in the stone angels of

Saint-André-des-Champs as in the young sons of France, noble, citizen or

peasant, whose faces are carved with that delicacy and boldness which

have remained as traditional there as on the famous porch, but are

creative still as well.

After leaving us for a moment in order to supervise personally the

barring of the door and the ordering of our dinner (he laid great stress

on our choosing “butcher’s meat”, the fowls being presumably nothing to

boast of) the proprietor came back to inform us that M. le Prince de

Foix would esteem it a favour if M. le Marquis would allow him to dine

at a table next to ours. “But they are all taken,” objected Robert,

casting an eye over the tables which blocked the way to mine. “That

doesn’t matter in the least, if M. le Marquis would like it, I can

easily ask these people to move to another table. It is always a

pleasure to do anything for M. le Marquis!” “But you must decide,” said

Saint-Loup to me. “Foix is a good fellow, he may bore you or he may not;

anyhow he’s not such a fool as most of them.” I told Robert that of

course I should like to meet his friend but that now that I was for once

in a way dining with him and was so entirely happy, I should be just as

well pleased to have him all to myself. “He’s got a very fine cloak, the

Prince has,” the proprietor broke in upon our deliberation. “Yes, I

know,” said Saint-Loup. I wanted to tell Robert that M. de Charlus had

disclaimed all knowledge of me to his sister-in-law, and to ask him what

could be the reason of this, but was prevented by the arrival of M. de

Foix. Come to see whether his request had been favourably received, we

caught sight of him standing beside our table. Robert introduced us, but

did not hide from his friend that as we had things to talk about he

would prefer not to be disturbed. The Prince withdrew, adding to the

farewell bow which he made me a smile which, pointed at Saint-Loup,

seemed to transfer to him the responsibility for the shortness of a

meeting which the Prince himself would have liked to see prolonged. As

he turned to go, Robert, struck, it appeared, by a sudden idea, dashed

off after his friend, with a “Stay where you are and get on with your

dinner, I shall be back in a moment,” to me; and vanished into the

smaller room. I was pained to hear the smart young men sitting near me,

whom I did not know, repeat the most absurd and malicious stories about

the young Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg (formerly Comte de Nassau)

whom I had met at Balbec and who had shewn me such delicate marks of

sympathy at the time of my grandmother’s illness. According to one of

these young men, he had said to the Duchesse de Guermantes: “I expect

everyone to get up when my wife passes,” to which the Duchess had

retorted (with as little truth, had she said any such thing, as humour,

the grandmother of the young Princess having always been the very pink

of propriety): “Get up when your wife passes, do they? Well, that’s a

change from her grandmother’s day. She expected the gentlemen to lie

down.” Then some one alleged that, having gone down to see his aunt the

Princesse de Luxembourg at Balbec, and put up at the Grand Hotel, he had

complained to the manager there (my friend) that the royal standard of

Luxembourg was not flown in front of the hotel, over the sea. And that

this flag being less familiar and less generally in use than the British

or Italian, it had taken him several days to procure one, greatly to the

young Grand Duke’s annoyance. I did not believe a word of this story,

but made up my mind, as soon as I went to Balbec, to inquire of the

manager, so as to make certain that it was a pure invention. While

waiting for Saint-Loup to return I asked the proprietor to get me some

bread. “Certainly, Monsieur le Baron!” “I am not a Baron,” I told him.

“Oh, beg pardon, Monsieur le Comte!” I had no time to lodge a second

protest which would certainly have promoted me to the rank of marquis;

faithful to his promise of an immediate return, Saint-Loup reappeared in

the doorway carrying over his arm the thick vicuna cloak of the Prince

de Foix, from whom I guessed that he had borrowed it in order to keep me

warm. He signed to me not to get up, and came towards me, but either my

table would have to be moved again or I must change my seat if he was to

get to his. Entering the big room he sprang lightly on to one of the red

plush benches which ran round its walls and on which, apart from myself,

there were sitting only three or four of the young men from the Jockey

Club, friends of his own, who had not managed to find places in the

other room. Between the tables and the wall electric wires were

stretched at a certain height; without the least hesitation Saint-Loup

jumped nimbly over them like a horse in a steeplechase; embarrassed that

it should be done wholly for my benefit and to save me the trouble of a

slight movement, I was at the same time amazed at the precision with

which my friend performed this exercise in levitation; and in this I was

not alone; for, albeit they would probably have had but little

admiration for a similar display on the part of a more humbly born and

less generous client, the proprietor and his staff stood fascinated,

like race-goers in the enclosure; one underling, apparently rooted to

the ground, stood there gaping with a dish in his hand for which a party

close beside him were waiting; and when Saint-Loup, having to get past

his friends, climbed on the narrow ledge behind them and ran along it,

balancing himself with his arms, discreet applause broke from the body

of the room. On coming to where I was sitting he stopped short in his

advance with the precision of a tributary chieftain before the throne of

a sovereign, and, stooping down, handed to me with an air of courtesy

and submission the vicuna cloak which, a moment later, having taken his

place beside me, without my having to make a single movement he arranged

as a light but warm shawl about my shoulders.

“By the way, while I think of it, my uncle Charlus has something to say

to you. I promised I’ld send you round to him to-morrow evening.”

“I was just going to speak to you about him. But to-morrow evening I am

dining with your aunt Guermantes.”

“Yes there’s a regular beanfeast to-morrow at Oriane’s. I’m not asked.

But my uncle Palamède don’t want you to go there. You can’t get out of

it, I suppose? Well, anyhow, go on to my uncle’s afterwards. I’m sure he

really does want to see you. Look here, you can easily manage to get

there by eleven. Eleven o’clock; don’t forget; I’ll let him know. He’s

very touchy. If you don’t turn up he’ll never forgive you. And Oriane’s

parties are always over quite early. If you are only going to dine there

you can quite easily be at my uncle’s by eleven. I ought really to go

and see Oriane, about getting shifted from Morocco; I want an exchange.

She is so nice about all that sort of thing, and she can get anything

she likes out of General de Saint-Joseph, who runs that branch. But

don’t say anything about it to her. I’ve mentioned it to the Princesse

de Parme, everything will be all right. Interesting place, Morocco. I

could tell you all sorts of things. Very fine lot of men out there. One

feels they’re on one’s own level, mentally.”

“You don’t think the Germans are going to go to war about it?”

“No; they’re annoyed with us, as after all they have every right to be.

But the Emperor is out for peace. They are always making us think they

want war, to force us to give in. Pure bluff, you know, like poker. The

Prince of Monaco, one of Wilhelm’s agents, comes and tells us in

confidence that Germany will attack us. Then we give way. But if we

didn’t give way, there wouldn’t be war in any shape or form. You have

only to think what a comic spectacle a war would be in these days. It’ld

be a bigger catastrophe than the Flood and the _Götterdämmerung_ rolled

in one. Only it wouldn’t last so long.”

He spoke to me of friendship, affection, regret, albeit like all

visitors of his sort he was going off the next morning for some months,

which he was to spend in the country, and would only be staying a couple

of nights in Paris on his way back to Morocco (or elsewhere); but the

words which he thus let fall into the heated furnace which my heart was

this evening kindled a pleasant glow there. Our infrequent meetings,

this one in particular, have since formed a distinct episode in my

memories. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And

yet the friendship that I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I

feared (and felt therefore some remorse at the thought), what he would

have liked to inspire. Filled still with the pleasure that I had had in

seeing him come bounding towards me and gracefully pause on arriving at

his goal, I felt that this pleasure lay in my recognising that each of

the series of movements which he had developed against the wall, along

the bench, had its meaning, its cause in Saint-Loup’s own personal

nature, possibly, but even more in that which by birth and upbringing he

had inherited from his race.

A certainty of taste in the region not of beauty but manners, which when

he was faced by a novel combination of circumstances enabled the man of

breeding to grasp at once—like a musician who has been asked to play a

piece he has never seen—the feeling, the motions that were required, and

to apply the appropriate mechanism and technique; which then allowed

this taste to display itself without the constraint of any other

consideration, by which the average young man of the middle class would

have been paralysed, from fear as well of making himself ridiculous in

the eyes of strangers by his disregard of convention as of appearing too

deferential in the eyes of his friends; the place of this constraint

being taken in Robert by a lofty disdain which certainly he had never

felt in his heart but which he had received by inheritance in his body,

and which had moulded the attitudes of his ancestors to a familiarity

with their inferiors which, they imagined, could only flatter and

enchant those to whom it was displayed; lastly, a noble liberality

which, taking no account of his boundless natural advantages (lavish

expenditure in this restaurant had succeeded in making him, here as

elsewhere, the most fashionable customer and the general favourite, a

position which was underlined by the deference shewn him throughout the

place not only by the waiters but by all its most exclusive young

patrons), led him to trample them underfoot, just as he had, actually

and symbolically, trodden upon those benches decked with purple, like a

triumphal way which pleased my friend only because it enabled him more

gracefully and swiftly to arrive at my side; such were the qualities,

essential to aristocracy, which through the husk of this body, not

opaque and vague as mine would have been, but significant and limpid,

transmitted as through a work of art the industrious, energetic force

which had created it and rendered the movements of this lightfoot course

which Robert had pursued along the wall intelligible and charming as

those of a row of knights upon a marble frieze. “Alas!” Robert might

have thought, “was it worth while to have grown up despising birth,

honouring only justice and intellect, choosing outside the ranks of the

friends provided for me companions who were awkward and ill-dressed,

provided they had the gift of eloquence, only for the sole personality

apparent in me, which is to remain a treasured memory, to be not that

which my will, with the most praiseworthy effort, has fashioned in my

likeness, but one which is not of my making, which is not even myself,

which I have always disliked and striven to overcome; was it worth while

to love my chosen friend as I have loved him, for the greatest pleasure

that he can find in me to be that of discovering something far more

general than myself, a pleasure which is not in the least (as he says,

though he cannot seriously believe it) one of the pleasures of

friendship, but an intellectual and detached, a sort of artistic

pleasure?” This is what I am now afraid that Saint-Loup may at times

have thought. If so, he was mistaken. If he had not (as he steadfastly

had) cherished something more lofty than the suppleness innate in his

body, if he had not kept aloof for so long from the pride that goes with

noble birth, there would have been something more studied, a certain

heaviness in his very agility, a self-important vulgarity in his

manners. As with Mme. de Villeparisis a strong vein of seriousness had

been necessary for her to give in her conversation and in her Memoirs a

sense of the frivolous, which is intellectual, so, in order that

Saint-Loup’s body might be indwelt by so much nobility, the latter had

first to desert a mind that was aiming at higher things, and, reabsorbed

into his body, to be fixed there in unconscious, noble lines. In this

way his distinction of mind was not absent from a bodily distinction

which otherwise would not have been complete. An artist has no need to

express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of

that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God

consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so

perfect that it can dispense with a creator. And I was quite well aware

that it was not merely a work of art that I was admiring in this young

man unfolding along the wall the frieze of his flying course; the young

Prince (a descendant of Catherine de Foix, Queen of Navarre and

grand-daughter of Charles VII) whom he had just left for my sake, the

endowments, by birth and fortune, which he was laying at my feet, the

proud and shapely ancestors who survived in the assurance, the agility,

the courtesy with which he now arranged about my shivering body the warm

woollen cloak, were not all these like friends of longer standing in his

life, by whom I might have expected that we should be permanently kept

apart, and whom, on the contrary, he was sacrificing to me by a choice

which one can make only in the loftiest places of the mind, with that

sovereign liberty of which Robert’s movements were the presentment and

in which is realised perfect friendship?

How much familiar intercourse with a Guermantes—in place of the

distinction that it had in Robert, because there the inherited scorn of

humanity was but the outer garment, become an unconscious charm, of a

real moral humility—could disclose of vulgar arrogance I had had an

opportunity of seeing, not in M. de Charlus, in whom certain

characteristic faults, for which I had been unable, so far, to account,

were overlaid upon his aristocratic habits, but in the Duc de

Guermantes. And yet he too, in the general impression of commonness

which had so strongly repelled my grandmother when she had met him once,

years earlier, at Mme. de Villeparisis’s, included glimpses of historic

grandeur of which I became conscious when I went to dine in his house,

on the evening following that which I had spent with Saint-Loup.

They had not been apparent to me either in himself or in the Duchess

when I had met them first in their aunt’s drawing-room, any more than I

had discerned, on first seeing her, the differences that set Berma apart

from her fellow-players, all the more that in her the individuality was

infinitely more striking than in any social celebrity, such distinctions

becoming more marked in proportion as the objects are more real, more

conceivable by the intellect. And yet, however slight the shades of

social distinction may be (and so slight are they that when an accurate

portrayer like Sainte-Beuve tries to indicate the shades of difference

between the salons of Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. Récamier and Mme. de Boigne,

they appear so much alike that the cardinal truth which, unknown to the

author, emerges from his investigations is the vacuity of that form of

life), with them, and for the same reason as with Berma, when the

Guermantes had ceased to impress me and the tiny drop of their

originality was no longer vaporised by my imagination, I was able to

distil and analyse it, imponderable as it was.

The Duchess having made no reference to her husband when she talked to

me at her aunt’s party, I wondered whether, in view of the rumours of a

divorce that were current, he would be present at the dinner. But my

doubts were speedily set at rest, for through the crowd of footmen who

stood about in the hall and who (since they must until then have

regarded me much as they regarded the children of the evicted

cabinet-maker, that is to say with more fellow-feeling perhaps than

their master but as a person incapable of being admitted to his house)

must have been asking themselves to what this social revolution could be

due, I saw slip towards me M. de Guermantes himself, who had been

watching for my arrival so as to receive me upon his threshold and take

off my greatcoat with his own hands.

“Mme. de Guermantes will be as pleased as punch,” he greeted me in a

glibly persuasive tone. “Let me help you off with your duds.” (He felt

it to be at once companionable and comic to employ the speech of the

people.) “My wife was just the least bit afraid you might fail us,

although you had fixed a date. We’ve been saying to each other all day

long: ‘Depend upon it, he’ll never turn up.’ I am bound to say, Mme. de

Guermantes was a better prophet than I was. You are not an easy man to

get hold of, and I was quite sure you were going to play us false.” And

the Duke was so bad a husband, so brutal even (people said), that one

felt grateful to him, as one feels grateful to wicked people for their

occasional kindness of heart, for those words “Mme. de Guermantes” with

which he appeared to be spreading out over the Duchess a protecting

wing, that she might be but one flesh with him. Meanwhile, taking me

familiarly by the hand, he began to lead the way, to introduce me into

his household. Just as some casual phrase may delight us coming from the

lips of a peasant if it points to the survival of a local tradition,

shews the trace of some historic event unknown, it may be, to him who

thus alludes to it; so this politeness on the part of M. de Guermantes,

which, moreover, he was to continue to shew me throughout the evening,

charmed me as a survival of habits of many centuries’ growth, habits of

the seventeenth century in particular. The people of bygone ages seem to

us infinitely remote. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any

underlying intention apart from those to which they give formal

expression; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less

akin to what we are feeling to-day in a Homeric hero, or upon a skilful

tactical feint in Hannibal, during the battle of Cannae, where he let

his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and

surround him; it would seem that we imagined the epic poet and the Punic

general as being as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a

zoological garden. Even in certain personages of the court of Louis XIV,

when we find signs of courtesy in the letters written by them to some

man of inferior rank who could be of no service to them whatever, they

leave us bewildered because they reveal to us suddenly, as existing

among these great gentlemen, a whole world of beliefs to which they

never give any direct expression but which govern their conduct, and

especially the belief that they are bound in politeness to feign certain

sentiments and to carry out with the most scrupulous care certain

obligations of friendship.

This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that

enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired

beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers, such as Macpherson’s

_Ossian_. We so little expected to learn that bards long dead could have

modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient

Gaelic ode we come upon one which we should have thought, at the most,

ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent has simply to add to

an ancient writer whom he presents to us more or less faithfully

reproduced fragments which, signed with a contemporary name and

published separately, would seem entertaining only; at once he imparts a

moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards

of several ages at once. This translator was capable only of a mediocre

book, if that book had been published as his original work. Given out as

a translation, it seems that of a masterpiece. The past not merely is

not fugitive, it remains present. It is not within a few months only

after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can

effectively influence its course, it is not within fifteen years only

after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still

find the vital evidence which will throw a light on it; after hundreds

and thousands of years the scholar who has been studying in a distant

land the place-names, the customs of the inhabitants, may still extract

from them some legend long anterior to the Christian era, already

unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus,

which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, dwells

surrounded by the present, like an emanation of greater density,

immemorial and stable. There was similarly an emanation, though far less

ancient, of the life of the court, if not in the manners of M. de

Guermantes, which were often vulgar, at least in the mind that

controlled them. I was to breathe this again, like the odour of

antiquity, when I joined him a little later in the drawing-room. For I

did not go there at once.

As we left the outer hall, I had mentioned to M. de Guermantes that I

was extremely anxious to see his Elstirs. “I am at your service. Is M.

Elstir a friend of yours, then? If so, it is most vexing, for I know him

slightly; he is a pleasant fellow, what our fathers used to call an

‘honest fellow’, I might have asked him to honour us with his company,

and to dine to-night. I am sure he would have been highly flattered at

being invited to spend the evening in your society.” Very little

suggestive of the old order when he tried thus to assume its manner, the

Duke relapsed unconsciously into it. After inquiring whether I wished

him to shew me the pictures, he conducted me to them, gracefully

standing aside for me at each door, apologising when, to shew me the

way, he was obliged to precede me, a little scene which (since the days

when Saint-Simon relates that an ancestor of the Guermantes did him the

honours of his town house with the same punctilious exactitude in the

performance of the frivolous duties of a gentleman) must, before coming

gradually down to us, have been enacted by many other Guermantes for

numberless other visitors. And as I had said to the Duke that I would

like very much to be left alone for a few minutes with the pictures, he

discreetly withdrew, telling me that I should find him in the

drawing-room when I was ready.

Only, once I was face to face with the Elstirs, I completely forgot

about dinner and the time; here again as at Balbec I had before me

fragments of that strangely coloured world which was no more than the

projection, the way of seeing things peculiar to that great painter,

which his speech in no way expressed. The parts of the walls that were

covered by paintings from his brush, all homogeneous with one another,

were like the luminous images of a magic lantern, which would have been

in this instance the brain of the artist, and the strangeness of which

one could never have suspected so long as one had known only the man,

which was like seeing the iron lantern boxing its lamp before any

coloured slide had been slid into its groove. Among these pictures

several of the kind that seemed most absurd to ordinary people

interested me more than the rest because they recreated those optical

illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying

objects if we did not make some process of reasoning intervene. How

often, when driving in the dark, do we not come upon a long, lighted

street which begins a few feet away from us, when what we have actually

before our eyes is nothing but a rectangular patch of wall with a bright

light falling on it, which has given us the mirage of depth. In view of

which is it not logical, not by any artifice of symbolism but by a

sincere return to the very root of the impression, to represent one

thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we

mistook it? Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names

of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognised

them. Elstir attempted to wrest from what he had just felt what he

already knew, his effort had often been to break up that aggregate of

impressions which we call vision.

The people who detested these “horrors” were astonished to find that

Elstir admired Chardin, Perroneau, any number of painters whom they, the

ordinary men and women of society, liked. They did not take into account

that Elstir had had to make, for his own part, in striving to reproduce

reality (with the particular index of his taste for certain lines of

approach), the same effort as a Chardin or a Perroneau and that

consequently, when he ceased to work for himself, he admired in them

attempts of the same order, fragments anticipatory so to speak of works

of his own. Nor did these society people include in their conception of

Elstir’s work that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or

at least to look without discomfort at Chardin’s painting. And yet the

older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of

their lives they had seen gradually, as the years bore them away from

it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by

Ingres and what, they had supposed, must remain for ever a “horror”

(Manet’s _Olympia_, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed

like twins. But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the

wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine

ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without

precedents in the past.

I was moved by the discovery in two of the pictures (more realistic,

these, and in an earlier manner) of the same person, in one in evening

dress in his own drawing-room, in the other wearing a frock coat and

tall hat at some popular regatta where he had evidently no business to

be, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter but a

friend, perhaps a patron whom it pleased him (just as Carpaccio used to

introduce prominent figures, and in speaking likenesses, from

contemporary life in Venice) to introduce into his pictures, just as

Beethoven, too, found pleasure in inscribing at the top of a favourite

work the beloved name of the Archduke Rudolph. There was something

enchanting about this waterside carnival. The river, the women’s

dresses, the sails of the boats, the innumerable reflexions of one thing

and another came crowding into this little square panel of beauty which

Elstir had cut out of a marvellous afternoon. What delighted one in the

dress of a woman who had stopped for a moment in the dance because it

was hot and she was out of breath was irresistible also in the same way

in the canvas of a motionless sail, in the water of the little harbour,

in the wooden bridge, in the leaves of the trees and in the sky. As in

one of the pictures that I had seen at Balbec, the hospital, as

beautiful beneath its sky of lapis lazuli as the cathedral itself,

seemed (more bold than Elstir the theorician, than Elstir the man of

taste, the lover of things mediaeval) to be intoning: “There is no such

thing as gothic, there is no such thing as a masterpiece; this tasteless

hospital is just as good as the glorious porch,” so I now heard: “The

slightly vulgar lady at whom a man of discernment would refrain from

glancing as he passed her by, would except from the poetical composition

which nature has set before him—her dress is receiving the same light as

the sail of that boat, and there are no degrees of value and beauty; the

commonplace dress and the sail, beautiful in itself, are two mirrors

reflecting the same gleam; the value is all in the painter’s eye.” This

eye had had the skill to arrest for all time the motion of the hours at

this luminous instant, when the lady had felt hot and had stopped

dancing, when the tree was fringed with a belt of shadow, when the sails

seemed to be slipping over a golden glaze. But just because the depicted

moment pressed on one with so much force, this so permanent canvas gave

one the most fleeting impression, one felt that the lady would presently

move out of it, the boats drift away, the night draw on, that pleasure

comes to an end, that life passes and that the moments illuminated by

the convergence, at once, of so many lights do not recur. I recognised

yet another aspect, quite different it is true, of what the moment means

in a series of water-colours of mythological subjects, dating from

Elstir’s first period, which also adorned this room. Society people who

held “advanced” views on art went “as far as” this earliest manner, but

no farther. These were certainly not the best work that he had done, but

already the sincerity with which the subject had been thought out melted

its natural coldness. Thus the Muses, for instance, were represented as

it might be creatures belonging to a species now fossilised, but

creatures which it would not have been surprising in mythological times

to see pass in the evening, in twos or threes, along some mountain path.

Here and there a poet, of a race that had also a peculiar interest for

the zoologist (characterised by a certain sexlessness) strolled with a

Muse, as one sees in nature creatures of different but of kindred

species consort together. In one of these water-colours one saw a poet

wearied by long wanderings on the mountains, whom a Centaur, meeting him

and moved to pity by his weakness, had taken on his back and was

carrying home. In more than one other, the vast landscape (in which the

mythical scene, the fabulous heroes occupied a minute place and were

almost lost) was rendered, from the mountain tops to the sea, with an

exactitude which told one more than the hour, told one to the very

minute what time of day it was, thanks to the precise angle of the

setting sun, to the fleeting fidelity of the shadows. In this way the

artist managed to give, by making it instantaneous, a sort of historical

reality, as of a thing actually lived, to the symbol of his fable,

painted it and set it at a definite point in the past.

While I was examining Elstir’s paintings the bell, rung by arriving

guests, had been pealing uninterruptedly, and had lulled me into a

pleasing unconsciousness. But the silence which followed its clangour

and had already lasted for some time succeeded—less rapidly, it is

true—in awakening me from my dream, as the silence that follows Lindor’s

music arouses Bartolo from his sleep. I was afraid that I had been

forgotten, that they had sat down to dinner, and hurried to the

drawing-room. At the door of the Elstir gallery I found a servant

waiting for me, white-haired, though whether with age or powder I cannot

say, with the air of a Spanish Minister, but treating me with the same

respect that he would have shewn to a King. I felt from his manner that

he must have been waiting for at least an hour, and I thought with alarm

of the delay I had caused in the service of dinner, especially as I had

promised to be at M. de Charlus’s by eleven.

The Spanish Minister (though I also met on the way the footman

persecuted by the porter, who, radiant with delight when I inquired

after his girl, told me that the very next day they were both to be off

duty, so that he would be able to spend the whole day with her, and

extolled the generosity of Madame la Duchesse) conducted me to the

drawing-room, where I was afraid of finding M. de Guermantes in an ill

humour. He welcomed me, on the contrary, with a joy that was evidently

to a certain extent artificial and dictated by politeness, but was also

sincere, prompted both by his stomach which so long a delay had begun to

famish, and his consciousness of a similar impatience in all his other

guests, who completely filled the room. Indeed I heard afterwards that I

had kept them waiting for nearly three-quarters of an hour. The Duc de

Guermantes probably thought that to prolong the general torment for two

minutes more would not intensify it and that, politeness having driven

him to postpone for so long the moment of moving into the dining-room,

this politeness would be more complete if, by not having dinner

announced immediately, he could succeed in persuading me that I was not

late, and that they had not been waiting for me. And so he asked me, as

if we had still an hour before dinner and some of the party had not yet

arrived, what I thought of his Elstirs. But at the same time, and

without letting the cravings of his stomach become apparent, so as not

to lose another moment, he, in concert with the Duchess, proceeded to

the ceremony of introduction. Then only I perceived that there had

occurred round about me, me who until this evening, save for my

novitiate in Mme. Swann’s drawing-room, had been accustomed, in my

mother’s homes, at Combray and in Paris, to the manners, either

protecting or defensive, of the grim ladies of our middle-world, who

treated me as a child, a change of surroundings comparable to that which

introduces Parsifal suddenly into the midst of the Flower-Maidens. Those

who surrounded me now, their bosoms entirely bare (the naked flesh

appeared on either side of a sinuous spray of mimosa or behind the broad

petals of a rose) could not murmur a word of greeting without at the

same time bathing me in long, caressing glances, as though shyness alone

restrained them from kissing me. Many of them were nevertheless highly

respectable from the moral standpoint; many, not all, for the most

virtuous had not for those of a lighter vein the same repulsion that my

mother would have felt. The caprices of one’s conduct, denied by

saintlier friends, in the face of the evidence, seemed in the Guermantes

world to matter far less than the relations which one had been able to

maintain. One pretended not to know that the body of one’s hostess was

at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no

gaps. As the Duke put himself out not at all for his other guests (of

whom he had long known everything that there was to know, and they of

him) but quite markedly for me, whose kind of superiority, being outside

his experience, inspired in him something akin to the respect which the

great noblemen of the court of Louis XIV used to feel for his plebeian

Ministers, he evidently considered that the fact of my not knowing his

other guests mattered not at all—to me at least, though it might to

them—and while I was anxious, on his account, as to the impression that

I was going to make on them he was thinking only of how his friends

would impress me.

At the very outset I found myself completely bewildered. No sooner had I

entered the drawing-room than M. de Guermantes, without even allowing me

time to shake hands with the Duchess, had led me, as though I were a

delightful surprise to the person in question to whom he seemed to be

saying: “Here’s your friend! You see, I’m bringing him to you by the

scruff of his neck,” towards a lady of smallish stature. Whereupon, long

before, thrust forward by the Duke, I had reached her chair, the lady

had begun to flash at me continuously from her large, soft, dark eyes

the thousand smiles of understanding which we address to an old friend

who perhaps has not recognised us. As this was precisely my case and I

could not succeed in calling to mind who she was I averted my eyes from

her as I approached so as not to have to respond until our introduction

should have released me from my predicament. Meanwhile the lady

continued to maintain in unstable equilibrium the smile intended for

myself. She looked as though she were anxious to be relieved of it and

to hear me say: “Oh, but this is a pleasure! Mamma will be pleased when

I tell her I’ve met you!” I was as impatient to learn her name as she

was to see that I did finally greet her, fully aware of what I was

doing, so that the smile which she was holding on indefinitely, like the

note of a tuning-fork, might at length be let go. But M. de Guermantes

managed things so badly (to my mind, at least) that I seemed to have

heard only my own name uttered and was given no clue to the identity of

my unknown friend, to whom it never occurred to tell me herself what her

name was, so obvious did the grounds of our intimacy, which baffled me

completely, seem to her. Indeed, as soon as I had come within reach, she

did not offer me her hand, but took mine in a familiar clasp, and spoke

to me exactly as though I had been equally conscious with herself of the

pleasant memories to which her mind reverted. She told me how sorry

Albert (who, I gathered, was her son) would be to have missed seeing me.

I tried to remember who, among the people I had known as boys, was

called Albert, and could think only of Bloch, but this could not be

Bloch’s mother that I saw before me since she had been dead for some

time. In vain I struggled to identify the past experience common to

herself and me to which her thoughts had been carried back. But I could

no more distinguish it through the translucent jet of her large, soft

pupils which allowed only her smile to pierce their surface than one can

distinguish a landscape that lies on the other side of a smoked glass,

even when the sun is blazing on it. She asked me whether my father was

not working too hard, if I would not come to the theatre some evening

with Albert, if I was stronger now, and as my replies, stumbling through

the mental darkness in which I was plunged, became distinct only to

explain that I was not feeling well that evening, she pushed forward a

chair for me herself, going to all sorts of trouble which I was not

accustomed to see taken by my parents’ friends. At length the clue to

the riddle was furnished me by the Duke: “She thinks you’re charming,”

he murmured in my ear, which felt somehow that it had heard these words

before. They were what Mme. de Villeparisis had said to my grandmother

and myself after we had made the acquaintance of the Princesse de

Luxembourg. Everything became clear; the lady I now saw had nothing in

common with Mme. de Luxembourg, but from the language of him who thus

served me with her I could discern the nature of the animal. It was a

Royalty. She had never before heard of either my family or myself, but,

a scion of the noblest race and endowed with the greatest fortune in the

world (for, a daughter of the Prince de Parme, she had married a cousin

of equal princelihood), she sought always, in gratitude to her Creator,

to testify to her neighbour, however poor or lowly he might be, that she

did not look down upon him. Really, I might have guessed this from her

smile. I had seen the Princesse de Luxembourg buy little rye-cakes on

the beach at Balbec to give to my grandmother, as though to a caged deer

in the zoological gardens. But this was only the second Princess of the

Blood Royal to whom I had been presented, and I might be excused my

failure to discern in her the common factors of the friendliness of the

great. Besides, had not they themselves gone out of their way to warn me

not to count too much on this friendliness, since the Duchesse de

Guermantes, who had waved me so effusive a greeting with her gloved hand

at the Opéra-Comique, had appeared furious when I bowed to her in the

street, like people who, having once given somebody a sovereign, feel

that this has set them free from any further obligation towards him. As

for M. de Charlus, his ups and downs were even more sharply contrasted.

While in the sequel I have known, as the reader will learn, Highnesses

and Majesties of another sort altogether, Queens who play the Queen and

speak not after the conventions of their kind but like the Queens in

Sardou’s plays.

If M. de Guermantes had been in such haste to present me, it was because

the presence at a party of anyone not personally known to a Royal

Personage is an intolerable state of things which must not be prolonged

for a single instant. It was similar to the haste which Saint-Loup had

shewn in making me introduce him to my grandmother. By the same token,

by a fragmentary survival of the old life of the court which is called

social courtesy and is not superficial, in which, rather, by a

centripetal reversion, it is the surface that becomes essential and

profound, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes regarded as a duty more

essential than those (which one at least of the pair neglected often

enough) of charity, chastity, pity and justice, as a more unalterable

law that of never addressing the Princesse de Parme save in the third

person.

Having never yet in my life been to Parma (a pilgrimage I had been

anxious to make ever since certain Easter holidays long ago), to meet

its Princess, who, I knew, owned the finest palace in that matchless

city, where, moreover, everything must be in keeping, isolated as it was

from the rest of the world, within the polished walls, in the

atmosphere, stifling as a breathless summer evening on the Piazza of a

small town in Italy, of its compact and almost cloying name, would

surely have substituted in a flash for what I had so often tried to

imagine all that did really exist at Parma in a sort of partial arrival

there, without my having to stir from Paris, of myself; it was in the

algebraical expression of a journey to the city of Correggio a simple

equation, so to speak, of that unknown quantity. But if I had for many

years past—like a perfumer impregnating a solid mass of grease with

scent—made this name, Princesse de Parme, absorb the fragrance of

thousands of violets, in return, when I set eyes on the Princess, who,

until then I should have sworn, must be the Sanseverina herself, a

second process began which was not, I may say, completed until several

months had passed, and consisted in expelling, by means of fresh

chemical combinations, all the essential oil of violets and all the

Stendhalian fragrance from the name of the Princess, and in implanting

there, in their place, the image of a little dark woman, taken up with

good works, of a friendliness so humble that one felt at once in how

exalted a pride that friendliness had its roots. Moreover, while,

barring a few points of difference, she was exactly like any other great

lady, she was as little Stendhalian as is, for example, in Paris, in the

Europe quarter, the Rue de Parme, which bears far less resemblance to

the name of Parma than to any or all of the neighbouring streets, and

reminds one not nearly so much of the Charterhouse in which Fabrice ends

his days as of the waiting room in the Saint-Lazare station.

Her friendliness sprang from two causes. The first and more general was

the education which this daughter of Kings had received. Her mother (not

merely allied by blood to all the royal families of Europe but

furthermore—in contrast to the Ducal House of Parma—richer than any

reigning Princess) had instilled into her from her earliest childhood

the arrogantly humble precepts of an evangelical snobbery; and to-day

every line of the daughter’s face, the curve of her shoulders, the

movements of her arms seemed to repeat the lesson: “Remember that if God

has caused you to be born on the steps of a throne you ought not to make

that a reason for looking down upon those to whom Divine Providence has

willed (wherefore His Name be praised) that you should be superior by

birth and fortune. On the contrary, you must suffer the little ones.

Your ancestors were Princes of Treves and Juliers from the year 647: God

has decreed in His bounty that you should hold practically all the

shares in the Suez Canal and three times as many Royal Dutch as Edmond

de Rothschild; your pedigree in a direct line has been established by

genealogists from the year 63 of the Christian Era; you have as

sisters-in-law two Empresses. Therefore never seem, in your speech, to

be recalling these great privileges, not that they are precarious (for

nothing can alter antiquity of race, while the world will always need

petrol), but because it is useless to point out that you are better born

than other people or that your investments are all gilt-edged, since

everyone knows these facts already. Be helpful to the needy. Furnish to

all those whom the bounty of heaven has done you the favour of placing

beneath you as much as you can give them without forfeiture of your

rank, that is to say help in the form of money, even your personal

service by their sickbeds, but never (bear well in mind) invite them to

your parties, which would do them no possible good and, by weakening

your own position, would diminish the efficacy of your benevolent

activities.”

And so even at the moments when she could not do good the Princess

endeavoured to shew, or rather to let it be thought, by all the external

signs of dumb language, that she did not consider herself superior to

the people among whom she found herself thrown. She treated each of them

with that charming courtesy with which well-bred people treat their

inferiors and was continually, to make herself useful, pushing back her

chair so as to leave more room, holding my gloves offering me all those

services which would demean the proud spirit of a commoner but are very

willingly rendered by sovereign ladies or, instinctively and by force of

professional habit, by retired servants.

But already the Duke, who seemed in a hurry to complete the round of

introduction, had led me off to another of the flower-maidens. On

hearing her name I told her that I had passed by her country house, not

far from Balbec. “Oh, I should have been so pleased to take you over

it,” she informed me, almost in a whisper, to enhance her modesty, but

in a tone of deep feeling, steeped in regret for the loss of an

opportunity to enjoy a quite exceptional pleasure; and went on, with a

meaning glance: “I do hope you will come again some day. But I must say

that what would interest you more still would be my aunt Brancas’s

place. It was built by Mansard; it is the jewel of the province.” It was

not only she herself who would have been glad to shew me over her house,

but her aunt Brancas would have been no less delighted to do me the

honours of hers, or so I was assured by this lady who thought evidently

that, especially at a time when the land shewed a tendency to pass into

the hands of financiers who had no knowledge of the world, it was

important that the great should keep up the exalted traditions of lordly

hospitality, by speeches which involved them in nothing. It was also

because she sought, like everyone in her world, to say the things which

would give most pleasure to the person she was addressing, to give him

the highest idea of himself, to make him think that he flattered people

by writing to them, that he honoured those who entertained him, that

everyone was burning to know him. The desire to give other people this

comforting idea of themselves does, it must be admitted, exist even

among the middle classes. We find there that kindly disposition, in the

form of an individual merit compensating for some other defect, not alas

among the most trusty male friends but at any rate among the most

agreeable female companions. But there anyhow it blooms only in isolated

patches. In an important section of the aristocracy, on the other hand,

this characteristic has ceased to be individual; cultivated by

education, sustained by the idea of a personal greatness which can fear

no humiliation, which knows no rival, is aware that by being pleasant it

can make people happy and delights in doing so, it has become the

generic feature of a class. And even those whom personal defects of too

incompatible a kind prevent from keeping it in their hearts bear the

unconscious trace of it in their vocabulary or their gesticulation.

“She is a very good creature,” said the Duc de Guermantes, of the

Princesse de Parme, “and she can play the ‘great lady’ when she likes,

better than anyone.”

While I was being introduced to the ladies, one of the gentlemen of the

party had been shewing various signs of agitation: this was Comte

Hannibal de Bréauté-Consalvi. Arriving late, he had not had time to

investigate the composition of the party, and when I entered the room,

seeing in me a guest who was not one of the Duchess’s regular circle and

must therefore have some quite extraordinary claim to admission,

installed his monocle beneath the groined arch of his eyebrow, thinking

that this would be a great help to him in discovering what manner of man

I was. He knew that Mme. de Guermantes possessed (the priceless appanage

of truly superior women) what was called a “salon”, that is to say added

occasionally to the people of her own set some celebrity who had

recently come into prominence by the discovery of a new cure for

something or the production of a masterpiece. The Faubourg Saint-Germain

had not yet recovered from the shock of learning that, to the reception

which she had given to meet the King and Queen of England, the Duchess

had not been afraid to invite M. Detaille. The clever women of the

Faubourg who had not been invited were inconsolable, so deliciously

thrilling would it have been to come into contact with that strange

genius. Mme. de Courvoisier made out that M. Ribot had been there as

well, but this was a pure invention, designed to make people believe

that Oriane was aiming at an Embassy for her husband. Finally, a last

straw of scandal, M. de Guermantes, with a gallantry that would have

done credit to Marshal Saxe, had repaired to the green-room of the

Comédie Française, and had begged Mlle. Reichemberg to come and recite

before the King, which having come to pass constituted an event without

precedent in the annals of routs. Remembering all these surprises,

which, moreover, had his entire approval, his own presence being not

merely an ornament but, in the same way as that of the Duchesse de

Guermantes, a consecration to any drawing-room, M. de Bréauté, when he

asked himself who I could be, felt that the field of exploration was

very wide. For a moment the name of M. Widor flashed before his mind,

but he decided that I was not old enough to be an organist, and M. Widor

not striking enough to be “asked out”. It seemed on the whole more

plausible to regard me simply as the new Attaché at the Swedish Legation

of whom he had heard, and he was preparing to ask me for the latest news

of King Oscar, by whom he had several times been very hospitably

received; but when the Duke, in introducing me, had mentioned my name to

M. de Bréauté, the latter, finding that name to be completely unknown to

him, had no longer any doubt that, being where I was, I must be a

celebrity of some sort. Oriane would certainly never invite anyone who

was not, and had the art of attracting men who were in the public eye to

her house, in a ratio that of course never exceeded one per cent,

otherwise she would have lowered its tone. M. de Bréauté began,

therefore, to lick his chops and to sniff the air greedily, his appetite

whetted not only by the good dinner upon which he could count, but by

the character of the party, which my presence could not fail to make

interesting, and which would furnish him with a topic for brilliant

conversation next day at the Duc de Chartres’s luncheon-table. He had

not yet settled in his own mind whether I was the man who had just been

making those experiments with a serum to cure cancer, or the author of

the new “curtain-raiser” then in rehearsal at the Théâtre Français; but,

a great intellectual, a great collector of “travellers’ tales”, he

continued an ever increasing display of reverences, signs of mutual

understanding, smiles filtered through the glass of his monocle; either

in the mistaken idea that a man of my standing would esteem him more

highly if he could manage to instil into me the illusion that for him,

the Comte de Bréauté-Consalvi, the privileges of the mind were no less

deserving of respect than those of birth; or simply from the need to

express and difficulty of expressing his satisfaction, in his ignorance

of the language in which he ought to address me, just as if, in fact, he

had found himself face to face with one of the “natives” of an

undiscovered country on which his keel had grounded, natives from whom,

in the hope of ultimate profit, he would endeavour, observing with

interest the while their quaint customs and without interrupting his

demonstrations of friendship, or like them uttering loud cries, to

obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for his glass beads. Having

responded as best I could to his joy, I shook hands next with the Duc de

Châtellerault, whom I had already met at Mme. de Villeparisis’s, who, he

informed me, was “as cunning as they made ’em”. He was typically

Guermantes in the fairness of his hair, his arched profile, the points

where the skin of his cheeks lost colour, all of which may be seen in

the portraits of that family which have come down to us from the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as I was no longer in love

with the Duchess, her reincarnation in the person of a young man offered

me no attraction. I interpreted the hook made by the Duc de

Châtellerault’s nose, as if it had been the signature of a painter whose

work I had long studied but who no longer interested me in the least.

Next, I said good evening also to the Prince de Foix, and to the

detriment of my knuckles, which emerged crushed and mangled, let them be

caught in a vice which was the German handclasp, accompanied by an

ironical or good-natured smile, of the Prince von Faffenheim, M. de

Norpois’s friend, who, by virtue of the mania for nicknames which

prevailed in this set, was known so universally as Prince Von that he

himself used to sign his letters “Prince Von”, or, when he wrote to his

intimates, “Von”. And yet this abbreviation was understandable, in view

of his triple-barrelled name. It was less easy to grasp the reasons

which made “Elizabeth” be replaced, now by “Lili”, now by “Bebeth”, just

as another world swarmed with “Kikis”. One can realise that these

people, albeit in most respects idle and light-minded enough, might have

come to adopt “Quiou” in order not to waste the precious time that it

would have taken them to pronounce “Montesquiou”. But it is not so easy

to see what they saved by naming one of their cousins “Dinand” instead

of “Ferdinand”. It must not be thought, however, that in the invention

of nicknames the Guermantes invariably proceed to curtail or reduplicate

syllables. Thus two sisters, the Comtesse de Montpeyroux and the

Vicomtesse de Vélude, who were both of them enormously stout, invariably

heard themselves addressed, without the least trace of annoyance on

their part or of amusement on other people’s, so long established was

the custom, as “Petite” and “Mignonne”. Mme. de Guermantes, who adored

Mme. de Montpeyroux, would, if her friend had been seriously ill, have

flown to the sister with tears in her eyes and exclaimed: “I hear Petite

is dreadfully bad!” Mme. de l’Eclin, who wore her hair in bands that

entirely hid her ears, was never called anything but “The Empty

Stomach”; in some cases people simply added an ‘a’ to the last or first

name of the husband to indicate the wife. The most miserly, most sordid,

most inhuman man in the Faubourg having been christened Raphael, his

charmer, his flower springing also from the rock always signed herself

“Raphaela”—but these are merely a few specimens taken from innumerable

rules, to which we can always return later on, if the occasion offers,

and explain some of them. I then asked the Duke to present me to the

Prince d’Agrigente. “What! Do you mean to say you don’t know our

excellent Gri-gri!” cried M. de Guermantes, and gave M. d’Agrigente my

name. His own, so often quoted by Françoise, had always appeared to me

like a transparent sheet of coloured glass through which I beheld,

struck, on the shore of the violet sea, by the slanting rays of a golden

sun, the rosy marble cubes of an ancient city of which I had not the

least doubt that the Prince—happening for a miraculous moment to be

passing through Paris—was himself, as luminously Sicilian and gloriously

mellowed, the absolute sovereign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was

introduced, and who wheeled round to bid me good evening with a

ponderous ease which he considered elegant, was as independent of his

name as of any work of art that he might have owned without bearing upon

his person any trace of its beauty, without, perhaps, ever having

stopped to examine it. The Prince d’Agrigente was so entirely devoid of

anything princely, anything that might make one think of Girgenti that

one was led to suppose that his name, entirely distinct from himself,

bound by no ties to his person, had had the power of attracting to

itself the whole of whatever vague poetical element there might have

been in this man as in any other, and isolating it, after the operation,

in the enchanted syllables. If any such operation had been performed, it

had certainly been done most efficiently, for there remained not an atom

of charm to be drawn from this kinsman of the Guermantes. With the

result that he found himself at one and the same time the only man in

the world who was Prince d’Agrigente and the man who, of all the men in

the world was, perhaps, least so. He was, for all that, very glad to be

what he was, but as a banker is glad to hold a number of shares in a

mine without caring whether the said mine answers to the charming name

of Ivanhoe or Primrose, or is called merely the Premier. Meanwhile, as

these introductions, which it has taken me so long to recount but which,

beginning as I entered the room, had lasted only a few seconds, were

coming to an end, and Mme. de Guermantes, in an almost suppliant tone,

was saying to me: “I am sure Basin is tiring you, dragging you round

like that; we are anxious for you to know our friends, but we are a

great deal more anxious not to tire you, so that you may come again

often,” the Duke, with a somewhat awkward and timid wave of the hand,

gave (as he would gladly have given it at any time during the last hour,

filled for me by the contemplation of his Elstirs) the signal that

dinner might now be served.

I should add that one of the guests was still missing, M. de Grouchy,

whose wife, a Guermantes by birth, had arrived by herself, her husband

being due to come straight from the country, where he had been shooting

all day. This M. de Grouchy, a descendent of his namesake of the First

Empire, of whom it has been said, quite wrongly, that his absence at the

start of the Battle of Waterloo was the principal cause of Napoleon’s

defeat, came of an excellent family which, however, was not good enough

in the eyes of certain fanatics for blue blood. Thus the Prince de

Guermantes, whose own tastes, in later life, were to prove more easily

satisfied, had been in the habit of saying to his nieces: “What a

misfortune for that poor Mme. de Guermantes” (the Vicomtesse de

Guermantes, Mme. de Grouchy’s mother) “that she has never succeeded in

marrying any of her children.” “But, uncle, the eldest girl married M.

de Grouchy.” “I do not call that a husband! However, they say that your

uncle François has proposed for the youngest one, so perhaps they won’t

all die old maids.” No sooner was the order to serve dinner given than

with a vast gyratory whirr, multiple and simultaneous, the double doors

of the dining-room swung apart; a chamberlain with the air of a Lord

Chamberlain bowed before the Princesse de Parme and announced the

tidings “Madame is served,” in a tone such as he would have employed to

say “Madame is dead,” which, however, cast no gloom over the assembly

for it was with an air of unrestrained gaiety and as, in summer, at

“Robinson” that the couples moved forward one behind another to the

dining-room, separating when they had reached their places where footmen

thrust their chairs in behind them; last of all, Mme. de Guermantes

advanced upon me, that I might lead her to the table, and without my

feeling the least shadow of the timidity that I might have feared, for,

like a huntress to whom her great muscular prowess has made graceful

motion an easy thing, observing no doubt that I had placed myself on the

wrong side of her, she pivoted with such accuracy round me that I found

her arm resting on mine and attuned in the most natural way to a rhythm

of precise and noble movements. I yielded to these with all the more

readiness in that the Guermantes attached no more importance to them

than does to learning a truly learned man in whose company one is less

alarmed than in that of a dunce; other doors opened through which there

entered the steaming soup, as though the dinner were being held in a

puppet-theatre of skillful mechanism where the belated arrival of the

young guest set, on a signal from the puppet-master, all the machinery

in motion.

Timid and not majestically sovereign had been this signal from the Duke,

to which had responded the unlocking of that vast, ingenious,

subservient and sumptuous clockwork, mechanical and human. The

indecision of his gesture did not spoil for me the effect of the

spectacle that was attendant upon it. For I could feel that what had

made it hesitating and embarrassed was the fear of letting me see that

they were waiting only for myself to begin dinner and that they had been

waiting for some time, just as Mme. de Guermantes was afraid that after

looking at so many pictures I would find it tiring and would be hindered

from taking my ease among them if her husband engaged me in a continuous

flow of introductions. So that it was the absence of grandeur in this

gesture that disclosed its true grandeur. As, also, did that

indifference shewn by the Duke to the splendour of his surroundings, in

contrast to his deference towards a guest, however insignificant, whom

he desired to honour.

Not that M. de Guermantes was not in certain respects thoroughly

commonplace, shewing indeed some of the absurd weaknesses of a man with

too much money, the arrogance of an upstart, which he certainly was not.

But just as a public official or a priest sees his own humble talents

multiplied to infinity (as a wave is by the whole mass of the sea which

presses behind it) by those forces on which they can rely, the

Government of France and the Catholic Church, so M. de Guermantes was

borne on by that other force, aristocratic courtesy in its truest form.

This courtesy drew the line at any number of people. Mme. de Guermantes

would not have asked to her house Mme. de Cambremer, or M. de

Forcheville. But the moment that anyone (as was the case with me)

appeared eligible for admission into the Guermantes world, this courtesy

revealed treasures of hospitable simplicity more splendid still, were

that possible, than those historic rooms, or the marvellous furniture

that had remained in them.

When he wished to give pleasure to anyone, M. de Guermantes possessed,

in this way, for making his guest for the moment the principal person

present, an art which made the most of the circumstances and the place.

No doubt at Guermantes his “distinctions” and “favours” would have

assumed another form. He would have ordered his carriage to take me for

a drive, alone with himself, before dinner. Such as they were, one could

not help feeling touched by his manners as one is in reading memoirs of

the period by those of Louis XIV when he replies good-naturedly, smiling

and almost with a bow, to some one who has come to solicit his favour.

It must however in both instances be borne in mind that this

“politeness” did not go beyond the strict meaning of the word.

Louis XIV (with whom the sticklers for pure nobility of his day find

fault, nevertheless, for his scant regard for etiquette, so much so

that, according to Saint-Simon, he was only a very minor king, as kings

go, when compared with such monarchs as Philippe de Valois or Charles

V), has the most minute instructions drawn up so that Princes of the

Blood and Ambassadors may know to what sovereigns they ought to give

precedence. In certain cases, in view of the impossibility of arriving

at a decision, a compromise is arranged by which the son of Louis XIV,

Monseigneur, shall entertain certain foreign sovereigns only out of

doors, in the open air, so that it may not be said that in entering the

house one has preceded the other; and the Elector Palatine, entertaining

the Duc de Chevreuse at dinner, pretends, so as not to have to make way

for his guest, to be taken ill, and dines with him indeed, but dines

lying down, thus avoiding the difficulty. M. le Duc evading

opportunities of paying his duty to Monsieur, the latter, on the advice

of the King, his brother, who is moreover extremely attached to him,

seizes an excuse for making his cousin attend his levee and forcing him

to pass him his shirt. But as soon as the feeling is deep, when the

heart is involved, this rule of duty, so inflexible when politeness only

is at stake, changes entirely. A few hours after the death of this

brother, one of the people whom he most dearly loved, when Monsieur, in

the words of the Duc de Montfort, is “still warm”, we find Louis XIV

singing snatches from operas, astonished that the Duchesse de Bourgogne,

who has difficulty in concealing her grief, should be looking so

woe-begone, and, desiring that the gaiety of the court shall be at once

resumed, so that his courtiers may be encouraged to sit down to the

tables, ordering the Duc de Bourgogne to start a game of _brelan_. Well,

not only in his social and concentrated activities, but in the most

spontaneous utterances, the ordinary preoccupations of M. de Guermantes,

the use he made of his time, one found a similar contrast; the

Guermantes were no more susceptible than other mortals to grief; one

might indeed say that their actual sensibility was lower; on the other

hand one saw their names every day in the social columns of the

_Gaulois_ on account of the prodigious number of funerals at which they

would have felt it a neglect of duty not to have their presence

recorded. As the traveller discovers, almost unaltered, the houses

roofed with turf, the terraces which may have met the eyes of Xenophon

or Saint Paul, so in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who melted

one’s heart by his courtesy and revolted it by his harshness, I found

still intact after the lapse of more than two centuries that deviation

typical of court life under Louis XIV which transfers all scruples of

conscience from matters of the affections and morality and applies them

to purely formal questions.

The other reason for the friendliness shewn me by the Princesse de Parme

was of a more personal kind. It was that she was convinced beforehand

that everything that she saw at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, people and

things alike, was of a quality superior to that of anything that she had

at home. It is true that in all the other houses of her acquaintance she

behaved as if this had been the case; over the simplest dish, the most

ordinary flowers, she was not satisfied with going into ecstasies, she

would ask leave to send round next morning, to copy the recipe or to

examine the variety of blossom, her head cook or head gardener,

gentlemen with large salaries who kept their own carriages and were

deeply humiliated at having to come to inquire after a dish they

despised or to take notes of a kind of carnation that was not half so

fine, had not such ornamental streaks, did not produce so large a

blossom as those which they had long been growing for her at home. But

if in the Princess, wherever she went, this astonishment at the sight of

the most commonplace things was assumed, and intended to shew that she

did not derive from the superiority of her rank and riches a pride

forbidden by her early instructors, habitually dissembled by her mother

and intolerable in the sight of her Creator, it was, on the other hand,

in all sincerity that she regarded the drawing-room of the Duchesse de

Guermantes as a privileged place in which she could pass only from

surprise to delight. To a certain extent, for that matter, though not

nearly enough to justify this state of mind, the Guermantes were

different from the rest of noble society, they were rarer and more

refined. They had given me at first sight the opposite impression; I had

found them vulgar, similar to all other men and women, but because

before meeting them I had seen in them, as in Balbec, in Florence, in

Parma, only names. Evidently, in this drawing-room, all the women whom I

had imagined as being like porcelain figures were even more like the

great majority of women. But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the

Guermantes, after first disappointing the imagination because they

resembled their fellow-creatures rather than their name, could

subsequently, though to a less degree, appeal to the intellect by

certain distinctive characteristics. Their bodily structure, the

colour—a peculiar pink that merged at times into violet—of their skins,

a certain almost flashing fairness of the finely spun hair, even in the

men, on whom it was massed in soft golden tufts, half a wall-growing

lichen, half a catlike fur (a luminous sparkle to which corresponded a

certain brilliance of intellect, for if people spoke of the Guermantes

complexion, the Guermantes hair, they spoke also of the wit of the

Guermantes, as of the wit of the Mortemarts—a certain social quality

whose superior fineness was famed even before the days of Louis XIV and

all the more universally recognised since they published the fame of it

themselves), all this meant that in the material itself, precious as

that might be, in which one found them embedded here and there, the

Guermantes remained recognisable, easy to detect and to follow, like the

veins whose paleness streaks a block of jasper or onyx, or, better

still, like the pliant waving of those tresses of light whose loosened

hairs run like flexible rays along the sides of a moss-agate.

The Guermantes—those at least who were worthy of the name—were not only

of a quality of flesh, or hair, of transparency of gaze that was

exquisite, but had a way of holding themselves, of walking, of bowing,

of looking at one before they shook one’s hand, of shaking hands, which

made them as different in all these respects from an ordinary person in

society as he in turn was from a peasant in a smock. And despite their

friendliness one asked oneself: “Have they not indeed the right, though

they waive it, when they see us walk, bow, leave a room, do any of those

things which when performed by them become as graceful as the flight of

a swallow or the bending of a rose on its stem, to think: ‘These people

are of another race than ours, and we are, we, the true lords of

creation.’?” Later on, I realised that the Guermantes did indeed regard

me as being of another race, but one that aroused their envy because I

possessed merits of which I knew nothing and which they professed to

regard as alone important. Later still I came to feel that this

profession of faith was only half sincere and that in them scorn or

surprise could be coexistent with admiration and envy. The physical

flexibility essential to the Guermantes was twofold; thanks to one of

its forms, constantly in action, at any moment and if, for example, a

male Guermantes were about to salute a lady, he produced a silhouette of

himself made from the unstable equilibrium of a series of asymmetrical

movements with nervous compensations, one leg dragging a little, either

on purpose or because, having been broken so often in the hunting-field,

it imparted to his trunk in its effort to keep pace with the other a

deviation to which the upward thrust of one shoulder gave a

counterpoise, while the monocle settled itself before his eye, raising

an eyebrow just as the tuft of hair on the forehead was lowered in the

formal bow; the other flexibility, like the form of the wave, the wind

or the ocean track which is preserved on the shell or the vessel, was so

to speak stereotyped in a sort of fixed mobility, curving the arched

nose which, beneath the blue, protruding eyes, above the over-thin lips,

from which, in the women, there emerged a raucous voice, recalled the

fabulous origin attributed in the sixteenth century by the complaisance

of parasitic and Hellenising genealogists to his race, ancient beyond

dispute, but not to the degree of antiquity which they claimed when they

gave as its source the mythological impregnation of a nymph by a divine

Bird.

The Guermantes were just as idiomatic from the intellectual as from the

physical point of view. With the exception of Prince Gilbert (the

husband with antiquated ideas of “Marie-Gilbert”, who made his wife sit

on his left when they drove out together because her blood, though

royal, was inferior to his own), but he was an exception and furnished,

behind his back, a perpetual laughing-stock to the rest of the family,

who had always fresh anecdotes to tell of him, the Guermantes, while

living in the pure cream of aristocracy, affected to take no account of

nobility. The theories of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, to tell the

truth, by dint of being a Guermantes, became to a certain extent

something different and more attractive, subordinated everything else so

completely to intellect, and were in politics so socialistic that one

asked oneself where in her mansion could be hiding the familiar spirit

whose duty it was to ensure the maintenance of the aristocratic standard

of living, and which, always invisible but evidently crouching at one

moment in the entrance hall, at another in the drawing-room, at a third

in her dressing-room, reminded the servants of this woman who did not

believe in titles to address her as Mme. la Duchesse, reminding also

herself who cared only for reading and had no respect for persons to go

out to dinner with her sister-in-law when eight o’clock struck, and to

put on a low gown.

The same familiar spirit represented to Mme. de Guermantes the social

duties of duchesses, of the foremost among them, that was, who like

herself were multi-millionaires, the sacrifice to boring tea, dinner and

evening parties of hours in which she might have read interesting books,

as unpleasant necessities like rain, which Mme. de Guermantes accepted,

letting play on them her biting humour, but without seeking in any way

to justify her acceptance of them. The curious accident by which the

butler of Mme. de Guermantes invariably said “Madame la Duchesse” to

this woman who believed only in the intellect did not however appear to

shock her. Never had it entered her head to request him to address her

simply as “Madame”. Giving her the utmost benefit of the doubt one might

have supposed that, thinking of something else at the time, she had

heard only the word “Madame” and that the suffix appended to it had not

caught her attention. Only, though she might feign deafness, she was not

dumb. In fact, whenever she had a message to give to her husband she

would say to the butler: “Remind Monsieur le Duc——”

The familiar spirit had other occupations as well, one of which was to

inspire them to talk morality. It is true that there were Guermantes who

went in for intellect and Guermantes who went in for morals, and that

these two classes did not as a rule coincide. But the former

kind—including a Guermantes who had forged cheques, who cheated at cards

and was the most delightful of them all, with a mind open to every new

and sound idea—spoke even more eloquently upon morals than the others,

and in the same strain as Mme. de Villeparisis, at the moments in which

the familiar spirit expressed itself through the lips of the old lady.

At corresponding moments one saw the Guermantes adopt suddenly a tone

almost as old-lady-like, as genial and (as they themselves had more

charm) more touching than that of the Marquise, to say of a servant:

“One feels that she has a thoroughly sound nature, she’s not at all a

common girl, she must come of decent parents, she is certainly a girl

who has never gone astray.” At such moments the familiar spirit took the

form of an intonation. But at times it could be bearing also, the

expression on a face, the same in the Duchess as in her grandfather the

Marshal, a sort of undefinable convulsion (like that of the Serpent, the

genius of the Carthaginian family of Barca) by which my heart had more

than once been set throbbing, on my morning walks, when before I had

recognized Mme. de Guermantes I felt her eyes fastened upon me from the

inside of a little dairy. This familiar spirit had intervened in a

situation which was far from immaterial not merely to the Guermantes but

to the Courvoisiers, the rival faction of the family and, though of as

good blood as the Guermantes (it was, indeed, through his Courvoisier

grandmother that the Guermantes explained the obsession which led the

Prince de Guermantes always to speak of birth and titles as though those

were the only things that mattered), their opposite in every respect.

Not only did the Courvoisiers not assign to intelligence the same

importance as the Guermantes, they had not the same idea of it. For a

Guermantes (even were he a fool) to be intelligent meant to have a sharp

tongue, to be capable of saying cutting things, to “get away with it”;

but it meant also the capacity to hold one’s own equally in painting,

music, architecture, to speak English. The Courvoisiers had formed a

less favourable impression of intelligence, and unless one were actually

of their world being intelligent was almost tantamount to “having

probably murdered one’s father and mother”. For them intelligence was

the sort of burglar’s jemmy by means of which people one did not know

from Adam forced the doors of the most reputable drawing-rooms, and it

was common knowledge among the Courvoisiers that you always had to pay

in the long run for having “those sort” of people in your house. To the

most trivial statements made by intelligent people who were not “in

society” the Courvoisiers opposed a systematic distrust. Some one having

on one occasion remarked: “But Swann is younger than Palamède,”—“He says

so, at any rate, and if he says it you may be sure it’s because he

thinks it is to his interest!” had been Mme. de Gallardon’s retort.

Better still, when some one said of two highly distinguished foreigners

whom the Guermantes had entertained that one of them had been sent in

first because she was the elder: “But is she really the elder?” Mme. de

Gallardon had inquired, not positively as though that sort of person did

not have any age, but as if presumably devoid of civil or religious

status, of definite traditions, they were both more or less young, like

two kittens of the same litter between which only a veterinary surgeon

was competent to decide. The Courvoisiers, more than the Guermantes,

maintained also in a certain sense the integrity of the titled class

thanks at once to the narrowness of their minds and the bitterness of

their hearts. Just as the Guermantes (for whom, below the royal families

and a few others like the Lignes, the La Trémoïlles and so forth, all

the rest were lost in a common rubbish-heap) were insolent towards

various people of long descent who lived round Guermantes, simply

because they paid no attention to those secondary distinctions by which

the Courvoisiers were enormously impressed, so the absence of such

distinctions affected them little. Certain women who did not hold any

specially exalted rank in their native provinces but, brilliantly

married, rich, good-looking, beloved of Duchesses, were for Paris, where

people are never very well up in who one’s “father and mother” were, an

excellent and exclusive piece of “imported goods”. It might happen,

though not commonly, that such women were, through the channel of the

Princesse de Parme or by virtue of their own attractions, received by

certain Guermantes. But with regard to these the indignation of the

Courvoisiers knew no bounds. Having to meet, between five and six in the

afternoon, at their cousin’s, people with whose relatives their own

relatives did not care to be seen mixing down in the Perche became for

them an ever-increasing source of rage and an inexhaustible fount of

rhetoric. The moment, for instance, when the charming Comtesse G——

entered the Guermantes drawing-room, the face of Mme. de Villebon

assumed exactly the expression that would have befitted it had she been

called to recite the line:

And should but one stand fast, that one were surely I,

a line which for that matter was unknown to her. This Courvoisier had

consumed almost every Monday an _éclair_ stuffed with cream within a few

feet of the Comtesse G——, but to no consequence. And Mme. de Villebon

confessed in secret that she could not conceive how her cousin

Guermantes could allow a woman into her house who was not even in the

second-best society of Châteaudun. “I really fail to see why my cousin

should make such a fuss about whom she knows; it’s making a perfect

farce of society!” concluded Mme. de Villebon with a change of facial

expression, this time a sly smile of despair, which, in a charade, would

have been interpreted rather as indicating another line of poetry,

though one with which she was no more familiar than with the first:

Grâce aux Dieux mon malheur passe mon espérance.

We may here anticipate events to explain that the _persévérance_ (which

rhymes, in the following line with _espérance_) shewn by Mme. de

Villebon in snubbing Mme. G—— was not entirely wasted. In the eyes of

Mme. G—— it invested Mme. de Villebon with a distinction so supreme,

though purely imaginary, that when the time came for Mme. G——’s

daughter, who was the prettiest girl and the greatest heiress in the

ballrooms of that season, to marry, people were astonished to see her

refuse all the Dukes in succession. The fact was that her mother,

remembering the weekly humiliations she had had to endure in the Rue de

Grenelle on account of Châteaudun could think of only one possible

husband for her daughter—a Villebon son.

A single point at which Guermantes and Courvoisiers converged was the

art (one, for that matter, of infinite variety) of marking distances.

The Guermantes manners were not absolutely uniform towards everyone. And

yet, to take an example, all the Guermantes, all those who really were

Guermantes, when you were introduced to them proceeded to perform a sort

of ceremony almost as though the fact that they held out their hands to

you had been as important as the conferring of an order of knighthood.

At the moment when a Guermantes, were he no more than twenty, but

treading already in the footsteps of his ancestors, heard your name

uttered by the person who introduced you, he let fall on you as though

he had by no means made up his mind to say “How d’ye do?” a gaze

generally blue, always of the coldness of a steel blade which he seemed

ready to plunge into the deepest recesses of your heart. Which was as a

matter of fact what the Guermantes imagined themselves to be doing, each

of them regarding himself as a psychologist of the highest order. They

thought moreover that they increased by this inspection the affability

of the salute which was to follow it, and would not be rendered you

without full knowledge of your deserts. All this occurred at a distance

from yourself which, little enough had it been a question of a passage

of arms, seemed immense for a handclasp, and had as chilling an effect

in this connexion as in the other, so that when the Guermantes, after a

rapid twisting thrust that explored the most intimate secrets of your

soul and laid bare your title to honour, had deemed you worthy to

associate with him thereafter, his hand, directed towards you at the end

of an arm stretched out to its fullest extent, appeared to be presenting

a rapier at you for a single combat, and that hand was in fact placed so

far in advance of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he

afterwards bowed his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was

yourself or his own hand that he was saluting. Certain Guermantes,

lacking the sense of proportion, or being incapable of refraining from

repeating themselves incessantly, went farther and repeated this

ceremony afresh every time that they met you. Seeing that they had no

longer any need to conduct the preliminary psychological investigation

for which the “familiar spirit” had delegated its powers to them and the

result of which they had presumably kept in mind, the insistence of the

perforating gaze preceding the handclasp could be explained only by the

automatism which their gaze had acquired or by some power of fascination

which they believed themselves to possess. The Courvoisiers, whose

physique was different, had tried in vain to assimilate that searching

gaze and had had to fall back upon a lordly stiffness or a rapid

indifference. On the other hand, it was from the Courvoisiers that

certain very exceptional Guermantes of the gentler sex seemed to have

borrowed the feminine form of greeting. At the moment when you were

presented to one of these, she made you a sweeping bow in which she

carried towards you, almost to an angle of forty-five degrees, her head

and bust, the rest of her body (which came very high, up to the belt

which formed a pivot) remaining stationary. But no sooner had she

projected thus towards you the upper part of her person than she flung

it backwards beyond the vertical line by a sudden retirement through

almost the same angle. This subsequent withdrawal neutralised what

appeared to have been conceded to you; the ground which you believed

yourself to have gained did not even remain a conquest, as in a duel;

the original positions were retained. This same annulment of affability

by the resumption of distance (which was Courvoisier in origin and

intended to shew that the advances made in the first movement were no

more than a momentary feint) displayed itself equally clearly, in the

Courvoisier ladies as in the Guermantes, in the letters which you

received from them, at any rate in the first period of your

acquaintance. The “body” of the letter might contain sentences such as

one writes only (you would suppose) to a friend, but in vain might you

have thought yourself entitled to boast of being in that relation to the

lady, since the letter began with “Monsieur,” and ended with “Croyez

monsieur à mes sentiments distingués.” After which, between this cold

opening and frigid conclusion which altered the meaning of all the rest,

there might come in succession (were it a reply to a letter of

condolence from yourself) the most touching pictures of the grief which

the Guermantes lady had felt on losing her sister, of the intimacy that

had existed between them, of the beauty of the place in which she was

staying, of the consolation that she found in the charm of her young

children, all this amounted to no more than a letter such as one finds

in printed collections, the intimate character of which implied,

however, no more intimacy between yourself and the writer than if she

had been the Younger Pliny or Mme. de Simiane.

It is true that certain Guermantes ladies wrote to you from the first as

“My dear friend,” or “My friend,” these were not always the most simple

natured among them, but rather those who, living only in the society of

kings and being at the same time “light”, assumed in their pride the

certainty that everything which came from themselves gave pleasure and

in their corruption the habit of setting no price upon any of the

satisfactions that they had to offer. However, since to have had a

common ancestor in the reign of Louis XIII was enough to make a young

Guermantes say, in speaking of the Marquise de Guermantes: “My aunt

Adam,” the Guermantes were so numerous a clan that, even among these

simple rites, that for example of the bow upon introduction to a

stranger, there existed a wide divergence. Each subsection of any

refinement had its own, which was handed down from parents to children

like the prescription for a liniment or a special way of making jam.

Thus it was that we saw Saint-Loup’s handclasp thrust out as though

involuntarily at the moment of his hearing one’s name, without any

participation by his eyes, without the addition of a bow. Any

unfortunate commoner who for a particular reason—which, for that matter,

very rarely occurred—was presented to anyone of the Saint-Loup

subsection racked his brains over this abrupt minimum of a greeting,

which deliberately assumed the appearance of non-recognition, to

discover what in the world the Guermantes—male or female—could have

against him. And he was highly surprised to learn that the said

Guermantes had thought fit to write specially to the introducer to tell

him how delighted he or she had been with the stranger, whom he or she

looked forward to meeting again. As specialised as the mechanical

gestures of Saint-Loup were the complicated and rapid capers (which M.

de Charlus condemned as ridiculous) of the Marquis de Fierbois, the

grave and measured paces of the Prince de Guermantes. But it is

impossible to describe here the richness of the choreography of the

Guermantes ballet owing to the sheer length of the cast.

To return to the antipathy which animated the Courvoisiers against the

Duchesse de Guermantes, they might have had the consolation of feeling

sorry for her so long as she was still unmarried, for she was then

comparatively poor. Unfortunately, at all times and seasons, a sort of

fuliginous emanation, quite _sui generis_, enveloped, hid from the eye

the wealth of the Courvoisiers which, however great it might be,

remained obscure. In vain might a young Courvoisier with an ample dowry

find a most eligible bridegroom; it invariably happened that the young

couple had no house of their own in Paris, “came up to stay” in the

season with his parents, and for the rest of the year lived down in the

country in the thick of a society that may have been unadulterated but

was also quite undistinguished. Whereas a Saint-Loup who was up to the

eyes in debt dazzled Doncières with his carriage-horses, a Courvoisier

who was extremely rich always went in the tram. Similarly (though of

course many years earlier) Mlle. de Guermantes (Oriane), who had

scarcely a penny to her name, created more stir with her clothes than

all the Courvoisiers put together. The really scandalous things she said

gave a sort of advertisement to her style of dressing and doing her

hair. She had had the audacity to say to the Russian Grand Duke: “Well,

Sir, I hear you would like to have Tolstoy murdered?” at a dinner-party

to which none of the Courvoisiers, not that any of them knew very much

about Tolstoy, had been asked. They knew little more about Greek

writers, if we may judge by the Dowager Duchesse de Gallardon

(mother-in-law of the Princesse de Gallardon who at that time was still

a girl) who, not having been honoured by Oriane with a single visit in

five years, replied to some one who asked her the reason for this

abstention: “It seems she recites Aristotle” (meaning Aristophanes) “in

society. I cannot allow that sort of thing in my house!”

One can imagine how greatly this “sally” by Mlle. de Guermantes upon

Tolstoy, if it enraged the Courvoisiers, delighted the Guermantes, and

by derivation everyone who was not merely closely but even remotely

attached to them. The Dowager Comtesse d’Argencourt (_née_ Seineport),

who entertained a little of everything, because she was a blue-stocking

and in spite of her son’s being a terrible snob, repeated the saying

before her literary friends with the comment: “Oriane de Guermantes, you

know; she’s as fine as amber, as mischievous as a monkey, there’s

nothing she couldn’t do if she chose, her water-colours are worthy of a

great painter and she writes better verses than most of the great poets,

and as for family, don’t you know, you couldn’t imagine anything better,

her grandmother was Mlle. de Montpensier, and she is the eighteenth

Oriane de Guermantes in succession, without a single misalliance; it’s

the purest blood, the oldest in the whole of France.” And so the sham

men of letters, those demi-intellectuals who went to Mme.

d’Argencourt’s, forming a mental picture of Oriane de Guermantes, whom

they would never have an opportunity to know personally, as something

more wonderful and more extraordinary than Princess Badroulbadour, not

only felt themselves ready to die for her on learning that so noble a

person glorified Tolstoy above all others, but felt also quickening with

a fresh strength in their minds their own love of Tolstoy, their longing

to fight against Tsarism. These liberal ideas might have grown faint in

them, they might have begun to doubt their importance, no longer

venturing to confess to holding them, when suddenly from Mlle. de

Guermantes herself, that is to say from a girl so indisputably cultured

and authorised to speak, who wore her hair flat on her brow (a thing

that no Courvoisier would ever have consented to do), came this vehement

support. A certain number of realities, good or bad in themselves, gain

enormously in this way by receiving the adhesion of people who are in

authority over us. For instance among the Courvoisiers the rites of

affability in a public thoroughfare consisted in a certain bow, very

ugly and far from affable in itself but which people knew to be the

distinguished way of bidding a person good day, with the result that

everyone else, suppressing the instinctive smile of welcome on his own

face, endeavoured to imitate these frigid gymnastics. But the Guermantes

in general and Oriane in particular, while better conversant than anyone

with these rites, did not hesitate, if they caught sight of you from a

carriage, to greet you with a sprightly wave of the hand, and in a

drawing-room, leaving the Courvoisiers to make their stiff and imitative

bows, sketched charming reverences in the air, held out their hands as

though to a comrade with a smile from their blue eyes, so that suddenly,

thanks to the Guermantes, there entered into the substance of smartness,

until then a little hollow and dry, everything that you would naturally

have liked and had compelled yourself to forego, a genuine welcome, the

effusion of a true friendliness, spontaneity. It is in a similar fashion

(but by a rehabilitation which this time is scarcely justified) that

people who carry in themselves an instinctive taste for bad music and

for melodies, however commonplace, which have in them something easy and

caressing, succeed, by dint of education in symphonic culture, in

mortifying that appetite. But once they have arrived at this point;

when, dazzled—and rightly so—by the brilliant orchestral colouring of

Richard Strauss, they see that musician adopt with an indulgence worthy

of Auber the most vulgar motifs, what those people originally admired

finds suddenly in so high an authority a justification which delights

them, and they let themselves be enchanted without scruple and with a

twofold gratitude, when they listen to _Salomé_, by what it would have

been impossible for them to admire in _Les Diamants de la Couronne_.

Authentic or not, the retort made by Mlle. de Guermantes to the Grand

Duke, retailed from house to house, furnished an opportunity to relate

the excessive smartness with which Oriane had been turned out at the

dinner-party in question. But if such splendour (and this is precisely

what rendered it unattainable by the Courvoisiers) springs not from

wealth but from prodigality, the latter does nevertheless last longer if

it enjoys the constant support of the former, which allows it to spend

all its fire. Given the principles openly advertised not only by Oriane

but by Mme. de Villeparisis, namely that nobility does not count, that

it is ridiculous to bother one’s head about rank, that wealth does not

necessarily mean happiness, that intellect, heart, talent are alone of

importance, the Courvoisiers were justified in hoping that, as a result

of the training she had received from the Marquise, Oriane would marry

some one who was not in society, an artist, a fugitive from justice, a

scalliwag, a free-thinker, that she would pass definitely into the

category of what the Courvoisiers called “detrimentals”. They were all

the more justified in this hope since, inasmuch as Mme. de Villeparisis

was at this very moment, from the social point of view, passing through

an awkward crisis (none of the few bright stars whom I was to meet in

her drawing-room had as yet reappeared there), she professed an intense

horror of the society which was thus holding her aloof. Even when she

referred to her nephew the Prince de Guermantes, whom she did still see,

she could never make an end of mocking at him because he was so

infatuated about his pedigree. But the moment it became a question of

finding a husband for Oriane, it had been no longer the principles

publicly advertised by aunt and niece that had controlled the

operations, it had been the mysterious “familiar spirit” of their race.

As unerringly as if Mme. de Villeparisis and Oriane had never spoken of

anything but rent-rolls and pedigrees in place of literary merit and

depth of character, and as if the Marquise, for the space of a few days,

had been—as she would ultimately be—dead and on her bier, in the church

of Combray, where each member of the family would be reduced to a mere

Guermantes, with a forfeiture of individuality and baptismal names to

which there testified on the voluminous black drapery of the pall the

single ‘G’ in purple surmounted by the ducal coronet, it was on the

wealthiest man and the most nobly born, on the most eligible bachelor of

the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the eldest son of the Duc de Guermantes,

the Prince des Laumes, that the familiar spirit had let fall the choice

of the intellectual, the critical, the evangelical Mme. de Villeparisis.

And for a couple of hours, on the day of the wedding, Mme. de

Villeparisis received in her drawing-room all the noble persons at whom

she had been in the habit of sneering, at whom she indeed sneered still

to the various plebeian intimates whom she had invited and on whom the

Prince des Laumes promptly left cards, preparatory to “cutting the

cable” in the following year. And then, making the Courvoisiers’ cup of

bitterness overflow, the same old maxims, which made out intellect and

talent to be the sole claims to social pre-eminence, resumed their

doctrinal force in the household of the Princesse des Laumes immediately

after her marriage. And in this respect, be it said in passing, the

point of view which Saint-Loup upheld when he lived with Rachel,

frequented the friends of Rachel, would have liked to marry Rachel,

implied—whatever the horror that it inspired in the family—less

falsehood than that of the Guermantes young ladies in general, preaching

the virtues of intellect, barely admitting the possibility of anyone’s

questioning the equality of mankind, all of which ended at a given point

in the same result as if they had professed the opposite principles,

that is to say in marriage to an extremely wealthy duke. Saint-Loup did,

on the contrary, act in conformity with his theories, which led people

to say that he was treading in evil ways. Certainly from the moral

standpoint Rachel was not altogether satisfactory. But it is by no means

certain whether, if she had been some person no more worthy but a

duchess or the heiress to many millions, Mme. de Marsantes would not

have been in favour of the match.

Well, to return to Mme. des Laumes (shortly afterwards Duchesse de

Guermantes, on the death of her father-in-law), it was the last

agonising straw upon the backs of the Courvoisiers that the theories of

the young Princess, remaining thus lodged in her speech, should not in

any sense be guiding her conduct; with the result that this philosophy

(if one may so call it) in no way impaired the aristocratic smartness of

the Guermantes drawing-room. No doubt all the people whom Mme. de

Guermantes did not invite imagined that it was because they were not

clever enough, and some rich American lady who had never had any book in

her possession except a little old copy, never opened, of Parny’s poems,

arranged because it was of the “period” upon one of the tables in her

inner room, shewed how much importance she attached to the things of the

mind by the devouring gaze which she fastened on the Duchesse de

Guermantes when that lady made her appearance at the Opera. No doubt,

also, Mme. de Guermantes was sincere when she selected a person on

account of his or her intellect. When she said of a woman: “It appears,

she’s quite charming!” or of a man that he was the “cleverest person in

the world,” she imagined herself to have no other reason for consenting

to receive them than this charm or cleverness, the familiar spirit not

interposing itself at this last moment; more deeply-rooted, stationed at

the obscure entry of the region in which the Guermantes exercised their

judgment, this vigilant spirit precluded them from finding the man

clever or the woman charming if they had no social value, actual or

potential. The man was pronounced learned, but like a dictionary, or, on

the contrary, common, with the mind of a commercial traveller, the woman

pretty, but with a terribly bad style, or too talkative. As for the

people who had no definite position, they were simply dreadful—such

snobs! M. de Bréauté, whose country house was quite close to Guermantes,

mixed with no one below the rank of Highness. But he laughed at them in

his heart and longed only to spend his days in museums. Accordingly Mme.

de Guermantes was indignant when anyone spoke of M. de Bréauté as a

snob. “A snob! Babal! But, my poor friend, you must be mad, it’s just

the opposite. He loathes smart people; he won’t let himself be

introduced to anyone. Even in my house! If I ask him to meet some one he

doesn’t know, he swears at me all the time.” This was not to say that,

even in practice, the Guermantes did not adopt an entirely different

attitude towards cleverness from the Courvoisiers. In a positive sense,

this difference between the Guermantes and the Courvoisiers had begun

already to bear very promising fruit. Thus the Duchesse de Guermantes,

enveloped moreover in a mystery which had set so many poets dreaming of

her at a respectful distance, had given that party to which I have

already referred, at which the King of England had enjoyed himself more

thoroughly than anywhere else, for she had had the idea, which would

never have occurred to a Courvoisier mind, of inviting, and the

audacity, from which a Courvoisier courage would have recoiled, to

invite, apart from the personages already mentioned, the musician Gaston

Lemaire and the dramatist Grandmougin. But it was pre-eminently from the

negative point of view that intellectuality made itself felt. If the

necessary coefficient of cleverness and charm declined steadily as the

rank of the person who sought an invitation from the Princesse des

Laumes became more exalted, vanishing into zero when he or she was one

of the principal Crowned Heads of Europe, conversely the farther they

fell below this royal level the higher the coefficient rose. For

instance at the Princesse de Parme’s parties there were a number of

people whom her Royal Highness invited because she had known them as

children, or because they were related to some duchess, or attached to

the person of some Sovereign, they themselves being quite possibly ugly,

boring or stupid; well, with a Courvoisier any of the reasons: “a

favourite of the Princesse de Parme,” “a niece on the mother’s side of

the Duchesse d’Arpajon,” “spends three months every year with the Queen

of Spain,” would have been sufficient to make her invite such people to

her house, but Mme. de Guermantes, who had politely acknowledged their

bows for ten years at the Princesse de Parme’s, had never once allowed

them to cross her threshold, considering that the same rule applied to a

drawing-room in a social as in a material sense, where it only needed a

few pieces of furniture which had no particular beauty but were left

there to fill the room and as a sign of the owner’s wealth, to render it

hideous. Such a drawing-room resembled a book in which the author could

not refrain from the use of language advertising his own learning,

brilliance, fluency. Like a book, like a house, the quality of a

“salon”, thought Mme. de Guermantes—and rightly—is based on the

corner-stone of sacrifice.

Many of the friends of the Princesse de Parme, with whom the Duchesse de

Guermantes had confined herself for years past to the same conventional

greeting, or to returning their cards, without ever inviting them to her

parties or going to theirs, complained discreetly of these omissions to

her Highness who, on days when M. de Guermantes came by himself to see

her, passed on a hint to him. But the wily nobleman, a bad husband to

the Duchess in so far as he kept mistresses, but her most tried and

trusty friend in everything that concerned the good order of her

drawing-room (and her own wit, which formed its chief attraction),

replied: “But does my wife know her? Indeed! Oh, well, I daresay she

does. But the truth is, Ma’am, that Oriane does not care for women’s

conversation. She lives, surrounded by a court of superior minds—I am

not her husband, I am only the first footman. Except for quite a small

number, who are all of them very clever indeed, women bore her. Surely,

Ma’am, your Highness with all her fine judgement is not going to tell me

that the Marquise de Souvré has any brains. Yes, I quite understand, the

Princess receives her out of kindness. Besides, your Highness knows her.

You tell me that Oriane has met her; it is quite possible, but once or

twice at the most, I assure you. And then, I must explain to your

Highness, it is really a little my fault as well. My wife is very easily

tired, and she is so anxious to be friendly always that if I allowed her

she would never stop going to see people. Only yesterday evening she had

a temperature, she was afraid of hurting the Duchesse de Bourbon’s

feelings by not going to see her. I had to shew my teeth, I assure you;

I positively forbade them to bring the carriage round. Do you know,

Ma’am, I should really prefer not to mention to Oriane that you have

spoken to me about Mme. de Souvré. My wife is so devoted to your

Highness, she will go round at once to invite Mme. de Souvré to the

house; that will mean another call to be paid, it will oblige us to make

friends with the sister, whose husband I know quite well. I think I

shall say nothing at all about it to Oriane, if the Princess has no

objection. That will save her a great deal of strain and excitement. And

I assure you that it will be no loss to Mme. de Souvré. She goes

everywhere, moves in the most brilliant circles. You know, we don’t

entertain at all, really, just a few little friendly dinners, Mme. de

Souvré would be bored to death.” The Princesse de Parme, innocently

convinced that the Duc de Guermantes would not transmit her request to

his Duchess, and dismayed by her failure to procure the invitation that

Mme. de Souvré sought, was all the more flattered to think that she

herself was one of the regular frequenters of so exclusive a household.

No doubt this satisfaction had its drawbacks also. Thus whenever the

Princesse de Parme invited Mme. de Guermantes to her own parties she had

to rack her brains to be sure that there was no one else on her list

whose presence might offend the Duchess and make her refuse to come

again.

On ordinary evenings (after dinner, at which she invariably entertained

at a very early hour, for she clung to old customs, a small party) the

drawing-room of the Princesse de Parme was thrown open to her regular

guests, and, generally speaking, to all the higher ranks of the

aristocracy, French and foreign. The order of her receptions was as

follows: on issuing from the dining-room the Princess sat down on a sofa

before a large round table and chatted with the two most important of

the ladies who had dined with her, or else cast her eyes over a

magazine, or sometimes played cards (or pretended to play, adopting a

German court custom), either a game of patience by herself or selecting

as her real or pretended partner some prominent personage. By nine

o’clock the double doors of the big drawing-room were in a state of

perpetual agitation, opening and shutting and opening again to admit the

visitors who had dined quietly at home (or if they had dined in town

hurried from their café promising to return later, since they intended

only to go in at one door and out at the other) in order to conform with

the Princess’s time-table. She, meanwhile, her mind fixed on her game or

conversation, made a show of not seeing the new arrivals, and it was not

until they were actually within reach of her that she rose graciously

from her seat, with a friendly smile for the women. The latter thereupon

sank before the upright Presence in a courtesy which was tantamount to a

genuflexion, so as to bring their lips down to the level of the

beautiful hand which hung very low, and to kiss it. But at that moment

the Princess, just as if she had been every time surprised by a

formality with which nevertheless she was perfectly familiar, raised the

kneeling figure as though by main force, and with incomparable grace and

sweetness, and kissed her on both cheeks. A grace and sweetness that

were conditional, you may say, upon the meekness with which the arriving

guest inclined her knee. Very likely; and it seems that in a society

without distinctions of rank politeness would vanish, not, as is

generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because from one class

would have vanished the deference due to a distinction which must be

imaginary to be effective, and, more completely still, from the other

class the affability in the distribution of which one is prodigal so

long as one knows it to be, to the recipient, of an untold value which,

in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like

everything that has only a promissory worth. But this disappearance of

politeness in a reconstructed society is by no means certain, and we are

at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible

state of things. People of first-rate intelligence have held the opinion

that a Republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances, and,

more recently, that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation

of Church and State. After all, the survival of politeness in a society

levelled to uniformity would be no more miraculous than the practical

success of the railway or the use of the aeroplane in war. Besides, even

if politeness were to vanish, there is nothing to shew that this would

be a misfortune. Lastly, would not society become secretly more

hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic. This seems highly

probable. The political power of the Popes has grown enormously since

they ceased to possess either States or an Army; our cathedrals meant

far less to a devout Catholic of the seventeenth century than they mean

to an atheist of the twentieth, and if the Princesse de Parme had been

the sovereign ruler of a State, no doubt I should have felt myself

impelled to speak of her almost as I should speak of a President of the

Republic, that is to say not at all.

As soon as the postulant had been raised from the ground and embraced by

the Princess, the latter resumed her seat and returned to her game of

patience, but first of all, if the newcomer were of any importance, held

her for a moment in conversation, making her sit down in an armchair.