When the room became too crowded the lady in waiting who had to control

the traffic cleared the floor by leading the regular guests into an

immense hall on to which the drawing-room opened, a hall filled with

portraits and minor trophies of the House of Bourbon. The intimate

friends of the Princess would then volunteer for the part of guide and

would repeat interesting anecdotes, to which the young people had not

the patience to listen, more interested in the spectacle of living

Royalties (with the possibility of having themselves presented to them

by the lady in waiting and the maids of honour) than in examining the

relics of dead Sovereigns. Too much occupied with the acquaintances

which they would be able to form and the invitations it might perhaps be

possible to secure, they knew absolutely nothing, even in after-years,

of what there was in this priceless museum of the archives of the

Monarchy, and could only recall confusedly that it was decorated with

cacti and giant palms which gave this centre of social elegance a look

of the palmarium in the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

Naturally the Duchesse de Guermantes, by way of self-mortification, did

occasionally appear on these evenings to pay an “after dinner” call on

the Princess, who kept her all the time by her side, while she rallied

the Duke. But on evenings when the Duchess came to dine, the Princess

took care not to invite her regular party, and closed her doors to the

world on rising from table, for fear lest a too liberal selection of

guests might offend the exacting Duchess. On such evenings, were any of

the faithful who had not received warning to present themselves on the

royal doorstep, they would be informed by the porter: “Her Royal

Highness is not at home this evening,” and would turn away. But, long

before this, many of the Princess’s friends had known that, on the day

in question, they would not be asked to her house. These were a special

set of parties, a privilege barred to so many who must have longed for

admission. The excluded could, with a practical certainty, enumerate the

roll of the elect, and would say irritably among themselves: “You know,

of course, that Oriane de Guermantes never goes anywhere without her

entire staff.” With the help of this body the Princesse de Parme sought

to surround the Duchess as with a protecting rampart against those

persons the chance of whose making a good impression on her was at all

doubtful. But with several of the Duchess’s favourites, with several

members of this glittering “staff” the Princesse de Parme resented

having to go out of her way to shew them attentions, seeing that they

paid little or no attention to herself. No doubt the Princess was fully

prepared to admit that it was possible to derive more enjoyment in the

company of the Duchesse de Guermantes than in her own. She could not

deny that there was always a “crush” on the Duchess’s at-home days, or

that she herself often met there three or four royal personages who

thought it sufficient to leave their cards upon her. And in vain might

she commit to memory Oriane’s witty sayings, copy her gowns, serve at

her own tea-parties the same strawberry tarts, there were occasions on

which she was left by herself all afternoon with a lady in waiting and

some foreign Counsellor of Legation. And so whenever (as had been the

case with Swann, for instance, at an earlier period) there was anyone

who never let a day pass without going to spend an hour or two at the

Duchess’s and paid a call once in two years on the Princesse de Parme,

the latter felt no great desire, even for the sake of amusing Oriane, to

make to this Swann or whoever he was the “advances” of an invitation to

dinner. In a word, having the Duchess in her house was for the Princess

a source of endless perplexity, so haunted was she by the fear that

Oriane would find fault with everything. But in return, and for the same

reason, when the Princesse de Parme came to dine with Mme. de Guermantes

she could be certain beforehand that everything would be perfect,

delightful, she had only one fear which was that of her own inability to

understand, remember, give satisfaction, her inability to assimilate new

ideas and people. On this account my presence aroused her attention and

excited her cupidity, just as might a new way of decorating the

dinner-table with festoons of fruit, uncertain as she was which of the

two it might be—the table decorations or my presence—that was the more

distinctively one of those charms, the secret of the success of Oriane’s

parties, and in her uncertainty firmly resolved to try at her own next

dinner-party to introduce them both. What for that matter fully

justified the enraptured curiosity which the Princesse de Parme brought

to the Duchess’s house was that element—amusing, dangerous,

exciting—into which the Princess used to plunge with a combination of

anxiety, shock and delight (as at the seaside on one of those days of

“big waves” of the danger of which the bathing-masters warn us, simply

and solely because none of them knows how to swim), from which she used

to emerge terrified, happy, rejuvenated, and which was known as the wit

of the Guermantes. The wit of the Guermantes—a thing as non-existent as

the squared circle, according to the Duchess who regarded herself as the

sole Guermantes to possess it—was a family reputation like that of the

pork pies of Tours or the biscuits of Rheims. No doubt (since an

intellectual peculiarity does not employ for its perpetuation the same

channels as a shade of hair or complexion) certain intimate friends of

the Duchess who were not of her blood were nevertheless endowed with

this wit, which on the other hand had failed to permeate the minds of

various Guermantes, too refractory to assimilate wit of any kind. The

holders, not related to the Duchess, of this Guermantes wit had

generally the characteristic feature of having been brilliant men,

fitted for a career to which, whether it were in the arts, diplomacy,

parliamentary eloquence or the army, they had preferred the life of a

small and intimate group. Possibly this preference could be explained by

a certain want of originality, of initiative, of will power, of health

or of luck, or possibly by snobbishness.

With certain people (though these, it must be admitted, were the

exception) if the Guermantes drawing-room had been the stumbling-block

in their careers, it had been without their knowledge. Thus a doctor, a

painter and a diplomat of great promise had failed to achieve success in

the careers for which they were nevertheless more brilliantly endowed

than most of their competitors because their friendship with the

Guermantes had the result that the two former were regarded as men of

fashion and the third as a reactionary, which had prevented each of the

three from winning the recognition of his colleagues. The mediaeval gown

and red cap which are still donned by the electoral colleges of the

Faculties are (or were at least, not so long since) something more than

a purely outward survival from a narrow-minded past, from a rigid

sectarianism. Under the cap with its golden tassels, like the High

Priest in the conical mitre of the Jews, the “Professors” were still, in

the years that preceded the Dreyfus Case, fast rooted in rigorously

pharisaical ideas. Du Boulbon was at heart an artist, but was safe

because he did not care for society. Cottard was always at the

Verdurins’. But Mme. Verdurin was a patient; besides, he was protected

by his vulgarity; finally, at his own house he entertained no one

outside the Faculty, at banquets over which there floated an aroma of

carbolic. But in powerful corporations, where moreover the rigidity of

their prejudices is but the price that must be paid for the noblest

integrity, the most lofty conceptions of morality, which weaken in an

atmosphere that, more tolerant, freer at first, becomes very soon

dissolute, a Professor in his gown of scarlet satin faced with ermine,

like that of a Doge (which is to say a Duke) of Venice enshrined in the

Ducal Palace, was as virtuous, as deeply attached to noble principles,

but as unsparing of any alien element as that other Duke, excellent but

terrible, whom we know as M. de Saint-Simon. The alien, here, was the

worldly doctor, with other manners, other social relations. To make

good, the unfortunate of whom we are now speaking, so as not to be

accused by his colleagues of looking down on them (the strange ideas of

a man of fashion!) if he concealed from them his Duchesse de Guermantes,

hoped to disarm them by giving mixed dinner-parties in which the medical

element was merged in the fashionable. He was unaware that in so doing

he signed his own death-warrant, or rather he discovered this later,

when the Council of Ten had to fill a vacant chair, and it was

invariably the name of another doctor, more normal, it might be

obviously inferior, that leaped from the fatal urn, when their “Veto”

thundered from the ancient Faculty, as solemn, as absurd and as terrible

as the “Juro” that spelt the death of Molière. So too with the painter

permanently labelled man of fashion, when fashionable people who dabbled

in art had succeeded in making themselves be labelled artists; so with

the diplomat who had too many reactionary associations.

But this case was the rarest of all. The type of distinguished man who

formed the main substance of the Guermantes drawing-room was that of

people who had voluntarily (or so at least they supposed) renounced all

else, everything that was incompatible with the wit of the Guermantes,

with the courtesy of the Guermantes, with that indefinable charm odious

to any “Corporation” however little centralised.

And the people who were aware that in days gone by one of these

frequenters of the Duchess’s drawing-room had been awarded the gold

medal of the Salon, that another, Secretary to the Bar Council, had made

a brilliant start in the Chamber, that a third had ably served France as

Chargé d’Affaires, might have been led to regard as “failures” people

who had done nothing more now for twenty years. But there were few who

were thus “well-informed”, and the parties concerned would themselves

have been the last to remind people, finding these old distinctions to

be now valueless, in the light of this very Guermantes spirit of wit:

for did not this condemn respectively as a bore or an usher, and as a

counter-jumper a pair of eminent Ministers, one a trifle solemn the

other addicted to puns, of whose praises the newspapers were always full

but in whose company Mme. de Guermantes would begin to yawn and shew

signs of impatience if the imprudence of a hostess had placed either of

them next to her at the dinner-table. Since being a statesman of the

first rank was in no sense a recommendation to the Duchess’s favour,

those of her friends who had definitely abandoned the “Career” or the

“Service”, who had never stood for the Chamber, felt, as they came day

after day to have luncheon and talk with their great friend, or when

they met her in the houses of Royal Personages, of whom for that matter

they thought very little (or at least they said so), that they

themselves had chosen the better part, albeit their melancholy air, even

in the midst of the gaiety, seemed somehow to challenge the soundness of

this opinion.

It must be recognised also that the refinement of social life, the

subtlety of conversation at the Guermantes’ did also contain, exiguous

as it may have been, an element of reality. No official title was

equivalent to the approval of certain chosen friends of Mme. de

Guermantes, whom the most powerful Ministers had been unable to attract

to their houses. If in this drawing-room so many intellectual ambitions,

such noble efforts even had been for ever buried, still at least from

their dust the rarest blossoms of civilised society had taken life.

Certainly men of wit, Swann for instance, regarded themselves as

superior to men of genuine worth, whom they despised, but that was

because what the Duchesse de Guermantes valued above everything else was

not intellect; it was, according to her, that superior, more exquisite

form of the human intellect exalted to a verbal variety of talent—wit.

And long ago at the Verdurins’ when Swann condemned Brichot and Elstir,

one as a pedant and the other as a clown, despite all the learning of

one and the other’s genius, it was the infiltration of the Guermantes

spirit that had led him to classify them so. Never would he have dared

to present either of them to the Duchess, conscious instinctively of the

air with which she would have listened to Brichot’s monologues and

Elstir’s hair-splittings, the Guermantes spirit regarding pretentious

and prolix speech, whether in a serious or a farcical vein, as alike of

the most intolerable imbecility.

As for the Guermantes of the true flesh and blood, if the Guermantes

spirit had not absorbed them as completely as we see occur in, to take

an example, those literary circles in which everyone shares a common way

of pronouncing his words, of expressing his thoughts, and consequently

of thinking, it was certainly not because originality is stronger in

purely social groups or presents any obstacle there to imitation. But

imitation depends not merely upon the absence of any unconquerable

originality but also demands a relative fineness of ear which enables

one first of all to discern what one is afterwards to imitate. Whereas

there were several Guermantes in whom this musical sense was as entirely

lacking as in the Courvoisiers.

To take as an instance what is called; in another sense of the word

imitation, “giving imitations” (or among the Guermantes was called

“taking off”), Mme. de Guermantes might succeed in this to perfection,

the Courvoisiers were as incapable of appreciating her as if they had

been a tribe of rabbits instead of men and women, because they had never

had the sense to observe the particular defect or accent that the

Duchess was endeavouring to copy. When she “gave an imitation” of the

Duc de Limoges, the Courvoisiers would protest: “Oh, no, he doesn’t

really speak like that; I met him again only yesterday at dinner at

Bebeth’s; he talked to me all evening and he didn’t speak like that at

all!” whereas the Guermantes of any degree of culture exclaimed: “Gad,

what fun Oriane is! The odd part of it is that when she is copying him

she looks exactly like him! I feel I’m listening to him. Oriane, do give

us a little more Limoges!” Now these Guermantes (and not necessarily the

few really outstanding members of the clan who, when the Duchess

imitated the Duc de Limoges, would say admiringly: “Oh, you really have

got him,” or “You do get him,”) might indeed be devoid of wit according

to Mme. de Guermantes (and in this respect she was right); yet, by dint

of hearing and repeating her sayings they had come to imitate more or

less her way of expressing herself, of criticising people, of what

Swann, like the Duke himself, used to call her “phrasing” of things, so

that they presented in their conversation something which to the

Courvoisiers appeared “fearfully like” Oriane’s wit and was treated by

them collectively as the “wit of the Guermantes”. As these Guermantes

were to her not merely kinsfolk but admirers, Oriane (who kept the rest

of the family rigorously at arm’s-length and now avenged by her disdain

the insults that they had heaped upon her in her girlhood) went to call

on them now and then, generally in company with the Duke, in the season,

when she drove out with him. These visits were historic events. The

heart began to beat more rapidly in the bosom of the Princesse d’Epinay,

who was “at home” in her big drawing-room on the ground floor, when she

perceived afar off, like the first glow of an innocuous fire, or the

“reconnaissances” of an unexpected invasion, making her way across the

courtyard slowly, in a diagonal course, the Duchess crowned with a

ravishing hat and holding atilt a sunshade from which there rained down

a summer fragrance. “Why, here comes Oriane,” she would say, like an “On

guard!” intended to convey a prudent warning to her visitors, so that

they should have time to beat an orderly retreat, to clear the rooms

without panic. Half of those present dared not remain, and rose at once

to go. “But no, why? Sit down again, I insist on keeping you a little

longer,” said the Princess in a careless tone and seemingly at her ease

(to shew herself the great lady) but in a voice that suddenly rang

false. “But you may want to talk to each other.” “Really, you’re in a

hurry? Oh, very well, I shall come and see you,” replied the lady of the

house to those whom she was just as well pleased to see depart. The Duke

and Duchess gave a very civil greeting to people whom they had seen

there regularly for years, without for that reason coming to know them

any better, while these in return barely said good day to them, thinking

this more discreet. Scarcely had they left the room before the Duke

began asking good-naturedly who they were, so as to appear to be taking

an interest in the intrinsic quality of people whom he himself, owing to

the cross-purposes of fate or the wretched state of Oriane’s nerves,

never saw in his own house. “Tell me, who was that little woman in the

pink hat?” “Why, my dear cousin, you have seen her hundreds of times,

she’s the Vicomtesse de Tours, who was a Lamarzelle.” “But, do you know,

she’s quite good-looking; she seems clever too; if it weren’t for a

little flaw in her upper lip she’ld be a regular charmer. If there’s a

Vicomte de Tours, he can’t have any too bad a time. Oriane, do you know

what those eyebrows and the way her hair grows reminded me of? Your

cousin Hedwige de Ligne.” The Duchesse de Guermantes, who languished

whenever people spoke of the beauty of any woman other than herself, let

the conversation drop. She had reckoned without the weakness her husband

had for letting it be seen that he knew all about the people who did not

come to his house, whereby he believed that he shewed himself to be more

seriously minded than his wife. “But,” he resumed suddenly with

emphasis, “You mentioned the name Lamarzelle. I remember, when I was in

the Chamber, hearing a really remarkable speech made....” “That was the

uncle of the young woman you saw just now.” “Indeed! What talent! No, my

dear girl,” he assured the Vicomtesse d’Egremont, whom Mme. de

Guermantes could not endure, but who, refusing to stir from the

Princesse d’Epinay’s drawing-room where she willingly humbled herself to

play the part of parlour-maid (and was ready to slap her own

parlour-maid on returning home), stayed there, confused, tearful, but

stayed when the ducal couple were in the room, took their cloaks, tried

to make herself useful, offered discreetly to withdraw into the next

room, “you are not to make tea for us, let us just sit and talk quietly,

we are simple souls, really, honestly. Besides,” he went on, turning to

the Princesse d’Epinay (leaving the Egremont lady blushing, humble,

ambitious and full of zeal), “we can only give you a quarter of an

hour.” This quarter of an hour was entirely taken up with a sort of

exhibition of the witty things which the Duchess had said during the

previous week, and to which she herself would certainly not have

referred had not her husband, with great adroitness, by appearing to be

rebuking her with reference to the incidents that had provoked them,

obliged her as though against her will to repeat them.

The Princesse d’Epinay, who was fond of her cousin and knew that she had

a weakness for compliments, went into ecstasies over her hat, her

sunshade, her wit. “Talk to her as much as you like about her clothes,”

said the Duke in the sullen tone which he had adopted and now tempered

with a sardonic smile so that his resentment should not be taken

seriously, “but for heaven’s sake don’t speak of her wit, I should be

only too glad not to have so witty a wife. You are probably alluding to

the shocking pun she made about my brother Palamède,” he went on,

knowing quite well that the Princess and the rest of the family had not

yet heard this pun, and delighted to have an opportunity of shewing off

his wife. “In the first place I consider it unworthy of a person who has

occasionally, I must admit, said some quite good things, to make bad

puns, but especially about my brother, who is very susceptible, and if

it is going to lead to his quarrelling with me, that would really be too

much of a good thing.” “But we never heard a word about it! One of

Oriane’s puns! It’s sure to be delicious. Oh, do tell us!” “No, no,” the

Duke went on, still sulking though with a broader smile, “I’m so glad

you haven’t heard it. Seriously, I’m very fond of my brother.” “Listen,

Basin,” broke in the Duchess, the moment having come for her to take up

her husband’s cue, “I can’t think why you should say that it might annoy

Palamède, you know quite well it would do nothing of the sort. He is far

too intelligent to be vexed by a stupid joke which has nothing offensive

about it. You are making them think I said something nasty; I simply

uttered a remark which was not in the least funny, it is you who make it

seem important by losing your temper over it. I don’t understand you.”

“You are making us terribly excited, what is it all about?” “Oh,

obviously nothing serious!” cried M. de Guermantes. “You may have heard

that my brother offered to give Brézé, the place he got from his wife,

to his sister Marsantes.” “Yes, but we were told that she didn’t want

it, she didn’t care for that part of the country, the climate didn’t

suit her.” “Very well, some one had been telling my wife all that and

saying that if my brother was giving this place to our sister it was not

so much to please her as to tease her. ‘He’s such a teaser, Charlus,’

was what they actually said. Well, you know Brézé, it’s a royal domain,

I should say it’s worth millions, it used to be part of the crown lands,

it includes one of the finest forests in the whole of France. There are

plenty of people who would be only too delighted to be teased to that

tune. And so when she heard the word ‘teaser’ applied to Charlus because

he was giving away such a magnificent property, Oriane could not help

exclaiming, without meaning anything, I must admit, there wasn’t a trace

of ill-nature about it, for it came like a flash of lightning: ‘Teaser,

teaser? Then he must be Teaser Augustus!’ You understand,” he went on,

resuming his sulky tone, having first cast a sweeping glance round the

room in order to judge the effect of his wife’s witticism—and in some

doubt as to the extent of Mme. d’Epinay’s acquaintance with ancient

history, “you understand, it’s an allusion to Augustus Caesar, the Roman

Emperor; it’s too stupid, a bad play on words, quite unworthy of Oriane.

And then, you see, I am more circumspect than my wife, if I haven’t her

wit, I think of the consequences; if anyone should be so ill-advised as

to repeat the remark to my brother there’ll be the devil to pay. All the

more,” he went on, “because as you know Palamède is very high and

mighty, and very fussy also, given to gossip and all that sort of thing,

so that quite apart from the question of his giving away Brézé you must

admit that ‘Teaser Augustus’ suits him down to the ground. That is what

justifies my wife’s remarks; even when she is inclined to stoop to what

is almost vulgar, she is always witty and does really describe people.”

And so, thanks on one occasion to “Teaser Augustus”, on another to

something else, the visits paid by the Duke and Duchess to their

kinsfolk replenished the stock of anecdotes, and the emotion which these

visits aroused lasted long after the departure of the sparkling lady and

her “producer”. Her hostess would begin by going over again with the

privileged persons who had been at the entertainment (those who had

remained in the room) the clever things that Oriane had said. “You

hadn’t heard ‘Teaser Augustus’?” asked the Princesse d’Epinay. “Yes,”

replied the Marquise de Baveno, blushing as she spoke, “the Princesse de

Sarsina (the La Rochefoucauld one) mentioned it to me, not quite in the

same words. But of course it was far more interesting to hear it

repeated like that with my cousin in the room,” she went on, as though

speaking of a song that had been accompanied by the composer himself.

“We were speaking of Oriane’s latest—she was here just now,” her hostess

greeted a visitor who would be plunged in despair at not having arrived

an hour earlier. “What! Has Oriane been here?” “Yes, you ought to have

come a little sooner,” the Princesse d’Epinay informed her, not in

reproach but letting her understand all that her clumsiness had made her

miss. It was her fault alone if she had not been present at the Creation

of the World or at Mme. Carvalho’s last performance. “What do you think

of Oriane’s latest? I must say, I do enjoy ‘Teaser Augustus’,” and the

“saying” would be served up again cold next day at luncheon before a few

intimate friends who were invited on purpose, and would reappear under

various sauces throughout the week. Indeed the Princess happening in the

course of that week to pay her annual visit to the Princesse de Parme

seized the opportunity to ask whether her Royal Highness had heard the

pun, and repeated it to her. “Ah! Teaser Augustus,” said the Princesse

de Parme, her eyes bulging with an instinctive admiration, which begged

however for a complementary elucidation which Mme. d’Epinay was not

loath to furnish. “I must say, ‘Teaser Augustus’ pleases me enormously

as a piece of ‘phrasing’,” she concluded. As a matter of fact the word

“phrasing” was not in the least applicable to this pun, but the

Princesse d’Epinay, who claimed to have assimilated her share of the

Guermantes spirit, had borrowed from Oriane the expressions “phrased”

and “phrasing” and employed them without much discrimination. Now the

Princesse de Parme, who was not at all fond of Mme. d’Epinay, whom she

considered plain, knew to be miserly and believed, on the authority of

the Courvoisiers, to be malicious, recognised this word “phrasing” which

she had heard used by Mme. de Guermantes but would not by herself have

known how or when to apply. She received the impression that it was in

fact its “phrasing” that formed the charm of “Teaser Augustus” and,

without altogether forgetting her antipathy towards the plain and

miserly lady, could not repress a burst of admiration for a person

endowed to such a degree with the Guermantes spirit, so strong that she

was on the point of inviting the Princesse d’Epinay to the Opera. She

was held in check only by the reflexion that it would be wiser perhaps

to consult Mme. de Guermantes first. As for Mme. d’Epinay, who, unlike

the Courvoisiers, paid endless attentions to Oriane and was genuinely

fond of her but was jealous of her exalted friends and slightly

irritated by the fun which the Duchess used to make of her before

everyone on account of her meanness, she reported on her return home

what an effort it had required to make the Princesse de Parme grasp the

point of “Teaser Augustus”, and declared what a snob Oriane must be to

number such a goose among her friends. “I should never have been able to

see much of the Princesse de Parme even if I had cared to,” she informed

the friends who were dining with her. “M. d’Epinay would not have

allowed it for a moment, because of her immorality,” she explained,

alluding to certain purely imaginary excesses on the part of the

Princess. “But even if I had had a husband less strict in his views, I

must say I could never have made friends with her. I don’t know how

Oriane can bear to see her every other day, as she does. I go there once

a year, and it’s all I can do to sit out my call.” As for those of the

Courvoisiers who happened to be at Victurnienne’s on the day of Mme. de

Guermantes’s visit, the arrival of the Duchess generally put them to

flight owing to the exasperation they felt at the “ridiculous salaams”

that were made to her there. One alone remained on the afternoon of

“Teaser Augustus”. He did not entirely see the point, but he did see

part of it, being an educated man. And the Courvoisiers went about

repeating that Oriane had called uncle Palamède “Caesar Augustus”, which

was, according to them, a good enough description of him, but why all

this endless talk about Oriane, they went on. People couldn’t make more

fuss about a queen. “After all, what is Oriane? I don’t say that the

Guermantes aren’t an old family, but the Courvoisiers are every bit as

good in rank, antiquity, marriages. We mustn’t forget that on the Field

of the Cloth of Gold, when the King of England asked François I who was

the noblest of the lords there present, ‘Sire,’ said the King of France,

‘Courvoisier.’” But even if all the Courvoisiers had stayed in the room

to hear them, Oriane’s sayings would have fallen on deaf ears, since the

incidents that usually gave occasion for those sayings would have been

regarded by them from a totally different point of view. If, for

instance, a Courvoisier found herself running short of chairs, in the

middle of a party, or if she used the wrong name in greeting a guest

whose face she did not remember, or if one of her servants said

something stupid, the Courvoisier, extremely annoyed, flushed, quivering

with excitement, would deplore so unfortunate an occurrence. And when

she had a visitor in the room and Oriane was expected, she would say in

a tone anxiously and imperiously questioning: “Do you know her?”,

fearing that if the visitor did not know her his presence might make an

unfortunate impression on Oriane. But Mme. de Guermantes on the contrary

extracted from such incidents opportunities for stories which made the

Guermantes laugh until the tears streamed down their cheeks, so that one

was obliged to envy her, her having run short of chairs, having herself

made or having allowed her servant to make a blunder, having had at her

party some one whom nobody knew, as one is obliged to be thankful that

great writers have been kept at a distance by men and betrayed by women

when their humiliations and their sufferings have been if not the direct

stimulus of their genius, at any rate the subject matter of their works.

The Courvoisiers were incapable of rising to the level of the spirit of

innovation which the Duchesse de Guermantes introduced into the life of

society and, by adapting it, following an unerring instinct, to the

necessities of the moment, made into something artistic where the purely

rational application of cut and dried rules would have given as

unfortunate results as would greet a man who, anxious to succeed in love

or in politics, was to reproduce in his own daily life the exploits of

Bussy d’Amboise. If the Courvoisiers gave a family dinner or a dinner to

meet some prince, the addition of a recognised wit, of some friend of

their son seemed to them an anomaly capable of producing the direst

consequences. A Courvoisier whose father had been a Minister of the

Empire having to give an afternoon party to meet Princesse Mathilde

deduced by a geometrical formula that she could invite no one but

Bonapartists. Of whom she knew practically none. All the smart women of

her acquaintance, all the amusing men were ruthlessly barred because,

from their Legitimist views or connexions, they might easily, according

to Courvoisier logic, give offence to the Imperial Highness. The latter,

who in her own house entertained the flower of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, was quite surprised when she found at Mme. de

Courvoisier’s only a notorious old sponger whose husband had been an

Imperial Prefect, the widow of the Director of Posts and sundry others

known for their loyalty to Napoleon, their stupidity and their dullness.

Princesse Mathilde, however, in no way stinted the generous and

refreshing shower of her sovereign grace over these miserable scarecrows

whom the Duchesse de Guermantes, for her part, took good care not to

invite when it was her turn to entertain the Princess, but substituted

for them without any abstract reasoning about Bonapartism the most

brilliant coruscation of all the beauties, all the talents, all the

celebrities, who, the exercise of some subtle sixth sense made her feel,

would be acceptable to the niece of the Emperor even when they belonged

actually to the Royal House. There was not lacking indeed the Duc

d’Aumale, and when on withdrawing the Princess, raising Mme. de

Guermantes from the ground where she had sunk in a curtsey and was

trying to kiss the august hand, embraced her on both cheeks, it was from

the bottom of her heart that she was able to assure the Duchess that

never had she spent a happier afternoon nor seen so delightful a party.

The Princesse de Parme was Courvoisier in her incapacity for innovation

in social matters, but unlike the Courvoisiers the surprise that was

perpetually caused her by the Duchesse de Guermantes engendered in her

not, as in them, antipathy but admiration. This astonishment was still

farther enhanced by the infinitely backward state of the Princess’s

education. Mme. de Guermantes was herself a great deal less advanced

than she supposed. But it was enough for her to have gone a little

beyond Madame de Parme to stupefy that lady, and, as the critics of each

generation confine themselves to maintaining the direct opposite of the

truths admitted by their predecessors, she had only to say that

Flaubert, that arch-enemy of the bourgeois, had been bourgeois through

and through, or that there was a great deal of Italian music in Wagner,

to open before the Princess, at the cost of a nervous exhaustion which

recurred every time, as before the eyes of a swimmer in a stormy sea,

horizons that seemed to her unimaginable and remained for ever vague. A

stupefaction caused also by the paradoxes uttered with relation not only

to works of art but to persons of their acquaintance and to current

social events. No doubt the incapacity that prevented Mme. de Parme from

distinguishing the true wit of the Guermantes from certain rudimentarily

acquired forms of that wit (which made her believe in the high

intellectual worth of certain, especially certain female Guermantes, of

whom she was bewildered on hearing the Duchess confide to her with a

smile that they were mere blockheads) was one of the causes of the

astonishment which the Princess always felt on hearing Mme. de

Guermantes criticise other people. But there was another cause also, one

which I, who knew at this time more books than people and literature

better than life, explained to myself by thinking that the Duchess,

living this worldly life the idleness and sterility of which are to a

true social activity what criticism, in art, is to creation, extended to

the persons who surrounded her the instability of point of view, the

uneasy thirst of the reasoner who to assuage a mind that has grown too

dry goes in search of no matter what paradox that is still fairly new,

and will make no bones about upholding the refreshing opinion that the

really great _Iphigénie_ is Piccini’s and not Gluck’s, at a pinch the

true _Phèdre_ that of Pradon.

When a woman who was intelligent, educated, witty had married a shy

bumpkin whom one saw but seldom and never heard, Mme. de Guermantes one

fine day would find a rare intellectual pleasure not only in decrying

the wife but in “discovering” the husband. In the Cambremer household,

for example, if she had lived in that section of society at the time,

she would have decreed that Mme. de Cambremer was stupid, and that the

really interesting person, misunderstood, delightful, condemned to

silence by a chattering wife but himself worth a thousand of her, was

the Marquis, and the Duchess would have felt on declaring this the same

kind of refreshment as the critic who, after people have for seventy

years been admiring _Hernani_, confesses to a preference for _Le Lion

Amoureux_. And from this same morbid need of arbitrary novelties, if

from her girlhood everyone had been pitying a model wife, a true saint,

for being married to a scoundrel, one fine day Mme. de Guermantes would

assert that this scoundrel was perhaps a frivolous man but one with a

heart of gold, whom the implacable harshness of his wife had driven to

do the most inconsistent things. I knew that it is not only over

different works, in the long course of centuries, but over different

parts of the same work that criticism plays, thrusting back into the

shadow what for too long has been thought brilliant, and making emerge

what has appeared to be doomed to permanent obscurity. I had not only

seen Bellini, Winterhalter, the Jesuit architects, a Restoration

cabinet-maker come to take the place of men of genius who were called

“worn out”, simply because they had worn out the lazy minds of the

intellectuals, as neurasthenics are always worn out and always changing;

I had seen preferred in Sainte-Beuve alternately the critic and the

poet, Musset rejected so far as his poetry went save for a few quite

unimportant little pieces. No doubt certain essayists are mistaken when

they set above the most famous scenes in _Le Cid_ or _Polyeucte_ some

speech from _Le Menteur_ which, like an old plan, furnishes information

about the Paris of the day, but their predilection, justified if not by

considerations of beauty at least by a documentary interest, is still

too rational for our criticism run mad. It will barter the whole of

Molière for a line from _L’Etourdi_, and even when it pronounces

Wagner’s _Tristan_ a bore will except a “charming note on the horns” at

the point where the hunt goes by. This depravation of taste helped me to

understand that of which Mme. de Guermantes gave proof when she decided

that a man of their world, recognised as a good fellow but a fool, was a

monster of egoism, sharper than people thought—that another widely known

for his generosity might be the personification of avarice, that a good

mother paid no attention to her children, and that a woman generally

supposed to be vicious was really actuated by the noblest feelings. As

though spoiled by the nullity of life in society, the intelligence and

perception of Mme. de Guermantes were too vacillating for disgust not to

follow pretty swiftly in the wake of infatuation (leaving her still

ready to feel herself attracted afresh by the kind of cleverness which

she had in turn sought out and abandoned) and for the charm which she

had felt in some warm-hearted man not to change, if he came too often to

see her, sought too freely from her directions which she was incapable

of giving him, into an irritation which she believed to be produced by

her admirer but which was in fact due to the utter impossibility of

finding pleasure when one does nothing else than seek it. The variations

of the Duchess’s judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone

had never been in love with her, in him she had always felt an iron

character, indifferent to the caprices that she displayed, contemptuous

of her beauty, violent, of a will that would never bend, the sort under

which alone nervous people can find tranquillity. M. de Guermantes on

the other hand, pursuing a single type of feminine beauty but seeking it

in mistresses whom he constantly replaced, had, once he had left them,

and to express derision of them, only an associate, permanent and

identical, who irritated him often by her chatter but as to whom he knew

that everyone regarded her as the most beautiful, the most virtuous, the

cleverest, the best-read member of the aristocracy, as a wife whom he,

M. de Guermantes, was only too fortunate to have found, who cloaked all

his irregularities, entertained like no one else in the world, and

upheld for their drawing-room its position as the premier in the

Faubourg Saint-Germain. This common opinion he himself shared; often

moved to ill-humour against her, he was proud of her. If, being as

niggardly as he was fastidious, he refused her the most trifling sums

for her charities or for the servants, yet he insisted upon her wearing

the most sumptuous clothes and driving behind the best horses in Paris.

Whenever Mme. de Guermantes had just perpetrated, with reference to the

merits and defects, which she suddenly transposed, of one of their

friends, a new and succulent paradox, she burned to make trial of it

before people capable of relishing it, to bring out its psychological

originality and to set its epigrammatic brilliance sparkling. No doubt

these new opinions embodied as a rule no more truth than the old, often

less; but this very element, arbitrary and incalculable, of novelty

which they contained conferred on them something intellectual which made

the communication of them exciting. Only the patient on whom the Duchess

was exercising her psychological skill was generally an intimate friend

as to whom those people to whom she longed to hand on her discovery were

entirely unaware that he was not still at the apex of her favour; thus

the reputation that Mme. de Guermantes had of being an incomparable

friend, sentimental, tender and devoted, made it difficult for her to

launch the attack herself; she could at the most intervene later on, as

though under constraint, by uttering a response to appease, to

contradict in appearance but actually to support a partner who had taken

it on himself to provoke her; this was precisely the part in which M. de

Guermantes excelled.

As for social activities, it was yet another form of pleasure, arbitrary

and spectacular, that Mme. de Guermantes felt in uttering, with regard

to them, those unexpected judgments which pricked with an incessant and

exquisite feeling of surprise the Princesse de Parme. But with this one

of the Duchess’s pleasures it was not so much with the help of literary

criticism as by following political life and the reports of

parliamentary debates that I tried to understand in what it might

consist. The successive and contradictory edicts by which Mme. de

Guermantes continually reversed the scale of values among the people of

her world no longer sufficing to distract her, she sought also in the

manner in which she ordered her own social behaviour, in which she

recorded her own most trivial decisions on points of fashion, to taste

those artificial emotions, to fulfil those adventitious obligations

which stimulate the perceptions of Parliaments and gain hold of the

minds of politicians. We know that when a Minister explains to the

Chamber that he believed himself to be acting rightly in following a

line of conduct which does, as a matter of fact, appear quite

straightforward to the commonsense person who next morning in his

newspaper reads the report of the sitting, this commonsense reader does

nevertheless feel himself suddenly stirred and begins to doubt whether

he has been right in approving the Minister’s conduct when he sees that

the latter’s speech was listened to with the accompaniment of a lively

agitation and punctuated with expressions of condemnation such as: “It’s

most serious!” ejaculated by a Deputy whose name and titles are so long,

and followed in the report by movements so emphatic that in the whole

interruption the words “It’s most serious!” occupy less room than a

hemistich does in an alexandrine. For instance in the days when M. de

Guermantes, Prince des Laumes, sat in the Chamber, one used to read now

and then in the Paris newspapers, albeit it was intended primarily for

the Méséglise division, to shew the electors there that they had not

given their votes to an inactive or voiceless mandatory:

(Monsieur de Guermantes-Bouillon, Prince des Laumes: “This is

serious!” “Hear, hear!” from the Centre and some of the Right benches,

loud exclamations from the Extreme Left.)

The commonsense reader still retains a gleam of faith in the sage

Minister, but his heart is convulsed with a fresh palpitation by the

first words of the speaker who rises to reply:

“The astonishment, it is not too much to say the stupor” (keen

sensation on the Right side of the House) “that I have felt at the

words of one who is still, I presume, a member of the Government”

(thunder of applause).... Several Under-Secretary of State for Posts

and Telegraphs without Deputies then crowded round the Ministerial

bench. Then rising from his seat, nodded his head in the affirmative.

This “thunder of applause” carries away the last shred of resistance in

the mind of the commonsense reader; he discovers to be an insult to the

Chamber, monstrous in fact, a course of procedure which in itself is of

no importance; it may be some normal action such as arranging that the

rich shall pay more than the poor, bringing to light some piece of

injustice, preferring peace to war; he will find it scandalous and will

see in it an offence to certain principles to which as a matter of fact

he had never given a thought, which are not engraved on the human heart,

but which move him forcibly by reason of the acclamations which they

provoke and the compact majorities which they assemble.

It must at the same time be recognised that this subtlety of the

politician which served to explain to me the Guermantes circle, and

other groups in society later on, is nothing more than the perversion of

a certain fineness of interpretation often described as “reading between

the lines”. If in representative assemblies there is absurdity owing to

perversion of this quality, there is equally stupidity, through the want

of it, in the public who take everything “literally”, who do not suspect

a dismissal when a high dignitary is relieved of his office “at his own

request”, and say: “He cannot have been dismissed, since it was he who

asked leave to retire,”—a defeat when the Russians by a strategic

movement withdraw upon a stronger position that has been prepared

beforehand, a refusal when, a Province having demanded its independence

from the German Emperor, he grants it religious autonomy. It is

possible, moreover (to return to these sittings of the Chamber), that

when they open the Deputies themselves are like the commonsense person

who will read the published report. Learning that certain workers on

strike have sent their delegates to confer with a Minister, they may ask

one another innocently: “There now, I wonder what they can have been

saying; let’s hope it’s all settled,” at the moment when the Minister

himself mounts the tribune in a solemn silence which has already brought

artificial emotions into play. The first words of the Minister: “There

is no necessity for me to inform the Chamber that I have too high a

sense of what is the duty of the Government to have received a

deputation of which the authority entrusted to me could take no

cognisance,” produce a dramatic effect, for this was the one hypothesis

which the commonsense of the Deputies had not imagined. But precisely

because of its dramatic effect it is greeted with such applause that it

is only after several minutes have passed that the Minister can succeed

in making himself heard, the Minister who will receive on returning to

his place on the bench the congratulations of his colleagues. We are as

deeply moved as on the day when the same Minister failed to invite to a

big official reception the President of the Municipal Council who was

supporting the Opposition, and declare that on this occasion as on the

other he has acted with true statesmanship.

M. de Guermantes at this period in his life had, to the great scandal of

the Courvoisiers, frequently been among the crowd of Deputies who came

forward to congratulate the Minister. I have heard it said afterwards

that even at a time when he was playing a fairly important part in the

Chamber and was being thought of in connexion with Ministerial office or

an Embassy he was, when a friend came to ask a favour of him, infinitely

more simple, behaved politically a great deal less like the important

political personage than anyone else who did not happen to be Duc de

Guermantes. For if he said that nobility made no difference, that he

regarded his fellow Deputies as equals, he did not believe it for a

moment. He sought, pretended to value but really despised political

importance, and as he remained in his own eyes M. de Guermantes it did

not envelop his person in that dead weight of high office which makes

other politicians unapproachable. And in this way his pride guarded

against every assault not only his manners which were of an ostentatious

familiarity but also such true simplicity as he might actually have.

To return to those artificial and moving decisions such as are made by

politicians, Mme. de Guermantes was no less disconcerting to the

Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in general and, more than

anyone, the Princesse de Parme by her habit of issuing unaccountable

decrees behind which one could feel to be latent principles which

impressed one all the more, the less one expected them. If the new Greek

Minister gave a fancy dress ball, everyone chose a costume and asked

everyone else what the Duchess would wear. One thought that she would

appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne, another suggested as probable the

guise of Princess of Dujabar, a third Psyche. Finally, a Courvoisier

having asked her: “What are you going to wear, Oriane?” provoked the one

response of which nobody had thought: “Why, nothing at all!” which at

once set every tongue wagging, as revealing Oriane’s opinion as to the

true social position of the new Greek Minister and the proper attitude

to adopt towards him, that is to say the opinion which ought to have

been foreseen, namely that a duchess “was not expected” to attend the

fancy dress ball given by this new Minister. “I do not see that there is

any necessity to go to the Greek Minister’s; I do not know him; I am not

a Greek; why should I go to these people’s house, I have nothing to do

with them?” said the Duchess. “But everybody will be there, they say

it’s going to be charming!” cried Mme. de Gallardon. “Still, it’s just

as charming sometimes to sit by one’s own fireside,” replied Mme. de

Guermantes. The Courvoisiers could not get over this, but the

Guermantes, without copying it, approved of their cousin’s attitude.

“Naturally, everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all

the conventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she was

actually wrong in wishing to shew that we are going rather far in

flinging ourselves at the feet of all these foreigners who appear from

heaven knows where.” Naturally, knowing the stream of comment which one

or other attitude would not fail to provoke, Mme. de Guermantes took as

much pleasure in appearing at a party to which her hostess had not dared

to count on her coming as in staying at home or spending the evening at

the play with her husband on the night of a party to which “everybody

was going”, or, again, when people imagined that she would eclipse the

finest diamonds with some historic diadem, by stealing into the room

without a single jewel, and in another style of dress than what had

been, wrongly, supposed to be essential to the occasion. Albeit she was

anti-Dreyfusard (while retaining her belief in the innocence of Dreyfus,

just as she spent her life in the social world believing only in

abstract ideas) she had created an enormous sensation at a party at the

Princesse de Ligne’s, first of all by remaining seated after all the

ladies had risen to their feet as General Mercier entered the room, and

then by getting up and in a loud voice asking for her carriage when a

Nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby shewing

that she did not consider that society was meant for talking politics;

all heads were turned towards her at a Good Friday concert at which,

although a Voltairean, she had not remained because she thought it

indecent to bring Christ upon the stage. We know how important, even for

the great queens of society, is that moment of the year at which the

round of entertainment begins: so much so that the Marquise d’Amoncourt,

who, from a need to say something, a form of mania, and also from want

of perception, was always making a fool of herself, had actually replied

to somebody who had called to condole with her on the death of her

father, M. de Montmorency: “What makes it sadder still is that it should

come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed with cards!” Very

well, at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse

de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not

already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in

society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among

the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were

stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess’s example,

derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has

in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of

determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the

world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought

before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit

from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the

employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called

“the season”. The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred

dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many

evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at

the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no

more explicable than the idea of _Twenty Thousand Leagues under the

Sea_, but conveyed to them a similar impression of independence and

charm. So that not a day passed on which somebody might not be heard to

ask, not merely: “You’ve heard Oriane’s latest joke?” but “You know

Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest” as on “Oriane’s latest joke”

would follow the comment: “How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure

Oriane?” Oriane’s latest might be, for instance, that, having to write

on behalf of a patriotic society to Cardinal X—, Bishop of Mâcon (whom

M. de Guermantes when he spoke of him invariably called “Monsieur de

Mascon,” thinking this to be “old French”), when everyone was trying to

imagine what form the letter would take, and had no difficulty as to the

opening words, the choice lying between “Eminence,” and “Monseigneur,”

but was puzzled as to the rest, Oriane’s letter, to the general

astonishment, began: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” following an old academic

form, or: “My Cousin,” this term being in use among the Princes of the

Church, the Guermantes and Crowned Heads, who prayed to God to take each

and all of them into “His fit and holy keeping”. To start people on the

topic of an “Oriane’s latest” it was sufficient that at a performance at

which all Paris was present and a most charming play was being given,

when they looked for Mme. de Guermantes in the boxes of the Princesse de

Parme, the Princesse de Guermantes, countless other ladies who had

invited her, they discovered her sitting by herself, in black, with a

tiny hat on her head, in a stall in which she had arrived before the

curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening

to,” she explained, to the scandal of the Courvoisiers and the admiring

bewilderment of the Guermantes and the Princesse de Parme, who suddenly

discovered that the “fashion” of hearing the beginning of a play was

more up to date, was a proof of greater originality and intelligence

(which need not astonish them, coming from Oriane) than that of arriving

for the last act after a big dinner-party and “going on” somewhere

first. Such were the various kinds of surprise for which the Princesse

de Parme knew that she ought to be prepared if she put a literary or

social question to Mme. de Guermantes, one result of which was that

during these dinner-parties at Oriane’s her Royal Highness never

ventured upon the slightest topic save with the uneasy and enraptured

prudence of the bather emerging from between two breakers.

Among the elements which, absent from the three or four other more or

less equivalent drawing-rooms that set the fashion for the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, differentiated from them that of the Duchesse de

Guermantes, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while reflecting the

entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one of the least

attractive was regularly furnished by one or two extremely good-looking

women who had no title to be there apart from their beauty, and the use

that M. de Guermantes had made of them, and whose presence revealed at

once, as does in other drawing-rooms that of certain otherwise

unaccountable pictures, that in this household the husband was an ardent

appreciator of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for

the Duke had a taste for large women, at once statuesque and

loose-limbed, of a type half-way between the Venus of Milo and the

Samothracian Victory; often fair, rarely dark, sometimes auburn, like

the most recent, who was at this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Arpajon whom

he had loved so well that for a long time he had obliged her to send him

as many as ten telegrams daily (which slightly annoyed the Duchess),

corresponded with her by carrier pigeon when he was at Guermantes, and

from whom moreover he had long been so incapable of tearing himself away

that, one winter which he had had to spend at Parma, he travelled back

regularly every week to Paris, spending two days in the train, in order

to see her.

As a rule these handsome “supers” had been his mistresses but were no

longer (as was Mme. d’Arpajon’s case) or were on the point of ceasing to

be so. It may well have been that the importance which the Duchess

enjoyed in their sight and the hope of being invited to her house,

though they themselves came of thoroughly aristocratic, but still not

quite first-class stock, had prompted them, even more than the good

looks and generosity of the Duke, to yield to his desires. Not that the

Duchess would have placed any insuperable obstacle in the way of their

crossing her threshold: she was aware that in more than one of them she

had found an ally, thanks to whom she had obtained a thousand things

which she wanted but which M. de Guermantes pitilessly denied his wife

so long as he was not in love with some one else. And so the reason why

they were not invited by the Duchess until their intimacy with the Duke

was already far advanced lay principally in the fact that he, every time

that he had embarked on the deep waters of love, had imagined nothing

more than a brief flirtation, as a reward for which he considered an

invitation from his wife to be more than adequate. And yet he found

himself offering this as the price of far less, for a first kiss in

fact, because a resistance upon which he had never reckoned had been

brought into play or because there had been no resistance. In love it

often happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, makes us

generous beyond the limits of what the other person’s expectation and

self-interest could have anticipated. But then the realisation of this

offer was hindered by conflicting circumstances. In the first place, all

the women who had responded to M. de Guermantes’s love, and sometimes

even when they had not yet surrendered themselves to him, he had, one

after another, segregated from the world. He no longer allowed them to

see anyone, spent almost all his time in their company, looked after the

education of their children to whom now and again, if one was to judge

by certain speaking likenesses later on, he had occasion to present a

little brother or sister. And so if, at the start of the connexion, the

prospect of an introduction to Mme. de Guermantes, which had never

crossed the mind of the Duke, had entered considerably into the thoughts

of his mistress, their connexion had by itself altered the whole of the

lady’s point of view; the Duke was no longer for her merely the husband

of the smartest woman in Paris, but a man with whom his new mistress was

in love, a man moreover who had given her the means and the inclination

for a more luxurious style of living and had transposed the relative

importance in her mind of questions of social and of material advantage;

while now and then a composite jealousy, into which all these factors

entered, of Mme. de Guermantes animated the Duke’s mistresses. But this

case was the rarest of all; besides, when the day appointed for the

introduction at length arrived (at a point when as a rule the Duke had

lost practically all interest in the matter, his actions, like

everyone’s else, being generally dictated by previous actions the prime

motive of which had already ceased to exist), it frequently happened

that it was Mme. de Guermantes who had sought the acquaintance of the

mistress in whom she hoped, and so greatly needed, to discover, against

her dread husband, a valuable ally. This is not to say that, save at

rare moments, in their own house, where, when the Duchess talked too

much, he let fall a few words or, more dreadful still, preserved a

silence which rendered her speechless, M. de Guermantes failed in his

outward relations with his wife to observe what are called the forms.

People who did not know them might easily misunderstand. Sometimes

between the racing at Deauville, the course of waters and the return to

Guermantes for the shooting, in the few weeks which people spend in

Paris, since the Duchess had a liking for café-concerts, the Duke would

go with her to spend the evening at one of these. The audience remarked

at once, in one of those little open boxes in which there is just room

for two, this Hercules in his “smoking” (for in France we give to

everything that is more or less British the one name that it happens not

to bear in England), his monocle screwed in his eye, in his plump but

finely shaped hand, on the ring-finger of which there glowed a sapphire,

a plump cigar from which now and then he drew a puff of smoke, keeping

his eyes for the most part on the stage but, when he did let them fall

upon the audience in which there was absolutely no one whom he knew,

softening them with an air of gentleness, reserve, courtesy and

consideration. When a verse struck him as amusing and not too indecent,

the Duke would turn round with a smile to his wife, letting her share,

by a twinkle of good-natured understanding, the innocent merriment which

the new song had aroused in himself. And the spectators might believe

that there was no better husband in the world than this, nor anyone more

enviable than the Duchess—that woman outside whom every interest in the

Duke’s life lay, that woman with whom he was not in love, to whom he had

been consistently unfaithful; when the Duchess felt tired, they saw M.

de Guermantes rise, put on her cloak with his own hands, arranging her

necklaces so that they did not catch in the lining, and clear a path for

her to the street with an assiduous and respectful attention which she

received with the coldness of the woman of the world who sees in such

behaviour simply conventional politeness, at times even with the

slightly ironical bitterness of the disabused spouse who has no illusion

left to shatter. But despite these externals (another element of that

politeness which has made duty evolve from the depths of our being to

the surface, at a period already remote but still continuing for its

survivors) the life of the Duchess was by no means easy. M. de

Guermantes never became generous or human save for a new mistress who

would take, as it generally happened, the Duchess’s part; the latter saw

becoming possible for her once again generosities towards inferiors,

charities to the poor, even for herself, later on, a new and sumptuous

motor-car. But from the irritation which developed as a rule pretty

rapidly in Mme. de Guermantes at people whom she found too submissive

the Duke’s mistresses were not exempt. Presently the Duchess grew tired

of them. Simultaneously, at this moment, the Duke’s intimacy with Mme.

d’Arpajon was drawing to an end. Another mistress dawned on the horizon.

No doubt the love which M. de Guermantes had had for each of them in

succession would begin one day to make itself felt afresh; in the first

place, this love in dying bequeathed them, like beautiful

marbles—marbles beautiful to the Duke, become thus in part an artist,

because he had loved them and was sensitive now to lines which he would

not have appreciated without love—which brought into juxtaposition in

the Duchess’s drawing-room their forms long inimical, devoured by

jealousies and quarrels, and finally reconciled in the peace of

friendship; besides, this friendship itself was an effect of the love

which had made M. de Guermantes observe in those who were his mistresses

virtues which exist in every human being but are perceptible only to the

sensual eye, so much so that the ex-mistress, become “the best of

comrades” who would do anything in the world for one, is as recognised a

type as the doctor or father who is not a doctor or a father but a

friend. But during a period of transition the woman whom M. de

Guermantes was preparing to abandon bewailed her lot, made scenes,

shewed herself exacting, appeared indiscreet, became a nuisance. The

Duke began to take a dislike to her. Then Mme. de Guermantes had an

opportunity to bring into prominence the real or imagined defects of a

person who annoyed her. Known as a kind woman, Mme. de Guermantes

received the telephone messages, the confidences, the tears of the

abandoned mistress and made no complaint. She laughed at them, first

with her husband then with a few chosen friends. And imagining that this

pity which she shewed for the poor wretch gave her the right to make fun

of her, even to her face, whatever the lady might say, provided it could

be included among the attributes of the character for absurdity which

the Duke and Duchess had recently fabricated for her, Mme. de Guermantes

had no hesitation in exchanging with her husband a glance of ironical

connivance.

Meanwhile, as she sat down to table, the Princesse de Parme remembered

that she had thought of inviting a certain other Princess to the Opera,

and, wishing to be assured that this would not in any way offend Mme. de

Guermantes, was preparing to sound her. At this moment there entered M.

de Grouchy, whose train, owing to some block on the line, had been held

up for an hour. He made what excuses he could. His wife, had she been a

Courvoisier, would have died of shame. But Mme. de Grouchy was not a

Guermantes for nothing. As her husband was apologising for being late:

“I see,” she broke in, “that even in little things arriving late is a

tradition in your family.”

“Sit down, Grouchy, and don’t let them pull your leg,” said the Duke.

“I hope I move with the times, still I must admit that the Battle of

Waterloo had its points, since it brought about the Restoration of the

Bourbons, and better still in a way which made them unpopular. But you

seem to be a regular Nimrod!”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I have had quite a good bag. I shall take

the liberty of sending the Duchess six brace of pheasants to-morrow.”

An idea seemed to flicker in the eyes of Mme. de Guermantes. She

insisted that M. de Grouchy must not give himself the trouble of sending

the pheasants. And making a sign to the betrothed footman with whom I

had exchanged a few words on my way from the Elstir room:

“Poullein,” she told him, “you will go to-morrow and fetch M. le Comte’s

pheasants and bring them straight back—you won’t mind, will you,

Grouchy, if I make a few little presents. Basin and I can’t eat a whole

dozen by ourselves.”

“But the day after to-morrow will be soon enough,” said M. de Grouchy.

“No, to-morrow suits me better,” the Duchess insisted.

Poullein had turned pale; his appointment with his sweetheart would have

to be missed. This was quite enough for the diversion of the Duchess,

who liked to appear to be taking a human interest in everyone. “I know

it’s your day out,” she went on to Poullein, “all you’ve got to do is to

change with Georges; he can take to-morrow off and stay in the day

after.”

But the day after, Poullein’s sweetheart would not be free. A holiday

then was of no account to him. As soon as he was out of the room,

everyone complimented the Duchess on the interest she took in her

servants. “But I only behave towards them as I like people to behave to

me.” “That’s just it. They can say they’ve found a good place with you.”

“Oh, nothing so very wonderful. But I think they all like me. That one

is a little annoying because he’s in love. He thinks it incumbent on him

to go about with a long face.”

At this point Poullein reappeared. “You’re quite right,” said M. de

Grouchy, “he doesn’t look much like smiling. With those fellows one has

to be good but not too good.” “I admit I’m not a very dreadful mistress.

He’ll have nothing to do all day but call for your pheasants, sit in the

house doing nothing and eat his share of them.” “There are plenty of

people who would be glad to be in his place,” said M. de Grouchy, for

envy makes men blind.

“Oriane,” began the Princesse de Parme, “I had a visit the other day

from your cousin Heudicourt; of course she’s a highly intelligent woman;

she’s a Guermantes, one can say no more, but they tell me she has a

spiteful tongue.” The Duke fastened on his wife a slow gaze of

deliberate stupefaction. Mme. de Guermantes began to smile. Gradually

the Princess became aware of their pantomime. “But ... do you mean to

say ... you don’t agree with me?” she stammered with growing uneasiness.

“Really, Ma’am, it’s too good of you to pay any attention to Basin’s

faces. Now, Basin, you’re not to hint nasty things about our cousins.”

“He thinks her too wicked?” inquired the Princess briskly. “Oh, dear me,

no!” replied the Duchess. “I don’t know who told your Highness that she

was spiteful. On the contrary, she’s an excellent creature who never

said any harm of anyone, or did any harm to any one.” “Ah!” sighed Mme.

de Parme, greatly relieved. “I must say I never noticed anything myself.

But I know it’s often difficult not to be a little spiteful when one is

so full of wit....” “Ah! Now that is a quality of which she has even

less.” “Less wit?” asked the stupefied Princess. “Come now, Oriane,”

broke in the Duke in a plaintive tone, casting to right and left of him

a glance of amusement, “you heard the Princess tell you that she was a

superior woman.” “But isn’t she?” “Superior in chest measurement, at any

rate.” “Don’t listen to him, Ma’am, he’s not sincere; she’s as stupid as

a (h’m) goose,” came in a loud and rasping voice from Mme. de

Guermantes, who, a great deal more “old French” even than the Duke when

he was not trying, did often deliberately seek to be, but in a manner

the opposite of the lace-neckcloth, deliquescent style of her husband

and in reality far more subtle, by a sort of almost peasant

pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil. “But

she’s the best woman in the world. Besides, I don’t really know that one

can call it stupidity when it’s carried to such a point as that. I don’t

believe I ever met anyone quite like her; she’s a case for a specialist,

there’s something pathological about her, she’s a sort of ‘innocent’ or

‘cretin’ or an ‘arrested development’, like the people you see in

melodramas, or in _L’Arlésienne_. I always ask myself, when she comes to

see me, whether the moment may not have arrived at which her

intelligence is going to dawn, which makes me a little nervous always.”

The Princess was lost in admiration of these utterances but remained

stupefied by the preceding verdict. “She repeated to me—and so did Mme.

d’Epinay—what you said about ‘Teaser Augustus.’ It’s delicious,” she put

in.

M. de Guermantes explained the joke to me. I wanted to tell him that his

brother, who pretended not to know me, was expecting me that same

evening at eleven o’clock. But I had not asked Robert whether I might

mention this engagement, and as the fact that M. de Charlus had

practically fixed it with me himself directly contradicted what he had

told the Duchess I judged it more tactful to say nothing. “‘Teaser

Augustus’ was not bad,” said M. de Guermantes, “but Mme. d’Heudicourt

probably did not tell you a far better thing that Oriane said to her the

other day in reply to an invitation to luncheon.” “No, indeed! Do tell

me!” “Now Basin, you keep quiet; in the first place, it was a stupid

remark, and it will make the Princess think me inferior even to my fool

of a cousin. Though I don’t know why I should call her my cousin. She’s

one of Basin’s cousins. Still, I believe she is related to me in some

sort of way.” “Oh!” cried the Princesse de Parme, at the idea that she

could possibly think Mme. de Guermantes stupid, and protesting

helplessly that nothing could ever lower the Duchess from the place she

held in her estimation. “Besides we have already subtracted from her the

quality of wit; as what I said to her tends to deny her certain other

good qualities also, it seems to me inopportune to repeat it.” “‘Deny

her!’ ‘Inopportune!’ How well she expresses herself!” said the Duke with

a pretence of irony, to win admiration for the Duchess. “Now, then,

Basin, you’re not to make fun of your wife.” “I should explain to your

Royal Highness,” went on the Duke, “that Oriane’s cousin may be

superior, good, stout, anything you like to mention, but she is not

exactly—what shall I say—lavish.” “No, I know, she’s terribly

close-fisted,” broke in the Princess. “I should not have ventured to use

the expression, but you have hit on exactly the right word. You can see

it in her house-keeping, and especially in the cooking, which is

excellent, but strictly rationed.” “Which leads to some quite amusing

scenes,” M. de Bréauté interrupted him. “For instance, my dear Basin, I

was down at Heudicourt one day when you were expected, Oriane and

yourself. They had made the most elaborate preparations when, during the

afternoon, a footman brought in a telegram to say that you weren’t

coming.” “That doesn’t surprise me!” said the Duchess, who not only was

difficult to secure, but liked people to know as much. “Your cousin read

the telegram, was duly distressed, then immediately, without losing her

head, telling herself that there was no point in going to unnecessary

expense for so unimportant a gentleman as myself, called the footman

back. ‘Tell the cook not to put on the chicken!’ she shouted after him.

And that evening I heard her asking the butler: ‘Well? What about the

beef that was left over yesterday? Aren’t you going to let us have

that?’” “All the same, one must admit that the cheer you get there is of

the very best,” said the Duke, who fancied that in using this language

he shewed himself to belong to the old school. “I don’t know any house

where one gets better food.” “Or less,” put in the Duchess. “It is quite

wholesome and quite enough for what you would call a vulgar yokel like

myself,” went on the Duke, “one keeps one’s appetite.” “Oh, if it’s to

be taken as a cure, it’s certainly more hygienic than sumptuous. Not

that it’s as good as all that,” added Mme. de Guermantes, who was not at

all pleased that the title of “best table in Paris” should be awarded to

any but her own. “With my cousin it’s just the same as with those

costive authors who hatch out every fifteen years a one-act play or a

sonnet. The sort of thing people call a little masterpiece, trifles that

are perfect gems, in fact the one thing I loathe most in the world. The

cooking at Zénaïde’s is not bad, but you would think it more ordinary if

she was less parsimonious. There are some things her cook does quite

well, and others that he spoils. I have had some thoroughly bad dinners

there, as in most houses, only they’ve done me less harm there because

the stomach is, after all, more sensitive to quantity than to quality.”

“Well, to get on with the story,” the Duke concluded, “Zénaïde insisted

that Oriane should go to luncheon there, and as my wife is not very fond

of going out anywhere she resisted, wanted to be sure that under the

pretence of a quiet meal she was not being trapped into some great

banquet, and tried in vain to find out who else were to be of the party.

‘You must come,’ Zénaïde insisted, boasting of all the good things there

would be to eat. ‘You are going to have a _purée_ of chestnuts, I need

say no more than that, and there will be seven little _bouchées à la

reine_.’ ‘Seven little _bouchées_!’ cried Oriane, ‘that means that we

shall be at least eight!’” There was silence for a few seconds, and then

the Princess having seen the point let her laughter explode like a peal

of thunder. “Ah! ‘Then we shall be eight,’—it’s exquisite. How very well

phrased!” she said, having by a supreme effort recaptured the expression

she had heard used by Mme. d’Epinay, which this time was more

appropriate. “Oriane, that was very charming of the Princess, she said

your remark was well phrased.” “But, my dear, you’re telling me nothing

new. I know how clever the Princess is,” replied Mme. de Guermantes, who

readily assimilated a remark when it was uttered at once by a Royal

Personage and in praise of her own wit. “I am very proud that Ma’am

should appreciate my humble phrasings. I don’t remember, though, that I

ever did say such a thing, and if I did it must have been to flatter my

cousin, for if she had ordered seven ‘mouthfuls’, the mouths, if I may

so express myself, would have been a round dozen if not more.”

“She used to have all M. de Bornier’s manuscripts,” went on the

Princess, still speaking of Mme. d’Heudicourt, and anxious to make the

most of the excellent reasons she might have for associating with that

lady. “She must have dreamed it, I don’t believe she ever even knew

him,” said the Duchess. “What is really interesting about him is that he

kept up a correspondence with people of different nationalities at the

same time,” put in the Vicomtesse d’Arpajon who, allied to the principal

ducal and even reigning families of Europe, was always glad that people

should be reminded of the fact. “Surely, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes,

with ulterior purpose, “you can’t have forgotten that dinner-party where

you had M. de Bornier sitting next to you!” “But, Basin,” the Duchess

interrupted him, “if you mean to inform me that I knew M. de Bornier,

why of course I did, he even called upon me several times, but I could

never bring myself to invite him to the house because I should always

have been obliged to have it disinfected afterwards with formol. As for

the dinner you mean, I remember it only too well, but it was certainly

not at Zénaïde’s, who never set eyes on Bornier in her life, and would

probably think if you spoke to her of the _Fille de Roland_ that you

meant a Bonaparte Princess who was said at one time to be engaged to the

son of the King of Greece; no, it was at the Austrian Embassy. Dear

Hoyos imagined he was giving me a great treat by planting on the chair

next to mine that pestiferous academician. I quite thought I had a

squadron of mounted police sitting beside me. I was obliged to stop my

nose as best I could, all through dinner; until the gruyère came round I

didn’t dare to breathe.” M. de Guermantes, whose secret object was

attained, made a furtive examination of his guests’ faces to judge the

effect of the Duchess’s pleasantry. “You were speaking of

correspondence; I must say, I thought Gambetta’s admirable,” she went

on, to shew that she was not afraid to be found taking an interest in a

proletarian and a radical. M. de Bréauté, who fully appreciated the

brilliance of this feat of daring, gazed round him with an eye at once

flashing and affectionate, after which he wiped his monocle.

“Gad, it’s infernally dull that _Fille de Roland_,” said M. de

Guermantes, with the satisfaction which he derived from the sense of his

own superiority to a work which had bored him so, perhaps also from the

_suave mari magno_ feeling one has in the middle of a good dinner, when

one recalls so terrible an evening in the past. “Still, there were some

quite good lines in it, and a patriotic sentiment.”

I let it be understood that I had no admiration for M. de Bornier.

“Indeed! You have some fault to find with him?” the Duke asked with a

note of curiosity, for he always imagined when anyone spoke ill of a man

that it must be on account of a personal resentment, just as to speak

well of a woman marked the beginning of a love-affair. “I see you’ve got

your knife into him. What did he do to you? You must tell us. Why yes,

there must be some skeleton in the cupboard or you wouldn’t run him

down. It’s long-winded, the _Fille de Roland_, but it’s quite strong in

parts.” “Strong is just the right word for an author who smelt like

that,” Mme. de Guermantes broke in sarcastically. “If this poor boy ever

found himself face to face with him, I can quite understand that he

carried away an impression in his nostrils!” “I must confess, though, to

Ma’am,” the Duke went on, addressing the Princesse de Parme, “that quite

apart from the _Fille de Roland_, in literature and even in music I am

terribly old-fashioned; no old nightingale can be too stale for my

taste. You won’t believe me, perhaps, but in the evenings, if my wife

sits down to the piano, I find myself calling for some old tune by Auber

or Boïeldieu, or even Beethoven! That’s the sort of thing that appeals

to me. As for Wagner, he sends me to sleep at once.” “You are wrong

there,” said Mme. de Guermantes, “in spite of his insufferable

long-windedness, Wagner was a genius. _Lohengrin_ is a masterpiece. Even

in _Tristan_ there are some amusing passages scattered about. And the

Chorus of Spinners in the _Flying Dutchman_ is a perfect marvel.” “A’n’t

I right, Babal,” said M. de Guermantes, turning to M. de Bréauté, “what

we like is:

Les rendez-vous de noble compagnie

Se donnent tous en ce charmant séjour.

It’s delicious. And _Fra Diavolo_, and the _Magic Flute_, and the

_Chalet_, and the _Marriage of Figaro_, and the _Diamants de la

Couronne_—there’s music for you! It’s the same thing in literature. For

instance, I adore Balzac, the _Bal de Sceaux_, the _Mohicans de Paris_.”

“Oh, my dear, if you are going to begin about Balzac, we shall never

hear the end of it; do wait, keep it for some evening when Mémé’s here.

He’s even better, he knows it all by heart.” Irritated by his wife’s

interruption, the Duke held her for some seconds under the fire of a

menacing silence. And his huntsman’s eyes reminded me of a brace of

loaded pistols. Meanwhile Mme. d’Arpajon had been exchanging with the

Princesse de Parme, upon tragic and other kinds of poetry, a series of

remarks which did not reach me distinctly until I caught the following

from Mme. d’Arpajon: “Oh, Ma’am is sure to be right; I quite admit he

makes the world seem ugly, because he’s unable to distinguish between

ugliness and beauty, or rather because his insufferable vanity makes him

believe that everything he says is beautiful; I agree with your Highness

that in the piece we are speaking of there are some ridiculous things,

quite unintelligible, errors of taste, that it is difficult to

understand, that it’s as much trouble to read as if it was written in

Russian or Chinese, for of course it’s anything in the world but French,

still when one has taken the trouble, how richly one is rewarded, it’s

so full of imagination!” Of this little lecture I had missed the opening

sentences. I gathered in the end not only that the poet incapable of

distinguishing between beauty and ugliness was Victor Hugo, but

furthermore that the poem which was as difficult to understand as

Chinese or Russian was

Lorsque l’enfant paraît, le cercle de famille

Applaudit à grands cris.

a piece dating from the poet’s earliest period, and perhaps even nearer

to Mme. Deshoulières than to the Victor Hugo of the _Légende des

Siècles_. Far from condemning Mme. d’Arpajon as absurd, I saw her (the

only one, at that table so matter-of-fact, so nondescript, at which I

had sat down with such keen disappointment), I saw her in my mind’s eye

crowned with that lace cap, with the long spiral ringlets falling from

it on either side, which was worn by Mme. de Rémusat, Mme. de Broglie,

Mme. de Saint-Aulaire, all those distinguished women who in their

fascinating letters quote with so much learning and so aptly passages

from Sophocles, Schiller and the _Imitation_, but in whom the earliest

poetry of the Romantics induced the alarm and exhaustion inseparable for

my grandmother from the latest verses of Stéphane Mallarmé. “Mme.

d’Arpajon is very fond of poetry,” said the Princesse de Parme to her

hostess, impressed by the ardent tone in which the speech had been

delivered. “No; she knows absolutely nothing about it,” replied Mme. de

Guermantes in an undertone, taking advantage of the fact that Mme.

d’Arpajon, who was dealing with an objection raised by General de

Beautreillis, was too much intent upon what she herself was saying to

hear what was being murmured by the Duchess. “She has become literary

since she’s been forsaken. I can tell your Highness that it is I who

have to bear the whole burden of it because it is to me that she comes

in floods of tears whenever Basin hasn’t been to see her, which is

practically every day. And yet it isn’t my fault, after all, if she

bores him, and I can’t force him to go to her, although I would rather

he were a little more faithful to her, because then I shouldn’t see

quite so much of her myself. But she drives him crazy, and there’s

nothing extraordinary in that. She isn’t a bad sort, but she’s boring to

a degree you can’t imagine. And all this because Basin took it into his

head for a year or so to play me false with her. And to have in addition

a footman who has fallen in love with a little street-walker and goes

about with a long face if I don’t request the young person to leave her

profitable pavement for half an hour and come to tea with me! Oh! Life

really is too tedious!” the Duchess languorously concluded. Mme.

d’Arpajon bored M. de Guermantes principally because he had recently

fallen in love with another, whom I discovered to be the Marquise de

Surgis-le-Duc. At this moment the footman who had been deprived of his

holiday was waiting at table. And it struck me that, still disconsolate,

he was doing it with a good deal of difficulty, for I noticed that, in

handing the dish to M. de Châtellerault, he performed his task so

awkwardly that the Duke’s elbow came in contact several times with his

own. The young Duke was not in the least annoyed with the blushing

footman, but looked up at him rather with a smile in his clear blue

eyes. This good humour seemed to me on the guest’s part to betoken a

kindness of heart. But the persistence of his smile led me to think

that, aware of the servant’s discomfiture, what he felt was perhaps

really a malicious joy. “But, my dear, you know you’re not revealing any

new discovery when you tell us about Victor Hugo,” went on the Duchess,

this time addressing Mme. d’Arpajon whom she had just seen turn away

from the General with a troubled air. “You mustn’t expect to launch that

young genius. Everybody knows that he has talent. What is utterly

detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the _Légende des

Siècles_, I forget all their names. But in the _Feuilles d’Automne_, the

_Chants du Crépuscule_, there’s a great deal that’s the work of a poet,

a true poet! Even in the _Contemplations_”, went on the Duchess, whom

none of her listeners dared to contradict, and with good reason, “there

are still some quite pretty things. But I confess that I prefer not to

venture farther than the _Crépuscule_! And then in the finer poems of

Victor Hugo, and there really are some, one frequently comes across an

idea, even a profound idea.” And with the right shade of sentiment,

bringing out the sorrowful thought with the full strength of her

intonation, planting it somewhere beyond the sound of her voice, and

fixing straight in front of her a charming, dreamy gaze, the Duchess

said slowly: “Take this:

La douleur est un fruit, Dieu ne le fait pas croître

Sur la branche trop faible encor pour le porter.

or, better still:

Les morts durent bien peu.

Hélas, dans le cercueil ils tombent en poussière

Moins vite qu’en nos cœurs!”

And, while a smile of disillusionment contracted with a graceful

undulation her sorrowing lips, the Duchess fastened on Mme. d’Arpajon

the dreaming gaze of her charming, clear blue eyes. I was beginning to

know them, as well as her voice, with its heavy drawl, its harsh savour.

In those eyes and in that voice, I recognised much of the life of nature

round Combray. Certainly, in the affectation with which that voice

brought into prominence at times a rudeness of the soil there was more

than one element: the wholly provincial origin of one branch of the

Guermantes family, which had for long remained more localised, more

hardy, wilder, more provoking than the rest; and also the usage of

really distinguished people, and of witty people who know that

distinction does not consist in mincing speech, and the usage of nobles

who fraternise more readily with their peasants than with the middle

classes; peculiarities all of which the regal position of Mme. de

Guermantes enabled her to display more easily, to bring out with every

sail spread. It appears that the same voice existed also in certain of

her sisters whom she detested, and who, less intelligent than herself

and almost plebeianly married, if one may coin this adverb to speak of

unions with obscure noblemen, entrenched on their provincial estates,

or, in Paris, in a Faubourg Saint-Germain of no brilliance, possessed

this voice also but had bridled it, corrected it, softened it so far as

lay in their power, just as it is very rarely that any of us presumes on

his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to copying the

most approved models. But Oriane was so much more intelligent, so much

richer, above all, so much more in fashion than her sisters, she had so

effectively, when Princesse des Laumes, behaved just as she pleased in

the company of the Prince of Wales, that she had realised that this

discordant voice was an attraction, and had made of it, in the social

order, with the courage of originality rewarded by success, what in the

theatrical order a Réjane, a Jeanne Granier (which implies no

comparison, naturally, between the respective merits and talents of

those two actresses) had made of theirs, something admirable and

distinctive which possibly certain Réjane and Granier sisters, whom no

one has ever known, strove to conceal as a defect.

To all these reasons for displaying her local originality, the favourite

writers of Mme. de Guermantes—Mérimée, Meilhac and Halévy—had brought in

addition, with the respect for what was natural, a feeling for the

prosaic by which she attained to poetry and a spirit purely of society

which called up distant landscapes before my eyes. Besides, the Duchess

was fully capable, adding to these influences an artistic research of

her own, of having chosen for the majority of her words the

pronunciation that seemed to her most “Ile-de-France”, most

“Champenoise”, since, if not quite to the same extent as her

sister-in-law Marsantes, she rarely used anything but the pure

vocabulary that might have been employed by an old French writer. And

when one was tired of the composite patchwork of modern speech, it was,

albeit one was aware that she expressed far fewer ideas, a thorough

relaxation to listen to the talk of Mme. de Guermantes—almost the same

feeling, if one was alone with her and she restrained and clarified

still further her flow of words, as one has on hearing an old song.

Then, as I looked at, as I listened to Mme. de Guermantes, I could see,

a prisoner in the perpetual and quiet afternoon of her eyes, a sky of

the Ile-de-France or of Champagne spread itself, grey-blue, oblique,

with the same angle of inclination as in the eyes of Saint-Loup.

Thus, by these several formations, Mme. de Guermantes expressed at once

the most ancient aristocratic France, then, from a far later source, the

manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie might have enjoyed and found

fault with Victor Hugo under the July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen

taste for the literature that sprang from Mérimée and Meilhac. The first

of these formations attracted me more than the second, did more to

console me for the disappointments of my pilgrimage to and arrival in

the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so different from what I had imagined it to

be; but even the second I preferred to the last. For, so long as Mme. de

Guermantes was being, almost spontaneously, a Guermantes and nothing

more; her Pailleronism, her taste for the younger Dumas were reflected

and deliberate. As this taste was the opposite of my own, she was

productive, to my mind, of literature when she talked to me of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain, and never seemed to me so stupidly Faubourg

Saint-Germain as when she was talking literature.

Moved by this last quotation, Mme. d’Arpajon exclaimed: “‘Ces reliques

du cœur ont aussi leur poussière!’—Sir, you must write that down for me

on my fan,” she said to M. de Guermantes. “Poor woman, I feel sorry for

her!” said the Princesse de Parme to Mme. de Guermantes. “No, really,

Ma’am, you must not be soft-hearted, she has only got what she

deserves.” “But—you’ll forgive me for saying this to you—she does really

love him all the same!” “Oh, not at all; she isn’t capable of it; she

thinks she loves him just as she thought just now she was quoting Victor

Hugo, when she repeated a line from Musset. Listen,” the Duchess went on

in a tone of melancholy, “nobody would be more touched than myself by

any true sentiment. But let me give you an instance. Only yesterday, she

made a terrible scene with Basin. Your Highness thinks perhaps that it

was because he’s in love with other women, because he no longer loves

her; not in the least, it was because he won’t put her sons down for the

Jockey. Does Ma’am call that the behaviour of a woman in love? No; I

will go farther;” Mme. de Guermantes added with precision, “she is a

person of singular insensibility.” Meanwhile it was with an eye

sparkling with satisfaction that M. de Guermantes had listened to his

wife talking about Victor Hugo “point-blank” and quoting his poetry. The

Duchess might frequently annoy him; at moments like this he was proud of

her. “Oriane is really extraordinary. She can talk about anything, she

has read everything. She could not possibly have guessed that the

conversation this evening would turn on Victor Hugo. Whatever subject

you take up, she is ready for you, she can hold her own with the most

learned scholars. This young man must be quite captivated.”

“Do let us change the conversation,” Mme. de Guermantes went on,

“because she’s dreadfully susceptible. You will think me quite

old-fashioned;” she began, turning to me, “I know that nowadays it’s

considered a weakness to care for ideas in poetry, poetry with some

thought in it.” “Old-fashioned?” asked the Princesse de Parme, quivering

with the slight thrill sent through her by this new wave which she had

not expected, albeit she knew that the conversation of the Duchesse de

Guermantes always held in store for her these continuous and delightful

shocks, that breath-catching panic, that wholesome exhaustion after

which her thoughts instinctively turned to the necessity of taking a

footbath in a dressing cabin and a brisk walk to “restore her

circulation”.

“For my part, no, Oriane,” said Mme. de Brissac, “I don’t in the least

object to Victor Hugo’s having ideas, quite the contrary, but I do

object to his seeking for them in sheer monstrosities. After all, it was

he who accustomed us to ugliness in literature. There are quite enough

ugly things already in real life. Why can’t we be allowed at least to

forget it while we are reading. A distressing spectacle, from which we

should turn away in real life, that is what attracts Victor Hugo.”