“Victor Hugo is not as realistic as Zola though, surely?” asked the

Princesse de Parme. The name of Zola did not stir a muscle on the face

of M. de Beautreillis. The General’s anti-Dreyfusism was too deep-rooted

for him to seek to give expression to it. And his good-natured silence

when anyone broached these topics moved the profane heart as a proof of

the same delicacy that a priest shews in avoiding any reference to your

religious duties, a financier when he takes care not to recommend your

investing in the companies which he himself controls, a strong man when

he behaves with lamblike gentleness and does not hit you in the jaw. “I

know you’re related to Admiral Jurien de la Gravière,” was murmured to

me with an air of connivance by Mme. de Varambon, the lady in waiting to

the Princesse de Parme, an excellent but limited woman, procured for the

Princess in the past by the Duke’s mother. She had not previously

uttered a word to me, and I could never afterwards, despite the

admonitions of the Princess and my own protestations, get out of her

mind the idea that I was in some way connected with the Academician

Admiral, who was a complete stranger to me. The obstinate persistence of

the Princesse de Parme’s lady in waiting in seeing in me a nephew of

Admiral Jurien de la Gravière was in itself quite an ordinary form of

silliness. But the mistake she made was only a crowning instance of all

the other mistakes, less serious, more elaborate, unconscious or

deliberate, which accompany one’s name on the label which society writes

out and attaches to one. I remember that a friend of the Guermantes who

had expressed a keen desire to meet me gave me as the reason that I was

a great friend of his cousin, Mme. de Chaussegros. “She is a charming

person, she’s so fond of you.” I scrupulously, though quite vainly,

insisted on the fact that there must be some mistake, as I did not know

Mme. de Chaussegros. “Then it’s her sister you know; it comes to the

same thing. She met you in Scotland.” I had never been in Scotland, and

took the futile precaution, in my honesty, of letting my informant know

this. It was Mme. de Chaussegros herself who had said that she knew me,

and no doubt sincerely believed it, as a result of some initial

confusion, for from that time onwards she never failed to hold out her

hand to me whenever she saw me. And as, after all, the world in which I

moved was precisely that in which Mme. de Chaussegros moved my modesty

had neither rhyme nor reason. To say that I was intimate with the

Chaussegros was, literally, a mistake, but from the social point of view

was to state an equivalent of my position, if one can speak of the

social position of so young a man as I then was. It therefore mattered

not in the least that this friend of the Guermantes should tell me only

things that were false about myself, he neither lowered nor exalted me

(from the worldly point of view) in the idea which he continued to hold

of me. And when all is said, for those of us who are not professional

actors the tedium of living always in the same character is removed for

a moment, as if we were to go on the boards, when another person forms a

false idea of us, imagines that we are friends with a lady whom we do

not know and are reported to have met in the course of a delightful tour

of a foreign country which we have never made. Errors that multiply

themselves and are harmless when they have not the inflexible rigidity

of this one which had been committed, and continued for the rest of her

life to be committed, in spite of my denials, by the imbecile lady in

waiting to Mme. de Parme, rooted for all time in the belief that I was

related to the tiresome Admiral Jurien de la Gravière. “She is not very

strong in her head,” the Duke confided to me, “and besides, she ought

not to indulge in too many libations. I fancy, she’s slightly under the

influence of Bacchus.” As a matter of fact Mme. de Varambon had drunk

nothing but water, but the Duke liked to find scope for his favourite

figures of speech. “But Zola is not a realist, Ma’am, he’s a poet!” said

Mme. de Guermantes, drawing inspiration from the critical essays which

she had read in recent years and adapting them to her own personal

genius. Agreeably buffeted hitherto, in the course of this bath of wit,

a bath stirred for herself, which she was taking this evening and which,

she considered, must be particularly good for her health, letting

herself be swept away by the waves of paradox which curled and broke one

after another, before this, the most enormous of them all, the Princesse

de Parme jumped for fear of being knocked over. And it was in a choking

voice, as though she were quite out of breath, that she now gasped:

“Zola a poet!” “Why, yes,” answered the Duchess with a laugh, entranced

by this display of suffocation. “Your Highness must have remarked how he

magnifies everything he touches. You will tell me that he touches just

what—perish the thought! But he makes it into something colossal. His is

the epic dungheap. He is the Homer of the sewers! He has not enough

capitals to print Cambronne’s word.” Despite the extreme exhaustion

which she was beginning to feel, the Princess was enchanted; never had

she felt better. She would not have exchanged for an invitation to

Schönbrunn, albeit that was the one thing that really flattered her,

these divine dinner-parties at Mme. de Guermantes’s, made invigorating

by so liberal a dose of attic salt. “He writes it with a big ‘C’,” cried

Mme. d’Arpajon. “Surely with a big ‘M’, I think, my dear,” replied Mme.

de Guermantes, exchanging first with her husband a merry glance which

implied: “Did you ever hear such an idiot?” “Wait a minute, now,” Mme.

de Guermantes turned to me, fixing on me a tender, smiling gaze,

because, as an accomplished hostess, she was anxious to display her own

knowledge of the artist who interested me specially, to give me, if I

required it, an opportunity for exhibiting mine. “Wait,” she urged me,

gently waving her feather fan, so conscious was she at this moment that

she was performing in full the duties of hospitality, and, that she

might be found wanting in none of them, making a sign also to the

servants to help me to more of the asparagus and _mousseline_ sauce:

“wait, now, I do believe that Zola has actually written an essay on

Elstir, the painter whose things you were looking at just now—the only

ones of his, really, that I care for,” she concluded. As a matter of

fact she hated Elstir’s work, but found a unique quality in anything

that was in her own house. I asked M. de Guermantes if he knew the name

of the gentleman in the tall hat who figured in the picture of the crowd

and whom I recognised as the same person whose portrait the Guermantes

also had and had hung beside the other, both dating more or less from

the same early period in which Elstir’s personality was not yet

completely established and he derived a certain inspiration from Manet.

“Good Lord, yes,” he replied, “I know it’s a fellow who is quite

well-known and no fool either, in his own line, but I have no head for

names. I have it on the tip of my tongue, Monsieur ... Monsieur ... oh,

well, it doesn’t matter, I can’t remember it. Swann would be able to

tell you, it was he who made Mme. de Guermantes buy all that stuff; she

is always too good-natured, afraid of hurting people’s feelings if she

refuses to do things; between ourselves, I believe he’s landed us with a

lot of rubbish. What I can tell you is that the gentleman you mean has

been a sort of Maecenas to M. Elstir, he started him and has often

helped him out of tight places by ordering pictures from him. As a

compliment to this man—if you can call that sort of thing a

compliment—he has painted him standing about among that crowd, where

with his Sunday-go-to-meeting look he creates a distinctly odd effect.

He may be a big gun in his own way but he is evidently not aware of the

proper time and place for a top hat. With that thing on his head, among

all those bare-headed girls, he looks like a little country lawyer on

the razzle-dazzle. But tell me, you seem quite gone on his pictures. If

I had only known, I should have got up the subject properly. Not that

there’s any need to rack one’s brains over the meaning of M. Elstir’s

work, as one would for Ingres’s _Source_ or the _Princes in the Tower_

by Paul Delaroche. What one appreciates in his work is that it’s

shrewdly observed, amusing, Parisian, and then one passes on to the next

thing. One doesn’t need to be an expert to look at that sort of thing. I

know of course that they’re merely sketches, still, I don’t feel myself

that he puts enough work into them. Swann was determined that we should

buy a _Bundle of Asparagus_. In fact it was in the house for several

days. There was nothing else in the picture, a bundle of asparagus

exactly like what you’re eating now. But I must say I declined to

swallow M. Elstir’s asparagus. He asked three hundred francs for them.

Three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus. A louis, that’s as much

as they’re worth, even if they are out of season. I thought it a bit

stiff. When he puts real people into his pictures as well, there’s

something rather caddish, something detrimental about him which does not

appeal to me. I am surprised to see a delicate mind, a superior brain

like yours admire that sort of thing.” “I don’t know why you should say

that, Basin,” interrupted the Duchess, who did not like to hear people

run down anything that her rooms contained. “I am by no means prepared

to admit that there’s nothing distinguished in Elstir’s pictures. You

have to take it or leave it. But it’s not always lacking in talent. And

you must admit that the ones I bought are singularly beautiful.” “Well,

Oriane, in that style of thing I’ld a thousand times rather have the

little study by M. Vibert we saw at the water-colour exhibition. There’s

nothing much in it, if you like, you could take it in the palm of your

hand, but you can see the man’s clever through and through: that

unwashed scarecrow of a missionary standing before the sleek prelate who

is making his little dog do tricks, it’s a perfect little poem of

subtlety, and in fact goes really deep.” “I believe you know M. Elstir,”

the Duchess went on to me, “as a man, he’s quite pleasant.” “He is

intelligent,” said the Duke; “one is surprised, when one talks to him,

that his painting should be so vulgar.” “He is more than intelligent, he

is really quite clever,” said the Duchess in the confidently critical

tone of a person who knew what she was talking about. “Didn’t he once

start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Princesse de Parme. “Yes, in

shrimp pink,” replied Mme. de Guermantes, “but that’s not going to hand

his name down to posterity. It’s a ghastly thing; Basin wanted to have

it destroyed.” This last statement was one which Mme. de Guermantes

often made. But at other times her appreciation of the picture was

different: “I do not care for his painting, but he did once do a good

portrait of me.” The former of these judgments was addressed as a rule

to people who spoke to the Duchess of her portrait, the other to those

who did not refer to it and whom therefore she was anxious to inform of

its existence. The former was inspired in her by coquetry, the latter by

vanity. “Make a portrait of you look ghastly. Why, then it can’t be a

portrait, it’s a falsehood; I don’t know one end of a brush from the

other, but I’m sure if I were to paint you, merely putting you down as I

see you, I should produce a masterpiece,” said the Princesse de Parme

ingenuously. “He sees me probably as I see myself, without any

allurements,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, with the look,

melancholy, modest and coaxing, which seemed to her best calculated to

make her appear different from what Elstir had portrayed. “That portrait

ought to appeal to Mme. de Gallardon,” said the Duke. “Because she knows

nothing about pictures?” asked the Princesse de Parme, who knew that

Mme. de Guermantes had an infinite contempt for her cousin. “But she’s a

very good woman, isn’t she?” The Duke assumed an air of profound

astonishment. “Why, Basin, don’t you see the Princess is making fun of

you?” (The Princess had never dreamed of doing such a thing.) “She knows

as well as you do that Gallardonette is an old _poison_,” went on Mme.

de Guermantes, whose vocabulary, limited as a rule to all these old

expressions, was as savoury as those dishes which it is possible to come

across in the delicious books of Pampille, but which have in real life

become so rare, dishes where the jellies, the butter, the gravy, the

quails are all genuine, permit of no alloy, where even the salt is

brought specially from the salt-marshes of Brittany; from her accent,

her choice of words, one felt that the basis of the Duchess’s

conversation came directly from Guermantes. In this way the Duchess

differed profoundly from her nephew Saint-Loup, the prey of so many new

ideas and expressions; it is difficult, when one’s mind is troubled by

the ideas of Kant and the longings of Baudelaire, to write the exquisite

French of Henri IV, which meant that the very purity of the Duchess’s

language was a sign of limitation, and that, in her, both her

intelligence and her sensibility had remained proof against all

innovation. Here again, Mme. de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just

because of what it excluded (which was exactly the content of my own

thoughts) and by everything which, by virtue of that exclusion, it had

been able to preserve, that seductive vigour of the supple bodies which

no exhausting necessity to think, no moral anxiety or nervous trouble

has deformed. Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me

the equivalent of what had been offered me by the procession of the

girls of the little band along the seashore. Mme. de Guermantes offered

me, domesticated and held in subjection by her natural courtesy, by the

respect due to another person’s intellectual worth, all the energy and

charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray

who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, tortured cats,

gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, albeit she had remained a pillar of

virtue, might equally well have been, a good few years ago now, the most

brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan. Only she was incapable of

realising what I had sought for in her, the charm of her historic name,

and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival

from Guermantes. Were our relations founded upon a misunderstanding

which could not fail to become manifest as soon as my homage, instead of

being addressed to the relatively superior woman that she believed

herself to be, should be diverted to some other woman of equal

mediocrity and breathing the same unconscious charm? A misunderstanding

so entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young

dreamer like myself and a woman of the world, one however that

profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature

of his imaginative faculties and has not acquired his share of the

inevitable disappointments which he is destined to find in people, as in

the theatre, in his travels and indeed in love. M. de Guermantes having

declared (following upon Elstir’s asparagus and those that were brought

round after the _financière_ chicken) that green asparagus grown in the

open air, which, as has been so quaintly said by the charming writer who

signs himself E. de Clermont-Tonnerre, “have not the impressive rigidity

of their sisters,” ought to be eaten with eggs: “One man’s meat is

another man’s poison, as they say,” replied M. de Bréauté. “In the

province of Canton, in China, the greatest delicacy that can be set

before one is a dish of ortolan’s eggs completely rotten.” M. de

Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons which had appeared in the

_Revue des Deux Mondes_, moved in none but the most aristocratic

circles, but among these visited only such as had a certain reputation

for intellect, with the result that from his presence, were it at all

regular, in a woman’s house one could tell that she had a “salon”. He

pretended to a loathing of society, and assured each of his duchesses in

turn that it was for the sake of her wit and beauty that he came to see

her. They all believed him. Whenever, with death in his heart, he

resigned himself to attending a big party at the Princesse de Parme’s,

he summoned them all to accompany him, to keep up his courage, and thus

appeared only to be moving in the midst of an intimate group. So that

his reputation as an intellectual might survive his worldly success,

applying certain maxims of the Guermantes spirit, he would set out with

ladies of fashion on long scientific expeditions at the height of the

dancing season, and when a woman who was a snob, and consequently still

without any definite position, began to go everywhere, he would put a

savage obstinacy into his refusal to know her, to allow himself to be

introduced to her. His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his

snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe

that he was immune from snobbishness. “Babal always knows everything,”

exclaimed the Duchesse de Guermantes.“ I think it must be charming, a

country where you can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you

with really rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet. I can see myself

dipping my bread and butter in them. I must say, you get the same thing

at aunt Madeleine’s” (Mme. de Villeparisis’s) “where everything’s served

in a state of putrefaction, eggs included.” Then, as Mme. d’Arpajon

protested, “But my dear Phili, you know it as well as I do. You can see

the chicken in the egg. What I can’t understand is how they manage not

to fall out. It’s not an omelette you get there, it’s a poultry-yard.

You were so wise not to come to dinner there yesterday, there was a

brill cooked in carbolic! I assure you, it wasn’t a dinner-table, it was

far more like an operating-table. Really, Norpois carries loyalty to the

pitch of heroism. He actually asked for more!” “I believe I saw you at

dinner there the time she made that attack on M. Bloch” (M. de

Guermantes, perhaps to give to an Israelite name a more foreign sound,

pronounced the ‘ch’ in Bloch not like a ‘k’ but as in the German “hoch”)

“when he said about some poit” (poet) “or other that he was sublime.

Châtellerault did his best to break M. Bloch’s shins, the fellow didn’t

understand in the least and thought my nephew’s kick was aimed at a

young woman sitting opposite him.” (At this point, M. de Guermantes

coloured slightly.) “He did not realise that he was annoying our aunt by

his ‘sublimes’ chucked about all over the place like that. In short,

aunt Madeleine, who doesn’t keep her tongue in her pocket, turned on him

with: ‘Indeed, sir, and what epithet do you keep for M. de Bossuet?’”

(M. de Guermantes thought that, when one mentioned a famous name, the

use of “Monsieur” and a particle was eminently “old school”.) “That put

him in his place, all right.” “And what answer did this M. Bloch make?”

came in a careless tone from Mme. de Guermantes, who, running short for

the moment of original ideas, felt that she must copy her husband’s

teutonic pronunciation. “Ah! I can assure, M. Bloch did not wait for any

more, he’s still running.” “Yes, I remember quite well seeing you there

that evening,” said Mme. de Guermantes with emphasis as though, coming

from her, there must be something in this reminiscence highly flattering

to myself. “It is always so interesting at my aunt’s. At the last party

she gave, which was, of course, when I met you, I meant to ask you

whether that old gentleman who went past where we were sitting wasn’t

François Coppée. You must know who everyone is,” she went on, sincerely

envious of my relations with poets and poetry, and also out of

“consideration” for myself, the wish to establish in a better position

in the eyes of her other guests a young man so well versed in

literature. I assured the Duchess that I had not observed any

celebrities at Mme. de Villeparisis’s party. “What!” she replied with a

bewilderment which revealed that her respect for men of letters and her

contempt for society were more superficial than she said, perhaps even

than she thought, “What! There were no famous authors there! You

astonish me! Why, I saw all sorts of quite impossible people!” I

remembered the evening in question distinctly owing to an entirely

trivial incident that had occurred at the party. Mme. de Villeparisis

had introduced Bloch to Mme. Alphonse de Rothschild, but my friend had

not caught the name and, thinking he was talking to an old English lady

who was a trifle mad, had replied only in monosyllables to the garrulous

conversation of the historic beauty, when Mme. de Villeparisis in making

her known to some one else uttered, quite distinctly this time: “The

Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild.” Thereupon there had coursed suddenly

and simultaneously through Bloch’s arteries so many ideas of millions

and of social importance, which it would have been more prudent to

subdivide and separate, that he had undergone, so to speak, a momentary

failure of heart and brain alike, and cried aloud in the dear old lady’s

presence: “If I’d only known!” an exclamation the silliness of which

kept him from sleeping for at least a week afterwards. His remark was of

no great interest, but I remembered it as a proof that sometimes in this

life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what is

in their minds. “I fancy Mme. de Villeparisis is not absolutely ...

moral,” said the Princesse de Parme, who knew that the best people did

not visit the Duchess’s aunt, and from what the Duchess herself had just

been saying that one might speak freely about her. But, Mme. de

Guermantes not seeming to approve of this criticism, she hastened to

add: “Though, of course, intellect carried to that degree excuses

everything.” “But you take the same view of my aunt that everyone else

does,” replied the Duchess, “which is, really, quite mistaken. It’s just

what Mémé was saying to me only yesterday.” She blushed; a reminiscence

unknown to me filmed her eyes. I formed the supposition that M. de

Charlus had asked her to cancel my invitation, as he had sent Robert to

ask me not to go to her house. I had the impression that the

blush—equally incomprehensible to me—which had tinged the Duke’s cheek

when he made some reference to his brother could not be attributed to

the same cause. “My poor aunt—she will always have the reputation of

being a lady of the old school, of sparkling wit and uncontrolled

passions. And really there’s no more middle-class, serious, commonplace

mind in Paris. She will go down as a patron of the arts, which means to

say that she was once the mistress of a great painter, though he was

never able to make her understand what a picture was; and as for her

private life, so far from being a depraved woman, she was so much made

for marriage, so conjugal from her cradle that, not having succeeded in

keeping a husband, who incidentally was a cad, she has never had a

love-affair which she hasn’t taken just as seriously as if it were holy

matrimony, with the same susceptibilities, the same quarrels, the same

fidelity. By which token, those relations are often the most sincere;

you’ll find, in fact, more inconsolable lovers than husbands.” “Yet,

Oriane, if you take the case of your brother-in-law Palamède you were

speaking about just now; no mistress in the world could ever dream of

being mourned as that poor Mme. de Charlus has been.” “Ah!” replied the

Duchess, “Your Highness must permit me to be not altogether of her

opinion. People don’t all like to be mourned in the same way, each of us

has his preferences.” “Still, he did make a regular cult of her after

her death. It is true that people sometimes do for the dead what they

would not have done for the living.” “For one thing,” retorted Mme. de

Guermantes in a dreamy tone which belied her teasing purpose, “we go to

their funerals, which we never do for the living!” M. de Guermantes gave

a sly glance at M. de Bréauté as though to provoke him into laughter at

the Duchess’s wit. “At the same time I frankly admit,” went on Mme. de

Guermantes, “that the manner in which I should like to be mourned by a

man I loved would not be that adopted by my brother-in-law.” The Duke’s

face darkened. He did not like to hear his wife utter rash judgments,

especially about M. de Charlus. “You are very particular. His grief set

an example to everyone,” he reproved her stiffly. But the Duchess had in

dealing with her husband that sort of boldness which animal tamers shew,

or people who live with a madman and are not afraid of making him angry:

“Oh, very well, just as you like—he does set an example, I never said he

didn’t, he goes every day to the cemetery to tell her how many people he

has had to luncheon, he misses her enormously, but—as he’ld mourn for a

cousin, a grandmother, a sister. It is not the grief of a husband. It is

true that they were a pair of saints, which makes it all rather

exceptional.” M. de Guermantes, infuriated by his wife’s chatter, fixed

on her with a terrible immobility a pair of eyes already loaded. “I

don’t wish to say anything against poor Mémé, who, by the way, could not

come this evening,” went on the Duchess, “I quite admit there’s no one

like him, he’s delightful; he has a delicacy, a warmth of heart that you

don’t as a rule find in men. He has a woman’s heart, Mémé has!” “What

you say is absurd,” M. de Guermantes broke in sharply. “There’s nothing

effeminate about Mémé, I know nobody so manly as he is.” “But I am not

suggesting that he’s the least bit in the world effeminate. Do at least

take the trouble to understand what I say,” retorted the Duchess. “He’s

always like that the moment anyone mentions his brother,” she added,

turning to the Princesse de Parme. “It’s very charming, it’s a pleasure

to hear him. There’s nothing so nice as two brothers who are fond of

each other,” replied the Princess, as many a humbler person might have

replied, for it is possible to belong to a princely race by birth and at

the same time to be mentally affiliated to a race that is thoroughly

plebeian.

“As we’re discussing your family, Oriane,” said the Princess, “I saw

your nephew Saint-Loup yesterday; I believe he wants to ask you to do

something for him.” The Duc de Guermantes bent his Olympian brow. When

he did not himself care to do a service, he preferred his wife not to

assume the responsibility for it, knowing that it would come to the same

thing in the end and that the people to whom the Duchess would be

obliged to apply would put this concession down to the common account of

the household, just as much as if it had been asked of them by the

husband alone. “Why didn’t he tell me about it himself?” said the

Duchess, “he was here yesterday and stayed a couple of hours, and heaven

only knows what a bore he managed to make himself. He would be no

stupider than anyone else if he had only the sense, like many people we

know, to be content with being a fool. It’s his veneer of knowledge

that’s so terrible. He wants to preserve an open mind—open to all the

things he doesn’t understand. He talks to you about Morocco. It’s

appalling.”

“He can’t go back there, because of Rachel,” said the Prince de Foix.

“Surely, now that they’ve broken it off,” interrupted M. de Bréauté. “So

far from breaking it off, I found her a couple of days ago in Robert’s

rooms, they didn’t look at all like people who’d quarrelled, I can

assure you,” replied the Prince de Foix, who loved to spread abroad

every rumour that could damage Robert’s chances of marrying, and might

for that matter have been misled by one of the intermittent resumptions

of a connexion that was practically at an end.

“That Rachel was speaking to me about you, I see her like that in the

mornings, on the way to the Champs-Élysées; she’s a kind of head-in-air,

as you say, what you call ‘unlaced’, a sort of ‘Dame aux Camélias’, only

figuratively speaking, of course.” This speech was addressed to me by

Prince Von, who liked always to appear conversant with French literature

and Parisian catch-words.

“Why, that’s just what it was—Morocco!” exclaimed the Princess, flinging

herself into this opening. “What on earth can he want in Morocco?” asked

M. de Guermantes sternly; “Oriane can do absolutely nothing for him

there, as he knows perfectly well.” “He thinks he invented strategy,”

Mme. de Guermantes pursued the theme, “and then he uses impossible words

for the most trivial things, which doesn’t prevent him from making blots

all over his letters. The other day he announced that he’d been given

some _sublime_ potatoes, and that he’d taken a _sublime_ stage box.” “He

speaks Latin,” the Duke went one better. “What! Latin?” the Princess

gasped. “’Pon my soul he does! Ma’am can ask Oriane if I’m not telling

the truth.” “Why, of course, Ma’am; the other day he said to us straight

out, without stopping to think: ‘I know of no more touching example of

_sic transit gloria mundi_.’ I can repeat the phrase now to your

Highness because, after endless inquiries and by appealing to

_linguists_, we succeeded in reconstructing it, but Robert flung it out

without pausing for breath, one could hardly make out that there was

Latin in it, he was just like a character in the _Malade Imaginaire_.

And all this referred simply to the death of the Empress of Austria!”

“Poor woman!” cried the Princess, “what a delicious creature she was.”

“Yes,” replied the Duchess, “a trifle mad, a trifle headstrong, but she

was a thoroughly good woman, a nice, kind-hearted lunatic; the only

thing I could never make out about her was why she had never managed to

get her teeth made to fit her; they always came loose half-way through a

sentence and she was obliged to stop short or she’ld have swallowed

them.” “That Rachel was speaking to me about you, she told me that young

Saint-Loup worshipped you, that he was fonder of you than he was of

her,” said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as he

spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin. “But in

that case she must be jealous of me and hate me,” said I. “Not at all,

she told me all sorts of nice things about you. The Prince de Foix’s

mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred you to her. You don’t

understand? Come home with me, and I’ll explain it all to you.” “I’m

afraid I can’t, I’m going on to M. de Charlus at eleven.” “Why, he sent

round to me yesterday to ask me to dine with him this evening, but told

me not to come after a quarter to eleven. But if you must go to him, at

least come with me as far as the Théâtre-Français, you will be in the

periphery,” said the Prince, who thought doubtless that this last word

meant “proximity” or possibly “centre”.

But the bulging eyes in his coarse though handsome red face frightened

me and I declined, saying that a friend was coming to call for me. This

reply seemed to me in no way offensive. The Prince, however, apparently

formed a different impression of it for he did not say another word to

me.

“I really must go and see the Queen of Naples; what a grief it must be

to her,” said (or at least appeared to me to have said) the Princesse de

Parme. For her words had come to me only indistinctly through the

intervening screen of those addressed to me, albeit in an undertone, by

Prince Von, who had doubtless been afraid, if he spoke louder, of being

overheard by the Prince de Foix. “Oh, dear, no!” replied the Duchess, “I

don’t believe it has been any grief at all.” “None at all! You do always

fly to extremes so, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, resuming his part of

the cliff which by standing up to the wave forces it to fling higher its

crest of foam. “Basin knows even better than I that I’m telling the

truth,” replied the Duchess, “but he thinks he’s obliged to look severe

because you are present, Ma’am, and he’s afraid of my shocking you.”

“Oh, please, no, I beg of you,” cried the Princesse de Parme, dreading

the slightest alteration on her account of these delicious Fridays at

the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, this forbidden fruit which the Queen of

Sweden herself had not yet acquired the right to taste. “Why, it was

Basin himself that she told, when he said to her with a duly sorrowful

expression: ‘But the Queen is in mourning; for whom, pray, is it a great

grief to your Majesty?’—‘No, it’s not a deep mourning, it’s a light

mourning, quite a light mourning, it’s my sister.’ The truth is, she’s

delighted about it, as Basin knows perfectly well, she invited us to a

party that very evening, and gave me two pearls. I wish she could lose a

sister every day! So far from weeping for her sister’s death, she was in

fits of laughter over it. She probably says to herself, like Robert,

‘_sic transit_——’ I forget how it goes on,” she added modestly, knowing

how it went on perfectly well.

In saying all this Mme. de Guermantes was only being witty, and with

complete insincerity, for the Queen of Naples, like the Duchesse

d’Alençon, also doomed to a tragic fate, had the warmest heart in the

world and mourned quite sincerely for her kinsfolk. Mme. de Guermantes

knew those noble Bavarian sisters, her cousins, too well not to be aware

of this. “He would like not to go back to Morocco,” said the Princesse

de Parme, alighting hurriedly again upon the perch of Robert’s name

which had been held out to her, quite unintentionally, by Mme. de

Guermantes. “I believe you know General de Monserfeuil.” “Very

slightly,” replied the Duchess, who was an intimate friend of the

officer in question. The Princess explained what it was that Saint-Loup

wanted. “Good gracious, yes, if I see him—it is possible that I may meet

him,” the Duchess replied, so as not to appear to be refusing, the

occasions of her meeting General de Monserfeuil seeming to extend

rapidly farther apart as soon as it became a question of her asking him

for anything. This uncertainty did not, however, satisfy the Duke, who

interrupted his wife: “You know perfectly well you won’t be seeing him,

Oriane, and besides you have already asked him for two things which he

hasn’t done. My wife has a passion for doing good turns to people,” he

went on, growing more and more furious, in order to force the Princess

to withdraw her request, without there being any question made of his

wife’s good nature and so that Mme. de Parme should throw the blame back

upon his own character, which was essentially obstructive. “Robert could

get anything he wanted out of Monserfeuil. Only, as he happens not to

know himself what he wants, he gets us to ask for it because he knows

there’s no better way of making the whole thing fall through. Oriane has

asked too many favours of Monserfeuil. A request from her now would be a

reason for him to refuse.” “Oh, in that case, it would be better if the

Duchess did nothing,” said Mme. de Parme. “Obviously!” the Duke closed

the discussion. “Poor General, he’s been defeated again at the

elections,” said the Princess, so as to turn the conversation from

Robert. “Oh, it’s nothing serious, it’s only the seventh time,” said the

Duke, who, having been obliged himself to retire from politics, quite

enjoyed hearing of other people’s failures at the polls. “He has

consoled himself by giving his wife another baby.” “What! Is that poor

Mme. de Monserfeuil in an interesting condition again?” cried the

Princess. “Why, of course,” replied the Duke, “that’s the one division

where the poor General has never failed to get in.”

In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, were it

with a small party only, to these repasts at which I had at one time

imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle.

They did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to

partake merely of a material nourishment, which incidentally was

exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a

few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of

my hosts, friends to whom they presented me with a shade of benevolent

patronage so marked (as a person for whom they had always had a sort of

parental affection) that there was not one among them who would not have

felt himself to be failing in his duty to the Duke and Duchess if he had

given a ball without including my name on his list, and at the same

time, while I sipped one of those Yquems which lay concealed in the

Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed according to each of the

different recipes which the Duke himself used to elaborate and modified

with prudence. However, for one who had already set his knees more than

once beneath the mystic board, the consumption of the latter was not

indispensable. Old friends of M. and Mme. de Guermantes came in to see

them after dinner, “with the tooth-picks”, as Mme. Swann would have

said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of _tilleul_ in

the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of

orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden

outside. There was no record of anything else, among the Guermantes, in

these evenings in the garden, but orangeade. It had a sort of ritual

meaning. To have added other refreshments would have seemed to be

falsifying the tradition, just as a big at-home in the Faubourg

Saint-Germain ceases to be an at-home if there is a play also, or music.

You must be supposed to have come simply—though there be five hundred of

you—to pay a call on, let us say, the Princesse de Guermantes. People

marvelled at my influence because I was able to procure the addition to

this orangeade of a jug containing the juice of stewed cherries or

stewed pears. I took a dislike on this account to the Prince

d’Agrigente, who was like all the people who, lacking in imagination but

not in covetousness, take a keen interest in what one is drinking and

ask if they may taste a little of it themselves. Which meant that, every

time, M. d’Agrigente, by diminishing my ration, spoiled my pleasure. For

this fruit juice can never be provided in sufficient quantities to

quench one’s thirst for it. Nothing is less cloying than these

transpositions into flavour of the colour of a fruit which when cooked

seems to have travelled backwards to the past season of its blossoming.

Blushing like an orchard in spring, or, it may be, colourless and cool

like the zephyr beneath the fruit-trees, the juice lets itself be

breathed and gazed into one drop by drop, and M. d’Agrigente prevented

me, regularly, from taking my fill of it. Despite these distillations

the traditional orangeade persisted like the _tilleul_. In these humble

kinds, the social communion was none the less administered. In this

respect, doubtless, the friends of M. and Mme. de Guermantes had, after

all, as I had originally imagined, remained more different from the rest

of humanity than their outward appearance might have misled me into

supposing. Numbers of elderly men came to receive from the Duchess,

together with the invariable drink, a welcome that was often far from

cordial. Now this could not have been due to snobbishness, they

themselves being of a rank to which there was none superior; nor to love

of splendour; they did love it perhaps, but on less stringent social

conditions might have been enjoying a glittering example of it, for on

these same evenings the charming wife of a colossally rich financier

would have given anything in the world to have them among the brilliant

shooting-party she was giving for a couple of days for the King of

Spain. They had nevertheless declined her invitation, and had come round

without fail to inquire whether Mme. de Guermantes was at home. They

were not even certain of finding there opinions that conformed entirely

with their own, or sentiments of any great warmth; Mme. de Guermantes

let fall now and then, on the Dreyfus Case, on the Republic, the Laws

against Religion, or even in an undertone on themselves, their

weaknesses, the dullness of their conversation, comments which they had

to appear not to notice. No doubt, if they kept up their habit of coming

there, it was owing to their superfine training as epicures in things

worldly, to their clear consciousness of the prime and perfect quality

of the social dish, with its familiar, reassuring, sappy savour, free

from blend or taint, with the origin and history of which they were as

well aware as she who served them with it, remaining more “noble” in

this respect than they themselves imagined. Now, on this occasion, among

the visitors to whom I was introduced after dinner, it so happened that

there was that General de Monserfeuil of whom the Princesse de Parme had

been speaking, while Mme. de Guermantes, of whose drawing-room he was

one of the regular frequenters, had not known that he was going to be

there that evening. He bowed before me, on hearing my name, as though I

had been the President of the Supreme War Council. I had supposed it to

be simply from some deep-rooted unwillingness to oblige, in which the

Duke, as in wit if not in love, was his wife’s accomplice, that the

Duchess had practically refused to recommend her nephew to M. de

Monserfeuil. And I saw in this an indifference all the more blameworthy

in that I seemed to have gathered from a few words let fall by the

Princess that Robert was in a post of danger from which it would be

prudent to have him removed. But it was by the genuine malice of Mme. de

Guermantes that I was revolted when, the Princesse de Parme having

timidly suggested that she might say something herself and on her own

responsibility to the General, the Duchess did everything in her power

to dissuade her. “But Ma’am,” she cried, “Monserfeuil has no sort of

standing or influence whatever with the new Government. You would be

wasting your breath.” “I think he can hear us,” murmured the Princess,

as a hint to the Duchess not to speak so loud. Without lowering her

voice: “Your Highness need not be afraid, he’s as deaf as a post,” said

the Duchess, every word reaching the General distinctly. “The thing is,

I believe M. de Saint-Loup is in a place that is not very safe,” said

the Princess. “What is one to do?” replied the Duchess. “He’s in the

same boat as everybody else, the only difference being that it was he

who originally asked to be sent there. Besides, no, it’s not really

dangerous; if it was, you can imagine how anxious I should be to help. I

should have spoken to Saint-Joseph about it during dinner. He has far

more influence, and he’s a real worker. But, as you see, he’s gone now.

Still, asking him would be less awkward than going to this one, who has

three of his sons in Morocco just now and has refused to apply for them

to be exchanged; he might raise that as an objection. Since your

Highness insists on it, I shall speak to Saint-Joseph—if I see him

again, or to Beautreillis. But if I don’t see either of them, you

mustn’t waste your pity on Robert. It was explained to us the other day

exactly where he is. I’m sure he couldn’t wish for a better place.”

“What a pretty flower, I’ve never seen one like it; there’s no one like

you, Oriane, for having such marvellous things in your house,” said the

Princess de Parme, who, fearing that General de Monserfeuil might have

overheard the Duchess, sought now to change the conversation. I looked

and recognised a plant of the sort that I had watched Elstir painting.

“I am so glad you like them; they are charming, do look at their little

purple velvet collars; the only thing against them is—as may happen with

people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed—they have a hideous

name and a horrid smell. In spite of which I am very fond of them. But

what is rather sad is that they are dying.” “But they’re growing in a

pot, they aren’t cut flowers,” said the Princess. “No,” answered the

Duchess with a smile, “but it comes to the same thing, as they’re all

ladies. It’s a kind of plant where the ladies and the gentlemen don’t

both grow on the same stalk. I’m like people who keep a lady dog. I have

to find a husband for my flowers. Otherwise I shan’t have any young

ones!” “How very strange. Do you mean to say that in nature...?” “Yes!

There are certain insects whose duty it is to bring about the marriage,

as they do with Sovereigns, by proxy, without the bride and bridegroom

ever having set eyes on one another. And so, I assure you, I always tell

my man to put my plant out in the window as often as possible, on the

courtyard side and the garden side turn about, in the hope that the

necessary insect will arrive. But the odds are too great. Fancy, he has

first to have been seen by a person of the same species and the opposite

sex, and he must then have taken it into his head to come and leave

cards at the house. He hasn’t appeared so far, I believe my plant can

still qualify for the white flower of a blameless life, but I must say a

little immodesty would please me better. It’s just the same with that

fine tree we have in the courtyard; he will die childless because he

belongs to a kind that’s very rare in these latitudes. In his case, it’s

the wind that’s responsible for consummating the marriage, but the wall

is a trifle high.” “By Jove, yes,” said M. de Bréauté, “you ought to

take just a couple of inches off the top, that will be quite enough.

There are certain operations one ought to know how to perform. The

flavour of vanilla we tasted in the excellent ice you gave us this

evening, Duchess, comes from a plant called the vanilla tree. This plant

produces flowers which are both male and female, but a sort of solid

wall set up between them prevents any communication. And so we could

never get any fruit from them until a young negro, a native of Réunion,

by the name of Albins, which by the way is rather an odd name for a

black man since it means ‘white’, had the happy thought of using the

point of a needle to bring the separate organs into contact.” “Babal,

you’re divine, you know everything,” cried the Duchess. “But you

yourself, Oriane, have told me things I had no idea of,” the Princesse

de Parme assured her. “I must explain to your Highness that it is Swann

who has always talked to me all about botany. Sometimes when we were too

bored to go to a tea-party or a concert we would set off for the

country, and he would shew me extraordinary marriages between flowers,

which was far more amusing than going to human marriages—no

wedding-breakfast and no crowd in the sacristy. We never had time to go

very far. Now that motor-cars have come in, it would be delightful.

Unfortunately, in the interval he himself has made an even more

astonishing marriage, which makes everything very difficult. Oh, Ma’am,

life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that

bore us, and when by mere chance we come across somebody with whom we

could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a

marriage like Swann’s. Faced with the alternatives of giving up my

botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person,

I chose the former calamity. Besides, when it comes to that, there was

no need to go quite so far. It seems that here, in my own little bit of

garden, more odd things happen in broad daylight than at midnight—in the

Bois de Boulogne! Only they attract no attention, because among flowers

it’s all done quite simply, you see a little orange shower, or else a

very dusty fly coming to wipe its feet or take a bath before crawling

into a flower. And that does the trick!” “The cabinet the plant is

standing on is splendid, too; it’s Empire, I think,” said the Princess,

who, not being familiar with the works of Darwin and his followers, was

unable to grasp the point of the Duchess’s pleasantries. “It’s lovely,

isn’t it? I’m so glad Ma’am likes it,” replied the Duchess, “it’s a

magnificent piece. I must tell you that I’ve always adored the Empire

style, even when it wasn’t in fashion. I remember at Guermantes I got

into terrible disgrace with my mother-in-law because I told them to

bring down from the attics all the splendid Empire furniture Basin had

inherited from the Montesquious, and used it to furnish the wing we

lived in.” M. de Guermantes smiled. He must nevertheless have remembered

that the course of events had been totally different. But, the

witticisms of the Princesse des Laumes at the expense of her

mother-in-law’s bad taste having been a tradition during the short time

in which the Prince was in love with his wife, his love for the latter

had been outlasted by a certain contempt for the intellectual

inferiority of the former, a contempt which, however, went hand in hand

with a considerable attachment and respect. “The Iénas have the same

armchair with Wedgwood medallions, it’s a lovely thing, but I prefer my

own;” said the Duchess, with the same air of impartiality as if she had

been the possessor of neither of the articles under discussion. “I know,

of course, that they’ve some marvellous things which I haven’t got.” The

Princesse de Parme remained silent. “But it’s quite true; your Highness

hasn’t seen their collection. Oh, you ought really to come there one day

with me, it’s one of the most magnificent things in Paris. You’ld say it

was a museum come to life.” And since this suggestion was one of the

most “Guermantes” of the Duchess’s audacities, inasmuch as the Iénas

were for the Princesse de Parme rank usurpers, their son bearing like

her own the title of Duc de Guastalla, Mme. de Guermantes in thus

launching it could not refrain (so far did the love that she bore for

her own originality prevail over the deference due to the Princess de

Parme) from casting at her other guests a smiling glance of amusement.

They too made an effort to smile, at once frightened, bewildered, and

above all delighted to think that they were being ear-witnesses of

Oriane’s very “latest” and could carry it away with them “red hot”. They

were only half shocked, knowing that the Duchess had the knack of

strewing the ground with all the Courvoisier prejudices to achieve a

vital success more thrilling and more enjoyable. Had she not, within the

last few years, brought together Princesse Mathilde and that Duc

d’Aumale who had written to the Princess’s own brother the famous

letter: “In my family all the men are brave and the women chaste”? And

inasmuch as Princes remain princely even at those moments when they

appear anxious to forget that they are, the Duc d’Aumale and Princesse

Mathilde had enjoyed themselves so greatly at Mme. de Guermantes’s that

they had thereafter formed a defensive alliance, with that faculty for

forgetting the past which Louis XVIII shewed when he took as his

Minister Fouché, who had voted the death of his brother. Mme. de

Guermantes was now nourishing a similar project of arranging a meeting

between Princesse Murat and the Queen of Naples. In the meantime, the

Princesse de Parme appeared as embarrassed as might have been the

heirs-apparent to the Thrones of the Netherlands and Belgium, styled

respectively Prince of Orange and Duke of Brabant, had one offered to

present to them M. de Mailly Nesle, Prince d’Orange, and M. de Charlus,

Duc de Brabant. But, before anything further could happen, the Duchess,

whom Swann and M. de Charlus between them (albeit the latter was

resolute in ignoring the Iénas’ existence) had with great difficulty

succeeded in making admire the Empire style, exclaimed: “Honestly,

Ma’am, I can’t tell you how beautiful you will think it! I must confess

that the Empire style has always had a fascination for me. But at the

Iénas’ it is really like a hallucination. That sort of—what shall I

say—reflux from the Expedition to Egypt, and also the sweep forward into

our own times from Antiquity, all those things that invade our houses,

the Sphinxes that come to crouch at the feet of the sofas, the serpents

coiled round candelabra, a huge Muse who holds out a little torch for

you to play at _bouillotte_, or has quietly climbed on to the

mantelpiece and is leaning against your clock; and then all the Pompeian

lamps, the little boat-shaped beds which look as if they had been found

floating on the Nile so that you expect to see Moses climb out of them,

the classical chariots galloping along the bed tables....” “They’re not

very comfortable to sit in, those Empire chairs,” the Princess ventured.

“No,” the Duchess agreed, “but,” she at once added, insisting on the

point with a smile: “I like being uncomfortable on those mahogany seats

covered with ruby velvet or green silk. I like that discomfort of the

warrior who understands nothing but the curule chair and in the middle

of his principal drawing-room crosses his fasces and piles his laurels.

I can assure you that at the Iénas’ one doesn’t stop to think for a

moment of how comfortable one is, when one sees in front of one a great

strapping wench of a Victory painted in fresco on the wall. My husband

is going to say that I’m a very bad Royalist, but I’m terribly

disaffected, as you know, I can assure you that in those people’s house

one comes to love all the big ‘N’s and all the bees. Good gracious,

after all for a good many years under our Kings we weren’t exactly

surfeited with glory, and so these warriors who brought home so many

crowns that they stuck them even on the arms of the chairs, I must say I

think it’s all rather fetching! Your Highness ought really.” “Why, my

dear, if you think so,” said the Princess, “but it seems to me that it

won’t be easy.” “But Ma’am will find that it will all go quite smoothly.

They are very good people, and no fools. We took Mme. de Chevreuse

there,” added the Duchess, knowing the force of this example, “she was

enchanted. The son is really very pleasant. I’m going to say something

that’s not quite proper,” she went on, “but he has a bedroom, and more

especially a bed in it, in which I should love to sleep—without him!

What is even less proper is that I went to see him once when he was ill

and lying in it. By his side on the frame of the bed was moulded a long

Siren, stretched out at full length, a lovely thing with a

mother-of-pearl tail and some sort of lotus flowers in her hand. I

assure you,” went on Mme. de Guermantes, reducing the speed of her

utterances to bring into even bolder relief the words which she had the

air of modelling with the pout of her fine lips, drawing them out with

her long expressive hands, directing on the Princess as she spoke a

gentle, steady and searching gaze, “that with the palms and the golden

crown at the side of it was most moving, it was just the arrangement of

Gustave Moreau’s _Death and the Young Man_ (your Highness must know that

great work, of course).” The Princesse de Parme, who did not know so

much as the painter’s name, made violent movements with her head and

smiled ardently, in order to manifest her admiration for his picture.

But the intensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light

which is absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what

people are trying to tell us. “A good-looking boy, I believe?” she

asked. “No, for he’s just like a tapir. The eyes are a little those of a

Queen Hortense on a screen. But he has probably come to the conclusion

that it is rather absurd for a man to develop such a resemblance, and it

is lost in the encaustic surface of his cheeks which give him really

rather a Mameluke appearance. You feel that the polisher must call round

every morning. Swann,” she went on, reverting to the bed of the young

Duke, “was struck by the resemblance between this Siren and Gustave

Moreau’s _Death_. But apart from that,” she added, her speech becoming

more rapid though still serious, so as to provoke more laughter, “there

was nothing really that could _strike_ us, for it was only a cold in the

head, and the young man made a marvellous recovery.” “They say he’s a

snob?” put in M. de Bréauté, with a malicious twinkle, expecting to be

answered with the same precision as though he had said: “They tell me

that he has only four fingers on his right hand; is that so?” “G—ood

g—racious, n—o,” replied Mme. de Guermantes with a smile of benign

indulgence. “Perhaps just the least little bit of a snob in appearance,

because he’s extremely young, but I should be surprised to hear that he

was really, for he’s intelligent,” she added, as though there were to

her mind some absolute incompatibility between snobbishness and

intelligence. “He has wit, too, I’ve known him be quite amusing,” she

said again, laughing with the air of an epicure and expert, as though

the act of declaring that a person could be amusing demanded a certain

expression of merriment from the speaker, or as though the Duc de

Guastalla’s sallies were recurring to her mind as she spoke. “Anyway, as

he never goes anywhere, he can’t have much field for his snobbishness,”

she wound up, forgetting that this was hardly encouraging the Princesse

de Parme to make overtures. “I cannot help wondering what the Prince de

Guermantes, who calls her Mme. Iéna, will say if he hears that I’ve been

to see her.” “What!” cried the Duchess with extraordinary vivacity.

“Don’t you know that it was we who gave up to Gilbert” (she bitterly

regretted that surrender now) “a complete card-room done in the Empire

style which came to us from Quiou-Quiou, and is an absolute marvel!

There was no room for it here, though I think it would look better here

than it does with him. It’s a thing of sheer beauty, half Etruscan, half

Egyptian....” “Egyptian?” queried the Princess, to whom the word

Etruscan conveyed little. “Well, really, you know, a little of both.

Swann told us that, he explained it all to me, only you know I’m such a

dunce. But then, Ma’am, what one has to bear in mind is that the Egypt

of the Empire cabinet-makers has nothing to do with the historical

Egypt, nor their Roman with the Romans nor their Etruria....” “Indeed,”

said the Princess. “No, it’s like what they used to call a Louis XV

costume under the Second Empire, when Anna de Monchy and dear Brigode’s

mother were girls. Basin was talking to you just now about Beethoven. We

heard a thing of his played the other day which was really quite good,

though a little stiff, with a Russian theme in it. It’s pathetic to

think that he believed it to be Russian. In the same way as the Chinese

painters believed they were copying Bellini. Besides, even in the same

country, whenever anybody begins to look at things in a way that is

slightly novel, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand

are totally incapable of seeing what he puts before them. It takes at

least forty years before they can manage to make it out.” “Forty years!”

the Princess cried in alarm. “Why, yes,” went on the Duchess, adding

more and more to her words (which were practically my own, for I had

just been expressing a similar idea to her), thanks to her way of

pronouncing them, the equivalent of what on the printed page is called

italics: “it’s like a sort of first isolated individual of a species

which does not yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an

individual endowed with a kind of _sense_ which the human race of his

generation does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance

because I, on the contrary, have always loved any interesting production

from the very start, however novel it might be. But really, the other

day I was with the Grand Duchess in the Louvre and we happened to pass

before Manet’s _Olympia_. Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by

it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many

spears I’ve had to break for that picture, which I don’t altogether like

but which is unquestionably the work of _somebody_.” “And is the Grand

Duchess well?” inquired the Princesse de Parme, to whom the Tsar’s aunt

was infinitely more familiar than Manet’s model. “Yes; we talked about

you. After all,” she resumed, clinging to her idea, “the fact of the

matter is, as my brother-in-law Palamède always says, that one has

between oneself and the rest of the world the barrier of a strange

language. Though I admit that there’s no one it’s quite so true of as

Gilbert. If it amuses you to go to the Iénas’, you have far too much

sense to let your actions be governed by what that poor fellow may

think, who is a dear, innocent creature, but really lives in a different

world. I feel myself nearer, more akin to my coachman, my horses even,

than to a man who keeps on harking back to what people would have

thought under Philip the Bold or Louis the Fat. Just fancy, when he goes

for a walk in the country, he takes a stick to drive the peasants out of

his way, quite in a friendly spirit, saying: ‘Get on, clowns!’ Really,

I’m just as much surprised when he speaks to me as if I heard myself

addressed by one of the ‘recumbents’ on the old gothic tombs. It’s all

very well that animated gravestone’s being my cousin; he frightens me,

and the only idea that comes into my head is to let him stay in his

Middle Ages. Apart from that, I quite admit that he’s never assassinated

anyone.” “I’ve just been seeing him at dinner at Mme. de

Villeparisis’s,” said the General, but without either smiling at or

endorsing the Duchess’s pleasantries. “Was M. de Norpois there?” asked

Prince Von, whose mind still ran on the Academy of Moral Sciences. “Why,

yes;” said the General. “In fact, he was talking about your Emperor.”

“It seems, the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he does not

care for Elstir’s painting. Not that I’m saying this against him,” said

the Duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done

a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me,

but it’s a remarkable piece of work. He is interesting while one’s

sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman. It’s after the

style of the _Regents of the Hospital_, by Hals. I expect you know those

sublimities, to borrow my nephew’s favourite expression,” the Duchess

turned to myself, gently flapping her fan of black feathers. More than

erect on her chair, she flung her head nobly backwards, for, while

always a great lady, she was a trifle inclined to play the great lady

also. I said that I had been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that

to avoid confusing my mind, as my time was limited, I had left out

Haarlem. “Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!” cried M. de Guermantes. I said

to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s _Street in Delft_. But

the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented

himself with replying in a tone of sufficiency, as was his habit

whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon,

which he did not remember having seen. “If it’s to be seen, I saw it!”

“What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haarlem!” cried the

Duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of an hour to spend in the

place, they’re an extraordinary thing to have seen, those Halses. I

don’t mind saying that a person who only caught a passing glimpse of

them from the top of a tramway-car without stopping, supposing they were

hung out to view in the street, would open his eyes pretty wide.” This

utterance shocked me as indicating a misconception of the way in which

artistic impressions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to

imply that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine which

takes instantaneous photographs.

M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me with

so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me, gazed

at the illustrious bearing of his wife, listened to what she was

saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She rides rough-shod over

everything! Our young friend can go home and say that he’s had

before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense

of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere to-day.”

Thus I beheld the pair of them, withdrawn from that name

Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an

unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women,

lingering, only, behind their contemporaries a little way, and

that not evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg, where

the wife has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband

the misfortune to come down to the pinchbeck age of history, she

remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously

Louis-Philippe. That Mme. de Guermantes should be like other women

had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a

natural reaction and with all these good wines to help, almost a

miracle. A Don John of Austria, an Isabella d’Este, situated for

us in the world of names, have as little communication with the

great pages of history as the Méséglise way had with the

Guermantes. Isabella d’Este was no doubt in reality a very minor

Princess, similar to those who under Louis XIV obtained no special

place at Court. But seeming to us to be of a unique and therefore

incomparable essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less

in greatness, so that a supper-party with Louis XIV would appear

to us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este

we should find ourself, were we to meet her, gazing with our own

eyes on a supernatural heroine of romance. Well, after we have, in

studying Isabella d’Este, in transplanting her patiently from this

world of fairyland into that of history, established the fact that

her life, her thought contained nothing of that mysterious

strangeness which had been suggested to us by her name, once this

disappointment is complete we feel a boundless gratitude to this

Princess for having had, of Mantegna’s paintings, a knowledge

almost equal to that, hitherto despised by us and put, as

Françoise would have said, lower than the dirt, of M. Lafenestre.

After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name

Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the

Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of

Victor Hugo, Franz Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same

astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, to

imagine the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley

of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical

remoteness, the strangeness of its flora, feels on discovering,

once he has made his way through a hedge of giant aloes or

manchineels, inhabitants who (sometimes indeed among the ruins of

a Roman theatre and beneath a column dedicated to Venus) are

engaged in reading _Mérope_ or _Alzire_. And similarly, so remote,

so distinct from, so far superior to the educated women of the

middle classes whom I had known, the similar culture by which Mme.

de Guermantes had made herself, with no ulterior motive, to

gratify no ambition, descend to the level of people whom she would

never know, had the character—meritorious, almost touching by

virtue of being wholly useless—of an erudition in Phoenician

antiquities in a politician or a doctor. “I might have shewn you a

very fine one,” said Mme. de Guermantes, still speaking of Hals,

“the finest in existence, some people say, which was left to me by

a German cousin. Unfortunately, it turned out to be ‘enfeoffed’ in

the castle—you don’t know the expression, nor I either,” she

added, with her fondness for making jokes (which made her, she

thought, seem modern) at the expense of the old customs to which

nevertheless she was unconsciously but keenly attached. “I am glad

you have seen my Elstirs, but, I must admit, I should have been a

great deal more glad if I could have done you the honours of my

Hals, this ‘enfeoffed’ picture.” “I know the one,” said Prince

Von, “it’s the Grand Duke of Hesse’s Hals.” “Quite so; his brother

married my sister,” said M. de Guermantes, “and his mother and

Oriane’s were first cousins as well.” “But so far as M. Elstir is

concerned,” the Prince went on, “I shall take the liberty of

saying, without having any opinion of his work, which I do not

know, that the hatred with which the Emperor pursues him ought

not, it seems to me, to be counted against him. The Emperor is a

man of marvellous intelligence.” “Yes, I’ve met him at dinner

twice, once at my aunt Sagan’s and once at my aunt Radziwill’s,

and I must say I found him quite unusual. I didn’t find him at all

simple! But there is something amusing about him, something

‘forced’,” she detached the word, “like a green carnation, that is

to say a thing that surprises me and does not please me

enormously, a thing it is surprising that anyone should have been

able to create but which I feel would have been just as well

uncreated. I trust I’m not shocking you.” “The Emperor is a man of

astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately

fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is

practically infallible, if a thing is good he spots it at once and

takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no

more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.” Everyone smiled.

“You set my mind at rest,” said the Duchess. “I should be inclined

to compare the Emperor,” went on the Prince, who, not knowing how

to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it

were spelt “arkeologist”), never missed an opportunity of using

it, “to an old archaeologist” (but the Prince said “arsheologist”)

“we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian

antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern sham, if it is not really

old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an

arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old

arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If

his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and

prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if

the Emperor says to me, of a play: ‘Prince, you must see that,

it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not to go to it; and when I

hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at

the first possible opportunity.” “Norpois is in favour of an

Anglo-French understanding, isn’t he?” said M. de Guermantes.

“What use would that be to you?” asked Prince Von, who could not

endure the English, in a tone at once of irritation and cunning.

“The English are so _schtubid_. I know, of course, that it would

not be as soldiers that they would help you. But one can judge

them, all the same, by the stupidity of their Generals. A friend

of mine was talking the other day to Botha, you know, the Boer

leader. He said to my friend: ‘It’s terrible, an army like that. I

rather like the English, as a matter of fact, but just imagine

that I, who am only a peasant, have beaten them in every battle.

And in the last, when I gave way before a force twenty times the

strength of my own, while I myself surrendered, because I had to,

I managed to take two thousand prisoners! That was good enough,

because I was only commanding an army of farmers, but if those

poor fools ever have to stand up against a European army, one

trembles to think what may happen to them!’ Besides, you have only

to see how their King, whom you know as well as I do, passes for a

great man in England.” I barely listened to these stories, stories

of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they

supplied no food for my favourite train of thought; and besides,

even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would

have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to

awaken during those hours in which I dwelt in my skin, my

well-brushed hair, my starched shirt-front, in which, that is to

say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure

of life. “Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme. de

Guermantes, who felt that the German Prince was wanting in tact,

“I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than

people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing

I’ve ever seen in the world.” “But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the

Prince, who was losing his temper and did not see that he was

giving offence, “You must admit that if the Prince of Wales had

been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have

blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands

with him. The Queen is charming, exceedingly sweet and limited.

But after all there is something shocking about a royal couple who

are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish

financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and

create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of

Bulgaria....” “He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess. “He’s a

clever fellow.” “He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good

fellow on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends

with, it’s the Emperor’s dearest wish, but he insists on its

coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand

clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you

would be invincible. It would be more practical than the

Anglo-French friendship M. de Norpois preaches.” “You know him, of

course,” the Duchess said, turning to me, so as not to leave me

out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said

that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand,

thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme. de

Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only

with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he

had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do

what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that

he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have

said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the

deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then

have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on

the other hand, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de

Norpois did not like me. “You are quite mistaken,” replied the

Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if

people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he

certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we have never heard

Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke to us of you. And

only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the

Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t

accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to

your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.” M. de

Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to

do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a

mocking and indeed somewhat malicious spirit, those people who had

let themselves be taken in as I had by his outward appearance of a

Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak-tree, by the sounds,

easily modulated to pity, that emerged from his somewhat too

tuneful lips, believed in a deliberate betrayal when they learned

of a slander uttered at their expense by a man who had always

seemed to put his whole heart into his speech. These slanders were

frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent him from

feeling attractions, from praising the people he liked and taking

pleasure in shewing that he could be of use to them. “Not that I’m

in the least surprised at his appreciating you,” said Mme. de

Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can quite understand,”

she added, for the benefit of the rest of the party, making

allusion to a purpose of marriage of which I had heard nothing,

“that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old

mistress, may not seem of very much use to him as a young wife.

Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she has ceased

for years now to serve any practical purpose, she is more wrapped

up in her devotions than anything else. Boaz-Norpois can say, in

the words of Victor Hugo:

Voilà longtemps que celle avec qui j’ai dormi,

O Seigneur, a quitté ma couche pour la vôtre!

Really, my poor aunt is like the artists of the advanced guard who have

stood out all their lives against the Academy, and in the end start a

little academy of their own, or the unfrocked priests who get up a

little private religion. They should either keep their frocks, or not

stick to their profession. And who knows,” went on the Duchess with a

meditative air, “it may be in preparation for her widowhood, there’s

nothing sadder than the weeds one’s not entitled to wear.” “Ah! If Mme.

de Villeparisis were to become Mme. de Norpois, I really believe our

cousin Gilbert would take to his bed,” said General de Monserfeuil. “The

Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he is, really, very much

taken up with questions of birth and manners,” said the Princesse de

Parme. “I went down to spend a few days with them in the country, when

the Princess, unfortunately, was ill in bed. I was accompanied by

Petite.” (This was a nickname that was given to Mme. d’Hunolstein

because she was enormously stout.) “The Prince came to meet me at the

foot of the steps, and pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the

first floor, to the door into the reception rooms, and then, stepping

back to make way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how d’ye do, Mme. d’Hunolsteins?’

(he always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have

caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to shew her that he had

not come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.” “That doesn’t

surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,” said the Duke, who

regarded himself as extremely modern, more contemptuous than anyone in

the world of mere birth, and in fact a Republican, “that I have not many

ideas in common with my cousin. Ma’am can imagine that we are just about

as much agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if

my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I should be of Gilbert’s

opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise, and then to make a

marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to make a cat

laugh; what more can I say?” These last words, which the Duke uttered as

a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here quite superfluous. But he

felt a perpetual need to be saying them which made him postpone them to

the end of a speech if he had found no place for them elsewhere. They

were for him, among other things, almost a question of prosody.

“Remember, though,” he added, “that the Norpois are gallant gentlemen

with a good place, of a good stock.”

“Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke fun at

Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he does,” said

Mme. de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a family, no less than

that of a wine, consisted in its age. But, less frank than her cousin

and more subtle than her husband, she made a point of never in her

conversation playing false to the Guermantes spirit, and despised rank

in her speech while ready to honour it by her actions. “But aren’t you

some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember

that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.” “Not in that way at all, she

belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, my grandmother

came from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard

Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of

wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t

intermarried since Louix XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather

distant.” “I say, that’s interesting; I never knew that,” said the

General. “However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe,

was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been

married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely

Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour

d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great

position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s

descended from Saintrailles, and as we ourselves are in a direct line of

descent....”

There was at Combray a Rue de Saintrailles, to which I had never given

another thought. It led from the Rue de la Bretonnerie to the Rue de

l’Oiseau. And as Saintrailles, the companion of Joan of Arc, had, by

marrying a Guermantes, brought into that family the County of Combray,

his arms were quartered with those of Guermantes at the foot of one of

the windows in Saint-Hilaire. I saw again a vision of dark sandstone

steps, while a modulation of sound brought to my ears that name,

Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago,

so different from that in which it was used to signify the genial hosts

with whom I was dining this evening. If the name, Duchesse de

Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was so not merely in

history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne

it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen,

in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women

superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had

acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as

much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our

memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful.

We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as

well as the living. We are obliged to build over what has gone before

and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name

Saintrailles had just wrought in my mind. I felt that it would be

useless to explain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had

lied by implication in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me:

“You don’t know our old wheedler?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that

I did know him, and it was only from good breeding that he did not press

the question.

Mme. de Guermantes drew me out of my meditation. “Really, I find all

that sort of thing too deadly. Listen, it’s not always as boring as this

at my parties. I hope that you will soon come and dine again as a

compensation, with no pedigrees next time,” she murmured, incapable both

of appreciating the kind of charm which I could find in her house and of

having sufficient humility to be content to appeal to me only as a

herbarium, filled with plants of another day.

What Mme. de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my expectations was

on the contrary what in the end—for the Duke and the General went on to

discuss pedigrees now without stopping—saved my evening from becoming a

complete disappointment. How could I have felt otherwise until now? Each

of my fellow-guests at dinner, smothering the mysterious name under

which I had only at a distance known and dreamed of them with a body and

with a mind similar or inferior to those of all the people I knew, had

given me the impression of flat vulgarity which the view on entering the

Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of

_Hamlet_. No doubt those geographical regions and that ancient past

which put forest glades and gothic belfries into their names had in a

certain measure formed their faces, their intellects and their

prejudices, but survived in them only as does the cause in the effect,

that is to say as a thing possible for the brain to extract but in no

way perceptible to the imagination.

And these old-time prejudices restored in a flash to the friends of M.

and Mme. de Guermantes their vanished poetry. Assuredly, the notions in

the possession of nobles, which make of them the scholars, the

etymologists of the language not of words but of names (and this,

moreover, relatively only to the ignorant mass of the middle classes,

for if at the same level of mediocrity a devout Catholic would be better

able to stand questioning upon the details of the Liturgy than a

free-thinker, on the other hand an anti-clerical archaeologist can often

give points to his parish priest on everything connected even with the

latter’s own church), those notions, if we are going to confine

ourselves to the truth, that is to say to the spirit, had not for these

great gentlemen the charm that they would have had for a man of simple

birth. They knew perhaps better than myself that the Duchesse de Guise

was Princess of Cleves, of Orleans and of Porcien, and all the rest, but

they had known, long before they knew all these names, the face of the

Duchesse de Guise which thenceforward the names reflected back to them.

I had begun with the fairy—were she fated shortly to perish; they with

the woman.

In middle-class families one sometimes sees jealousies spring up if the

younger sister is married before the elder. So the aristocratic world,

Courvoisiers especially but Guermantes also, reduced its ennobled

greatness to simple domestic superiorities, by a system of child’s-play

which I had met originally (and this gave it for me its sole charm) in

books. Is it not just as though Tallemant des Réaux were speaking of the

Guermantes, and not of the Rohans, when he relates with evident

satisfaction how M. de Guéménée cried to his brother: “You can come in

here; this is not the Louvre!” and said of the Chevalier de Rohan

(because he was a natural son of the Duc de Clermont): “At any rate,

he’s a Prince.” The only thing that distressed me in all this talk was

to find that the absurd stories which were being circulated about the

charming Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg found as much credence in

this drawing-room as they had among Saint-Loup’s friends. Plainly it was

an epidemic that would not last longer than perhaps a year or two but

had meanwhile infected everyone. People repeated the same old stories,

or enriched them with others equally untrue. I gathered that the

Princesse de Luxembourg herself, while apparently defending her nephew,

supplied weapons for the assault. “You are wrong to stand up for him,”

M. de Guermantes told me, as Saint-Loup had told me before. “Why,

without taking into consideration the opinion of our family, who are

unanimous about him, you have only to talk to his servants, and they,

after all, are the people who know him best. M. de Luxembourg gave his

little negro page to his nephew. The negro came back in tears: ‘Grand

Duke beaten me; me no bad boy; Grand Duke naughty man,’ it’s really too

much. And I can speak with some knowledge, he’s Oriane’s cousin.” I

cannot, by the way, say how many times in the course of this evening I

heard the word “cousin” used. On the one hand, M. de Guermantes, almost

at every name that was mentioned, exclaimed: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin!”

with the sudden joy of a man who, lost in a forest, reads at the ends of

a pair of arrows pointing in opposite directions on a metal plate, and

followed by quite a low number of kilometres, the words: “Belvédère

Casimir-Perier” and “Croix du Grand-Veneur”, and gathers from them that

he is on the right road. On the other hand the word cousin was employed

in a wholly different connexion (which was here the exception to the

prevailing rule) by the Turkish Ambassadress, who had come in after

dinner. Devoured by social ambition and endowed with a real power of

assimilating knowledge, she would pick up with equal facility the story

of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand or the details of sexual perversion

among birds. It would have been impossible to “stump” her on any of the

most recent German publications, whether they dealt with political

economy, mental aberrations, the various forms of onanism, or the

philosophy of Epicurus. She was, incidentally, a dangerous person to

listen to, for, perpetually in error, she would point out to you as

being of the loosest morals women of irreproachable virtue, would put

you on your guard against a gentleman whose intentions were perfectly

honourable, and would tell you anecdotes of the sort that seem always to

have come out of a book, not so much because they are serious as because

they are so wildly improbable.

She was at this period little received in society. She had been going

for some weeks now to the houses of women of real social brilliance,

such as the Duchesse de Guermantes, but as a general rule had confined

herself, of necessity, in the noblest families, to obscure scions whom

the Guermantes had ceased to know. She hoped to give herself a really

fashionable air by quoting the most historic names of the little-known

people who were her friends. At once M. de Guermantes, thinking that she

was referring to people who frequently dined at his table, quivered with

joy at finding himself once more in sight of a landmark and shouted the

rallying-cry: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin! I know him as well as I know my

own name. He lives in the Rue Vaneau. His mother was Mlle. d’Uzès.” The

Ambassadress was obliged to admit that her specimen had been drawn from

smaller game. She tried to connect her friends with those of M. de

Guermantes by cutting across his track: “I know quite well who’ you

mean. No, it’s not those ones, they’re cousins.” But this cross-current

launched by the unfortunate Ambassadress ran but a little way. For M. de

Guermantes, losing interest, answered: “Oh, then I don’t know who’

you’re talking about.” The Ambassadress offered no reply, for if she

never knew anyone nearer than the “cousins” of those whom she ought to

have known in person, very often these “cousins” were not even related

at all. Then, from the lips of M. de Guermantes, would flow a fresh wave

of “But she’s Oriane’s cousin!” words which seemed to have for the Duke

the same practical value as certain epithets, convenient to the Roman

poets because they provided them with dactyls or spondees for their

hexameters. At least the explosion of: “But she’s Oriane’s cousin!”

appeared to me quite natural when applied to the Princesse de

Guermantes, who was indeed very closely related to the Duchess. The

Ambassadress did not seem to care for this Princess. She said to me in

an undertone: “She is stupid. No, she is not so beautiful as all that.

That claim is usurped. Anyhow,” she went on, with an air at once

reflective, rejecting and decided, “I find her most uncongenial.” But

often the cousinship extended a great deal farther than this, Mme. de

Guermantes making it a point of honour to address as “Aunt” ladies with

whom it would have been impossible to find her an ancestress in common

without going back at least to Louis XV; just as, whenever the

“hardness” of the times brought it about that a multimillionairess

married a prince whose great-great-grandfather had espoused, as had

Oriane’s also, a daughter of Louvois, one of the chief joys of the fair

American was to be able, after a first visit to the Hôtel de Guermantes,

where she was, incidentally, more or less coldly received and hotly

cross-examined, to say “Aunt” to Mme. de Guermantes, who allowed her to

do so with a maternal smile. But little did it concern me what birth

meant for M. de Guermantes and M. de Monserfeuil, in the conversations

which they held on the subject I sought only for a poetic pleasure.

Without being conscious of it themselves, they procured me this pleasure

as might a couple of labourers or sailors speaking of the soil or the

tides, realities too little detached from their own lives for them to be

capable of enjoying the beauty which personally I proceeded to extract

from them.

Sometimes rather than of a race it was of a particular fact, of a date

that a name reminded me. Hearing M. de Guermantes recall that M. de

Bréauté’s mother had been a Choiseul and his grandmother a Lucinge, I

fancied I could see beneath the commonplace shirt with its plain pearl

studs, bleeding still in two globes of crystal, those august relics, the

hearts of Mme. de Praslin and of the Duc de Berri. Others were more

voluptuous; the fine and flowing hair of Mme. de Tallien or Mme. de

Sabran.

Better informed than his wife as to what their ancestors had been, M. de

Guermantes found himself the possessor of memories which gave to his

conversation a fine air of an ancient mansion stripped of its real

treasures but still full of pictures, authentic, indifferent and

majestic, which taken as a whole look remarkably well. The Prince

d’Agrigente having asked why Prince Von had said, in speaking of the Duc

d’Aumale, “my uncle,” M. de Guermantes had replied: “Because his

mother’s brother, the Duke of Wurtemberg, married a daughter of

Louis-Philippe.” At once I was lost in contemplation of a casket, such

as Carpaccio or Memling used to paint, from its first panel in which the

Princess, at the wedding festivities of her brother the Duc d’Orléans,

appeared wearing a plain garden dress to indicate her resentment at

having seen the return, empty-handed, of the ambassadors who had been

sent to sue on her behalf for the hand of the Prince of Syracuse, down

to the last, in which she had just given birth to a son, the Duke of

Wurtemberg (the first cousin of the Prince whom I had met at dinner), in

that castle called Fantaisie, one of those places which are as

aristocratic as certain families. They, moreover, outlasting a single

generation of men, see attached to themselves more than one historical

personage. In this one, especially, survive side by side memories of the

Margravine of Bayreuth, of this other somewhat fantastic Princess (the

Duc d’Orléans’s sister), to whom it was said that the name of her

husband’s castle made a distinct appeal, of the King of Bavaria, and

finally of Prince Von, to whom it was simply his own postal address, at

which he had just asked the Duc de Guermantes to write to him, for he

had succeeded to it, and let it only during the Wagner festivals, to the

Prince de Polignac, another delightful “fantasist”. When M. de

Guermantes, to explain how he was related to Mme. d’Arpajon, was

obliged, going so far and so simply, to climb the chain formed by the

joined hands of three or five ancestresses back to Marie-Louise or

Colbert, it was still the same thing in each case; a great historical

event appeared only in passing, masked, unnatural, reduced, in the name

of a property, in the Christian names of a woman, so selected because

she was the grand-daughter of Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie,

considered no longer as King and Queen of the French, but merely in the

extent to which in their capacity as grand-parents they bequeathed a

heritage. (We see for other reasons in a gazetteer of the works of

Balzac, where the most illustrious personages figure only according to

their connexion with the _Comédie Humaine_, Napoleon occupy a space

considerably less than that allotted to Rastignac, and occupy that space

solely because he once spoke to the young ladies of Cinq-Cygne.)

Similarly the aristocracy, in its heavy structure, pierced with rare

windows, admitting a scanty daylight, shewing the same incapacity to

soar but also the same massive and blind force as the architecture of

the romanesque age, embodies all our history, immures it, beetles over

it.

Thus the empty spaces of my memory were covered by degrees with names

which in taking order, in composing themselves with relation to one

another, in linking themselves to one another by an increasingly

numerous connexion, resembled those finished works of art in which there

is not one touch that is isolated, in which every part in turn receives

from the rest a justification which it confers on them.

M. de Luxembourg’s name having come up again in the course of the

conversation, the Turkish Ambassadress told us how, the young bride’s

grandfather (he who had made that immense fortune out of flour and

cereals) having invited M. de Luxembourg to luncheon, the latter had

written to decline, putting on the envelope: “M. So-and-so, Miller,” to

which the grandfather had replied: “I am all the more disappointed that

you were not able to come, my dear friend, because I should have been

able to enjoy your society quite intimately, for we were quite an

intimate party, just ourselves, and there would have been only the

Miller, his Son, and you.” This story was not merely utterly distasteful

to me, who knew the impossibility of my dear M. de Nassau’s writing to

the grandfather of his wife (whose fortune, moreover, he was expecting

to inherit) and addressing him as “Miller”; but furthermore its

stupidity became glaring from the start, the word “Miller” having

obviously been dragged in only to lead up to the title of La Fontaine’s

fable. But there is in the Faubourg Saint-Germain a silliness so great,

when it is aggravated by malice, that they all decided that the letter

had been sent and that the grandfather, as to whom at once everyone

confidently declared that he was a remarkable man, had shewn a prettier

wit than his grandson-in-law. The Duc de Châtellerault tried to take

advantage of this story to tell the one that I had heard in the café:

“Everyone had to lie down!”—but scarcely had he begun, or reported M. de

Luxembourg’s pretension that in his wife’s presence M. de Guermantes

ought to stand up, when the Duchess stopped him with the protest: “No,

he is very absurd, but not as bad as that.” I was privately convinced

that all these stories at the expense of M. de Luxembourg were equally

untrue, and that whenever I found myself face to face with any of the

reputed actors or spectators I should hear the same contradiction. I

asked myself, nevertheless, whether the contradiction just uttered by

Mme. de Guermantes had been inspired by regard for truth or by

self-esteem. In either event the latter quality succumbed to malice, for

she went on, with a laugh: “Not that I haven’t had my little fling at

him too, for he invited me to luncheon, wishing to make me know the

Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, which is how he has the good taste to

describe his wife when he’s writing to his aunt. I sent a reply

expressing my regret, and adding: As for the ‘Grand Duchess of

Luxembourg’ (in inverted commas), tell her that if she is coming to see

me I am at home every Thursday after five. I have even had another

little fling. Happening to be at Luxembourg, I telephoned, asking him to

ring me up. His Highness was going to luncheon, had just risen from

luncheon, two hours went by and nothing happened; so then I employed

another method: ‘Will you tell the Comte de Nassau to come and speak to

me?’ Cut to the quick, he was at the instrument that very minute.”

Everyone laughed at the Duchess’s story, and at other analogous, that is

to say (I am convinced of it) equally untrue stories, for a man more

intelligent, better, more refined, in a word more exquisite than this

Luxembourg-Nassau I have never met. The sequel will shew that it was I

who was in the right. I must admit that, in the midst of her onslaught,

Mme. de Guermantes had still a kind word for him. “He was not always

like that,” she informed us. “Before he went off his head, like the man

in the story-book who thinks he’s become king, he was no fool, and

indeed in the early days of his engagement he used to speak of it in

really quite a nice way, as something he could never have dreamed of:

‘It’s just like a fairy-tale; I shall have to make my entry into

Luxembourg in a fairy coach,’ he said to his uncle d’Ornessan, who

answered—for you know it’s not a very big place, Luxembourg: ‘A fairy

coach! I’m afraid, my dear fellow, you’ld never get it in. I should

suggest that you take a goat carriage.’ Not only did this not annoy

Nassau, but he was the first to tell us the story, and to laugh at it.”

“Ornessan is a witty fellow, and he’s every reason to be; his mother was

a Montjeu. He’s in a very bad way now, poor Ornessan.” This name had the

magic virtue of interrupting the flow of stale witticisms which

otherwise would have gone on for ever. In fact, M. de Guermantes had to

explain that M. d’Ornessan’s great-grandmother had been the sister of

Marie de Castille Montjeu, the wife of Timoléon de Lorraine, and

consequently Oriane’s aunt, with the result that the conversation

drifted back to genealogies, while the idiot of a Turkish Ambassadress

breathed in my ear: “You appear to be very much in the Duke’s good

books; have a care!” and, on my demanding an explanation: “I mean to

say, you understand what I mean, he’s a man to whom one could safely

entrust one’s daughter, but not one’s son.” Now if ever, on the

contrary, a man existed who was passionately and exclusively a lover of

women, it was certainly the Duc de Guermantes. The state of error, the

falsehood fatuously believed to be the truth, were for the Ambassadress

like a vital element out of which she could not move. “His brother Mémé,

who is, as it happens, for other reasons altogether” (he did not bow to

her) “profoundly uncongenial to me, is genuinely distressed by the

Duke’s morals. So is their aunt Villeparisis. Ah, now, her I adore!

There is a saint of a woman for you, the true type of the great ladies

of the past. It’s not only her actual virtue that’s so wonderful but her

restraint. She still says ‘Monsieur’ to the Ambassador Norpois whom she

sees every day, and who, by the way, left an excellent impression behind

him in Turkey.”

I did not even reply to the Ambassadress, in order to listen to the

genealogies. They were not all of them important. There came up indeed

in the course of the conversation one of those unexpected alliances,

which, M. de Guermantes informed me, was a misalliance, but not without

charm, for, uniting under the July Monarchy the Duc de Guermantes and

the Duc de Fezensac with the two irresistible daughters of an eminent

navigator, it gave to the two Duchesses the exciting novelty of a grace

exotically middle-class, “Louisphilippically” Indian. Or else, under

Louis XIV, a Norpois had married the daughter of the Duc de Mortemart,

whose illustrious title struck, in the remoteness of that epoch, the

name—which I had found colourless and might have supposed to be

modern—of Norpois, carving deeply upon it the beauty of an old medal.

And in these cases, moreover, it was not only the less well-known name

that benefited by the association; the other, grown commonplace by the

fact of its lustre, struck me more forcibly in this novel and more

obscure aspect, just as among the portraits painted by a brilliant

colourist the most striking is sometimes one that is all in black. The

sudden mobility with which all these names seemed to me to have been

endowed, as they sprang to take their places by the side of others from

which I should have supposed them to be remote, was due not to my

ignorance alone; the country-dances which they were performing in my

mind they had carried out no less spontaneously at those epochs in which

a title, being always attached to a piece of land, used to follow it

from one family to another, so much so that, for example, in the fine

feudal structure that is the title of Duc de Nemours or Duc de

Chevreuse, I was able to discover successively hidden, as in the

hospitable abode of a hermit-crab, a Guise, a Prince of Savoy, an

Orléans, a Luynes. Sometimes several remained in competition for a

single shell: for the Principality of Orange the Royal House of the

Netherlands and MM. de Mailly-Nesle, for the Duchy of Brabant the Baron

de Charlus and the Royal House of Belgium, various others for the titles

of Prince of Naples, Duke of Parma, Duke of Reggio. Sometimes it was the

other way; the shell had been so long uninhabited by proprietors long

since dead that it had never occurred to me that this or that name of a

country house could have been, at an epoch which after all was

comparatively recent, the name of a family. And so, when M. de

Guermantes replied to a question put to him by M. de Monserfeuil: “No,

my cousin was a fanatical Royalist; she was the daughter of the Marquis

de Féterne, who played a certain part in the Chouan rising,” on seeing

this name Féterne, which had been for me, since my stay at Balbec, the

name of a country house, become, what I had never dreamed that it could

possibly be, a family name, I felt the same astonishment as in reading a

fairy-tale, where turrets and a terrace come to life and turn into men

and women. In this sense of the words, we may say that history, even

mere family history, gives life to the old stones of a house. There have

been in Parisian society men who played as considerable a part in it,

who were more sought after for their distinction or for their wit, who

were equally well born as the Duc de Guermantes or the Duc de La

Trémoille. They have now fallen into oblivion because, as they left no

descendants, their name which we no longer hear sounds like a name

unknown; at most, the name of a thing beneath which we never think to

discover the name of any person, it survives in some country house, some

remote village. The day is not distant when the traveller who, in the

heart of Burgundy, stops in the little village of Charlus to look at its

church, if he has not sufficient industry or is in too great a hurry to

examine its tombstones, will go away ignorant that this name, Charlus,

was that of a man who ranked with the highest in the land. This thought

reminded me that it was time to go, and that while I was listening to M.

de Guermantes talking pedigrees, the hour was approaching at which I had

promised to call upon his brother. “Who knows,” I continued to muse,

“whether one day Guermantes itself may not appear nothing more than a

place-name, save to the archaeologists who, stopping by chance at

Combray and standing beneath the window of Gilbert the Bad, have the

patience to listen to the account given them by Théodore’s successor or

to read the Curé’s guide?” But so long as a great name is not extinct it

keeps in the full light of day those men and women who bear it; and

there can be no doubt that, to a certain extent, the interest which the

illustriousness of these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact

that one can, starting from to-day, follow their ascending course, step

by step, to a point far beyond the fourteenth century, recover the

diaries and correspondence of all the forebears of M. de Charlus, of the

Prince d’Agrigente, of the Princesse de Parme, in a past in which an

impenetrable night would cloak the origins of a middle-class family, and

in which we make out, in the luminous backward projection of a name, the

origin and persistence of certain nervous characteristics, certain

vices, the disorders of one or another Guermantes. Almost identical

pathologically with their namesakes of the present day, they excite from

century to century the startled interest of their correspondents,

whether these be anterior to the Princess Palatine and Mme. de

Motteville, or subsequent to the Prince de Ligne.

However, my historical curiosity was faint in comparison with my

aesthetic pleasure. The names cited had the effect of disincarnating the

Duchess’s guests, whom, for all they might call themselves Prince

d’Agrigente or de Cystira, their mask of flesh and of a common

intelligence or want of intelligence had transformed into ordinary

mortals, so much so that I had made my landing on the ducal door-mat not

as upon the threshold (as I had supposed) but as at the farthest

confines of the enchanted world of names. The Prince d’Agrigente

himself, as soon as I heard that his mother had been a Damas, a

grand-daughter of the Duke of Modena, was delivered, as from an unstable

chemical alloy, from the face and speech that prevented one from

recognising him, and went to form with Damas and Modena, which

themselves were only titles, a combination infinitely more seductive.

Each name displaced by the attractions of another, with which I had

never suspected it of having any affinity, left the unalterable position

which it had occupied in my brain, where familiarity had dulled it, and,

speeding to join the Mortemarts, the Stuarts or the Bourbons, traced

with them branches of the most graceful design and an ever-changing

colour. The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful

names—extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled—with which I

learned only now that it was connected, a new sense and purpose, purely

poetical. At the most, at the extremity of each spray that burgeoned

from the exalted stem, I could see it flower in some face of a wise king

or illustrious princess, like the sire of Henri IV or the Duchesse de

Longueville. But as these faces, different in this respect from those of

the party around me, were not discoloured for me by any trace of

physical experience or fashionable mediocrity, they remained, in their

handsome outlines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names

which at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached themselves

from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed with no foreign

or opaque matter the buds—pellucid, alternate, many-coloured—which

(like, in the old Jesse windows, the ancestors of Jesus) blossomed on

either side of the tree of glass.

Already I had made several attempts to slip away, on account, more than

for any other reason, of the triviality which my presence at it imparted

to the gathering, albeit it was one of those which I had long imagined

as being so beautiful—as it would doubtless have been had there been no

inconvenient witness present. At least my departure would permit the

other guests, once the profane intruder was no longer among them, to

constitute themselves at length into a secret conclave. They would be

free to celebrate the mysteries for the celebration of which they had

met together, for it could obviously not have been to talk of Franz Hals

or of avarice, and to talk of them in the same way as people talk in

middle-class society. They uttered nothing but trivialities, doubtless

because I was in the room, and I felt with some compunction, on seeing

all these pretty women kept apart, that I was preventing them by my

presence from carrying on, in the most precious of its drawing-rooms,

the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But this departure

which I was trying at every moment to effect, M. and Mme. de Guermantes

carried the spirit of self-sacrifice so far as to postpone, by keeping

me in the room. A more curious thing still, several of the ladies who

had come hurrying, delighted, beautifully dressed, with constellations

of jewels, to be present at a party which, through my fault only,

differed in no essential point from those that are given elsewhere than

in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, any more than one feels oneself at Balbec

to be in a town that differs from what one’s eyes are accustomed to

see—several of these ladies retired not at all disappointed, as they had

every reason to be, but thanking Mme. de Guermantes most effusively for

the delightful evening which they had spent, as though on the other

days, those on which I was not present, nothing more used to occur.

Was it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all these people

dressed themselves up and refused to allow the penetration of

middle-class women into their so exclusive drawing-rooms—for dinners

such as this? The same, had I been absent? The suspicion flashed across

my mind for a moment, but it was too absurd. Plain commonsense enabled

me to brush it aside. And then, if I had adopted it, what would have

been left of the name Guermantes, already so degraded since Combray?

It struck me that these flower-maidens were, to a strange extent, either

ready to be pleased with another person or anxious to make that person

pleased with them, for more than one of them, to whom I had not uttered,

during the whole course of the evening, more than two or three casual

remarks, the stupidity of which had left me blushing, made a point,

before leaving the drawing-room, of coming to tell me, fastening on me

her fine caressing eyes, straightening as she spoke the garland of

orchids that followed the curve of her bosom, what an intense pleasure

it had been to her to make my acquaintance, and to speak to me—a veiled

allusion to an invitation to dinner—of her desire to “arrange something”

after she had “fixed a day” with Mme. de Guermantes. None of these

flower ladies left the room before the Princesse de Parme. The presence

of that lady—one must never depart before Royalty—was one of the two

reasons, neither of which I had guessed, for which the Duchess had

insisted so strongly on my remaining. As soon as Mme. de Parme had

risen, it was like a deliverance. Each of the ladies having made a

genuflexion before the Princess, who raised her up from the ground, they

received from her, in a kiss, and like a benediction which they had

craved kneeling, the permission to ask for their cloaks and carriages.

With the result that there followed, at the front door, a sort of

stentorian recital of great names from the History of France. The

Princesse de Parme had forbidden Mme. de Guermantes to accompany her

downstairs to the hall for fear of her catching cold, and the Duke had

added: “There, Oriane, since Ma’am gives you leave, remember what the

doctor told you.”

“I am sure the Princesse de Parme was _most pleased_ to take dinner with

you.” I knew the formula. The Duke had come the whole way across the

drawing-room in order to utter it before me with an obliging, concerned

air, as though he were handing me a diploma or offering me a plateful of

biscuits. And I guessed from the pleasure which he appeared to be

feeling as he spoke, and which brought so sweet an expression

momentarily into his face that the effort which this represented for him

was of the kind which he would continue to make to the very end of his

life, like one of those honorific and easy posts which, even when

paralytic, one is still allowed to retain.

Just as I was about to leave, the lady in waiting reappeared in the

drawing-room, having forgotten to take away some wonderful carnations,

sent up from Guermantes, which the Duchess had presented to Mme. de

Parme. The lady in waiting was somewhat flushed, one felt that she had

just been receiving a scolding, for the Princess, so kind to everyone

else, could not contain her impatience at the stupidity of her

attendant. And so the latter picked up the flowers and ran quickly, but

to preserve her air of ease and independence flung at me as she passed:

“The Princess says I’m keeping her waiting; she wants to be gone, and to

have the carnations as well. Good lord! I’m not a little bird, I can’t

be in two places at once.”

Alas! the rule of not leaving before Royalty was not the only one. I

could not depart at once, for there was another: this was that the

famous lavishness, unknown to the Courvoisiers, with which the

Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, excelled in

entertaining their friends, was not only a material lavishness, of the

kind that I had often experienced with Robert de Saint-Loup, but also a

lavish display of charming words, of courteous actions, a whole system

of verbal elegance supplied from a positive treasure-house within. But

as this last, in the inactivity of fashionable existence, must remain

unemployed, it expanded at times, sought an outlet in a sort of fugitive

effusion, all the more intense, which might, in Mme. de Guermantes, have

led one to suppose a genuine affection for oneself. Which she did, for

that matter, feel at the moment when she let it overflow, for she found

then in the society of the friend, man or woman, with whom she happened

to be a sort of intoxication, in no way sensual, similar to that which

music produces in certain people; she would suddenly detach a flower

from her bodice, or a medallion, and present it to someone with whom she

would have liked to prolong the evening, with a melancholy feeling the

while that such a prolongation could have led to nothing but idle talk,

into which nothing could have passed of the nervous pleasure, the

fleeting emotion, similar to the first warm days of spring in the

impression they leave behind them of exhaustion and regret. As for the

friend, it did not do for him to put too implicit a faith in the

promises, more exhilarating than anything he had ever heard, tendered by

these women who, because they feel with so much more force the sweetness

of a moment, make of it, with a delicacy, a nobility of which normally

constituted creatures are incapable, a compelling masterpiece of grace

and goodness, and have no longer anything of themselves left to give

when the next moment has arrived. Their affection does not outlive the

exaltation that has dictated it; and the subtlety of mind which had then

led them to divine all the things that you wished to hear and to say

them to you will permit them just as easily, a few days later, to seize

hold of your absurdities and use them to entertain another of their

visitors with whom they will then be in the act of enjoying one of those

“musical moments” which are so brief.

In the hall where I asked a footman for my snowboots which I had brought

as a precaution against the snow, several flakes of which had already

fallen, to be converted rapidly into slush, not having realised that

they were hardly fashionable, I felt, at the contemptuous smile on all

sides, a shame which rose to its highest pitch when I saw that Mme. de

Parme had not gone and was watching me put on my American “rubbers”. The

Princess came towards me. “Oh! What a good idea,” she exclaimed, “it’s

so practical! There’s a sensible man for you. Madame, we shall have to

get a pair of those,” she went on to her lady in waiting, while the

mockery of the footmen turned to respect and the other guests crowded

round me to inquire where I had managed to find these marvels. “With

those on, you will have nothing to fear even if it starts snowing again

and you have a long way to go. You’re independent of the weather,” said

the Princess to me. “Oh! If it comes to that, your Royal Highness can be

reassured,” broke in the lady in waiting with a knowing air, “it will

not snow again.” “What do you know about it, Madame?” came witheringly

from the excellent Princesse de Parme, who alone could succeed in

piercing the thick skin of her lady in waiting. “I can assure your Royal

Highness, it cannot snow again. It is a physical impossibility.” “But

why?” “It cannot snow any more, they have taken the necessary steps to

prevent it, they have put down salt in the streets!” The simple-minded

lady did not observe either the anger of the Princess or the mirth of

the rest of her audience, for instead of remaining silent she said to me

with a genial smile, paying no heed to my repeated denials of any

connexion with Admiral Jurien de la Gravière: “Not that it matters,

after all. This gentleman must have stout sea-legs. What’s bred in the

bone!”

Then, having escorted the Princesse de Parme to her carriage, M. de

Guermantes said to me, taking hold of my greatcoat: “Let me help you

into your skin.” He had ceased even to smile when he employed this

expression, for those that were most vulgar had for that very reason,

because of the Guermantes affection of simplicity, become aristocratic.

An exaltation that sank only into melancholy, because it was artificial,

was what I also, although quite differently from Mme. de Guermantes,

felt once I had finally left her house, in the carriage that was taking

me to that of M. de Charlus. We can at pleasure abandon ourselves to one

or other of two forces, of which one rises in ourselves, emanates from

our deepest impressions, the other comes to us from without. The first

carries with it naturally a joy, the joy that springs from the life of

the creator. The other current, that which endeavours to introduce into

us the movement by which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is

not accompanied by pleasure; but we can add a pleasure to it, by the

shock of reaction, in an intoxication so feigned that it turns swiftly

into boredom, into melancholy, whence the gloomy faces of so many men of

fashion, and all those nervous conditions which may make them end in

suicide. Well, in the carriage which was taking me to M. de Charlus, I

was a prey to this second sort of exaltation, widely different from that

which is given us by a personal impression, such as I had received in

other carriages, once at Combray, in Dr. Percepied’s gig, from which I

had seen painted against the setting sun the spires of Martinville,

another day at Balbec, in Mme. de Villeparisis’s barouche, when I strove

to identify the reminiscence that was suggested to me by an avenue of

trees. But in this third carriage, what I had before my mind’s eye were

those conversations that had seemed to me so tedious at Mme. de

Guermantes’s dinner-table, for example Prince Von’s stories about the

German Emperor, General Botha and the British Army. I had slipped them

into the frame of the internal stereoscope through the lenses of which,

once we are no longer ourselves, once, endowed with the spirit of

society, we no longer wish to receive our life save from other people,

we cast into relief what they have said and done. Like a tipsy man

filled with tender feeling for the waiter who has been serving him, I

marvelled at my good fortune, a good fortune not realised by me, it is

true, at the actual moment, in having dined with a person who knew

William II so well, and had told stories about him that were—upon my

word—really witty. And, as I repeated to myself, with the Prince’s

German accent, the story of General Botha, I laughed out loud, as though

this laugh, like certain kinds of applause which increase one’s inward

admiration, were necessary to the story as a corroboration of its comic

element. Through the magnifying lenses even those of Mme. de

Guermantes’s pronouncements which had struck me as being stupid (as for

example that on the Hals pictures which one ought to see from the top of

a tramway-car) took on a life, a depth that were extraordinary. And I

must say that, even if this exaltation was quick to subside, it was not

altogether unreasonable. Just as there may always come a day when we are

glad to know the person whom we despise more than anyone in the world

because he happens to be connected with a girl with whom we are in love,

to whom he can introduce us, and thus offers us both utility and

gratification, attributes in each of which we should have supposed him

to be entirely lacking, so there is no conversation, any more than there

are personal relations, from which we can be certain that we shall not

one day derive some benefit. What Mme. de Guermantes had said to me

about the pictures which it would be interesting to see, even from a

tramway-car, was untrue, but it contained a germ of truth which was of

value to me later on.

Similarly the lines of Victor Hugo which I had heard her quote were, it

must be admitted, of a period earlier than that in which he became

something more than a new man, in which he brought to light, in the

order of evolution, a literary species till then unknown, endowed with

more complex organs than any then in existence. In these first poems,

Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like

Nature, with supplying food for thought. His “thoughts” he at that time

expressed in the most direct form, almost in the sense in which the Duke

employed the word when, feeling it to be out of date and a nuisance that

the guests at his big parties at Guermantes should, in the visitors’

book, append to their signatures a philosophico-poetical reflexion, he

used to warn novices in an appealing tone: “Your name, my dear fellow,

but no ‘thoughts’, please!” Well, it was these “thoughts” of Victor Hugo

(almost as entirely absent from the _Légende des Siècles_ as “airs”, as

“melodies” are from Wagner’s later manner) that Mme. de Guermantes

admired in the early Hugo. Nor was she altogether wrong. They were

touching, and already round about them, without their form’s having yet

the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide

of words and of richly articulated rhymes put them beyond comparison

with the lines that one might discover in a Corneille, for example,

lines in which a Romanticism that is intermittent, restrained and so all

the more moving, nevertheless has not at all penetrated to the physical

sources of life, modified the unconscious and generalisable organism in

which the idea is latent. And so I had been wrong in confining myself,

hitherto, to the later volumes of Hugo. Of the earlier, of course, it

was only a fractional part that Mme. de Guermantes used to embellish her

conversation. But simply by quoting in this way an isolated line one

multiplies its power of attraction tenfold. The lines that had entered

or returned to my mind during this dinner magnetised in turn, summoned

to themselves with such force the poems in the heart of which they were

normally embedded, that my magnetised hands could not hold out for

longer than forty-eight hours against the force that drew them towards

the volume in which were bound up the _Orientales_ and the _Chants du

Crépuscule_. I cursed Françoise’s footman for having made a present to

his native village of my copy of the _Feuilles d’Automne_, and sent him

off, with not a moment to be lost, to procure me another. I read these

volumes from cover to cover and found peace of mind only when I suddenly

came across, awaiting me in the light in which she had bathed them, the

lines that I had heard Mme. de Guermantes quote. For all these reasons,

conversations with the Duchess resembled the discoveries that we make in

the library of a country house, out of date, incomplete, incapable of

forming a mind, lacking in almost everything that we value, but offering

us now and then some curious scrap of information, for instance the

quotation of a fine passage which we did not know and as to which we are

glad to remember in after years that we owe our knowledge of it to a

stately mansion of the great. We are then, by having found Balzac’s

preface to the _Chartreuse_, or some unpublished letters of Joubert,

tempted to exaggerate the value of the life we led there, the sterile

frivolity of which, for this windfall of a single evening, we forget.

From this point of view, if the fashionable world had been unable, at

the first moment, to provide what my imagination expected, and must

consequently strike me first of all by what it had in common with all

the other worlds rather than by its difference, still it revealed itself

to me by degrees as something quite distinct. Great noblemen are almost

the only people of whom one learns as much as one does of peasants;

their conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land,

houses, as people used to live in them long ago, old customs, everything

of which the world of money is profoundly ignorant. Even supposing that

the aristocrat most moderate in his aspirations has finally overtaken

the period in which he lives, his mother, his uncles, his great-aunts

keep him in touch, when he recalls his childhood, with the conditions of

a life almost unknown to-day. In the death-chamber of a contemporary

corpse Mme. de Guermantes would not have pointed out, but would

immediately have perceived all the lapses from the traditional customs.

She was shocked to see at a funeral women mingling with the men, when

there was a particular ceremony which ought to be celebrated for the

women. As for the pall, the use of which Bloch would doubtless have

believed to be confined to coffins, on account of the pall bearers of

whom one reads in the reports of funerals, M. de Guermantes could

remember the time when, as a child, he had seen it borne at the wedding

of M. de Mailly-Nesle. While Saint-Loup had sold his priceless

“Genealogical Tree”, old portraits of the Bouillons, letters of Louis

XIII, in order to buy Carrières and furniture in the modern style, M.

and Mme. de Guermantes, moved by a sentiment in which the burning love

of art may have played only a minor part, and which left them themselves

more insignificant than before, had kept their marvellous Boule

furniture, which presented a picture attractive in a different way to an

artist. A literary man would, similarly have been enchanted by their

conversation, which would have been for him—for one hungry man has no

need of another to keep him company—a living dictionary of all those

expressions which every day are becoming more and more forgotten:

Saint-Joseph cravats, children dedicated to the Blue, and so forth,

which one finds to-day only among those people who have constituted

themselves the friendly and benevolent custodians of the past. The

pleasure that a writer, more than among other writers, feels among them

is not without danger, for there is a risk of his coming to believe that

the things of the past have a charm in themselves, of his transferring

them bodily into his work, still-born in that case, exhaling a tedium

for which he consoles himself with the reflexion: “It is attractive

because it’s true; that is how people do talk.” These aristocratic

conversations had moreover the charm, with Mme. de Guermantes, of being

couched in excellent French. For this reason they made permissible on

the Duchess’s part her hilarity at the words “viaticum”, “cosmic”,

“pythian”, “pre-eminent”, which Saint-Loup used to employ—as, similarly,

at his Bing furniture.

When all was said, very different in this respect from what I had been

able to feel before the hawthorns, or when I tasted a crumb of

_madeleine_, the stories that I had heard at Mme. de Guermantes’s

remained alien to me. Entering for a moment into me, who was only

physically possessed by them, one would have said that, being of a

social, not an individual nature, they were impatient to escape. I

writhed in my seat in the carriage like the priestess of an oracle. I

looked forward to another dinner-party at which I might myself become a

sort of Prince Von to Mme. de Guermantes, and repeat them. In the mean

time they made my lips quiver as I stammered them to myself, and I tried

in vain to bring back and concentrate a mind that was carried away by a

centrifugal force. And so it was with a feverish impatience not to have

to bear the whole weight of them any longer by myself in a carriage

where, for that matter, I atoned for the lack of conversation by

soliloquising aloud, that I rang the bell at M. de Charlus’s door, and

it was in long monologues with myself, in which I rehearsed everything

that I was going to tell him and gave scarcely a thought to what he

might have to say to me, that I spent the whole of the time during which

I was kept waiting in a drawing-room into which a footman shewed me and

where I was incidentally too much excited to look at what it contained.

I felt so urgent a need that M. de Charlus should listen to the stories

which I was burning to tell him that I was bitterly disappointed to

think that the master of the house was perhaps in bed; and that I might

have to go home to sleep off by myself my drunkenness of words. I had

just noticed, in fact, that I had been twenty-five minutes—that they had

perhaps forgotten about me—in this room of which, despite this long

wait, I could at the most have said that it was very big, greenish in

colour, and contained a large number of portraits. The need to speak

prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in

this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is

tantamount to a description of my internal state. I was preparing to

leave the room to try to get hold of some one, and if I found no one to

make my way back to the hall and have myself let out, when, just as I

had risen from my chair and taken a few steps across the mosaic parquet

of the floor, a manservant came in, with a troubled expression:

“Monsieur le Baron has been engaged all evening, Sir,” he told me.

“There are still several people waiting to see him. I am doing

everything I possibly can to get him to receive you, I have already

telephoned up twice to the secretary.” “No; please don’t bother. I had

an appointment with M. le Baron, but it is very late already, and if he

is busy this evening I can come back another day.” “Oh no, Sir, you must

not go away,” cried the servant. “M. le Baron might be vexed. I will try

again.” I was reminded of the things I had heard about M. de Charlus’s

servants and their devotion to their master. One could not quite say of

him as of the Prince de Conti that he sought to give pleasure as much to

the valet as to the Minister, but he had shewn such skill in making of

the least thing that he asked of them a sort of personal favour that at

night, when, his body-servants assembled round him at a respectful

distance, after running his eye over them he said: “Coignet, the

candlestick!” or “Ducret, the nightshirt!” it was with an envious murmur

that the rest used to withdraw, jealous of him who had been singled out

by his master’s favour. Two of them, indeed, who could not abide one

another, used to try to snatch the favour each from his rival by going

on the most flimsy pretext with a message to the Baron, if he had gone

upstairs earlier than usual, in the hope of being invested for the

evening with the charge of candlestick or nightshirt. If he addressed a

few words directly to one of them on some subject outside the scope of

his duty, still more if in winter, in the garden, knowing that one of

his coachmen had caught cold, he said to him, after ten minutes: “Put

your cap on!” the others would not speak to the fellow again for a

fortnight, in their jealousy of the great distinction that had been

conferred on him. I waited ten minutes more, and then, after requesting

me not to stay too long as M. le Baron was tired and had had to send

away several most important people who had made appointments with him

many days before, they admitted me to his presence. This setting with

which M. de Charlus surrounded himself seemed to me a great deal less

impressive than the simplicity of his brother Guermantes, but already

the door stood open, I could see the Baron, in a Chinese dressing-gown,

with his throat bare, lying upon a sofa. My eye was caught at the same

moment by a tall hat, its nap flashing like a mirror, which had been

left on a chair with a cape, as though the Baron had but recently come

in. The valet withdrew. I supposed that M. de Charlus would rise to

greet me. Without moving a muscle he fixed on me a pair of implacable

eyes. I went towards him, I said good evening; he did not hold out his

hand, made no reply, did not ask me to take a chair. After a moment’s

silence I asked him, as one would ask an ill-mannered doctor, whether it

was necessary for me to remain standing. I said this without any evil

intention, but my words seemed only to intensify the cold fury on M. de

Charlus’s face. I was not aware, as it happened, that at home, in the

country, at the Château de Charlus, he was in the habit, after dinner

(so much did he love to play the king) of sprawling in an armchair in

the smoking-room, letting his guests remain standing round him. He would

ask for a light from one, offer a cigar to another and then, after a few

minutes’ interval, would say: “But Argencourt, why don’t you sit down?

Take a chair, my dear fellow,” and so forth, having made a point of

keeping them standing simply to remind them that it was from himself

that permission came to them to be seated. “Put yourself in the Louis

XIV seat,” he answered me with an imperious air, as though rather to

force me to move away farther from himself than to invite me to be

seated. I took an armchair which was comparatively near. “Ah! so that is

what you call a Louis XIV seat, is it? I can see you have been well

educated,” he cried in derision. I was so much taken aback that I did

not move, either to leave the house, as I ought to have done, or to

change my seat, as he wished. “Sir,” he next said to me, weighing each

of his words, to the more impertinent of which he prefixed a double yoke

of consonants, “the interview which I have condescended to grant you at

the request of a person who desires to be nameless, will mark the final

point in our relations. I shall not conceal from you that I had hoped

for better things! I should perhaps be forcing the sense of the words a

little, which one ought not to do, even with people who are ignorant of

their value, simply out of the respect due to oneself, were I to tell

you that I had felt a certain _attraction_ towards you. I think,

however, that _benevolence_, in its most actively protecting sense,

would exceed neither what I felt nor what I was proposing to display. I

had, immediately on my return to Paris, given you to understand, while

you were still at Balbec, that you could count upon me.” I who

remembered with what a torrent of abuse M. de Charlus had parted from me

at Balbec made an instinctive gesture of contradiction. “What!” he cried

with fury, and indeed his face, convulsed and white, differed as much

from his ordinary face as does the sea when on a morning of storm one

finds instead of its customary smiling surface a thousand serpents

writhing in spray and foam, “do you mean to pretend that you did not

receive my message—almost a declaration—that you were to remember me?

What was there in the way of decoration round the cover of the book that

I sent you?” “Some very pretty twined garlands with tooled ornaments,” I

told him. “Ah!” he replied, with an air of scorn, “these young Frenchmen

know little of the treasures of our land. What would be said of a young

Berliner who had never heard of the _Walküre_? Besides, you must have

eyes to see and see not, since you yourself told me that you had stood

for two hours in front of that particular treasure. I can see that you

know no more about flowers than you do about styles; don’t protest that

you know about styles,” he cried in a shrill scream of rage, “you can’t

even tell me what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a

Directory _chauffeuse_ as a Louis XIV _bergère_. One of these days

you’ll be mistaking Mme. de Villeparisis’s knees for the seat of the

rear, and a fine mess you’ll make of things then. It’s precisely the

same; you didn’t even recognise on the binding of Bergotte’s book the

lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there be any

clearer way of saying to you: ‘Forget me not!’?”