In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (14 page)

Moreover, people who had known the old Swann not merely outside society, as I had, but in society, in that Guermantes set which, with certain concessions to Highnesses and Duchesses, was infinitely exacting in the matter of wit and charm, from which banishment was sternly decreed for men of real eminence whom its members found boring or vulgar,—such people might have been astonished to observe that the old Swann had ceased not only to be discreet when he spoke of his acquaintance, but particular when it came to choosing it. How was it that Mme Bontemps, so common, so ill-natured, failed to exasperate him? How could he possibly describe her as attractive? The memory of the Guermantes set must, one would suppose, have prevented him; in fact it encouraged him. There was certainly among the Guermantes, as compared with the great majority of groups in society, a degree of taste, even refined taste, but also a snobbishness from which there arose the possibility of a momentary interruption in the exercise of that taste. In the case of someone who was not indispensable to their circle, of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, a slightly pompous Republican, or an Academician who talked too much, their taste would be brought to bear heavily against him; Swann would condole with Mme de Guermantes on having had to sit next to such people at dinner at one of the embassies; and they would a thousand times rather have a man of fashion, that is to say a man of the Guermantes kind, good for nothing, but endowed with the wit of the Guermantes, someone who belonged to the same clique. Only, a Grand Duchess, a Princess of the Blood, should she dine often with Mme de Guermantes, would soon find herself enrolled in that clique also, without having any right to be there, without being at all so endowed. But with the naïvety of society people, from the moment they had her in their houses they went out of their way to find her agreeable, since they were unable to say to themselves that it was because she was agreeable that they invited her. Swann, coming to the rescue of Mme de Guermantes, would say to her after the Highness had gone: “After all, she’s not such a bad sort; really, she has quite a sense of humour. I don’t suppose for a moment she has mastered the
Critique of Pure Reason
; still, she’s not unpleasant.” “Oh, I do so entirely agree with you!” the Duchess would reply. “Besides, she was a little shy: you’ll see that she can be charming.” “She is certainly a great deal less boring than Mme X” (the wife of the talkative Academician, who was in fact a remarkable woman) “who quotes twenty volumes at you.” “Oh, but there’s no comparison.” The faculty of saying such things as these, and of saying them sincerely, Swann had acquired from the Duchess, and had never lost. He made use of it now with reference to the people who came to his house. He went out of his way to discern and to admire in them the qualities that every human being will display if we examine him with a prejudice in his favour and not with the distaste of the nice-minded; he extolled the merits of Mme Bontemps as he had once extolled those of the Princesse de Parme, who must have been excluded from the Guermantes set if there had not been privileged terms of admission for certain Highnesses, and if, when they too presented themselves for election, the only consideration had been wit and a certain charm. We have seen already, moreover, that Swann had always an inclination (which he was now putting into practice merely in a more lasting fashion) to exchange his social position for another which, in certain circumstances, might suit him better. It is only people incapable of dissecting what at first sight appears indivisible in their perception who believe that one’s position is an integral part of one’s person. One and the same man, taken at successive points in his life, will be found to breathe, on different rungs of the social ladder, in atmospheres that do not of necessity become more and more refined; whenever, in any period of our existence, we form or re-form associations with a certain circle, and feel cherished and at ease in it, we begin quite naturally to cling to it by putting down human roots.

Where Mme Bontemps was concerned, I believe also that Swann, in speaking of her with so much emphasis, was not sorry to think that my parents would hear that she had been to see his wife. To tell the truth, in our house the names of the people whom Mme Swann was gradually getting to know aroused more curiosity than admiration. At the name of Mme Trombert, my mother exclaimed: “Ah! there’s a new recruit who will bring in others.” And as though she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid, and violent manner in which Mme Swann conquered her new connections and a colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe: “Now that the Tromberts have been subdued, the neighbouring tribes will soon surrender.” If she had passed Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us when she came home: “I saw Mme Swann in all her war-paint; she must have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the Massachutoes, or the Singhalese, or the Tromberts.” And so with all the new people whom I told her that I had seen in that somewhat composite and artificial society, to which they had often been brought with some difficulty and from widely different worlds, Mamma would at once divine their origin, and, speaking of them as of trophies dearly bought, would say: “Brought back from the expedition against the so-and-so!”

As for Mme Cottard, my father was astonished that Mme Swann could see anything to be gained from inviting so utterly undistinguished a woman to her house, and said: “In spite of the Professor’s position, I must say that I cannot understand it.” Mamma, on the other hand, understood very well; she knew that a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. For this, she requires an eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world (as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will then, so it is hoped, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad the tidings, the latent germ of envy and of wonder. Mme Cottard, who might have been created on purpose to fulfil this role, belonged to that special category in a visiting list which Mamma (who inherited certain facets of her father’s turn of mind) used to call “Go tell the Spartans” people. Besides—apart from another reason which did not come to our knowledge until many years later—Mme Swann, in inviting this good-natured, reserved and modest friend to her “at homes,” had no need to fear lest she might be introducing into her drawing-room a traitor or a rival. She knew what a vast number of bourgeois calyxes that busy worker, armed with her plume and card-case, could visit in a single afternoon. She knew her power of pollination, and, basing her calculations upon the law of probability, was justified in thinking that almost certainly some intimate of the Verdurins would be bound to hear, within two or three days, how the Governor of Paris had left cards upon her, or that M. Verdurin himself would be told how M. Le Hault de Pressagny, the President of the Horse Show, had taken them, Swann and herself, to the King Theodosius gala; she imagined the Verdurins to be informed of these two events, both so flattering to herself, and of these alone, because the particular manifestations in which we envisage and pursue fame are but few in number, through the deficiency of our own minds, which are incapable of imagining at one and the same time all the forms which we none the less hope—on the whole—that fame will not fail simultaneously to assume for our benefit.

Mme Swann had, however, met with no success outside what was called the “official world.” Elegant women did not go to her house. It was not the presence there of Republican notables that frightened them away. In the days of my early childhood, everything that pertained to conservative society was worldly, and no respectable salon would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. The people who lived in such an atmosphere imagined that the impossibility of ever inviting an “opportunist”—still, more a “horrid radical”—was something that would endure for ever, like oil-lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, right-minded ladies had had the stupefying experience of meeting an elegant Jewess while paying a social call. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a “change of criterion.” The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its coloured lozenges. Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself, went down, and various obscure nationalists rose to take its place. The most brilliant salon in Paris was that of an ultra-Catholic Austrian prince. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the pattern of the kaleidoscope would have taken a turn in the other direction. The Jews having shown, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots, would have kept their position, and no one would any longer have cared to go, or even to admit that he had ever
gone any longer to the Austrian prince’s. None of this alters the fact, however, that whenever society is momentarily stationary, the people who live in it imagine that no further change will occur, just as, in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone, they decline to believe in the aeroplane. Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work castigating the preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been “great changes.” At the time when I went to Mme Swann’s the Dreyfus storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were extremely powerful—none more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife, Lady Israels, was Swann’s aunt. She herself had no intimate connections as distinguished as those of her nephew, who, since he did not care for her, had never much cultivated her society, although he was presumed to be her heir. But she was the only one of Swann’s relations who had any idea of his social position, the others having always remained in the state of ignorance, in that respect, which had long been our own. When one of the members of a family emigrates into high society—which to him appears a feat without parallel until after the lapse of a decade he observes that it has been performed in other ways and for different reasons by more than one young man whom he knew as a boy—he draws round about himself a zone of shadow, a
terra incognita
, which is clearly visible in its minutest details to all those who inhabit it but is darkest night, pure nothingness, to those who do not penetrate it but touch its fringe without the least suspicion of its existence in their midst. There being no news agency to furnish Swann’s cousins with intelligence of the people with whom he consorted, it was (before his appalling marriage, of course) with a smile of condescension that they would tell one another over family dinner-tables that they had spent a “virtuous” Sunday in going to see “cousin Charles,” whom (regarding him as a poor relation who was inclined to envy their prosperity) they used wittily to name, playing upon the title of Balzac’s novel, “Le Cousin Bête.” Lady Israels, however, knew exactly who the people were who lavished upon Swann a friendship of which she was frankly jealous. Her husband’s family, which was roughly the equivalent of the Rothschilds, had for several generations managed the affairs of the Orléans princes. Lady Israels, being immensely rich, exercised a wide influence, and had employed it so as to ensure that no one whom she knew should be “at home” to Odette. One alone had disobeyed her, in secret, the Comtesse de Marsantes. And then, as ill luck would have it, Odette having gone to call upon Mme de Marsantes, Lady Israels had entered the room almost at her heels. Mme de Marsantes was on tenterhooks.* With the cowardice of those who are nevertheless in a position to act as they choose, she did not address a single word to Odette, who thus found little encouragement to pursue any further an incursion into a world which was not in any case the one into which she wished to be received. In her complete detachment from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Odette continued to be the illiterate courtesan, utterly different from those bourgeois snobs, “well up” in all the minutest points of genealogy, who endeavour to quench by reading old memoirs their thirst for the aristocratic connections with which real life has omitted to provide them. And Swann, for his part, continued no doubt to be the lover in whose eyes all these peculiarities of an old mistress seem lovable or at least inoffensive, for I often heard his wife perpetuate veritable social heresies without his attempting to correct them, whether from lingering affection, lack of esteem, or weariness of the effort to improve her. It was perhaps also another form of the simplicity which for so long had misled us at Combray, and which now had the effect that, while he continued to know, on his own account at least, very grand people, he had no wish for them to appear to be regarded as of any importance in conversation in his wife’s drawing-room. They had, indeed, less importance than ever for Swann, the centre of gravity of his life having shifted. In any case, Odette’s ignorance in social matters was such that if the name of the Princesse de Guermantes were mentioned in conversation after that of the Duchess, her cousin, “Those ones are princes, are they?” she would exclaim; “So they’ve gone up a step?” Were anyone to say “the Prince,” in speaking of the Duc de Chartres, she would put him right: “The Duke, you mean; he’s Duc de Chartres, not Prince.” As for the Duc d’Orléans, son of the Comte de Paris: “That’s funny; the son is higher than the father!” she would remark, adding, for she was afflicted with Anglomania, “Those
Royalties
are so dreadfully confusing!”—while to someone who asked her from what province the Guermantes family came she would reply: “From the Aisne.”