In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (11 page)

This dialogue, half mute, half spoken, had lasted only a few moments, and I had barely entered the first of the drawing-rooms with the Duchesse de Guermantes, when a little dark lady, extremely pretty, stopped her:

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere. D’Annunzio saw you from a box in the theatre, and he wrote the Princesse de T—— a letter in which he says that he never saw anything so lovely. He would give his life for ten minutes’ conversation with you. In any case, even if you can’t or won’t, the letter is in my possession. You must fix a day to come and see me. There are some secrets which I cannot tell you here. I see you don’t remember me,” she added, turning to me; “I met you at the Princesse de Parme’s” (where I had never been). “The Emperor of Russia is anxious for your father to be sent to Petersburg. If you could come in on Tuesday, Isvolski himself will be there, and he’ll talk to you about it. I have a present for you, my dear,” she went on, turning back to the Duchess, “which I should not dream of giving to anyone but you. The manuscripts of three of Ibsen’s plays, which he sent to me by his old attendant. I shall keep one and give you the other two.”

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen or D’Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind’s eye a tribe of authors and playwrights coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once “put in” the people he meets. This is obviously rather underhand, and writers are a pretty low class. True, it’s not a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one “gets to know the inside story,” one “sees people in their true colours.” On the whole, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors. M. de Guermantes considered “perfectly decent” only the gentleman who did the funeral notices in the
Gaulois
. He, at any rate, was content to include M. de Guermantes at the head of the list of people present “among others” at funerals at which the Duke had given his name. When he preferred that his name should not appear, instead of giving it, he sent a letter of condolence to the relatives of the deceased, assuring them of his deep and heartfelt sympathy. If, then, the family inserted an announcement in the paper: “Among the letters received, we may mention one from the Duc de Guermantes,” etc., this was the fault not of the ink-slinger but of the son, brother, father of the deceased whom the Duke thereupon denounced as upstarts, and with whom he decided for the future to have no further dealings (what he called, not being very well up in the meaning of such expressions, “having a bone to pick”). At all events, the names of Ibsen and D’Annunzio, and his uncertainty as to their continued survival, brought a frown to the brow of the Duke, who was not yet far enough away from us to avoid hearing the various blandishments of Mme Timoléon d’Amoncourt. She was a charming woman, her wit, like her beauty, so entrancing that either of them by itself would have made her shine. But, born outside the world in which she now lived, having aspired at first merely to a literary salon, the friend successively—by no means the lover, her morals were above reproach—and exclusively of all the great writers, who gave her their manuscripts, wrote books for her, chance having once introduced her into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, these literary privileges served her well there. She was now in a position where she had no need to dispense other graces than those shed by her presence. But, accustomed in the past to worldly wisdom, social wiles, services to render, she persevered in these things even when they were no longer necessary. She had always a state secret to reveal to you, a potentate whom you must meet, a water-colour by a master to present to you. There was indeed in all these superfluous attractions a trace of falsehood, but they made her life a comedy that scintillated with complications, and it was true to say that she was responsible for the appointment of prefects and generals.

As she strolled by my side, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but vaguely, so as to avoid the people with whom she did not wish to enter into relations, whose presence she discerned from time to time like a menacing reef in the distance. We advanced between a double hedge of guests, who, conscious that they would never come to know “Oriane,” were anxious at least to point her out, as a curiosity, to their wives: “Quick, Ursule, come and look at Madame de Guermantes talking to that young man.” And one felt that in another moment they would be clambering upon the chairs for a better view, as at the military review on the 14th July or the Grand Prix at Longchamp. Not that the Duchesse de Guermantes had a more aristocratic salon than her cousin. The former’s was frequented by people whom the latter would never have been willing to invite, chiefly because of her husband. She would never have been at home to Mme Alphonse de Rothschild, who, an intimate friend of Mme de La Trémoïlle and of Mme de Sagan, as was Oriane herself, was constantly to be seen in the house of the last-named. It was the same with Baron Hirsch, whom the Prince of Wales had brought to her house but not to that of the Princess, who would not have approved of him, and also with certain outstanding Bonapartist or even Republican celebrities whom the Duchess found interesting but whom the Prince, a convinced Royalist, would on principle not have allowed inside his house. His anti-semitism, being also founded on principle, did not yield before any social distinction, however strongly accredited, and if he was at home to Swann, whose friend he had been from time immemorial—being, however, the only Guermantes who addressed him as Swann and not as Charles—this was because, knowing that Swann’s grandmother, a Protestant married to a Jew, had been the Duc de Berry’s mistress, he endeavoured, from time to time, to believe in the legend which made out Swann’s father to be that prince’s natural son. On this hypothesis, which incidentally was false, Swann, the son of a Catholic father himself the son of a Bourbon by a Catholic mother, was a Gentile to his fingertips.

“What, you don’t know these splendours?” said the Duchess, referring to the rooms through which we were moving. But, having given its due meed of praise to her cousin’s “palace,” she hastened to add that she infinitely preferred her own “humble den.” “This is an admirable house to
visit
. But I should die of misery if I had to stay and sleep in rooms that have witnessed so many historic events. It would give me the feeling of having been left behind after closing-time, forgotten, in the Château of Blois, or Fontainebleau, or even the Louvre, with no antidote to my depression except to tell myself that I was in the room in which Monaldeschi was murdered. As a sedative, that is not good enough. Why, here comes Mme de Saint-Euverte. We’ve just been dining with her. As she is giving her great annual beanfeast tomorrow, I supposed she would be going straight to bed. But she can never miss a party. If this one had been in the country, she would have jumped on a delivery-van rather than not go to it.”

As a matter of fact, Mme de Saint-Euverte had come this evening less for the pleasure of not missing another person’s party than in order to ensure the success of her own, recruit the latest additions to her list, and, so to speak, hold an eleventh-hour review of the troops who were on the morrow to perform such brilliant manoeuvres at her garden-party. For in the course of the years the guests at the Saint-Euverte parties had almost entirely changed. The female celebrities of the Guermantes world, formerly so sparsely scattered, had—loaded with attentions by their hostess—begun gradually to bring their friends. At the same time, by a similarly gradual process, but in the opposite direction, Mme de Saint-Euverte had year by year reduced the number of persons unknown to the world of fashion. One after another had ceased to be seen. For some time the “batch” system was in operation, which enabled her, thanks to parties over which a veil of silence was drawn, to summon the unelected separately to entertain one another, which dispensed her from having to invite them with the best people. What cause had they for complaint? Were they not given (
panem et circenses
) light refreshments and a select musical programme? And so, in a kind of symmetry with the two exiled duchesses whom formerly, when the Saint-Euverte salon was only starting, one used to see holding up its shaky pediment like a pair of caryatids, in these later years one could distinguish, mingling with the fashionable throng, only two heterogeneous persons: old Mme de Cambremer and the architect’s wife with a fine voice who often had to be asked to sing. But, no longer knowing anybody at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, bewailing their lost comrades, feeling out of place, they looked as though they might at any moment die of cold, like two swallows that have not migrated in time. And so, the following year, they were not invited. Mme de Franquetot made an appeal on behalf of her cousin, who was so fond of music. But as she could obtain for her no more explicit reply than the words: “Why, people can always come in and listen to music, if they like; there’s nothing criminal about that!” Mme de Cambremer did not find the invitation sufficiently pressing, and abstained.

Such a transformation having been effected by Mme de Saint-Euverte, from a leper colony to a gathering of great ladies (the latest form, apparently ultra-smart, that it had assumed), it might seem odd that the person who on the following day was to give the most brilliant party of the season should need to appear overnight to address a final appeal to her troops. But the fact was that the preeminence of Mme de Saint-Euverte’s salon existed only for those whose social life consists exclusively in reading the accounts of afternoon and evening parties in the
Gaulois
or the
Figaro
, without ever having been present at any of them. To these worldlings who see the world only through the newspapers, the enumeration of the British, Austrian, etc., ambassadresses, of the Duchesses d’Uzès, de La Trémoïlle, etc., etc., was sufficient to make them automatically imagine the Saint-Euverte salon to be the first in Paris, whereas it was among the last. Not that the reports were mendacious. The majority of the persons mentioned had indeed been present. But each of them had come in response to entreaties, civilities, favours, and with the sense of doing infinite honour to Mme de Saint-Euverte. Such salons, shunned rather than sought after, which are attended as a sort of official duty, deceive no one but the fair readers of the “Society” columns. They pass over a really fashionable party, the sort at which the hostess, who could have had all the duchesses in existence, every one of them athirst to be “numbered among the elect,” has invited only two or three. And so these hostesses, who do not send a list of their guests to the papers, ignorant or contemptuous of the power that publicity has acquired today, are considered fashionable by the Queen of Spain but are overlooked by the crowd, because the former knows and the latter does not know who they are.

Mme de Saint-Euverte was not one of these women, and, like the busy bee she was, had come to gather up for the morrow everyone who had been invited. M. de Charlus was not among these, having always refused to go to her house. But he had quarrelled with so many people that Mme de Saint-Euverte might put this down to his peculiar nature.

Of course, if it had been only Oriane, Mme de Saint-Euverte need not have put herself to the trouble, for the invitation had been given by word of mouth, and moreover accepted with that charming and deceptive grace which is practised to perfection by those Academicians from whose doors the candidate emerges with a warm glow, never doubting that he can count upon their support. But there were others as well. The Prince d’Agrigente—would he come? And Mme de Durfort? And so, keeping a weather eye open, Mme de Saint-Euverte had thought it expedient to appear on the scene in person; insinuating with some, imperative with others, to all alike she hinted in veiled words at unimaginable attractions which could never be seen anywhere again, and promised each of them that they would find at her house the person they most desired or the personage they most needed to meet. And this sort of function with which she was invested on one day in the year—like certain public offices in the ancient world—as the person who is to give on the morrow the biggest garden-party of the season, conferred upon her a momentary authority. Her lists were made up and closed, so that while she wandered slowly through the Princess’s rooms dropping into one ear after another: “You won’t forget tomorrow,” she had the ephemeral glory of averting her eyes, while continuing to smile, if she caught sight of some ugly duckling who was to be avoided or some country squire for whom the bond of a schoolboy friendship had secured admission to “Gilbert’s,” and whose presence at her garden-party would be no gain. She preferred not to speak to him so as to be able to say later on: “I issued my invitations verbally, and unfortunately I didn’t meet you anywhere.” And so she, a mere Saint-Euverte, set to work with her gimlet eyes to pick and choose among the guests at the Princess’s party. And she imagined herself, in so doing, to be every inch a Duchesse de Guermantes.

It must be said that the latter too did not enjoy to the extent that one might suppose the unrestricted use of her greetings and smiles. Sometimes, no doubt, when she withheld them, it was deliberately: “But the woman bores me to tears,” she would say. “Am I expected to talk to her about the party for the next hour?” (A duchess of swarthy complexion went past, whose ugliness and stupidity, and certain irregularities of conduct, had exiled her not from society but from certain elegant circles. “Ah!” murmured Mme de Guermantes, with the sharp, unerring glance of the connoisseur who is shown a false jewel, “so they invite
that
here!” From the mere sight of this semi-tarnished lady, whose face was overburdened with moles from which black hairs sprouted, Mme de Guermantes gauged the mediocrity of this party. They had been brought up together, but she had severed all relations with the lady; and responded to her greeting only with the curtest little nod. “I cannot understand,” she said to me as if to excuse herself, “how Marie-Gilbert can invite us with all these dregs. It looks as though there are people from every parish. Mélanie Pourtalès arranged things far better. She could have the Orthodox Synod and the Oratoire Protestants in her house if she liked, but at least she didn’t invite us on those days.”) But in many cases, it was from timidity, fear of a scene with her husband, who did not like her to entertain artists and such-like (Marie-Gilbert took a kindly interest in dozens of them: you had to take care not to be accosted by some illustrious German diva), from some misgivings, too, with regard to nationalist feeling, which, inasmuch as she was endowed like M. de Charlus with the wit of the Guermantes, she despised from the social point of view (people were now, for the greater glory of the General Staff, sending a plebeian general in to dinner before certain dukes), but to which nevertheless, as she knew that she was considered unsound in her views, she made large concessions, even dreading the prospect of having to shake hands with Swann in these anti-semitic surroundings. With regard to this, her mind was soon set at rest, for she learned that the Prince had refused to have Swann in the house and had had “a sort of an altercation” with him. There was no risk of her having to converse in public with “poor Charles,” whom she preferred to cherish in private.