In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (15 page)

Mme. Swann had, however, met with no success outside what was called
the 'official world.' Smart 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, conservative society was to the
last degree worldly, and no 'good' house 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'—to their parties 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 to be immovable, and composes a fresh
pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, ladies on the 'right
side' in politics had had the stupefaction of meeting, while paying
calls, a smart Jewess. 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 scattered
once again its little scraps of colour. Everything Jewish, even the
smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure
nationalities appeared in its place. The most brilliant drawing–room
in Paris was that of a Prince who was an Austrian and ultra–Catholic.
If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the
base of the kaleidoscope would have been turned in the other
direction, and its pattern reversed. The Jews having shewn, to the
general astonishment, that they were patriots also, would have kept
their position, and no one would have cared to go any more, or even to
admit that he had ever gone to the Austrian Prince's. All this does
not, however, prevent the people who move in it from imagining,
whenever society is stationary for the moment, 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 had not herself any intimate
acquaintance so distinguished as her nephew's, while he, since he did
not care for her, had never much cultivated her society, although he
was, so far as was known, her heir. But she was the only one of
Swann's relatives 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, from a family circle, one of its
members 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 of the men whom he knew as boys—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 with him, but is darkest
night and nothingness to those who may 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 lady 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 story,
Le Cousin Bête
. Lady Israels, however, was letter–perfect in the
names and quality of the people who lavished upon Swann a friendship
of which she was frankly jealous. Her husband's family, which almost
equalled the Rothschilds in importance, had for several generations
managed the affairs of the Orleans 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
only 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 tenter–hooks. With the craven impotence of
those who are at liberty to act as they choose, she did not address a
single word to Odette, who thus found little encouragement to press
further the invasion of a world which, moreover, was not at all that
into which she would have liked to be welcomed. In this complete
detachment of the Faubourg Saint–Germain, Odette continued to be
regarded as the illiterate 'light woman,' utterly different from the
respectable ladies, 'well up' in all the minutest points of genealogy,
who endeavoured to quench by reading biographies and memoirs their
thirst for the aristocratic relations with which real life had 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 would
appear lovable or at least inoffensive, for I have often heard his
wife profess what were really social heresies, without his attempting
(whether from lingering affection for her, loss of regard for society
or weariness of the effort to make her perfect) to correct them. 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, many highly
distinguished people, he did not make a point, in conversation in his
wife's drawing–room, of our seeming to feel that they were of the
smallest importance. They had, indeed, less than ever for Swann, the
centre of gravity of his life having been displaced. In any case,
Odette's ignorance of social distinctions was so dense that if the
name of the Princesse de Guermantes were mentioned in conversation
after that of the Duchess, her cousin, "So those ones are Princes, are
they?" she would exclaim; "Why, they've gone up a step." Were anyone
to say "the Prince," in speaking of the Duc de Chartres, she would put
him right with, "The Duke, you mean; he is 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 replied, "From the Aisne."

But, so far as Odette was concerned, Swann was quite blind, not merely
to these deficiencies in her education but to the general mediocrity
of her intelligence. More than that; whenever Odette repeated a silly
story Swann would sit listening to his wife with a complacency, a
merriment, almost an admiration into which some survival of his desire
for her must have entered; while in the same conversation, anything
subtle, anything deep even that he himself might say would be listened
to by Odette with an habitual lack of interest, rather curtly, with
impatience, and would at times be sharply contradicted. And we must
conclude that this enslavement of refinement by vulgarity is the rule
in many households, when we think, conversely, of all the superior
women who yield to the blandishments of a boor, merciless in his
censure of their most delicate utterances, while they go into
ecstasies, with the infinite indulgence of love, over the feeblest of
his witticisms. To return to the reasons which prevented Odette, at
this period, from making her way into the Faubourg Saint–Germain, it
must be observed that the latest turn of the social kaleidoscope had
been actuated by a series of scandals. Women to whose houses one had
been going with entire confidence had been discovered to be common
prostitutes, if not British spies. One would, therefore, for some time
to come expect people (so, at least, one supposed) to be, before
anything else, in a sound position, regular, settled, accountable.
Odette represented simply everything with which one had just severed
relations, and was incidentally to renew them at once (for men, their
natures not altering from day to day, seek in every new order a
continuance of the old) but to renew them by seeking it under another
form which would allow one to be innocently taken in, and to believe
that it was no longer the same society as before the disaster.
However, the scapegoats of that society and Odette were too closely
alike. People who move in society are very short–sighted; at the
moment in which they cease to have any relations with the Israelite
ladies whom they have known, while they are asking themselves how they
are to fill the gap thus made in their lives, they perceive, thrust
into it as by the windfall of a night of storm, a new lady, an
Israelite also; but by virtue of her novelty she is not associated in
their minds with her predecessors, with what they are convinced that
they must abjure. She does not ask that they shall respect her God.
They take her up. There was no question of anti–semitism at the time
when I used first to visit Odette. But she was like enough to it to
remind people of what they wished, for a while, to avoid.

As for Swann himself, he was still a frequent visitor of several of
his former acquaintance, who, of course, were all of the very highest
rank. And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been
to see I noticed that, among those whom he had known in the old days,
the choice that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly
artistic, partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And
remarking that it was often some great lady or other of waning
reputation, who interested him because she had been the mistress of
Liszt or because one of Balzac's novels was dedicated to her
grandmother (as he would purchase a drawing if Chateaubriand had
written about it) I conceived a suspicion that we had, at Combray,
replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as a mere stockbroker, who
did not go into society, by another, when we supposed him to be one of
the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of the Comte de Paris meant
nothing at all. Is not the world full of such 'friends of Princes,'
who would not be received in any house that was at all 'exclusive'?
Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides,
they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of
their blood royal that great nobles and 'business men' appear, in the
depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.

But Swann went farther than this; not content with seeking in society,
such as it was, when he fastened upon the names which, inscribed upon
its roll by the past, were still to be read there, a simple artistic
and literary pleasure, he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of
arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogeneous
elements, bringing together people taken at hazard, here, there and
everywhere. These experiments in the lighter side (or what was to
Swann the lighter side) of sociology did not stimulate an identical
reaction, with any regularity, that is to say, in each of his wife's
friends. "I'm thinking of asking the Cottards to meet the Duchesse de
Vendôme," he would laughingly say to Mme. Bontemps, in the appetised
tone of an epicure who has thought of, and intends to try the
substitution, in a sauce, of cayenne pepper for cloves. But this plan,
which was, in fact, to appear quite humorous, in an archaic sense of
the word, to the Cottards, had also the power of infuriating Mme.
Bontemps. She herself had recently been presented by the Swanns to the
Duchesse de Vendôme, and had found this as agreeable as it seemed to
her natural. The thought of winning renown from it at the Cottards',
when she related to them what had happened, had been by no means the
least savoury ingredient of her pleasure. But like those persons
recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would
like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme.
Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her
own circle of friends should be made known to the Princess. She
denounced (to herself, of course) the licentious taste of Swann who,
in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, was obliging her to
scatter to the winds, at one swoop, all the dust that she would have
thrown in the eyes of the Cottards when she told them about the
Duchesse de Vendôme. How was she even to dare to announce to her
husband that the Professor and his wife were in their turn to partake
of this pleasure, of which she had boasted to him as though it were
unique. And yet, if the Cottards could only be made to know that they
were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their host!
It is true that the Bontemps had been invited for the same reason, but
Swann, having acquired from the aristocracy that eternal 'Don Juan'
spirit which, in treating with two women of no importance, makes each
of them believe that it is she alone who is seriously loved, had
spoken to Mme. Bontemps of the Duchesse de Vendôme as of a person whom
it was clearly laid down that she must meet at dinner. "Yes, we're
determined to have the Princess here with the Cottards," said Mme.
Swann a few weeks later; "My husband thinks that we might get
something quite amusing out of that conjunction." For if she had
retained from the 'little nucleus' certain habits dear to Mme.
Verdurin, such as that of shouting things aloud so as to be heard by
all the faithful, she made use, at the same time, of certain
expressions, such as 'conjunction,' which were dear to the Guermantes
circle, of which she thus felt unconsciously and at a distance, as the
sea is swayed by the moon, the attraction, though without being drawn
perceptibly closer to it. "Yes, the Cottards and the Duchesse de
Vendôme. Don't you think that might be rather fun?" asked Swann. "I
think they'll be exceedingly ill–assorted, and it can only lead to a
lot of bother; people oughtn't to play with fire, is what I say!"
snapped Mme. Bontemps, furious. She and her husband were, all the
same, invited, as was the Prince d'Agrigente, to this dinner, which
Mme. Bontemps and Cottard had each two alternative ways of describing,
according to whom they were telling about it. To one set Mme. Bontemps
for her part, and Cottard for his would say casually, when asked who
else had been of the party: "Only the Prince d'Agrigente; it was all
quite intimate." But there were others who might, alas, be better
informed (once, indeed, some one had challenged Cottard with: "But
weren't the Bontemps there too?" "Oh, I forgot them," Cottard had
blushingly admitted to the tactless questioner whom he ever afterwards
classified among slanderers and speakers of evil). For these the
Bontemps and Cottards had each adopted, without any mutual
arrangement, a version the framework of which was identical for both
parties, their own names alone changing places. "Let me see;" Cottard
would say, "there were our host and hostess, the Duc and Duchesse de
Vendôme—" (with a satisfied smile) "Professor and Mme. Cottard, and,
upon my soul, heaven only knows how they got there, for they were
about as much in keeping as hairs in the soup, M. and Mme. Bontemps!"
Mme. Bontemps would recite an exactly similar 'piece,' only it was M.
and Mme. Bontemps who were named with a satisfied emphasis between the
Duchesse de Vendôme and the Prince d'Agrigente, while the 'also ran,'
whom finally she used to accuse of having invited themselves, and who
completely spoiled the party, were the Cottards.