The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (212 page)

Many of the friends of the Princesse de Parme, with whom the Duchesse de Guermantes had confined herself for years past to the same conventional greeting, or to returning their cards, without ever inviting them to her house or going to theirs, complained discreetly of these omissions to Her Highness who, on days when M. de Guermantes came by himself to see her, dropped a hint of it to him. But the wily nobleman, a bad husband to the Duchess in so far as he kept mistresses, but her most tried and trusty friend in everything that concerned the proper functioning of her salon (and her own wit, which formed its chief attraction), replied: “But does my wife know her? Indeed! Oh, well, I dare say she ought to have. But the truth is, Ma’am, that Oriane doesn’t care for women’s conversations. She lives surrounded by a court of superior minds—I’m not her husband, I’m only the senior valet. Except for quite a small number, who are all of them very witty indeed, women bore her. Surely, Ma’am, Your Highness with all her fine judgment is not going to tell me that the Marquise de Souvré has any wit. Yes, I quite understand, Your Highness receives her out of kindness. Besides, Your Highness knows her. You tell me that Oriane has met her; it’s quite possible, but once or twice at the most, I assure you. And then, I must explain to Your Highness, it’s really a little my fault as well. My wife is very easily tired, and she’s so anxious to be friendly always that if I allowed her she would never stop going to see people. Only yesterday evening, although she had a temperature, she was afraid of hurting the Duchesse de Bourbon’s feelings by not going to see her. I had to show my teeth, I can tell you; I positively forbade them to bring the carriage round. Do you know, Ma’am, I’ve a very good mind not to mention to Oriane that you’ve spoken to me about Mme de Souvré. Oriane is so devoted to Your Highness that she’ll go round at once to invite Mme de Souvré to the house; that will mean another call to be paid, it will oblige us to make friends with the sister, whose husband I know quite well. I think I shall say nothing at all about it to Oriane, if Your Highness has no objection. We’ll save her a great deal of strain and agitation. And I assure you that it will be no loss to Mme de Souvré. She goes everywhere, moves in the most brilliant circles. We scarcely entertain at all, really, just a few little friendly dinners. Mme de Souvré would be bored to death.” The Princesse de Parme, innocently convinced that the Duc de Guermantes would not transmit her request to the Duchess, and dismayed by her failure to procure the invitation that Mme de Souvré sought, was all the more flattered to think that she herself was one of the regular frequenters of so exclusive a household. No doubt this satisfaction had its drawbacks also. Thus whenever the Princesse de Parme invited Mme de Guermantes to her own parties she had to rack her brains to be sure that there was no one else on her list whose presence might offend the Duchess and make her refuse to come again.

On her habitual evenings, after dinner, to which she always invited a few people (very early, for she clung to old customs), the Princesse de Parme’s drawing-room was thrown open to her regular guests and, generally speaking, to the whole of the higher aristocracy, French and foreign. The order of her receptions was as follows: on issuing from the dining-room the Princess sat down on a settee in front of a large round table and chatted with two of the most important ladies who had dined with her, or else cast her eyes over a magazine, or sometimes played cards (or pretended to play, following a German court custom), either a game of patience or selecting as her real or pretended partner some prominent personage. By nine o’clock the double doors of the big drawing-room were in constant action, opening and shutting and opening again to admit the visitors who had dined hurriedly at home (or if they had dined “out,” skipped coffee, promising to return later, having intended only “to go in at one door and out at the other”) in order to conform with the Princess’s time-table. She, meanwhile, attentive to her game or conversation, made a show of not seeing the new arrivals, and it was not until they were actually within reach of her that she rose graciously from her seat, with a benevolent smile for the women. The latter thereupon sank before the standing Princess in a curtsey which was tantamount to a genuflexion, in such a way as to bring their lips down to the level of the beautiful hand which hung very low, and to kiss it. But at that moment the Princess, just as if she had been surprised each time by a protocol with which nevertheless she was perfectly familiar, raised the kneeling lady as though by main force, but with incomparable grace and sweetness, and kissed her on both cheeks. A grace and sweetness that were conditional, you may say, upon the meekness with which the arriving guest bent her knee. Very likely; and it would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispensed when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything that has only a fiduciary value. But this disappearance of social distinctions in a reconstructed society is by no means a foregone conclusion, and we are at times too ready to believe that present circumstances are the only ones in which a state of things can survive. People of first-rate intelligence believed that a republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances, and that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation of Church and State. After all, the survival of etiquette in an egalitarian society would be no more miraculous than the practical success of the railways or the use of the aeroplane in war. Besides, even if politeness were to vanish, there is nothing to show that this would be a misfortune. Finally, would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic? Very possibly. The political power of the Popes has grown enormously since they ceased to possess either States or an army; our cathedrals meant far less to a devout Catholic of the seventeenth century than they mean to an atheist of the twentieth, and if the Princesse de Parme had been the sovereign ruler of a State, no doubt I should have felt moved to speak of her about as much as of a President of the Republic, that is to say not at all.

As soon as the postulant had been raised up and embraced by the Princess, the latter resumed her seat and returned to her game of patience, unless the newcomer was a lady of some distinction, in which case she sat her down in an armchair and chatted to her for a while.

When the room became too crowded the lady-in-waiting who had to control the traffic cleared some space by leading the regular guests into an immense hall on to which the drawing-room opened, a hall filled with portraits and minor trophies relating to the House of Bourbon. The intimate friends of the Princess would then volunteer as guides and tell interesting anecdotes, to which the young people had not the patience to listen, more interested in the spectacle of living royalty (with the possibility of getting themselves presented to it by the lady-in-waiting and the maids of honour) than in examining the relics of dead sovereigns. Too occupied with the acquaintances they might be able to make and the invitations they might be able to pick up, they knew absolutely nothing, even after several years, of what there was in this priceless museum of the archives of the monarchy, and could only recall vaguely that it was decorated with cacti and giant palms which gave this centre of social elegance a look of the palmarium in the Zoological Gardens.

Of course the Duchesse de Guermantes, by way of self-mortification, did occasionally appear on these evenings to pay an “after dinner” call on the Princess, who kept her all the time by her side, while exchanging pleasantries with the Duke. But on evenings when the Duchess came to dine, the Princess took care not to invite her regular party, and closed her doors to the world on rising from table, for fear lest a too liberal selection of guests might offend the exacting Duchess. On such evenings, were any of the faithful who had not received warning to present themselves on the royal doorstep, they would be informed by the porter: “Her Royal Highness is not at home this evening,” and would turn away. But many of the Princess’s friends would have known in advance that on the day in question they would not be asked to her house. These were a special category of parties, a category barred to many who must have longed for admission. Those who were excluded could with virtual certainty enumerate the roll of the elect, and would say irritably among themselves: “You know, of course, that Oriane de Guermantes never goes anywhere without her entire general staff.” With the help of this body, the Princesse de Parme sought to surround the Duchess as with a protective rampart against those persons the chance of whose making a good impression on her was at all doubtful. But there were several of the Duchess’s favourites, several members of this glittering “staff,” for whom the Princesse de Parme resented having to put herself out, seeing that they paid little or no attention to herself. No doubt the Princess was fully prepared to admit that people might derive more enjoyment from the company of the Duchesse de Guermantes than from her own. She could not deny that there was always a “crush” at the Duchess’s “at homes,” or that she herself often met there three or four royal personages who thought it sufficient to leave their cards upon her. And in vain might she commit to memory Oriane’s witty sayings, copy her gowns, serve at her own tea-parties the same strawberry tarts, there were occasions on which she was left by herself all afternoon with a lady-in-waiting and some councillor from a foreign legation. And so whenever (as had been the case with Swann, for instance, at an earlier period) there was anyone who never let a day pass without going to spend an hour or two at the Duchess’s and paid a call once every two years on the Princesse de Parme, the latter felt no great desire, even for the sake of amusing Oriane, to make “advances” to this Swann or whoever he was by inviting him to dinner. In a word, having the Duchess in her house was for the Princess a source of endless perplexity, so haunted was she by the fear that Oriane would find fault with everything. But in return, and for the same reason, when the Princesse de Parme came to dine with Mme de Guermantes she could be certain in advance that everything would be perfect, delightful, and she had only one fear, which was that of being unable to understand, remember, give satisfaction, being unable to assimilate new ideas and people. On this score, my presence aroused her attention and excited her cupidity, just as might a new way of decorating the dinner-table with garlands of fruit, uncertain as she was which of the two—the table decorations or my presence—was the more distinctively one of those charms which were the secret of the success of Oriane’s receptions, and in her uncertainty firmly resolved to try to have them both at her own next dinner-party. What in fact fully justified the enraptured curiosity which the Princesse de Parme brought to the Duchess’s house was that unique, dangerous, exciting element into which the Princess used to plunge with a thrill of anxiety, shock and delight (as at the seaside on one of those days of “heavy seas” of the danger of which the bathing-attendants warn one for the simple reason that none of them can swim), and from which she would emerge feeling braced, happy, rejuvenated—the element known as the wit of the Guermantes. The wit of the Guermantes—a thing as non-existent as the squared circle, according to the Duchess who regarded herself as the sole Guermantes to possess it—was a family reputation like that of the minced pork of Tours or the biscuits of Rheims. However (since an intellectual characteristic does not employ for its propagation the same channels as the colour of hair or complexion) certain intimate friends of the Duchess who were not of her blood were nevertheless endowed with this wit, which on the other hand had failed to inculcate itself into various Guermantes who were all too resistant to wit of any kind. For the most part, the custodians of the Guermantes wit who were not related to the Duchess shared the characteristic feature of having been brilliant men, eminently fitted for a career to which, whether in the arts, diplomacy, parliamentary eloquence or the army, they had preferred the life of society. Possibly this preference could be explained by a certain lack of originality, of initiative, of will power, of health or of luck, or possibly by snobbishness.

With certain of them (though these, it must be admitted, were the exception), if the Guermantes drawing-room had been the stumbling-block in their careers, it had been against their will. Thus a doctor, a painter and a diplomat of great promise had failed to achieve success in the careers for which they were nevertheless more brilliantly endowed than most because their friendship with the Guermantes had resulted in the first two being regarded as men of fashion and the third as a reactionary, and this had prevented all three from winning the recognition of their peers. The mediaeval gown and red cap which are still donned by the electoral colleges of the Faculties are (or were, at least, not so long since) something more than a purely outward survival from a narrow-minded past, from a rigid sectarianism. Under the cap with its golden tassels, like the high priests in the conical mitre of the Jews, the “professors” were still, in the years that preceded the Dreyfus case, fast rooted in rigorously pharisaical ideas. Du Boulbon was at heart an artist, but was safe because he did not care for society. Cottard was always at the Verdurins’, but Mme Verdurin was a patient, he was moreover protected by his vulgarity, and at his own house he entertained no one outside the Faculty, at banquets over which there floated an aroma of carbolic acid. But in strongly corporate bodies, where moreover the rigidity of their prejudices is but the price that must be paid for the noblest integrity, the most lofty conceptions of morality, which wither in more tolerant, more liberal, ultimately more corrupt atmospheres, a professor in his gown of scarlet satin faced with ermine, like that of a Doge (which is to say a Duke) of Venice shut away in the ducal palace, was as virtuous, as deeply attached to noble principles, but as pitiless towards any alien element as that other admirable but fearsome duke, M. de Saint-Simon. The alien, here, was the worldly doctor, with other manners, other social relations. To make good, the unfortunate of whom we are now speaking, so as not to be accused by his colleagues of looking down on them (who but a man of fashion would think of such an idea!) if he concealed the Duchesse de Guermantes from them, hoped to disarm them by giving mixed dinner-parties in which the medical element was merged in the fashionable. He was unaware that in so doing he signed his own death-warrant, or rather he discovered this when the Council of Ten (a little larger in number) had to fill a vacant chair, and it was invariably the name of another doctor, more normal if more mediocre, that emerged from the fatal urn, and the “Veto” thundered round the ancient Faculty, as solemn, as absurd and as terrible as the “Juro” that spelt the death of Molière. So too with the painter permanently labelled man of fashion, when fashionable people who dabbled in art had succeeded in getting themselves labelled artists; so with the diplomat who had too many reactionary associations.