The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (226 page)

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 prodigality, unknown to the Courvoisiers, with which the Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, excelled in entertaining their friends, was not only a material prodigality, of the kind that I had often experienced with Robert de Saint-Loup, but also a prodigality of charming words, of courteous gestures, a whole system of verbal elegance fed by a positive cornucopia within. But as this last, in the idleness of fashionable existence, remains unemployed, it overflowed at times, sought an outlet in a sort of fleeting effusion which was all the more intense, and which might, on the part of Mme de Guermantes, have led one to suppose a genuine affection. She did in fact feel it 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 pluck 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, reminiscent of the first warm days of spring in the impression they leave behind them of lassitude 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 kindness, and no longer have 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 enable 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 the footmen for my snow-boots, which I had brought, not realising how unfashionable they were, as a precaution against the snow, a few flakes of which had already fallen, to be converted rapidly into slush, I felt, at the contemptuous smiles on all sides, a shame which rose to its highest pitch when I saw that Mme de Parme had not yet 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 said 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,” the Princess said to me.

“Oh! if it comes to that, your Royal Highness can rest assured,” broke in the lady-in-waiting with a knowing air, “it won’t snow again.”

“What do you know about it, Madame?” came witheringly from the excellent Princesse de Parme, whose temper only the stupidity of her lady-in-waiting could succeed in ruffling.

“I can assure your Royal Highness that it can’t snow again. It’s a physical impossibility.”

“But why?”

“It can’t snow any more, because they’ve taken the necessary steps to prevent it: they’ve sprinkled salt in the streets!”

The simple-minded lady did not notice 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. Monsieur must have stout sealegs. What’s bred in the bone!”

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 affectation of simplicity, become aristocratic.

An exhilaration relapsing 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 to take me to that of M. de Charlus. We can as we choose abandon ourselves to one or other of two forces, of which one rises in ourselves, emanates from our deepest impressions, while the other comes to us from without. The first brings with it naturally a joy, the joy that springs from the life of those who create. The other current, that which endeavours to introduce into us the impulses by which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is not accompanied by pleasure; but we can add a pleasure to it, by a sort of recoil, in an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom, into melancholy—whence the gloomy faces of so many men of the world, and all those nervous conditions which may even lead to suicide. Now, in the carriage which was taking me to M. de Charlus, I was a prey to this second sort of exaltation, very 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 the spires of Martinville against the setting sun, 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 just slid them into the internal stereoscope through the lenses of which, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as, endowed with a worldly spirit, we wish to receive our life only from other people, we give depth and relief to 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 recognised by me, it is true, at the actual moment, in having dined with a person who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were—upon my word—extremely 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 hilariousness. Through the magnifying lenses, even those of Mme de Guermantes’s pronouncements which had struck me as being stupid (as for example the one about the Hals pictures which one ought to see from the top of a tram-car) took on an extraordinary life and depth. 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 agreeableness, attributes in which we should have supposed him to be permanently 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 tram-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 hitherto unknown, endowed with more complex organs. In these early poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like Nature, with providing food for thought. His “thoughts” he at that time expressed in the most direct form, almost in the sense in which the Duke understood the word when, feeling it to be “old hat” and otiose for the guests at his big parties at Guermantes to append to their signatures in the visitors’ book a philosophico-poetical reflexion, he used to warn newcomers in a beseeching tone: “Your name, my dear fellow, but no ‘thoughts,’ please!” Now, it was these “thoughts” of Victor Hugo’s (almost as absent from the
Légende des Siècles
as “tunes,” 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, before their form had yet achieved the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes rendered them unassimilable to the lines that one can discover in a Corneille, for example, lines in which a romanticism that is intermittent, restrained, and thus all the more moving, has nevertheless in no way 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 ones, of course, it was only with a fractional part that Mme de Guermantes embellished her conversation. But it is precisely by thus quoting an isolated line that 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 within which they were normally embedded, that my electrified 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 without a moment’s delay to buy 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 which Mme de Guermantes had quoted to me. 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, or even a quotation from 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 baronial mansion. We are then, as a result of 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 barren frivolity of which we forget for this windfall of a single evening.

From this point of view, if this world had been unable at the outset to respond to what my imagination expected, and was consequently to strike me first of all by what it had in common with every other world rather than by the ways in which it differed from them, it yet revealed itself to me by degrees as something quite distinct. Noblemen are almost the only people from whom one learns as much as one does from peasants; their conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land, dwellings 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 caught up with 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 today. In the death-chamber of a contemporary corpse Mme de Guermantes would not have pointed out, but would immediately have noticed, all the lapses from traditional customs. She was shocked to see women mingling with the men at a funeral, 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 Art Nouveau furniture, M. and Mme de Guermantes, actuated by a sentiment in which a fervent love of art may have played very little part and which left them themselves more commonplace, had kept their marvellous Boulle furniture, which presented an ensemble altogether more seductive to an artist. A literary man would similarly have been enchanted by their conversation, which would have been for him—for a 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: St Joseph ties, children pledged to wear blue for Our Lady, and so forth, which one finds today only among those who have constituted themselves the amiable and benevolent custodians of the past. The pleasure that a writer experiences among them, far more than among other writers, 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’s attractive because it’s true; that’s how people do talk.” These aristocratic conversations had moreover the charm, in Mme de Guermantes’s case, of being couched in excellent French. For this reason they made permissible on the Duchess’s part her hilarity at the words “vatic,” “cosmic,” “pythian,” “supereminent,” which Saint-Loup used to employ—as well as his Bing furniture.

When all was said, the stories I had heard at Mme de Guermantes’s, very different in this respect from what I had felt in the case of the hawthorns, or when I tasted a
madeleine
, remained alien to me. Entering me for a moment and possessing me only physically, it was as though, 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 of X … , of Mme de Guermantes, and repeat them. In the meantime 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 indeed I made up 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 showed me and which I was incidentally too excited to inspect. I felt so urgent a need for M. de Charlus to listen to the stories 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 work off by myself my verbal intoxication. 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 immense, greenish in colour, and contained a large number of portraits. The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing, and in this case the absence of any description of external surroundings is tantamount to a description of an internal state. I was about to leave the room to try to get hold of someone, 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 and said to me: “Monsieur le Baron has been engaged all evening, sir. There are still several people waiting to see him. I shall do everything I possibly can to get him to receive you; I have already telephoned up twice to the secretary.”