The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (315 page)

What is more, these two inverse idiosyncrasies of jealousy often extend beyond words, whether they implore or reject confidences. We see jealous lovers who are jealous only of the men with whom their mistress has relations in their absence, but allow her to give herself to another man, if it is done with their permission, near at hand, and, if not actually before their eyes, at least under their roof. This case is not at all uncommon among elderly men who are in love with a young woman. They feel the difficulty of winning her favours, sometimes their inability to satisfy her, and, rather than be deceived, prefer to allow into the house, into an adjoining room, some man whom they consider incapable of giving her bad advice, but not incapable of giving her pleasure. With others it will be just the opposite; never allowing their mistress to go out by herself for a single minute in a town they know, keeping her in a state of veritable bondage, they allow her to go for a month to a place they do not know, where they cannot picture to themselves what she may be doing. With regard to Albertine, I had both sorts of soothing quirk. I should not have been jealous if she had enjoyed her pleasures in my vicinity, with my encouragement, completely under my surveillance, thereby relieving me of
any fear of mendacity; nor should I have been jealous if she had moved to a place so unfamiliar and remote that I could not imagine, had no possibility of knowing, and no temptation to know, her manner of life. In either case, my uncertainty would have been eliminated by a knowledge or an ignorance equally complete.

The decline of day plunging me back by an act of memory into a cool atmosphere of long ago, I would inhale it with the same delight as Orpheus the subtle air, unknown upon this earth, of the Elysian Fields. But already the day was ending and I would be overcome by the desolation of evening. Looking mechanically at the clock to see how many hours must elapse before Albertine’s return, I would see that I still had time to dress and go downstairs to ask my landlady, Mme de Guermantes, for particulars of various pretty articles of clothing which I wanted to give Albertine. Sometimes I would meet the Duchess in the courtyard, going out shopping, even if the weather was bad, in a close-fitting hat and furs. I knew quite well that to a number of intelligent people she was merely a lady like any other, the name Duchesse de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there are no longer any duchies or principalities; but I had adopted a different point of view in my manner of enjoying people and places. This lady in furs braving the bad weather seemed to me to carry with her all the castles of the territories of which she was duchess, princess, viscountess, as the figures carved over a portal hold in their hands the cathedral they have built or the city they have defended. But my mind’s eyes alone could discern these castles and these forests in the gloved hand of the lady in furs who was a cousin of the king. My bodily eyes distinguished in it
only, on days when the sky was threatening, an umbrella with which the Duchess did not hesitate to arm herself. “It’s much wiser—one can never be certain, I may find myself miles from home, with a cabman demanding a fare
beyond my means.
” The words “too dear” and “beyond my means” kept recurring all the time in the Duchess’s conversation, as did also: “I’m too poor”—without its being possible to decide whether she spoke thus because she thought it amusing to say that she was poor, being so rich, or because she thought it smart, being so aristocratic (that is to say affecting to be a peasant), not to attach to riches the importance that people give them who are merely rich and nothing else and who look down on the poor. Perhaps it was, rather, a habit contracted at a time in her life when, already rich, but not rich enough to satisfy her needs considering the expense of keeping up all those properties, she felt a certain financial embarrassment which she did not wish to appear to be concealing. The things about which we most often jest are generally, on the contrary, the things that worry us but that we do not wish to appear to be worried by, with perhaps a secret hope of the further advantage that the person to whom we are talking, hearing us treat the matter as a joke, will conclude that it is not true.

But on most evenings at this hour I could count on finding the Duchess at home, and I was glad of this, for it was more convenient for the purpose of discussing at length the particulars that Albertine required. And I would go down almost without thinking how extraordinary it was that I should be calling upon that mysterious Mme de Guermantes of my boyhood simply in order to make use of her for a practical purpose, as one makes use
of the telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.

The accessories of costume gave Albertine enormous pleasure. I could not resist giving her some new trifle every day. And whenever she had spoken to me rapturously of a scarf, a stole, a sunshade which, from the window or as they passed one another in the courtyard, her eyes, that so quickly distinguished anything connected with elegance of dress, had seen round the throat, over the shoulders, or in the hand of Mme de Guermantes, knowing how the girl’s naturally fastidious taste (refined still further by the lessons in elegance which Elstir’s conversation had been to her) would by no means be satisfied by any mere substitute, even of a pretty thing, such as fills its place in the eyes of the common herd but differs from it entirely, I would go in secret to ask the Duchess to explain to me where, how, from what model the article had been created that had taken Albertine’s fancy, how I should set about obtaining one exactly similar, in what lay the maker’s secret, the charm (what Albertine called the “chic,” the “style”) of its manner and—the beauty of the material having also its importance—the name and quality of the fabrics that I was to insist upon their using.

When I had mentioned to Albertine, on our return from Balbec, that the Duchesse de Guermantes lived opposite us, in the same building, she had assumed, on hearing the proud title and great name, that more than indifferent, that hostile, contemptuous air which is the sign of an impotent desire in proud and passionate natures. Splendid though Albertine’s might be, the qualities that
lay buried in it could develop only amid those trammels which are our personal tastes, or that bereavement of those of our tastes that we have been obliged to forgo, as in Albertine’s case snobbery: in other words, what are called aversions. Albertine’s aversion for society people occupied very little room in her nature, and appealed to me as an aspect of the revolutionary spirit—that is to say an embittered love for the nobility—engraved upon the obverse side of the French character to that which displays the aristocratic style of Mme de Guermantes. Albertine would perhaps not have given a thought to this aristocratic style, in view of the impossibility of achieving it, but remembering that Elstir had spoken to her of the Duchess as the best-dressed woman in Paris, her republican contempt for a duchess gave way to a keen interest in a fashionable woman. She was always asking me to tell her about Mme de Guermantes, and was glad that I should call on the Duchess to obtain advice about her own clothes. No doubt I could have got this from Mme Swann, and indeed I did once write to her with this intention. But Mme de Guermantes seemed to me to carry the art of dressing even further. If, on going down for a moment to see her, after making sure that she had not gone out and leaving word that I was to be warned as soon as Albertine returned, I found the Duchess swathed in the mist of a grey crepe de Chine gown, I accepted this aspect of her which I felt to be due to complex causes and to be quite unalterable, and steeped myself in the atmosphere which it exhaled, like that of certain late afternoons cushioned in pearly grey by a vaporous fog; if, on the other hand, her indoor gown was Chinese with red and yellow flames, I gazed at it as at a glowing sunset; these garmerits
were not a casual decoration alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality like that of the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.

Of all the outdoor and indoor gowns that Mme de Guermantes wore, those which seemed most to respond to a specific intention, to be endowed with a special significance, were the garments made by Fortuny from old Venetian models. Is it their historical character, or is it rather the fact that each one of them is unique, that gives them so special a significance that the pose of the woman who is wearing one while she waits for you to appear or while she talks to you assumes an exceptional importance, as though the costume had been the fruit of a long deliberation and your conversation was somehow detached from everyday life like a scene in a novel? In the novels of Balzac, we see his heroines put on this or that dress on purpose when they are expecting some particular visitor. The dresses of today have less character, always excepting the creations of Fortuny. There is no room for vagueness in the novelist’s description, since the dress does really exist, its smallest details are as naturally preordained as those of a work of art. Before putting on one or another of them, the woman has had to make a choice between two garments that are not more or less alike but each one profoundly individual, and identifiable by name.

But the dress did not prevent me from thinking of the woman. Indeed, Mme de Guermantes seemed to me at this time more attractive than in the days when I was still in love with her. Expecting less of her (I no longer went to visit her for her own sake), it was almost with the relaxed negligence one exhibits when alone, with my feet on the fender, that I listened to her as though I were reading
a book written in the language of long ago. I was sufficiently detached to enjoy in what she said that pure charm of the French language which we no longer find either in the speech or in the writing of the present day. I listened to her conversation as to a folk song deliciously and purely French; I understood why I should have heard her deriding Maeterlinck (whom in fact she now admired, out of feminine weak-mindedness, influenced by those literary fashions whose rays spread slowly), as I understood why Mérimée had derided Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Paul-Louis Courier, Victor Hugo, Meilhac, Mallarmé. I was well aware that the critic had a far more restricted outlook than his victim, but also a purer vocabulary. That of Mme de Guermantes, almost as much as that of Saint-Loup’s mother, was enchantingly pure. It is not in the bloodless pastiches of the writers of today who say
au fait
(for “in reality”),
singulièrement
(for “in particular”),
étonné
(for “struck with amazement”), and the like, that we recapture the old speech and the true pronunciation of words, but in conversing with a Mme de Guermantes or a Françoise. I had learned from the latter, when I was five years old, that one did not say “the Tarn” but “the Tar;” not “Beam” but “Bear.” The effect of which was that at twenty, when I began to go into society, I had no need to be taught there that one ought not to say, like Mme Bontemps, “Madame de Beam.”

It would not be true to say that the Duchess was unaware of this earthy and quasi-peasant quality that survived in her, or was entirely innocent of affectation in displaying it. But, on her part, it was not so much the false simplicity of a great lady aping the countrywoman, or the pride of a duchess bent upon snubbing the rich
ladies who express contempt for the peasants whom they do not know, as the quasi-artistic preference of a woman who knows the charm of what she possesses and is not going to spoil it with a coat of modern varnish. In the same way, everybody used to know a Norman innkeeper, landlord of the “William the Conqueror” at Dives, who had carefully refrained—a rare thing indeed—from giving his hostelry the modern comforts of a hotel, and, albeit a millionaire, retained the speech and the smock of a Norman peasant and allowed you to enter his kitchen and watch him prepare with his own hands, as in a farmhouse, a dinner which was nevertheless infinitely better, and even more expensive, than in the most luxurious hotel.

All the local sap that survives in the old noble families is not enough; it must be embodied in a person of sufficient intelligence not to despise it, not to obliterate it beneath a society veneer. Mme de Guermantes, unfortunately clever and Parisian and, when I knew her, retaining nothing of her native soil but its accent, had at least, when she wished to describe her life as a girl, contrived for her speech one of those compromises (between what would have seemed too spontaneously provincial on the one hand or artificially literary on the other) which form the attraction of George Sand’s
La Petite Fadette
or of certain legends related by Chateaubriand in his
Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe
. My chief pleasure was in hearing her tell some anecdote which brought peasants into the picture with herself. The historic names, the old customs, gave to these blendings of the castle with the village a distinctly attractive savour. Having stayed in contact with the lands where it was sovereign, a certain type of aristocracy remains regional, so that the simplest utterance unfolds under
our eyes a whole map of France, historical and geographical.

If there was no affectation, no deliberate effort to fabricate a special language, then this style of pronunciation was a regular museum of French history displayed in conversation. “My great-uncle Fitt-jam” was not at all surprising, for we know that the Fitz-James family are proud to boast that they are French nobles and do not like to hear their name pronounced in the English fashion. One must, however, marvel at the touching docility of the people who had previously supposed themselves obliged to pronounce certain names phonetically, and who, all of a sudden, after hearing the Duchesse de Guermantes pronounce them otherwise, adopted a pronunciation which they could never have guessed. Thus the Duchess, who had had a great-grandfather attending on the Comte de Chambord, liked to tease her husband for having turned Orleanist by proclaiming: “We old Frochedorf people …” The visitor, who had always imagined that he was correct in saying “Frohsdorf,” at once turned his coat, and ever afterwards might be heard saying “Frochedorf.”