The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (408 page)

“After all,” I said to my mother, “it’s quite natural, when you think of it. Here are the Cambremers established in that Guermantes clan among which they never hoped to pitch their tent; what is more, the girl, adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable since the Cambremers have lost theirs; and after all she’s the adopted daughter, and in the Cambremers’ eyes probably the real daughter—the natural daughter—of a person whom they regard as a Prince of the Blood. A bastard of a semi-royal house has always been regarded as a flattering alliance by the nobility of France and other countries. Indeed, without going so far back, to the Lucinges,
³²
only the other day, not more than six months ago, you remember the marriage of Robert’s friend and that girl whose only social qualification was that she was supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be the natural daughter of a sovereign prince.”

My mother, without abandoning the caste ethos of Combray in the light of which my grandmother ought to have been scandalised by such a marriage, being anxious above all to show the validity of her mother’s judgment, added: “Anyhow, the girl is worth her weight in gold, and your dear grandmother wouldn’t have had to draw upon her immense goodness, her infinite tolerance, to keep her from condemning young Cambremer’s choice. Do you remember how distinguished she thought the girl was, long ago, when she went into the shop to have a stitch put in her skirt? She was only a child then. And now, even if she has rather run to seed and become an old maid, she’s a different woman, a thousand times more perfect. But your grandmother saw all that at a glance. She found the little niece of a jobbing tailor more ‘noble’ than the Duc de Guermantes.”

But even more necessary than to extol my grandmother was it for my mother to decide that it was “better” for her that she had not lived to see the day. This was the culmination of her daughterly love, as though she were sparing my grandmother a final grief.

“And yet, can you imagine for a moment,” my mother said to me, “what old Swann—not that you ever knew him, of course—would have felt if he could have known that he would one day have a great-grandchild in whose veins the blood of old mother Moser who used to say: ‘Ponchour Mezieurs’ would mingle with the blood of the Duc de Guise!”

“But you know, Mamma, it’s much more surprising than that. Because the Swanns were very respectable people, and, given the social position that their son acquired, his daughter, if he himself had made a decent marriage,
might have married very well indeed. But everything had to start again from scratch because he married a whore.”

“Oh, a whore, you know, people were perhaps rather malicious. I never quite believed it all.”

“Yes, a whore; indeed I shall let you have some … family revelations one of these days.”

Lost in reverie, my mother said: “To think of the daughter of a woman whom your father would never allow me to greet marrying the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis on whom your father wouldn’t allow me to call at first because he thought her too grand for me!” Then: “And the son of Mme de Cambremer to whom Legrandin was so afraid of having to give us a letter of introduction because he didn’t think us smart enough, marrying the niece of a man who would never dare to come to our flat except by the service stairs! … All the same, your poor grandmother was absolutely right—you remember—when she said that the high aristocracy did things that would shock the middle classes and that Queen Marie-Amélie was spoiled for her by the overtures she made to the Prince de Condé’s mistress to get her to persuade him to make his will in favour of the Duc d’Aumale. You remember too how it shocked her that for centuries past daughters of the house of Gramont who were veritable saints had borne the name Corisande in memory of Henri IV’s liaison with one of their ancestresses. These things may perhaps also occur among the middle classes, but they conceal them better. Can’t you imagine how it would have amused your poor grandmother!” Mamma added sadly, for the joys which it grieved us to think that my grandmother was deprived of were the simplest joys of life—an item of news, a play, or even something more
trifling still, a piece of mimicry, which would have amused her. “Can’t you imagine her astonishment! But still, I’m sure that your grandmother would have been shocked by these marriages, that they would have grieved her; I feel that it’s better that she never knew about them,” my mother went on, for, when confronted with any event, she liked to think that my grandmother would have received an utterly distinctive impression from it which would have stemmed from the marvellous singularity of her nature and have been uniquely significant. If anything sad or painful occurred which could not have been foreseen in the past—the disgrace or ruin of one of our old friends, some public calamity, an epidemic, a war, a revolution—my mother would say to herself that perhaps it was better that Grandmamma had known nothing about it, that it would have grieved her too much, that perhaps she would not have been able to endure it. And when it was a question of something shocking like these two marriages, my mother, by an impulse directly opposite to that of the malicious people who are pleased to imagine that others whom they do not like have suffered more than is generally supposed, would not, in her tenderness for my grandmother, allow that anything sad or diminishing could ever have happened to her. She always imagined my grandmother as being above the assaults even of any evil which might not have been expected to occur, and told herself that my grandmother’s death had perhaps been a blessing on the whole, inasmuch as it had shut off the too ugly spectacle of the present day from that noble nature which could never have become resigned to it. For optimism is the philosophy of the past. The events that have occurred being, among all those that
were possible, the only ones which we have known, the harm that they have caused seems to us inevitable, and we give them the credit for the slight amount of good that they could not help bringing with them, for we imagine that without them it would not have occurred. My mother sought at the same time to form a more accurate idea of what my grandmother would have felt when she learned these tidings, and to believe that it was impossible for our minds, less exalted than hers, to form any such idea. “Can’t you imagine,” she said to me first of all, “how astonished your poor grandmother would have been!” And I felt that my mother was distressed by her inability to tell her the news, regretting that my grandmother would never know it, and feeling it to be somehow unjust that the course of life should bring to light facts which my grandmother would never have believed, thus rendering erroneous and incomplete, retrospectively, the knowledge of people and society which my grandmother had taken to the grave, the marriage of the Jupien girl and Legrandin’s nephew being calculated to modify her general notions of life, no less than the news—had my mother been able to convey it to her—that people had succeeded in solving the problems, which my grandmother had regarded as insoluble, of aerial navigation and wireless telegraphy. But as we shall see, this desire that my grandmother should share in the blessings of our modern science was soon, in its turn, to appear too selfish to my mother.

What I was to learn later on—for I had been unable to keep in touch with it all from Venice—was that Mlle de Forcheville’s hand had been sought both by the Duc de Châtellerault and by the Prince de Silistrie, while
Saint-Loup was seeking to marry Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter.

This is what had occurred. Mlle de Forcheville possessing a hundred million francs, Mme de Marsantes had decided that she would be an excellent match for her son. She made the mistake of saying that the girl was charming, that she herself had not the slightest idea whether she was rich or poor, that she did not wish to know, but that even without a dowry it would be a piece of good luck for the most exacting young man to find such a wife. This was going rather too far for a woman who was tempted only by the hundred million, which made her shut her eyes to everything else. People realised at once that she was thinking of the girl for her own son. The Princesse de Silistrie went round protesting loudly, expatiating on Saint-Loup’s social grandeur, and proclaiming that if he should marry the daughter of Odette and a Jew then it was the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mme de Marsantes, sure of herself as she was, dared not proceed further and retreated before the indignant protests of the Princesse de Silistrie, who immediately made a proposal on behalf of her own son. She had protested only in order to keep Gilberte for herself. Meanwhile Mme de Marsantes, refusing to own herself defeated, had turned at once to Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter. Having no more than twenty million, the latter suited her purpose less, but Mme de Marsantes told everyone that a Saint-Loup could not marry a Mlle Swann (there was no longer any mention of Forcheville). Some time later, somebody having thoughtlessly remarked that the Duc de Châtellerault was thinking of marrying Mlle d’Entragues, Mme de Marsantes, who was the most punctilious
woman in the world, mounted her high horse, changed her tactics, returned to Gilberte, made a formal offer of marriage on Saint-Loup’s behalf, and the engagement was immediately announced.

This engagement was to provoke keen comment in the most different social circles. Several of my mother’s friends, who had met Saint-Loup in our house, came to her “day,” and inquired whether the bridegroom was indeed the same person as my friend. Certain people went so far as to maintain, with regard to the other marriage, that it had nothing to do with the Legrandin-Cambremers. They had this on good authority, for the Marquise,
née
Legrandin, had denied it on the very eve of the day on which the engagement was announced. I, for my part, wondered why M. de Charlus on the one hand, Saint-Loup on the other, each of whom had had occasion to write to me shortly before and had spoken in such friendly terms of various travel plans the realisation of which must have precluded the wedding ceremonies, had said nothing whatever to me about them. I came to the conclusion, forgetting the secrecy which people maintain until the last moment in affairs of this sort, that I was less their friend than I had supposed, a conclusion which, so far as Saint-Loup was concerned, saddened me. Though why, when I had already remarked that the affability, the egalitarian, “man-to-man” attitude of the aristocracy was all a sham, should I be surprised to find myself left out of it? In the establishment for women—where men were now to be procured in increasing numbers—in which M. de Charlus had spied on Morel, and in which the “assistant matron,”
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a great reader of the
Gaulois
, used to discuss the social gossip with her clients, this lady, while
conversing with a stout gentleman who used to come to her to drink bottle after bottle of champagne with young men, because, being already very stout, he wished to become obese enough to be certain of not being called up should there ever be a war, declared: “It seems young Saint-Loup is ‘one of those,’ and young Cambremer too. Poor wives! In any case, if you know these bridegrooms, you must send them to us. They’ll find everything they want here, and there’s plenty of money to be made out of them.” Whereupon the stout gentleman, albeit he was himself “one of those,” indignantly retorted, being something of a snob, that he often met Cambremer and Saint-Loup at his cousins’ the Ardonvillers, and that they were great womanisers, and quite the opposite of “those.” “Ah!” the assistant matron concluded in a sceptical tone, but possessing no proof of the assertion, and convinced that in our century the perversity of morals was rivalled only by the absurd exaggeration of slanderous tittle-tattle.

Certain people whom I no longer saw wrote to me and asked me “what I thought” of these two marriages, precisely as though they were conducting an inquiry into the height of women’s hats in the theatre or the psychological novel. I had not the heart to answer these letters. Of these two marriages I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one’s past existence, which have been anchored near to one, and upon which one has perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous flapping of pennants, for unknown destinations, like a pair of ships. As for the prospective bridegrooms themselves, their attitude towards their own marriages was perfectly natural, since it was a question not of other people
but of themselves—though hitherto they had never tired of mocking at such “grand marriages” founded upon some secret taint. And even the Cambremer family, so ancient in its lineage and so modest in its pretensions, would have been the first to forget Jupien and to remember only the unimaginable grandeur of the House of Oloron, had not an exception appeared in the person who ought to have been most gratified by this marriage, the Marquise de Cambremer-Legrandin. Being spiteful by nature, she reckoned the pleasure of humiliating her family above that of glorifying herself. And so, not being enamoured of her son, and having rapidly taken a dislike to her future daughter-in-law, she declared that it was a calamity for a Cambremer to marry a person who had sprung from heaven knew where, and had such bad teeth. As for young Cambremer, who had already shown a propensity towards the society of men of letters such as Bergotte and even Bloch, it may be imagined that so brilliant a marriage did not have the effect of making him more of a snob than before, but that, feeling himself to have become the successor of the Ducs d’Oloron—“sovereign princes” as the newspapers said—he was sufficiently persuaded of his own grandeur to be able to mix with anyone he chose. And he deserted the minor nobility for the intelligent bourgeoisie on the days when he did not confine himself to royalty. The notices in the papers, especially when they referred to Saint-Loup, invested my friend, whose royal ancestors were endlessly enumerated, with a renewed grandeur which, however, could only sadden me, as though he had become someone else, the descendant of Robert the Strong rather than the friend who, only a little while since, had taken the folding seat in the carriage in
order that I might be more comfortable in the back; the fact that I had had no previous suspicion of his marriage with Gilberte—the prospect of which had appeared to me suddenly, in my letter, so different from anything that I could have expected of either of them the day before, as unexpected as a chemical precipitate—pained me, whereas I ought to have reflected that he had had a great deal to do, and that moreover in the fashionable world marriages are often arranged thus all of a sudden, as a substitute for a different combination which has come to grief And the gloom, as dismal as the depression of moving house, as bitter as jealousy, that these marriages caused me by the accident of their sudden impact was so profound that people used to remind me of it later, congratulating me absurdly on my perspicacity, as having been, quite contrary to what it was at the time, a twofold, indeed a threefold and fourfold presentiment.