Time Regained & a Guide to Proust

by Marcel Proust

  The friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes was not only beautifully dressed and charming, she was also intelligent and conversation with her was agreeable, but for me rendered difficult by the novelty to my ears of the names not only of my interlocutress herself but also of most of the people she talked about, although they were the very people who formed the core of society today. The converse also was true: at her request I related various anecdotes of the past, and many of the names which I pronounced meant absolutely nothing to her, they had all sunk into oblivion (all those at least which had shone only with the individual brilliance of a single person and were not the surname, permanent and generic, of some famous aristocratic family, whose exact title even so the young woman seldom knew, having perhaps recently misheard a name at a dinner-party and proceeded to form quite wrong ideas about its pedigree) and she had for the most part never heard them mentioned, having, not merely because she was young but because she had not lived in France for long and when she first arrived had known nobody, only started to go into society some years after I myself had withdrawn from it. So that though for ordinary speech she and I used the same language, when it came to names our vocabularies had nothing in common. The name of Mme Leroi happened to fall from my lips, and by chance, thanks to some elderly admirer, himself an old friend of Mme de Guermantes, my interlocutress had heard of her. But only vaguely and inaccurately, as I saw from the contemptuous tone in which this snobbish young woman replied to me: “Yes, I know who you mean by Mme Leroi, an old friend of Bergotte’s, I believe,” a tone which barely concealed the comment: “a woman whom I should never have wished to have in my house.” I realised at once that the old friend of Mme de Guermantes, as a perfect man of the world imbued with the Guermantes spirit, one of the essential elements of which was not to appear to attach too much importance to aristocratic friendships, had thought it too stupid, too anti-Guermantes to say: “Mme Leroi, who was a friend of every Royalty and Duchess in Paris,” and had preferred to say: “She could be quite amusing. Let me tell you the retort she made to Bergotte one day.” But for people who are not already in the know information gleaned in this way from conversation is equivalent only to that which is doled out to the masses by the press and which makes them believe alternatively, depending upon the views of their newspaper, either that M. Loubet and M. Reinach are brigands or that they are great patriots. In the eyes of my interlocutress Mme Leroi had been something like Mme Verdurin as she was before her social transformation, but with less brilliance and with a little clan consisting of one member only, Bergotte. But at least this young woman, by pure chance, had heard the name of Mme Leroi, and she is one of the last of whom so much can be said. Today that name is utterly forgotten, nor is there any good reason why it should be remembered. It does not figure even in the index to the posthumous memoirs of Mme de Villeparisis, whose mind was so much occupied with the lady who bore it. And if the Marquise has omitted to mention Mme Leroi, this is less because in her lifetime that lady had been less than friendly towards her than because, once she was dead, no one was likely to take any interest in her, it is a silence dictated less by the social resentment of a woman than by the literary tact of an author. My conversation with Bloch’s fashionable friend was delightful, for she was an intelligent young woman; but this difference which I have described between our two vocabularies made it at the same time both awkward and instructive. For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it. And the result is that we see as always young the men and women whom we have known young, that those whom we have known old we retrospectively endow in the past with the virtues of old age, that we trust unreservedly in the credit of a millionaire and the influence of a reigning monarch, knowing with our reason, though we do not actually believe, that tomorrow both the one and the other may be fugitives stripped of all power. In a more restricted field, one that is purely social—as in a simpler problem which initiates a student into difficulties that are more complex but of the same order—the unintelligibility which, in my conversation with the young woman, resulted from the fact that the two of us had lived in the same world but with an interval of twenty-five years between us, gave me the impression, and might have strengthened within me the sense, of History.

  And indeed this ignorance of people’s true social position which every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in all the glory of the moment as though the past had never existed, which makes it impossible for an American woman just landed in Europe to see that in an age when Bloch was nobody M. de Charlus was socially supreme in Paris and that Swann, who put himself out to please M. Bontemps, had himself been treated with every mark of friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance, which exists not only in new arrivals but also in those who have always frequented adjacent but distinct regions of society, is itself also invariably an effect—but an effect operative not so much upon a whole social stratum as within individuals—of Time. No doubt we ourselves may change our social habitat and our manner of life and yet our memory, clinging still to the thread of our personal identity, will continue to attach to itself at successive epochs the recollection of the various societies in which, even if it be forty years earlier, we have lived. Bloch the guest of the Prince de Guermantes remembered perfectly well the humble Jewish environment in which he had lived at the age of eighteen, and Swann, when he was no longer in love with Mme Swann but with a waitress at that same Colombin’s where at one time Mme Swann had thought it smart to go and drink tea (as she did also at the tea-room in the Rue Royale), Swann was very well aware of his own social value—he remembered Twickenham and had no doubt in his mind about the reasons for which he chose to go to Colombin’s rather than to call on the Duchesse de Broglie, and he knew also that, had he been a thousand times less “smart” than he was, he would not have become the slightest bit smarter by frequenting Colombin’s or the Ritz, since anybody can go to these places who pays. And no doubt the friends, too, of Bloch or of Swann remembered the little Jewish coterie or the invitations to Twickenham and thus, as though they, the friends, were other not very clearly defined “I’s” of the two men, made no division in their memories between the fashionable Bloch of today and the sordid Bloch of the past, between the Swann who in his latter days could be seen at Colombin’s and the Swann of Buckingham Palace. But these friends were to some extent Swann’s neighbours in life, their own lives had developed along lines near enough to his own for their memories to be fairly full of him, whereas other men who were more remote from Swann—at a greater distance measured not perhaps socially but in terms of intimacy, which caused their knowledge of him to be vaguer and their meetings with him rarer—possessed of him recollections that were less numerous and in consequence conceptions that were less fixed. And after thirty years a comparative stranger of this kind no longer has any precise recollection with the power to change the value of the person whom he has before his eyes by prolonging him into the past. In the last years of Swann’s life I had heard people, even people in society, say when his name was mentioned, as though this had been his title to fame: “You mean the Swann who goes to Colombin’s?” And now, with reference to Bloch, even those who ought to have known better might be heard to inquire: “The Guermantes Bloch? The Bloch who is such a friend of the Guermantes?” These errors which split a life in two and, by isolating his present from his past, turn some man whom one is talking about into another, a different man, a creation of yesterday, a man who is no more than the condensation of his current habits (whereas the real man bears within himself an awareness, linking him to the past, of the continuity of his life), these errors, though they too, as I have said, are a result of the passage of Time, are not a social phenomenon but one of memory. And at that very moment
I was presented with an example, of a different variety, it is true, but all the more impressive for that, of this forgetfulness which modifies for us our image of a human being. Long ago a young nephew of Mme de Guermantes, the Marquis de Villemandois, had behaved towards me with a persistent insolence which had obliged me to retaliate by adopting an equally insulting attitude towards him, so that tacitly we had become as it were enemies. This man, while I was engaged in my reflexions upon Time at the Princesse de Guermantes’s party, asked someone to introduce him to me, saying that he thought that I had known some of his family, that he had read articles of mine and wanted to make, or re-make, my acquaintance. Now it is true to say that with age he had become, like many others, serious instead of rude and frivolous and that he had lost much of his former arrogance, and it is also true that I was a good deal talked about now, though on the strength of some very slight articles, in the circles which he frequented. But these motives for his cordiality, for his making advances to me, were only secondary. The principal motive, or at least the one which permitted the others to come into play, was that—either because he had a worse memory than I or because in the past, since I was then for him a much less important personage than he for me, he had paid less attention to my ripostes than I to his attacks—he had completely forgotten our feud. At most my name recalled to him that he must have seen me, or some member of my family, in the house of one of his aunts. And being uncertain whether he was being introduced to me for the first time or whether we were old acquaintances, he made haste to talk to me about the aunt in whose house he was sure that we had met, remembering that my name had often been mentioned there and not remembering our quarrels. A name: that very often is all that remains for us of a human being, not only when he is dead, but sometimes even in his lifetime. And our notions about him are so vague or so bizarre and correspond so little to those that he has of us that we have entirely forgotten that we once nearly fought a duel with him but remember that, when he was a child, he used to wear curious yellow gaiters in the Champs-Elysées, where he, on the contrary, in spite of our assurances, has no recollection of ever having played with us.

  Bloch had come bounding into the room like a hyena. “He is at home now,” I thought, “in drawing-rooms into which twenty years ago he would never have been able to penetrate.” But he was also twenty years older. He was nearer to death. What did this profit him? At close quarters, in the translucency of a face in which, at a greater distance or in a bad light, I saw only youthful gaiety (whether because it survived there or because I with my recollections evoked it), I could detect another face, almost frightening, racked with anxiety, the face of an old Shylock, waiting in the wings, with his make-up prepared, for the moment when he would make his entry on to the stage and already reciting his first line under his breath. In ten years, in drawing-rooms like this which their own feebleness of spirit would allow him to dominate, he would enter on crutches to be greeted as “the Master” for whom a visit to the La Trémoïlles was merely a tedious obligation. And what would this profit him?

  From changes accomplished in society I was all the better able to extract important truths, worthy of being used as the cement which would hold part of my work together, for the reason that such changes were by no means, as at the first moment I might have been tempted to suppose, peculiar to the epoch in which we lived. At the time when I, myself only just “arrived”—newer even than Bloch at the present day—had made my first entry into the world of the Guermantes, I must have contemplated in the belief that they formed an integral part of that world elements that were in fact utterly foreign to it, recently incorporated and appearing strangely new to older elements from which I failed to distinguish them and which themselves, though regarded by the dukes of the day as members of the Faubourg from time immemorial, had in fact—if not themselves, then their fathers or their grandfathers—been the upstarts of an earlier age. So much so that it was not any inherent quality of “men of the best society” which made this world so brilliant, but rather the fact of being more or less completely assimilated to this world which out of people who fifty years later, in spite of their diverse origins, would all look very much the same, formed “men of the best society.” Even in the past into which I pushed back the name of Guermantes in order to give it its full grandeur—with good reason, for under Louis XIV the Guermantes had been almost royal and had cut a more splendid figure than they did today—the phenomenon which I was observing at this moment had not been unknown. The Guermantes of that time had allied themselves, for instance, with the family of Colbert, which today, it is true, appears to us in the highest degree aristocratic, since a Colbert bride is thought an excellent match even for a La Rochefoucauld. But it is not because the Colberts, then a purely bourgeois family, were aristocratic that the Guermantes had sought them in a matrimonial alliance, it was because of this alliance with the Guermantes that the Colberts became aristocratic. If the name of Haussonville should be extinguished with the present representative of that house, it will perhaps owe its future renown to the fact that the family today is descended from Mme de Staël, regardless of the fact that before the Revolution M. d’Haussonville, one of the first noblemen of the kingdom, found it gratifying to his vanity to be able to tell M. de Broglie that he was not acquainted with the father of that lady and was therefore no more in a position to present him at court than was M. de Broglie himself, neither of the two men for one moment suspecting that their own grandsons would later marry one the daughter and the other the grand-daughter of the authoress of Corinne. From the remarks of the Duchesse de Guermantes I realised that it would have been in my power to play the role of the fashionable commoner in grand society, the man whom everybody supposes to have been from his earliest days affiliated to the aristocracy, a role once played by Swann and before him by M. Lebrun and M. Ampère and all those friends of the Duchesse de Broglie who herself at the beginning of her career had by no means belonged to the best society. The first few times I had dined with Mme de Guermantes how I must have shocked men like M. de Beauserfeuil, less by my actual presence than by remarks indicating how entirely ignorant I was of the memories which constituted his past and which gave its form to the image that he had of society! Yet the day would come when Bloch, as a very old man, with recollections from a then distant past of the Guermantes drawing-room as it presented itself to his eyes at this moment, would feel the same astonishment, the same ill-humour in the presence of certain intrusions and certain displays of ignorance. And at the same time he would no doubt have developed and would radiate around him those qualities of tact and discretion which I had thought were the special prerogative of men like M. de Norpois but which, when their original avatars have vanished from the scene, form themselves again for a new incarnation in those of our acquaintance who seem of all people the least likely to possess them. It was true that my own particular case, the experience that I had had of being admitted to the society of the Guermantes, had appeared to me to be something exceptional. But as soon as I got outside myself and the circle of people by whom I was immediately surrounded, I could see that this was a social phenomenon less rare than I had at first supposed and that from the single fountain-basin of Combray in which I had been born there were in fact quite a number of jets of water which had risen, in symmetry with myself, above the liquid mass which had fed them. No doubt, since circumstances have always about them something of the particular and characters something of the individual, it was in an entirely different fashion that Legrandin (through his nephew’s strange marriage) had in his turn penetrated into this exalted world, a fashion quite different from that in which Odette’s daughter had married into it or those in which Swann long ago and I myself had reached it. Indeed to me, passing by shut up inside my own life so that I saw it only from within, Legrandin’s life seemed to bear absolutely no resemblance to my own, the two seemed to have followed widely divergent paths, and in this respect I was like a stream which from the bottom of its own deep valley do
es not see another stream which proceeds in a different direction and yet, in spite of the great loops in its course, ends up as a tributary of the same river. But taking a bird’s-eye view, as the statistician does who, ignoring the reasons of sentiment or the avoidable imprudences which may have led some particular person to his death, counts merely the total number of those who have died in a year, I could see that quite a few individuals, starting from the same social milieu, the portrayal of which was attempted in the first pages of this work, had arrived finally in another milieu of an entirely different kind, and the probability is that, just as every year in Paris an average number of marriages take place, so any other rich and cultivated middle-class milieu might have been able to show a roughly equal proportion of men who, like Swann and Legrandin and myself and Bloch, could be found at a later stage in their lives flowing into the ocean of “high society.” Moreover, in their new surroundings they recognised each other, for if the young Comte de Cambremer won the admiration of society for his distinction, his refinement, his sober elegance, I myself was able to recognise in these qualities—and at the same time in his fine eyes and his ardent craving for social success—characteristics that were already present in his uncle Legrandin, who in spite of his aristocratic elegance of bearing had been no more than a typical middle-class friend of my parents.