In the entertainments which she gave, since I could not imagine the guests as possessing bodies, moustaches, boots, as making any utterance that was commonplace, or even original in a human and rational way, this vortex of names, introducing less material substance than would a phantom banquet or a spectral ball, round that statuette in Dresden china which was Mme de Guermantes, gave her mansion of glass the transparency of a showcase. Then, after Saint-Loup had told me various anecdotes about his cousin’s chaplain, her gardeners and the rest, the Hôtel de Guermantes had become—as the Louvre might have been in days gone by—a kind of palace surrounded, in the very heart of Paris, by its own domains, acquired by inheritance, by virtue of an ancient right that had quaintly survived, over which she still enjoyed feudal privileges. But this last dwelling had itself vanished when we came to live near Mme de Villeparisis in one of the apartments adjoining that occupied by Mme de Guermantes in a wing of the Hôtel. It was one of those old town houses, a few of which for all I know may still be found, in which the main courtyard was flanked—alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, perhaps, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered round the overlord—by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for instance, or a tailor’s, such as we see nestling between the buttresses of those cathedrals which the aesthetic zeal of the restorer has not swept clear of such accretions, and a porter who also did cobbling, kept hens, grew flowers—and, at the far end, in the main house, a “Countess” who, when she drove out in her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which seemed to have escaped from the plot by the lodge (with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who got down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighbourhood), dispensed smiles and little waves of the hand impartially to the porter’s children and to any bourgeois tenants who might happen to be passing and whom, in her disdainful affability and her egalitarian arrogance, she found indistinguishable from one another.
In the house in which we had now come to live, the great lady at the end of the courtyard was a Duchess, elegant and still young. She was, in fact, Mme de Guermantes and, thanks to Françoise, I soon came to know all about her household. For the Guermantes (to whom Françoise regularly alluded as the people “below,” or “downstairs”) were her constant preoccupation from the first thing in the morning when, as she did Mamma’s hair, casting a forbidden, irresistible, furtive glance down into the courtyard, she would say: “Look at that, now, a pair of holy Sisters: they’ll be for downstairs, surely”; or, “Oh! just look at the fine pheasants in the kitchen window. No need to ask where they’ve come from: the Duke’s been out with his gun!”—until the last thing at night when, if her ear, while she was putting out my night-things, caught the sound of a piano or a few notes of a song, she would conclude: “They’re having company down below; gay goings-on”; whereupon, in her symmetrical face, beneath her snow-white hair, a smile from her young days, sprightly but proper, would for a moment set each of her features in its place, arranging them in a prim and prepared order, as though for a quadrille.
But the moment in the life of the Guermantes which excited the keenest interest in Françoise, gave her the most complete satisfaction and at the same time the sharpest annoyance, was that at which, the carriage gates having been flung open, the Duchess stepped into her barouche. It was generally a little while after our servants had finished celebrating that sort of solemn passover which none might disturb, called their midday dinner, during which they were so far “taboo” that my father himself would not have taken the liberty of ringing for them, knowing moreover that none of them would have paid any more attention to the fifth peal than to the first, and that he would thus have committed this impropriety to no purpose, though not without detriment to himself. For Françoise (who, in her old age, lost no opportunity of standing upon her dignity) would not have failed to present him, for the rest of the day, with a face covered with the tiny red cuneiform hieroglyphs by which she made visible—though by no means legible—to the outer world the long tale of her grievances and the underlying causes of her displeasure. She would enlarge upon them, too, in a running “aside,” but not so that we could catch her words. She called this practice—which, she imagined, must be shattering for us, “mortifying,” “vexing,” as she put it—saying “low masses” to us the whole blessed day.
The last rites accomplished, Françoise, who was at one and the same time, as in the primitive church, the celebrant and one of the faithful, helped herself to a final glass, undid the napkin from her throat, folded it after wiping from her lips the vestiges of watered wine and coffee, slipped it into its ring, turned a doleful eye to thank “her” young footman who, to show his zeal in her service, was saying: “Come, ma’am, a few more grapes—they’re d’licious,” and went straight across to the window, which she flung open, protesting that it was too hot to breathe in “this wretched kitchen.” Dexterously casting, as she turned the latch and let in the fresh air, a glance of studied indifference into the courtyard below, she furtively ascertained that the Duchess was not yet ready to start, gazed for a moment with scornful and impassioned eyes at the waiting carriage, and, this meed of attention once paid to the things of the earth, raised them towards the heavens, whose purity she had already divined from the sweetness of the air and the warmth of the sun; and let them rest on a corner of the roof, at the place where, every spring, there came to nest, immediately over the chimney of my bedroom, a pair of pigeons like those she used to hear cooing from her kitchen at Combray.
“Ah! Combray, Combray!” she cried. And the almost singing tone in which she declaimed this invocation might, taken with the Arlesian purity of her features, have prompted a stranger to surmise that she was of Southern origin and that the lost homeland she was lamenting was no more than a land of adoption. If so, he would have been wrong, for it seems that there is no province that has not its own South-country; do we not indeed constantly meet Savoyards and Bretons in whose speech we find all those pleasing transpositions of longs and shorts that are characteristic of the Southerner? “Ah, Combray, when will I see you again, poor old place? When will I spend the whole blessed day among your hawthorns, under our own poor lilac trees, hearing the finches sing and the Vivonne making a little noise like someone whispering, instead of that wretched bell from our young master, who can never stay still for half an hour on end without having me run the length of that confounded corridor. And even then he makes out I don’t come quick enough; you’d need to hear the bell before he rung it, and if you’re a minute late, he flies into the most horrible rage. Ah, poor Combray! maybe I’ll only see you when I’m dead, when they drop me like a stone into a hole in the ground. And so, nevermore will I smell your lovely hawthorns, so white. But in the sleep of death I dare say I shall still hear those three peals of the bell which will already have driven me to damnation in this world.”
Her soliloquy was interrupted by the voice of the waistcoat-maker in the courtyard below, the same who had so pleased my grandmother once, long ago, when she had gone to pay a call on Mme de Villeparisis, and now occupied no less high a place in Françoise’s affections. Having raised his head when he heard our window open, he had already been trying for some time to attract his neighbour’s attention, in order to bid her good day. The coquetry of the young girl that Françoise had once been softened and refined for M. Jupien the querulous face of our old cook, dulled by age, ill-temper and the heat of the kitchen stove, and it was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity and modesty that she bestowed a gracious salutation on the waistcoat-maker, but without making any audible response, for if she infringed Mamma’s injunctions by looking into the courtyard, she would never have dared to go the length of talking from the window, which would have been quite enough (according to her) to bring down on her “a whole chapter” from the Mistress. She pointed to the waiting carriage, as who should say: “A fine pair, eh!” though what she actually muttered was
: “What an old rattletrap!”—but principally because she knew that he would be bound to answer, putting his hand to his lips so as to be audible without having to shout: “You could have one too if you liked, as good as they have and better, I dare say, only you don’t care for that sort of thing.”
And Françoise, after a modest, evasive and delighted signal, the meaning of which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know; simplicity’s the rule in this house,” shut the window again in case Mamma should come in. The “you” who might have had more horses than the Guermantes were ourselves, but Jupien was right in saying “you” since, except for a few purely personal self-gratifications (such as, when she coughed all day long without ceasing and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her cold, that of insisting, with an irritating little titter, that she had not got a cold), Françoise, like those plants that an animal to which they are wholly attached keeps alive with food which it catches, eats and digests for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily assimilable residue, lived with us in a symbiotic relationship; it was we who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take on ourselves the task of concocting those little sops to her vanity out of which was formed—with the addition of the recognised right to practise freely the cult of the midday dinner according to the traditional custom, which included a gulp of air at the window when the meal was finished, a certain amount of loitering in the street when she went out to do her marketing, and a holiday on Sundays when she paid a visit to her niece—the portion of contentment indispensable to her existence. So it can be understood why Françoise pined in those first days of our migration, a prey—in a house where my father’s claims to distinction were not yet known—to a malady which she herself called “ennui,” ennui in the strong sense in which the word is employed by Corneille, or in the letters of soldiers who end by taking their own lives because they are pining after1 their sweethearts or their native villages. Françoise’s ennui had soon been cured by none other than Jupien, for he at once procured her a pleasure no less keen and more refined than she would have felt if we had decided to keep a carriage. “Very good class, those Juliens” (for Françoise readily assimilated new names to those with which she was already familiar), “very decent people; you can see it written on their faces.” Jupien was indeed able to understand, and to inform the world, that if we did not keep a carriage it was because we had no wish to do so.
This new friend of Françoise’s was seldom at home, having obtained a post in a Government office. A waistcoat-maker first of all, with the “chit of a girl” whom my grandmother had taken for his daughter, he had lost all interest in the exercise of that calling after the girl (who, when still little more than a child, had shown great skill in darning a torn skirt, that day when my grandmother had gone to call on Mme de Villeparisis) had turned to ladies’ fashions and become a skirt-maker. A prentice hand, to begin with, in a dressmaker’s workroom, employed to stitch a seam, to sew up a flounce, to fasten a button or a press-stud, to fix a waistband with hooks and eyes, she had quickly risen to be second and then chief assistant, and having formed a clientele of her own among ladies of fashion, now worked at home, that is to say in our courtyard, generally with one or two of her young friends from the workroom, whom she had taken on as apprentices. After this, Jupien’s presence had become less essential. No doubt the little girl (a big girl by this time) had often to cut out waistcoats still. But with her friends to assist her she needed no one besides. And so Jupien, her uncle, had sought employment outside. He was free at first to return home at midday; then, when he had definitely succeeded the man whose assistant only he had begun by being, not before dinner-time. His appointment to the “regular establishment” was, fortunately, not announced until some weeks after our arrival, so that his amiability could be brought to bear on Françoise long enough to help her through the first, most difficult phase without undue pain. At the same time, and without underrating his value to Françoise as, so to speak, an interim sedative, I am bound to say that my first impression of Jupien had been far from favourable. From a few feet away, entirely destroying the effect that his plump cheeks and florid complexion would otherwise have produced, his eyes, brimming with a compassionate, mournful, dreamy gaze, led one to suppose that he was seriously ill or had just suffered a great bereavement. Not only was this not so, but as soon as he spoke (quite perfectly as it happened) he was inclined rather to be cold and mocking. There resulted from this discord between his look and his speech a certain falsity which was not attractive, and by which he himself had the air of being made as uncomfortable as a guest who arrives in day clothes at a party where everyone else is in evening dress, or as someone who, having to speak to a royal personage, does not know exactly how he ought to address him and gets round the difficulty by cutting down his remarks to almost nothing. Jupien’s (here the comparison ends) were, on the contrary, charming. Indeed, corresponding perhaps to that inundation of the face by the eyes (which one ceased to notice when one came to know him), I soon discerned in him a rare intelligence, one of the most spontaneously literary that it has been my privilege to come across, in the sense that, probably without education, he possessed or had assimilated, with the help only of a few books hastily perused, the most ingenious turns of speech. The most gifted people that I had known had died young. And so I was convinced that Jupien’s life would soon be cut short. He was kind and sympathetic, and had the most delicate and the most generous feelings.
His role in Françoise’s life had soon ceased to be indispensable. She had learned to stand in for him. Even when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a parcel or message, while seeming to pay no attention to him and merely pointing vaguely to an empty chair, Françoise so skilfully put to the best advantage the few moments that he spent in the kitchen while he waited for Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that he went away without having ineradicably engraved in his mind the conviction that, if we “did not have” any particular thing, it was because we had “no wish” for it. If she made such a point of other people’s knowing that we “had money”2 (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive articles, and said simply “have money,” “fetch water”), of their knowing us to be rich, it was not because wealth with nothing else besides, wealth without virtue, was in her eyes the supreme good; but virtue without wealth was not her ideal either. Wealth was for her, so to speak, a necessary condition failing which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so little between them that she had come in time to invest each with the other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to discover something edifying in wealth.
The Guermantes Way Page 2