As soon as she had shut the window again, fairly quickly—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on her “every imaginable insult”—Françoise began with many groans and sighs to put the kitchen table straight.
“There’s some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my father’s valet. “I had a friend used to work there; he was their second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old pal but his brother-in-law, who did his time in the Army with one of the Baron de Guermantes’s grooms. ‘And after all, he ain’t my father,’ ”3 added the valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to hum the popular airs of the season, of peppering his conversation with all the latest witticisms.
Françoise, with the tired eyes of an ageing woman, eyes which moreover saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, perceived, not the witticism that underlay these words, but the fact that there must be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of the observation and had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a joker. She therefore smiled with an air of dazzled benevolence, as who should say: “Always the same, that Victor?” And she was genuinely pleased, knowing that listening to smart sayings of this sort was akin—if remotely—to those reputable social pleasures for which, in every class of society, people make haste to dress themselves in their best and run the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed the valet to be a friend after her own heart, for he never ceased to denounce with fierce indignation the appalling measures which the Republic was about to enforce against the clergy. Françoise had not yet learned that our cruellest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports which are liable to distress us, taking care not to give them any appearance of justification which might lessen our pain and perhaps give us some slight regard for an attitude which they make a point of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.
“The Duchess must be allianced with all that lot,” said Françoise, taking up the conversation again at the Guermantes of the Rue de la Chaise, as one resumes a piece of music at the andante. “I can’t recall who it was told me one of them married a cousin of the Duke. It’s the same kindred, anyway. Ay, they’re a great family, the Guermantes!” she added, in a tone of respect, founding the greatness of the family at once on the number of its branches and the brilliance of its connexions, as Pascal founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on the authority of the Scriptures. For since she had only the single word “great” to express both meanings, it seemed to her that they formed a single idea, her vocabulary, like certain cut stones, showing thus on certain of its facets a flaw which projected a ray of darkness into the recesses of her mind.
“I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them that have their castle at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they must be kin to their cousin in Algiers, too.” (My mother and I had wondered for a long time who this cousin in Algiers could be until finally we discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of Angers. What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near. Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and especially its toponymy, was thickly strewn with errors.) “I meant to talk to their butler about it . . . What is it now they call him?” She broke off as though putting to herself a question of protocol, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course, it’s Antoine they call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s the one could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great pedant, you’d think they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no reply when you talk to him,” went on Françoise, who said “make reply” like Mme de Sévigné. “But,” she added, quite untruthfully, “so long as I know what’s boiling in my pot I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s. In any case it’s not Catholic. And what’s more, he’s not a courageous man.” (This criticism might have led one to suppose that Françoise had changed her mind about physical bravery which according to her, in Combray days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts. But it was not so. “Courageous” meant simply hard-working.) “They do say, too, that he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all you hear. The staff never stay long there because of the lodge; the porters are jealous and set the Duchess against them. But it’s safe to say that he’s a real idler, that Antoine, and his Antoinesse is no better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing the name “Antoine” with a feminine suffix that would designate the butler’s wife, was inspired, no doubt, in her act of word-formation by an unconscious memory of the words chanoine and chanoinesse. If so, she was not far wrong. There is still a street near Notre-Dame called Rue Chanoinesse, a name which must have been given to it (since it was inhabited only by canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise was in reality the contemporary. She proceeded, moreover, at once to furnish another example of this way of forming feminines, for she added: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the Duchess that has Guermantes Castle. And it’s she that is the Lady Mayoress down in those parts. That’s something.”
“I should think it is something,” said the footman with conviction, having failed to detect the irony.
“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why, for folk like them to be Mayor and Mayoress, it’s just thank you for nothing. Ah, if it was mine, that Guermantes Castle, you wouldn’t see me setting foot in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a family who’ve got something to go on with, like Monsieur and Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on in this wretched town sooner than get away down to Combray the moment they’re free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off retiring when they’ve got everything they want? Why wait till they’re dead? Ah, if only I had a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to keep me warm in winter, I’d have been back home long since in my brother’s poor old house at Combray. Down there at least you feel you’re alive; you don’t have all these houses stuck up in front of you, and there’s so little noise at night-time you can hear the frogs singing five miles off and more.”
“That must be really nice, Madame,” exclaimed the young footman with enthusiasm, as though this last attraction had been as peculiar to Combray as the gondola is to Venice. A more recent arrival in the household than my father’s valet, he used to talk to Françoise about things which might interest not himself so much as her. And Françoise, whose face wrinkled up in disgust when she was treated as a mere cook, had for the young footman, who referred to her always as the “housekeeper,” that peculiar tenderness which certain princes of the second rank feel towards the well-intentioned young men who dignify them with a “Highness.”
“At any rate you know what you’re about there, and what time of year it is. It isn’t like here where you won’t find one wretched buttercup flowering at holy Easter any more than you would at Christmas, and I can’t hear so much as the tiniest angelus ring when I lift my old bones out of bed in the morning. Down there, you can hear every hour. It’s only a poor old bell, but you say to yourself: ‘My brother will be coming in from the fields now,’ and you watch the daylight fade, and the bell rings to bless the fruits of the earth, and you have time to take a turn before you light the lamp. But here it’s day-time and it’s night-time, and you go to bed, and you can’t say any more than the dumb beasts what you’ve been about.”
“They say Méséglise is a fine place, too, Madame,” broke in the young footman, who found that the conversation was becoming a little too abstract for his liking, and happened to remember having heard us, at table, mention Méséglise.
“Oh! Méséglise, is it?” said Françoise with the broad smile which one could always bring to her lips by uttering any of those names—Méséglise, Combray, Tansonville. They were so intimate a part of her life that she fel
t, on meeting them outside it, on hearing them used in conversation, a hilarity more or less akin to that which a teacher excites in his class by making an allusion to some contemporary personage whose name the pupils had never supposed could possibly greet their ears from the height of the academic rostrum. Her pleasure arose also from the feeling that these places meant something to her which they did not to the rest of the world, old companions with whom one has shared many an outing; and she smiled at them as if she found in them something witty, because there was in them a great part of herself.
“Yes, you may well say so, son, it’s a pretty enough place is Méséglise,” she went on with a tinkling laugh, “but how did you ever come to hear tell of Méséglise?”
“How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-known place. People have told me about it oftentimes,” he assured her with that criminal inexactitude of the informant who, whenever we attempt to form an impartial estimate of the importance that a thing which matters to us may have for other people, makes it impossible for us to do so.
“Ah! I can tell you it’s better down there under the cherry trees than standing in front of the kitchen stove all day.”
She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since Eulalie’s death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had loved her as little in her lifetime as she loved anyone whose cupboard was bare, who was “perishing poor” and then came, like a good for nothing, thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put on airs.” It no longer pained her that Eulalie had so skilfully managed, Sunday after Sunday, to secure her “tip” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never ceased to sing her praises.
“So it was at Combray itself that you used to be, with a cousin of Madame?” asked the young footman.
“Yes, with Mme Octave—ah, a real saintly woman, I can tell you, and a house where there was always more than enough, and all of the very best—a good woman, and no mistake, who didn’t spare the partridges, or the pheasants, or anything. You might turn up five to dinner or six, it was never the meat that was lacking, and of the first quality too, and white wine, and red wine, and everything you could wish.” (Françoise used the word “spare” in the same sense as La Bruyère.)4 “It was she that always paid the damages, even if the family stayed for months and years.” (This reflexion was not really meant as a slur upon us, for Françoise belonged to an epoch when the word “damages” was not restricted to a legal use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell you people didn’t go away empty from that house. As his reverence the Curé impressed on us many’s the time, if there ever was a woman who could count on going straight before the Throne of God, it was her. Poor Madame, I can still hear her saying in that faint little voice of hers: ‘You know, Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the victuals, you may be quite sure. If you’d only seen her, she weighed no more than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She would never listen to a word I said, she’d never send for the doctor. Ah, it wasn’t in that house that you’d have to gobble down your dinner. She liked her servants to be fed properly. Here, it’s been just the same again today; we’ve hardly had time for a snack. Everything has to be done on the run.”
What exasperated her more than anything were the slices of thin toast that my father used to eat. She was convinced that he indulged in them simply to give himself airs and to keep her “dancing.” “I can tell you frankly,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw the like.” He said this as if he had seen everything, and as if for him the range of an inexhaustible experience extended over all countries and their customs, among which was nowhere to be found the custom of eating slices of toast. “Yes, yes,” the butler muttered, “but that may all be changed; the workers are going on strike in Canada, and the Minister told Monsieur the other evening that he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself entirely honest, but since he regarded all politicians as shady, the crime of peculation seemed to him less serious than the pettiest larceny. He did not even stop to ask himself whether he had heard this historic utterance aright, and seemed not to have been struck by the improbability that such a thing should have been said by the guilty party himself to my father without my father’s immediately turning him out of the house. But the philosophy of Combray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that the strikes in Canada could have any repercussion on the consumption of toast. “Ah, well, as long as the world goes round, there’ll be masters to keep us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of this theory of perpetual trotting, for the last quarter of an hour my mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time as Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had been saying: “What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at table for at least two hours.” And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, “her” footman and the butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no thought of answering it, but rather as the first sounds of the instruments being tuned when the next part of a concert will soon begin, and one knows that there will be only a few minutes more of interval. And so, when the peals were repeated and became more urgent, our servants began to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much time left and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal somewhat louder than the rest gave a collective sigh and went their several ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette outside the door, Françoise, after a string of reflexions on ourselves, such as: “They’ve got the jumps today all right,” going up to tidy her attic, while the butler, having supplied himself first with note-paper from my bedroom, polished off the arrears of his private correspondence.
Despite the arrogant air of their butler, Françoise had been in a position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes occupied their mansion by virtue not of an immemorial right but of a quite recent tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked on the side that I did not know was quite small and just like all the neighbouring gardens, and I realised at last that there were not to be seen there pit and gallows or fortified mill, secret chamber, pillared dovecote, manorial bakehouse, tithe-barn or fortress, drawbridge or fixed bridge or even flying or toll bridge, charters, muniments, ramparts or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when the bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of salt water distributed over the earth’s surface, had suddenly restored to it a personality of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal painted by Whistler in his Harmonies in Blue and Silver, so the name Guermantes had seen the last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables perish under Françoise’s blows, when one day an old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess: “She has the highest position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; hers is the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” No doubt the most exclusive drawing-room, the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was little or nothing after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed. And yet this one too (and it was to be the last of the series), however humble it was, possessed something, quite apart from its material components, that amounted to an obscure differentiation.
And it became all the more essential that I should be able to explore in the “salon” of Mme de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery of her name, since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage. Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks that were irreducible to, impervious to the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, taking the place of my shattered dream, like a swan or a willow into which a god or nymph has been changed, and which henceforward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be shaken by the win
d. And yet scarcely had I left her presence than those glittering fragments had reassembled like the green and roseate reflexions of the sunset behind the oar that has broken them, and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had quickly appropriated to itself my impression of the face. But now, frequently, I saw her at her window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least, if I did not succeed in integrating into the living woman the name Guermantes, in thinking of her as Mme de Guermantes, I could cast the blame on the impotence of my mind to carry through the act that I demanded of it; but she herself, our neighbour, seemed to commit the same error, commit it without discomfiture moreover, without any of my scruples, without even suspecting that it was an error. Thus Mme de Guermantes showed in her dresses the same anxiety to follow the fashion as if, believing herself to have become a woman like any other, she had aspired to that elegance in her attire in which ordinary women might equal and perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in the street gaze admiringly at a well-dressed actress; and in the morning, before she sallied forth on foot, as if the opinion of the passers-by, whose vulgarity she accentuated by parading familiarly through their midst her inaccessible life, could be a tribunal competent to judge her, I would see her in front of the glass playing, with a conviction free from all pretence or irony, with passion, with ill-humour, with conceit, like a queen who has consented to appear as a servant-girl in theatricals at court, the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked whether her veil was hanging properly, smoothed her cuffs, adjusted her cloak, as the divine swan performs all the movements natural to his animal species, keeps his eyes painted on either side of his beak without putting into them any glint of life, and darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, as a swan would, without remembering that he is a god. But as the traveller, disappointed by his first impression of a strange town, tells himself that he will doubtless succeed in penetrating its charm if he visits its museums and galleries, strikes up an acquaintance with its people, works in its libraries, so I assured myself that, had I been given the right of entry into Mme de Guermantes’s house, were I one of her friends, were I to penetrate into her life, I should then know what, within its glowing amber envelope, her name enclosed in reality, objectively, for other people, since, after all, my father’s friend had said that the Guermantes set was in a class of its own in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
The Guermantes Way Page 3