Perhaps Mme de Guermantes would smile next day when she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that the latter had been none the less quite lovely and marvellously got up; and the Princess, whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a little “tailor-made” in her cousin’s way of dressing, would discover in this strict sobriety an exquisite refinement. Moreover, the harmony that existed between them, the universal and pre-established gravitational pull of their upbringing, neutralised the contrasts not only in their apparel but in their attitude. At those invisible magnetic longitudes which the refinement of their manners traced between them, the natural expansiveness of the Princess died away, while towards them the formal correctness of the Duchess allowed itself to be attracted and loosened, turned to sweetness and charm. As, in the play which was now being performed, to realise how much personal poetry Berma extracted from it one had only to entrust the part which she was playing, which she alone could play, to any other actress, so the spectator who raised his eyes to the balcony would have seen in two smaller boxes there how an “arrangement” intended to suggest that of the Princesse de Guermantes simply made the Baronne de Morienval appear eccentric, pretentious and ill-bred, while an effort as painstaking as it must have been costly to imitate the clothes and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, rigid, erect, desiccated, angular, with a plume of raven’s feathers stuck vertically in her hair. Perhaps this lady was out of place in a theatre in which it was only with the brightest stars of the season that the boxes (even those in the highest tier, which from below seemed like great hampers studded with human flowers and attached to the ceiling of the auditorium by the red cords of their plush-covered partitions) composed an ephemeral panorama which deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which this evening was held motionless by attentiveness, heat, dizziness, dust, elegance and boredom, in the sort of eternal tragic instant of unconscious expectancy and calm torpor which, in retrospect, seems always to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker of a fire.
The explanation for Mme de Cambremer’s presence on this occasion was that the Princesse de Parme, devoid of snobbishness as are most truly royal personages, and by contrast eaten up with a pride in and passion for charity which rivalled her taste for what she believed to be the Arts, had bestowed a few boxes here and there upon women like Mme de Cambremer who were not numbered among the highest aristocratic society but with whom she was in communication with regard to charitable undertakings. Mme de Cambremer never took her eyes off the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which was all the easier for her since, not being actually acquainted with either, she could not be suspected of angling for a sign of recognition. Inclusion in the visiting lists of these two great ladies was nevertheless the goal towards which she had been striving for the last ten years with untiring patience. She had calculated that she might possibly reach it in five years more. But having been smitten by a fatal disease, the inexorable character of which—for she prided herself upon her medical knowledge—she thought she knew, she was afraid that she might not live so long. This evening she was happy at least in the thought that all these women whom she scarcely knew would see in her company a man who was one of their own set, the young Marquis de Beausergent, Mme d’Argencourt’s brother, who moved impartially in both worlds and whom the women of the second were very keen to parade before the eyes of those of the first. He was seated behind Mme de Cambremer on a chair placed at an angle, so that he might be able to scan the other boxes. He knew everyone in them and to bow to his friends, with the exquisite elegance of his delicately arched figure, his fine features and fair hair, he half-raised his upright torso, a smile brightening his blue eyes, with a blend of deference and detachment, a picture etched with precision in the rectangle of the oblique plane in which he was placed, like one of those old prints which portray a great nobleman in his courtly pride. He often accepted these invitations to go to the theatre with Mme de Cambremer. In the auditorium, and, on the way out, in the lobby, he stood gallantly by her side amid the throng of more brilliant friends whom he saw about him, and to whom he refrained from speaking, to avoid any awkwardness, just as though he had been in doubtful company. If at such moments the Princesse de Guermantes swept by, lightfoot and fair as Diana, trailing behind her the folds of an incomparable cloak, making every head turn round and followed by all eyes (and, most of all, by Mme de Cambremer’s), M. de Beausergent would become engrossed in conversation with his companion, acknowledging the friendly and dazzling smile of the Princess only with constraint, and with the well-bred reserve, the considerate coldness of a person whose friendliness might have become momentarily embarrassing.
Had not Mme de Cambremer known already that the box belonged to the Princess, she could still have told that the Duchesse de Guermantes was the guest from the air of greater interest with which she was surveying the spectacle of stage and auditorium, out of politeness to her hostess. But simultaneously with this centrifugal force, an equal and opposite force generated by the same desire to be sociable drew her attention back to her own attire, her plume, her necklace, her bodice and also to that of the Princess herself, whose subject, whose slave her cousin seemed to proclaim herself, come there solely to see her, ready to follow her elsewhere should the titular holder of the box have taken it into her head to get up and go, and regarding the rest of the house as composed merely of strangers, worth looking at simply as curiosities, though she numbered among them many friends to whose boxes she regularly repaired on other evenings and with regard to whom she never failed on those occasions to demonstrate a similar loyalty, exclusive, relativistic and weekly. Mme de Cambremer was surprised to see her there that evening. She knew that the Duchess stayed on very late at Guermantes, and had supposed her to be there still. But she had been told that sometimes, when there was some special function in Paris which she considered it worth her while to attend, Mme de Guermantes would order one of her carriages to be brought round as soon as she had taken tea with the guns, and, as the sun was setting, drive off at a spanking pace through the gathering darkness of the forest, then along the high road, to join the train at Combray and so be in Paris the same evening. “Perhaps she has come up from Guermantes especially to see Berma,” thought Mme de Cambremer, and marvelled at the thought. And she remembered having heard Swann say in that ambiguous jargon which he shared with M. de Charlus: “The Duchess is one of the noblest souls in Paris, the cream of the most refined, the choicest society.” For myself, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavaria and Condé what I imagined to be the lives and the thoughts of the two cousins (I could no longer do so from their faces, having seen them), I would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world. For in his I should have found merely intelligence, an intelligence superior to my own but similar in kind. But what the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion which would have furnished me with an invaluable clue to the nature of these two poetic creatures, I imagined with the aid of their names, I endowed with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and the longing of a fever-stricken patient, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should yield to me was the charm of the summer afternoons that I had spent wandering along the Guermantes way.
Mme de Cambremer was trying to make out how exactly the two cousins were dressed. For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialisation, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and wh
ich, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven. I gazed on this momentary apotheosis with a perturbation which was partly soothed by the feeling that I myself was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no memory of that, and I was not distressed that she should find herself, owing to the position that she occupied in the box, gazing down upon the nameless, collective madrepores of the audience in the stalls, for I was happily aware that my being was dissolved in their midst, when, at the moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, the blurred shape of the protozoon devoid of any individual existence which was myself must have come to be reflected in the impassive current of those two blue eyes, I saw a ray illumine them: the Duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing in that moment a thousand times more lovely, raised towards me the white-gloved hand which had been resting on the balustrade of the box and waved it in token of friendship; my gaze was caught in the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the Princess, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by turning her head to see who it might be that her cousin was thus greeting; and the latter, who had recognised me, poured upon me the sparkling and celestial shower of her smile.
Now, every morning, long before the hour at which she left her house, I went by a devious route to post myself at the corner of the street along which she generally came, and, when the moment of her arrival seemed imminent, I strolled back with an air of being absorbed in something else, looking the other way, and raised my eyes to her face as I drew level with her, but as though I had not in the least expected to see her. Indeed, for the first few mornings, so as to be sure of not missing her, I waited in front of the house. And every time the carriage gate opened (letting out one after another so many people who were not the one for whom I was waiting) its grinding rattle prolonged itself in my heart in a series of oscillations which took a long time to subside. For never was devotee of a famous actress whom he does not know, kicking his heels outside the stage door, never was angry or idolatrous crowd, gathered to insult or to carry in triumph through the streets the condemned assassin or the national hero whom it believes to be on the point of coming whenever a sound is heard from the inside of the prison or the palace, never were these so stirred by emotion as I was, awaiting the emergence of this great lady who in her simple attire was able, by the grace of her movements (quite different from the gait she affected on entering a drawing-room or a box), to make of her morning walk—and for me there was no one in the world but she out walking—a whole poem of elegant refinement and the loveliest ornament, the rarest flower of the season. But after the third day, so that the porter should not discover my stratagem, I betook myself much further afield, to some point upon the Duchess’s usual route. Often before that evening at the theatre I had made similar little excursions before lunch, when the weather was fine; if it had been raining, at the first gleam of sunshine I would hasten downstairs to take a stroll, and if, suddenly, coming towards me along the still wet pavement, changed by the sun into a golden lacquer, in the transformation scene of a crossroads powdered with mist which the sun tanned and bleached, I caught sight of a schoolgirl followed by her governess or of a dairy-maid with her white sleeves, I stood motionless, my hand pressed to my heart which was already leaping towards an unexplored life; I tried to bear in mind the street, the time, the number of the door through which the girl (whom I followed sometimes) had vanished and failed to reappear. Fortunately the fleeting nature of these cherished images, which I promised myself that I would make an effort to see again, prevented them from fixing themselves with any vividness in my memory. No matter, I was less depressed now at the thought of my own ill health, of my never having summoned up the energy to set to work, to begin a book, for the world appeared to me a pleasanter place to live in, life a more interesting experience to go through, now that I had learned that the streets of Paris, like the roads round Balbec, were in bloom with those unknown beauties whom I had so often sought to conjure from the woods of Méséglise, each of whom aroused a voluptuous longing which she alone seemed capable of assuaging.
On coming home from the Opéra, I had added for the following morning, to those whom for some days past I had been hoping to meet again, the image of Mme de Guermantes, tall, with her high-piled crown of silky, golden hair, with the tenderness promised by the smile which she had directed at me from her cousin’s box. I would follow the route which Françoise had told me that the Duchess generally took, and I would try at the same time, in the hope of meeting two girls whom I had seen a few days earlier, not to miss the coming out of a class or a catechism. But meanwhile, from time to time, the scintillating smile of Mme de Guermantes, and the warm feeling it had engendered, came back to me. And without exactly knowing what I was doing, I tried to find a place for them (as a woman studies the effect a certain kind of jewelled buttons that have just been given her might have on a dress) beside the romantic ideas which I had long held and which Albertine’s coldness, Gisèle’s premature departure, and before them my deliberate and too long sustained separation from Gilberte had set free (the idea for instance of being loved by a woman, of having a life in common with her); then it was the image of one or other of the two girls seen in the street that I coupled with those ideas, to which immediately afterwards I tried to adapt my memory of the Duchess. Compared with those ideas, the memory of Mme de Guermantes at the Opéra was a very insignificant thing, a tiny star twinkling beside the long tail of a blazing comet; moreover I had been quite familiar with the ideas long before I came to know Mme de Guermantes; whereas the memory of her I possessed but imperfectly; at moments it escaped me; it was during the hours when, from floating vaguely in my mind in the same way as the images of various other pretty women, it gradually developed into a unique and definitive association—exclusive of every other feminine image—with those romantic ideas of mine which were of so much longer standing than itself, it was during those few hours in which I remembered it most clearly, that I ought to have taken steps to find out exactly what it was; but I did not then know the importance it was to assume for me; I cherished it simply as a first private meeting with Mme de Guermantes inside myself; it was the first, the only accurate sketch, the only one made from life, the only one that was really Mme de Guermantes; during the few hours in which I was fortunate enough to retain it without giving it any conscious thought, it must have been charming, though, that memory, since it was always to it, freely still at that moment, without haste, without strain, without the slightest compulsion or anxiety, that my ideas of love returned; then, as gradually those ideas fixed it more permanently, it acquired from them a greater strength but itself became more vague; presently I could no longer recapture it; and in my dreams I no doubt distorted it completely, for whenever I saw Mme de Guermantes I realised the disparity—always, as it happened, different—between what I had imagined and what I saw. True, every morning now, at the moment when Mme de Guermantes emerged from her doorway at the top of the street, I saw again her tall figure, her face with its bright eyes and crown of silken hair—all the things for which I was waiting there; but, on the other hand, a minute or two later, when, having first turned my eyes away so as to appear not to be expecting this encounter which I
had come to seek, I raised them to look at the Duchess at the moment in which we converged, what I saw then were red patches (as to which I did not know whether they were due to the fresh air or to a blotchy skin) on a sullen face which with the curtest of nods, a long way removed from the affability of the Phèdre evening, acknowledged the greeting which I addressed to her daily with an air of surprise and which did not seem to please her. And yet, after a few days during which the memory of the two girls fought against heavy odds for the mastery of my amorous feelings with that of Mme de Guermantes, it was in the end the latter which, as though of its own accord, generally prevailed while its competitors withdrew; it was to it that I finally found myself, on the whole voluntarily still and as though from choice and with pleasure, to have transferred all my thoughts of love. I had ceased to dream of the little girls coming from their catechism, or of a certain dairy-maid; and yet I had also lost all hope of encountering in the street what I had come to seek, either the affection promised to me at the theatre in a smile, or the profile, the bright face beneath its pile of golden hair which were so only when seen from afar. Now I should not even have been able to say what Mme de Guermantes was like, what I recognised her by, for every day, in the picture which she presented as a whole, the face was as different as were the dress and the hat.
The Guermantes Way Page 7