The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  And the Duke murmured, lowering his voice, for his wife’s and M. d’Argencourt’s benefit, “Mater Semita,” which had already made its way into the Jockey Club, for, of all the flying seeds in the world, that to which are attached the most solid wings, enabling it to be disseminated at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke.

  “We might ask this gentleman, who has a nerudite air, to explain it to us,” he went on, pointing to the historian. “But it’s better not to repeat it, especially as there’s not a vestige of truth in the suggestion. I’m not so ambitious as my cousin Mirepoix, who claims that she can trace the descent of her family before Christ to the Tribe of Levi, and I’ll guarantee to prove that there has never been a drop of Jewish blood in our family. Still it’s no good shutting our eyes to the fact that my dear nephew’s charming views are liable to make a considerable stir in Landerneau. Especially as Fezensac is ill just now, and Duras will be running the election; you know how he likes to draw the longbow,” concluded the Duke, who had never succeeded in learning the exact meaning of certain phrases, and supposed drawing the longbow to mean making complications.

  “In any case, if this man Dreyfus is innocent,” the Duchess broke in, “he hasn’t done much to prove it. What idiotic, turgid letters he writes from his island! I don’t know whether M. Esterhazy is any better, but at least he has more of a knack of phrase-making, a different tone altogether. That can’t be very welcome to the supporters of M. Dreyfus. What a pity for them that they can’t swap innocents.”

  Everyone burst out laughing. “Did you hear what Oriane said?” the Duc de Guermantes inquired eagerly of Mme de Villeparisis. “Yes, I thought it most amusing.” This was not enough for the Duke: “Well, I don’t know, I can’t say that I thought it amusing; or rather it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether a thing is amusing or not. I set no store by wit.” M. d’Argencourt protested. “He doesn’t believe a word he says,” murmured the Duchess. “It’s probably because I’ve been a Member of Parliament, where I’ve listened to brilliant speeches that meant absolutely nothing. I learned there to value logic more than anything else. That’s probably why I wasn’t re-elected. Amusing things leave me cold.” “Basin, don’t play the humbug like that, my sweet, you know quite well that no one admires wit more than you do.” “Please let me finish. It’s precisely because I’m unmoved by a certain type of humour that I appreciate my wife’s wit. For you will find it based, as a rule, upon sound observation. She reasons like a man; she expresses herself like a writer.”

  Meanwhile Bloch was trying to pin M. de Norpois down on Colonel Picquart.

  “There can be no question,” replied M. de Norpois, “that the Colonel’s evidence became necessary if only because the Government felt that there might well be something in the wind. I am well aware that, by maintaining this attitude, I have drawn shrieks of protest from more than one of my colleagues, but to my mind the Government were bound to let the Colonel speak. One can’t get out of that sort of fix simply by performing a pirouette, or if one does there’s always the risk of falling into a quagmire. As for the officer himself, his statement made a most excellent impression at the first hearing. When one saw him, looking so well in that smart Chasseur uniform, come into court and relate in a perfectly simple and frank tone what he had seen and what he had deduced, and say: ‘On my honour as a soldier’ ” (here M. de Norpois’s voice shook with a faint patriotic throb) “‘such is my conviction,’ it is impossible to deny that the impression he made was profound.”

  “There, he’s a Dreyfusard, there’s not the least doubt of it,” thought Bloch.

  “But where he entirely forfeited all the sympathy that he had managed to attract was when he was confronted with the registrar, Gribelin. When one heard that old public servant, a man of his word if ever there was one” (here M. de Norpois began to accentuate his words with the energy of sincere conviction), “when one saw him look his superior officer in the face, not afraid to hold his head up to him, and say to him in an unanswerable tone: ‘Come, come, Colonel, you know very well that I have never told a lie, you know that at this moment, as always, I am speaking the truth,’ the wind changed; M. Picquart might move heaven and earth at the subsequent hearings, but he came completely to grief.”

  “No, he’s definitely an anti-Dreyfusard; it’s quite obvious,” said Bloch to himself. “But if he considers Picquart a traitor and a liar, how can he take his revelations seriously, and quote them as if he found them charming and believed them to be sincere? And if, on the other hand, he sees him as an honest man unburdening his conscience, how can he suppose him to have been lying when he was confronted with Gribelin?”

  Perhaps the reason why M. de Norpois spoke thus to Bloch as though they were in agreement arose from the fact that he himself was so keen an anti-Dreyfusard that, finding the Government not anti-Dreyfusard enough, he was its enemy just as much as the Dreyfusards were. Perhaps it was because the object to which he devoted himself in politics was something more profound, situated on another plane, from which Dreyfusism appeared as an unimportant issue which did not deserve the attention of a patriot interested in large questions of foreign policy. Perhaps, rather, it was because, the maxims of his political wisdom being applicable only to questions of form, of procedure, of expediency, they were as powerless to solve questions of fact as, in philosophy, pure logic is powerless to tackle the problems of existence; or else because that very wisdom made him see danger in handling such subjects and so, in his caution, he preferred to speak only of minor circumstances. But where Bloch was mistaken was in assuming that M. de Norpois, even had he been less cautious by nature and of a less exclusively formal cast of mind, could, if he had wished, have told him the truth as to the part played by Henry, Picquart or du Paty de Clam, or as to any of the different aspects of the case. For Bloch had no doubt that M. de Norpois knew the truth as to all these matters. How could he fail to know it, seeing that he was a friend of all the ministers? Naturally, Bloch thought that the truth in politics could be approximately reconstructed by the most lucid minds, but he imagined, like the man in the street, that it resided permanently, beyond the reach of argument and in a material form, in the secret files of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, who imparted it to the Cabinet. Whereas, even when a political truth is enshrined in written documents, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient’s disease is inscribed in so many words, whereas in fact the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be combined with a number of others on which the doctor’s reasoning powers will be brought to bear and on which he will base his diagnosis. Thus the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession, followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in opposite ways by the Dreyfusard ministers and by Cavaignac and Cuignet who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery and conducted the interrogation; more remarkable still, among the Dreyfusard ministers themselves, men of the same shade of opinion, judging not only from the same documents but in the same spirit, the part played by Henry was explained in two entirely opposite ways, one set seeing in him an accomplice of Esterhazy, the others assigning that role to du Paty de Clam, thus adopting a thesis of their opponent Cuignet and in complete opposition to their supporter Reinach. All that Bloch could elicit from M. de Norpois was that if it were true that the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, had had a secret communication sent to M. Rochefort, it was evident that a singularly regrettable irregularity had occurred.

  “You may be quite sure that the War Minister must (in petto at any rate) have called down every curse on his Chief of Staff. An official disclaimer would not have been (to my mind) a work of supererogation. But the War Minister expresses himself very bluntly on the matter i
nter pocula. There are certain subjects, moreover, about which it is highly imprudent to create an agitation over which one cannot afterwards retain control.”

  “But those documents are obviously fake,” said Bloch.

  M. de Norpois made no reply to this, but declared that he did not approve of the public demonstrations of Prince Henri d’Orléans:16

  “Besides, they can only ruffle the calm of the praetorium, and encourage disturbances which, looked at from either point of view, would be deplorable. Certainly we must put a stop to the anti-militarist intrigues, but neither can we tolerate a brawl encouraged by those elements on the Right who instead of serving the patriotic ideal themselves are hoping to make it serve them. Heaven be praised, France is not a South American replica, and the need has not yet been felt here for a military pronunciamento.”

  Bloch could not get him to pronounce on the question of Dreyfus’s guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the civil trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M. de Norpois seemed only too ready to expatiate on the consequences of the verdict.

  “If it is a conviction,” he said, “it will probably be quashed, for it is seldom that, in a case where there has been such a number of witnesses, there is not some flaw in the procedure which counsel can raise on appeal. To return to Prince Henri’s outburst, I greatly doubt whether it met with his father’s approval.”

  “You think Chartres is for Dreyfus?” asked the Duchess with a smile, her eyes rounded, her cheeks bright, her nose buried in her plate of petits fours, her whole manner deliciously scandalised.

  “Not at all. I meant only that there runs through the whole family, on that side, a political sense of which we have seen the ne plus ultra in the admirable Princess Clémentine, and which her son, Prince Ferdinand, has kept as a priceless inheritance. You would never have found the Prince of Bulgaria clasping Major Esterhazy to his bosom.”

  “He would have preferred a private soldier,” murmured Mme de Guermantes, who often met the Bulgarian at dinner at the Prince de Joinville’s, and had said to him once, when he asked if she was not jealous: “Yes, Your Highness, of your bracelets.”

  “You aren’t going to Mme de Sagan’s ball this evening?” M. de Norpois asked Mme de Villeparisis, to cut short his conversation with Bloch.

  The latter had made a not unpleasing impression on the Ambassador, who told us afterwards, with some naïvety, thinking no doubt of the traces that survived in Bloch’s speech of the neo-Homeric manner which he had on the whole outgrown: “He is quite amusing, with his old-fashioned, rather solemn way of speaking. You expect him to come out with ‘the Learned Sisters,’ like Lamartine or Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. It has become quite rare in the youth of the present day, as it was indeed in the generation before them. We ourselves were inclined to be a bit romantic.” But however interesting his interlocutor may have seemed to him, M. de Norpois considered that the conversation had lasted long enough.

  “No, I don’t go to balls any more,” Mme de Villeparisis replied with a charming grandmotherly smile. “You’re going, all of you, I suppose? You’re the right age for that sort of thing,” she added, embracing in a comprehensive glance M. de Châtellerault, his friend and Bloch. “I was asked too,” she went on, coyly pretending to be flattered by the distinction. “In fact, they came specially to invite me.” (“They” being the Princesse de Sagan.)

  “I haven’t had a card,” said Bloch, thinking that Mme de Villeparisis would at once offer to procure him one, and that Mme de Sagan would be happy to welcome the friend of a woman on whom she had called in person to invite.

  The Marquise made no reply, and Bloch did not press the point, for he had another, more serious matter to discuss with her, and, with that in view, had already asked her whether he might call again in a couple of days. Having heard the two young men say that they had both just resigned from the Rue Royale Club, which was letting in every Tom, Dick and Harry, he wished to ask Mme de Villeparisis to arrange for his election there.

  “Aren’t they rather bad form, rather stuck-up snobs, these Sagans?” he inquired in a sarcastic tone of voice.

  “Not at all, they’re the best we can do for you in that line,” replied M. d’Argencourt, who adopted all the witticisms of Parisian society.

  “Then,” said Bloch, still half in irony, “I suppose it’s one of the solemnities, the great social fixtures of the season.”

  Mme de Villeparisis turned merrily to Mme de Guermantes:

  “Tell us, is it a great social solemnity, Mme de Sagan’s ball?”

  “It’s no good asking me,” answered the Duchess, “I have never yet succeeded in finding out what a social solemnity is. Besides, society isn’t my forte.”

  “Oh, I thought it was just the opposite,” said Bloch, who supposed Mme de Guermantes to have spoken seriously.

  He continued, to the desperation of M. de Norpois, to ply him with questions about the Dreyfus case. The Ambassador declared that at first sight Colonel du Paty de Clam gave him the impression of a somewhat woolly mind, which had perhaps not been very happily chosen to conduct that delicate operation, which required so much coolness and discernment, a judicial inquiry.

  “I know that the Socialist Party are clamouring for his head on a charger, as well as for the immediate release of the prisoner from Devil’s Island. But I trust that we are not yet reduced to the necessity of going through the Caudine Forks of MM. Gérault-Richard and company. So far, there’s no making head or tail of the case. I don’t say that on both sides there isn’t some pretty dirty work to be hushed up. That certain of your client’s more or less disinterested patrons may have the best intentions I will not attempt to deny. But you know that hell is paved with such things,” he added, with a look of great subtlety. “The great thing is that the Government should make it clear that it is no more in the hands of the factions of the Left than it is prepared to surrender, bound hand and foot, to the demands of some praetorian guard or other which, believe me, is not the same thing as the Army. It goes without saying that, should any fresh evidence come to light, a new trial would be ordered. It’s as plain as a pike-staff; to demand that is to push at an open door. When that day comes the Government will speak out loud and clear—otherwise it would forfeit what is its essential prerogative. Cock and bull stories will no longer suffice. We must appoint judges to try Dreyfus. And that will be an easy matter because, although we have acquired the habit in our beloved France, where we love to speak ill of ourselves, of thinking or letting it be thought that in order to hear the words Truth and Justice it is necessary to cross the Channel, which is very often only a roundabout way of reaching the Spree, there are judges to be found outside Berlin. But once the machinery of Government has been set in motion, will you have ears for the voice of authority? When it bids you perform your duty as a citizen will you take your stand in the ranks of law and order? When its patriotic appeal sounds, will you have the wisdom not to turn a deaf ear but to answer: ‘Present!’?”

  M. de Norpois put these questions to Bloch with a vehemence which, while it alarmed my old schoolfriend, flattered him also; for the Ambassador seemed to be addressing a whole party in Bloch’s person, to be interrogating him as though he had been in the confidence of that party and might be held responsible for the decisions which it would adopt. “Should you fail to disarm,” M. de Norpois went on without waiting for Bloch’s collective answer, “should you, before even the ink has dried on the decree ordering the retrial, obeying I know not what insidious word of command, fail, I say, to disarm, and band yourselves in a sterile opposition which seems to some minds the ultima ratio of policy, should you retire to your tents and burn your boats, you would be doing so to your own detriment. Are you the prisoner of those who foment disorder? Have you given them pledges?” Bloch was at a loss for an answer. M. de Norpois gave him no time. “If the negative be true, as I sincerely hope and trust, and if you have a little of what seems to me to be lamentably lacking in certain of your leade
rs and your friends, namely political sense, then, on the day when the Criminal Court assembles, if you do not allow yourselves to be dragooned by the fishers in troubled waters, you will have won the day. I do not guarantee that the whole of the General Staff is going to get away unscathed, but it will be so much to the good if some of them at least can save their faces without putting a match to the powder-barrel. It goes without saying, of course, that it rests with the Government to pronounce judgment and to close the list—already too long—of unpunished crimes, not, certainly, at the bidding of Socialist agitators, nor yet of any obscure military rabble,” he added, looking Bloch in the eyes, perhaps with the instinct that leads all Conservatives to try to win support for themselves in the enemy’s camp. “Government action is not to be dictated by the highest bid, wherever it may come from. The Government is not, thank heaven, under the orders of Colonel Driant, nor, at the other end of the scale, under M. Clemenceau’s. We must curb the professional agitators and prevent them from raising their heads again. France, the vast majority here in France, desires only to be allowed to work in orderly conditions. As to that, there can be no question whatever. But we must not be afraid to enlighten public opinion; and if a few sheep, of the kind our friend Rabelais knew so well, should dash headlong into the water, it would be as well to point out to them that the water in question is troubled water, that it has been troubled deliberately by an agency not within our borders, in order to conceal the dangers lurking in its depths. And the Government must not give the impression that it is emerging from its passivity under duress when it exercises the right which is essentially its own and no one else’s, I mean that of setting the wheels of justice in motion. The Government will accept all your suggestions. If there should prove to have been a judicial error, it can be assured of an overwhelming majority which would give it some elbow-room.”