The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  They talked for a moment, doubtless about me, for as Saint-Loup was leaving her to join his mother Mme de Guermantes turned to me:

  “Good evening, how are you?” was her greeting.

  She showered me with the light of her azure gaze, hesitated for a moment, unfolded and stretched towards me the stem of her arm, and leaned forward her body which sprang rapidly backwards like a bush that has been pulled down to the ground and, on being released, returns to its natural position. Thus she acted under the fire of Saint-Loup’s eyes, which kept her under observation from a distance and made frantic efforts to obtain some further concession still from his aunt. Fearing that our conversation might dry up altogether, he came across to fuel it, and answered for me:

  “He’s not very well just now, he gets rather tired. I think he would be a great deal better, by the way, if he saw you more often, for I don’t mind telling you that he enjoys seeing you very much.”

  “Oh, but that’s very nice of him,” said Mme de Guermantes in a deliberately trite tone, as if I had brought her her coat. “I’m most flattered.”

  “Look, I must go and talk to my mother for a minute; take my chair,” said Saint-Loup, thus forcing me to sit down next to his aunt.

  We were both silent.

  “I catch sight of you sometimes in the morning,” she said, as though she were giving me a piece of news and as though I for my part never saw her. “It’s so good for one, a walk.”

  “Oriane,” said Mme de Marsantes in a low voice, “you said you were going on to Mme de Saint-Ferréol’s. Would you be so very kind as to tell her not to expect me to dinner. I shall stay at home now that I’ve got Robert. And might I ask you in passing to see that someone sends out at once for a box of the cigars Robert likes? ‘Corona,’ they’re called. I’ve none in the house.”

  Robert came up to us. He had caught only the name of Mme de Saint-Ferréol.

  “Who in the world is Mme de Saint-Ferréol?” he inquired in a tone of studied surprise, for he affected ignorance of everything to do with society.

  “But, my darling boy, you know perfectly well,” said his mother. “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she who gave you that nice billiard table you liked so much.”

  “What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea. Really, my family are amazing,” he went on, half-turning towards me and unconsciously adopting Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed his ideas, “they know the most unheard-of people, people called Saint-Ferréol” (emphasising the final consonant of each word) “or something like that; my family go to balls, they drive in victorias, they lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”

  Mme de Guermantes made a slight, short, sharp sound in her throat as of an involuntary laugh choked back, which was intended to show that she acknowledged her nephew’s wit to the degree which kinship demanded. A servant came in to say that the Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen sent word to M. de Norpois that he had arrived.

  “Go and fetch him, Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to the ex-Ambassador, who set off in quest of the German Prime Minister.

  “Wait, Monsieur. Do you think I ought to show him the miniature of the Empress Charlotte?”

  “Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the Ambassador in a tone of conviction, as though he envied the fortunate Minister the favour that was in store for him.

  “Oh, I know he’s very sound,” said Mme de Marsantes, “and that is so rare among foreigners. But I’ve found out all about him. He’s anti-semitism personified.”

  The Prince’s name preserved, in the boldness with which its opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the energy, the mannered simplicity, the heavy refinements of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “Heim” of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a small child I had gone with my grandmother, under a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard it spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the Prince’s name seemed to shrink, to become imbued with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetising, light, with something about it that was authorised, prescribed. Furthermore, M. de Guermantes, in explaining who the Prince was, quoted a number of his titles, and I recognised the name of a village traversed by a river on which, every evening, the cure finished for the day, I used to go boating amid the mosquitoes, and that of a forest far enough away for the doctor not to allow me to make the excursion to it. And indeed it was comprehensible that the suzerainty of the noble gentleman should extend to the surrounding places and associate afresh in the enumeration of his titles the names which one could read side by side on a map. Thus beneath the visor of the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Knight of Franconia it was the face of a beloved, smiling land, on which the rays of the evening sun had often lingered for me, that I saw, at any rate before the Prince, Rhinegrave and Elector Palatine, had entered the room. For I speedily learned that the revenues which he drew from the forest and the river peopled with gnomes and undines, and from the magic mountain on which rose the ancient Burg that still cherished memories of Luther and Louis the German, he employed in keeping five Charron motor-cars, a house in Paris and another in London, a box on Mondays at the Opéra and another for the “Tuesdays” at the “Français.” He did not seem to me to be—nor did he himself seem to believe that he was—different from other men of similar wealth and age who had a less poetic origin. He had their culture, their ideals, he was proud of his rank but purely on account of the advantages it conferred on him, and had now only one ambition in life, to be elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, which was the reason of his coming to see Mme de Villeparisis.

  If he, whose wife was a leader of the most exclusive set in Berlin, had solicited an introduction to the Marquise, it was not the result of any desire on his part for her acquaintance. Devoured for years past by this ambition to be elected to the Institut, he had unfortunately never been in a position to reckon above five the number of Academicians who seemed prepared to vote for him. He knew that M. de Norpois could by himself command at least a dozen votes, a number which he was capable, by skilful negotiations, of increasing still further. And so the Prince, who had known him in Russia when they were both there as ambassadors, had gone to see him and had done everything in his power to win him over. But in vain might he intensify his friendly overtures, procure for the Marquis Russian decorations, quote him in articles on foreign policy, he had been faced with a heartless ingrate, a man in whose eyes all these attentions appeared to count as nothing, who had not advanced the prospects of his candidature one inch, had not even promised him his own vote. True, M. de Norpois received him with extreme politeness, indeed begged him not to put himself out and “take the trouble to come so far out of his way,” went himself to the Prince’s residence, and when the Teutonic knight had launched his: “I should very much like to be your colleague,” replied in a tone of deep emotion: “Ah! I should be most happy!” And no doubt a simpleton, a Dr Cottard, would have said to himself: “Well, here he is in my house; it was he who insisted on coming because he regards me as a more important person than himself; he tells me he’d be happy to see me in the Academy; words do have some meaning after all, damn it, so if he doesn’t offer to vote for me it’s probably because it hasn’t occurred to him. He lays so much stress on influence that he must imagine the plums fall into my lap, that I have all the support I need and that’s why he doesn’t offer me his; but I’ve only to corner him he
re, just the two of us, and say to him: ‘Very well, vote for me,’ and he’ll be obliged to do it.”

  But Prince von Faffenheim was no simpleton. He was what Dr Cottard would have called “a shrewd diplomat” and he knew that M. de Norpois was a no less shrewd one and a man who would have realised without needing to be told that he could confer a favour on a candidate by voting for him. The Prince, in his ambassadorial missions and as Foreign Minister, had conducted, on his country’s behalf instead of, as in the present instance, his own, many of those conversations in which one knows beforehand just how far one is prepared to go and at what point one will decline to commit oneself. He was not unaware that in diplomatic parlance to talk means to offer. And it was for this reason that he had arranged for M. de Norpois to receive the Order of Saint Andrew. But if he had had to report to his Government the conversation which he had subsequently had with M. de Norpois, he would have stated in his dispatch: “I realised that I had taken the wrong tack.” For as soon as he had returned to the subject of the Institut, M. de Norpois had repeated:

  “I should like nothing better; nothing could be better for my colleagues. They ought, I consider, to feel genuinely honoured that you should have thought of them. It’s a really interesting candidature, a little outside our normal practice. As you know, the Academy is very hide-bound; it takes fright at anything that smacks of novelty. Personally, I deplore this. How often have I not had occasion to say as much to my colleagues! I cannot be sure, God forgive me, that I did not even once let the term ‘stick-in-the-mud’ escape my lips,” he added with a scandalised smile in an undertone, almost an aside, as though on the stage, giving the Prince a rapid, sidelong glance from his blue eyes, like a veteran actor studying an effect on his audience. “You understand, Prince, that I should not care to allow a personality so eminent as yourself to embark on a venture which was hopeless from the start. So long as my colleagues’ ideas linger so far behind the times, I consider that the wiser course will be to abstain. But you may rest assured that if I were ever to discern a slightly more modern, a slightly more lively spirit emerge in that college, which is tending to become a mausoleum, if I felt you had a genuine chance of success, I should be the first to inform you of it.”

  “The Order was a mistake,” thought the Prince; “the negotiations have not advanced one step. That’s not what he wanted. I have not yet laid my hand on the right key.”

  This was a kind of reasoning of which M. de Norpois, formed in the same school as the Prince, would also have been capable. One may mock at the pedantic silliness which makes diplomats of the Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording which is to all intents and purposes meaningless. But their childishness has this compensation: diplomats know that, in the scales which ensure that balance of power, European or otherwise, which we call peace, good feeling, fine speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something else, in the possibility which the adversary enjoys, if he is strong enough, or does not enjoy, of satisfying a desire in exchange for something in return. With this order of truths, which an entirely disinterested person, such as my grandmother for instance, would not have understood, M. de Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim had frequently to deal. As an envoy in countries with which we had been within an ace of going to war, M. de Norpois, in his anxiety as to the turn which events were about to take, knew very well that it was not by the word “Peace,” nor by the word “War,” that it would be revealed to him, but by some other, apparently commonplace word, a word of terror or blessing, which the diplomat, by the aid of his cipher, would immediately know how to interpret and to which, to safeguard the dignity of France, he would respond in another word, quite as commonplace, but one beneath which the minister of the enemy nation would at once decipher: “War.” Moreover, in accordance with a time-honoured custom, analogous to that which used to give to the first meeting between two young people promised to one another in marriage the form of a chance encounter at a performance in the Théâtre du Gymnase, the dialogue in the course of which destiny was to dictate the word “War” or the word “Peace” took place, as a rule, not in the ministerial sanctum but on a bench in a Kurgarten where the minister and M. de Norpois went independently to a thermal spring to drink at its source their little tumblers of some curative water. By a sort of tacit convention they met at the hour appointed for their cure, and began by taking together a short stroll which, beneath its benign appearance, the two interlocutors knew to be as tragic as an order for mobilisation. And so, in a private matter like this nomination for election to the Institute, the Prince had employed the same system of induction which had served him in the diplomatic service, the same method of reading beneath superimposed symbols.

  And certainly it would be wrong to pretend that my grandmother and the few who resembled her would have been alone in their failure to understand this kind of calculation. For one thing, the average run of humanity, practising professions the lines of which have been laid down in advance, approximate in their lack of intuition to the ignorance which my grandmother owed to her lofty disinterestedness. Often one has to come down to “kept” persons, male or female, before one finds the hidden spring of actions or words, apparently of the most innocent nature, in self-interest, in the necessity to keep alive. What man does not know that when a woman whom he is going to pay says to him: “Don’t let’s talk about money,” the speech must be regarded as what is called in music “a silent bar” and that if, later on, she declares: “You make me too unhappy, you’re always keeping things from me; I can’t stand it any longer,” he must interpret this as: “Someone else has been offering her more”? And yet this is only the language of the woman of easy virtue, not so far removed from society women. The ponce furnishes more striking examples. But M. de Norpois and the German prince, if ponces and their ways were unknown to them, had been accustomed to living on the same plane as nations, which are also, for all their grandeur, creatures of selfishness and cunning, which can be tamed only by force, by consideration of their material interests which may drive them to murder, a murder that is also often symbolic, since its mere hesitation or refusal to fight may spell for a nation the word “Perish.” But since all this is not set forth in the various Yellow Books or elsewhere, the people as a whole are naturally pacific; if they are warlike, it is instinctively, from hatred, from a sense of injury, not for the reasons which have made up the mind of their ruler on the advice of his Norpois.

  The following winter the Prince was seriously ill. He recovered, but his heart was permanently affected.

  “The devil!” he said to himself, “I can’t afford to lose any time over the Institut. If I wait too long, I may be dead before they elect me. That really would be disagreeable.”

  He wrote an essay for the Revue des Deux Mondes on European politics over the past twenty years, in which he referred more than once to M. de Norpois in the most flattering terms. The latter called upon him to thank him. He added that he did not know how to express his gratitude. The Prince said to himself, like a man who has just tried to fit another key into a stubborn lock: “Still not the right one!” and, feeling somewhat out of breath as he showed M. de Norpois to the door, thought: “Damn it, these fellows will see me in my grave before letting me in. We must hurry up.”

  That evening, he met M. de Norpois again at the Opéra.

  “My dear Ambassador,” he said to him, “you told me this morning that you did not know how to prove your gratitude to me. It’s entirely superfluous, since you owe me none, but I am going to be so indelicate as to take you at your word.”

  M. de Norpois had a no less high esteem for the Prince’s tact than the Prince had for his. He understood at once that it was not a request that Prince von Faffenheim was about to put to him, but an offer, and with a radiant affability he made ready to hear it.

  “Well now, you will think me highly indiscreet. There are two people to whom I am greatly attached—in qui
te different ways, as you will understand in a moment—two people both of whom have recently settled in Paris, where they intend to live henceforth: my wife, and the Grand Duchess John. They are thinking of giving a few dinners, notably in honour of the King and Queen of England, and their dream would have been to be able to offer their guests the company of a person for whom, without knowing her, they both of them feel a great admiration. I confess that I did not know how I was going to gratify their wish when I learned just now, by the merest chance, that you were a friend of this person. I know that she lives a most retired life, and sees only a very few people—happy few—but if you were to give me your support, with the kindness you have always shown me, I am sure that she would allow you to present me to her so that I might convey to her the wish of the Grand Duchess and the Princess. Perhaps she would consent to come to dinner with the Queen of England, and then (who knows) if we don’t bore her too much, to spend the Easter holidays with us at Beaulieu, at the Grand Duchess John’s. This person is called the Marquise de Villeparisis. I confess that the hope of becoming an habitué of such a school of wit would console me, would make me contemplate without regret the abandoning of my candidature for the Institut. For in her house, too, I understand, there is intellectual intercourse and brilliant talk.”

  With an inexpressible sense of pleasure the Prince felt that the lock no longer resisted and that at last the key was turning.

  “Such an alternative is wholly unnecessary, my dear Prince,” replied M. de Norpois. “Nothing could be more in harmony with the Institut than the house you speak of, which is a regular breeding-ground of academicians. I shall convey your request to Mme la Marquise de Villeparisis: she will undoubtedly be flattered. As for her dining with you, she goes out very little, and that will perhaps be more difficult to arrange. But I shall introduce you to her and you will plead your cause in person. You must on no account give up the Academy; tomorrow fortnight, as it happens, I shall be having luncheon, before going on with him to an important meeting, with Leroy-Beaulieu, without whom nobody can be elected; I had already allowed myself in conversation with him to let fall your name, with which, naturally, he was perfectly familiar. He raised certain objections. But it so happens that he requires the support of my group at the next election, and I fully intend to return to the charge; I shall tell him frankly of the extremely cordial ties that unite us, I shall not conceal from him that, if you were to stand, I should ask all my friends to vote for you” (here the Prince breathed a deep sigh of relief), “and he knows that I have friends. I consider that if I were to succeed in obtaining his co-operation, your chances would become very real. Come that evening, at six, to Mme de Villeparisis’s. I will introduce you, and at the same time will be able to give you an account of my morning meeting.”