The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  Robert swept me back to his mother.

  “Good-bye,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t know when I shall get leave again. Probably not for a month. I shall write to you as soon as I know.”

  Certainly Robert was not in the least the sort of son who, when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exasperation towards her ought to counterbalance the smiles and greetings which he bestows on strangers. Nothing is more prevalent than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear to believe that rudeness to one’s own family is the natural complement to ceremonial behaviour. Whatever the wretched mother may say, her son, as though he had been brought along against his will and wished to make her pay dearly for his presence, immediately refutes the timidly ventured assertion with a sarcastic, precise, cruel contradiction; the mother at once conforms, though without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior being whose delightful nature she will continue to vaunt to all and sundry in his absence, but who, for all that, spares her none of his most wounding remarks. Saint-Loup was not at all like this; but the anguish which Rachel’s absence provoked in him caused him for different reasons to be no less harsh with his mother than those other sons are with theirs. And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like the beating of a wing, which Mme de Marsantes had been unable to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole body once again; but this time it was an anxious face and woebegone eyes that she fastened on him.

  “What, Robert, you’re going off? Seriously? My little son—the one day I had a chance to see something of you!”

  And then quite softly, in the most natural tone, in a voice from which she strove to banish all sadness so as not to inspire her son with a pity which would perhaps have been painful to him, or else useless and simply calculated to irritate him, as a simple common-sense assertion she added: “You know it’s not at all nice of you.”

  But to this simplicity she added so much timidity, to show him that she was not trespassing on his freedom, so much affection, so that he should not reproach her for interfering with his pleasures, that Saint-Loup could not help but observe in himself as it were the possibility of a similar wave of affection, in other words an obstacle to his spending the evening with his mistress. And so he reacted angrily: “It’s unfortunate, but, nice or not, that’s how it is.”

  And he heaped on his mother the reproaches which no doubt he felt that he himself perhaps deserved; thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having posited at the start that their resolution is unshakeable, the more susceptible the feeling to which one appeals in them to make them abandon their resolution, the more reprehensible they find, not themselves who resist that appeal, but those who put them under the necessity of resisting it, so that their own harshness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty without having any effect in their eyes but to aggravate the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity. But of her own accord Mme de Marsantes ceased to pursue the matter, for she sensed that she would be unable to dissuade him.

  “Well, I’m off,” he said to me, “but you’re not to keep him long, Mamma, because he’s got to go and pay a call elsewhere quite soon.”

  I was fully aware that my company could not afford any pleasure to Mme de Marsantes, but I was glad not to give her the impression by leaving with Robert that I was involved in these pleasures which deprived her of him. I should have liked to find some excuse for her son’s conduct, less from affection for him than from pity for her. But it was she who spoke first:

  “Poor boy,” she began, “I’m sure I must have hurt him dreadfully. You see, Monsieur, mothers are such selfish creatures. After all, he hasn’t many pleasures, he comes so seldom to Paris. Oh, dear, if he hadn’t gone already I should have liked to stop him, not to keep him of course, but just to tell him that I’m not vexed with him, that I think he was quite right. Will you excuse me if I go and look over the staircase?”

  I accompanied her there.

  “Robert! Robert!” she called. “No, he’s gone. It’s too late.”

  At that moment I would as gladly have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as, a few hours earlier, to make him go and live with her altogether. In the one case Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet I was the same man at an interval of a few hours.

  We returned to the drawing-room. Seeing that Saint-Loup was not with us, Mme de Villeparisis exchanged with M. de Norpois one of those sceptical, mocking and not too compassionate glances with which people point out to one another an over-jealous wife or an over-fond mother (traditional laughing-stocks), as much as to say: “Well, well, there’s been trouble.”

  Robert went to his mistress, taking with him the splendid ornament which, after what had passed between them, he ought not to have given her. But it came to the same thing, for she would not look at it, and even subsequently he could never persuade her to accept it. Certain of Robert’s friends thought that these proofs of disinterestedness were deliberately calculated to bind him to her. And yet she was not greedy for money, except perhaps in order to be able to spend it freely. I often saw her lavish on people whom she believed to be in need the most extravagant largesse. “At this moment,” Robert’s friends would say to him, seeking to invalidate by their malicious words a disinterested action on Rachel’s part, “at this moment she’ll be in the promenade at the Folies-Bergère. She’s an enigma, that Rachel, a regular sphinx.” In any case, how many mercenary women, women who are kept by men, does one not see setting countless little limits to the generosity of their lovers out of a delicacy that flowers in the midst of that sordid existence!

  Robert was ignorant of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, and tormented himself over what were mere nothings compared with the real life of Rachel, a life which began every day only after he had left her. He was ignorant of almost all these infidelities. One could have told him of them without shaking his confidence in Rachel. For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love. On the one hand the lover says to himself: “She is an angel, she will never give herself to me, I may as well die—and yet she loves me; she loves me so much that perhaps . . . but no, it can never possibly happen.” And in the exaltation of his desire, in the anguish of his expectation, what jewels he flings at the feet of this woman, how he runs to borrow money to save her from financial worries! Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass screen, through which these conversations will no more carry than those which visitors exchange in front of an aquarium in a zoo, the public are saying: “You don’t know her? You can count yourself lucky—she has robbed, in fact ruined, I don’t know how many men, as girls go there’s nothing worse. She’s a swindler pure and simple. And crafty!” And perhaps this last epithet is not absolutely wrong, for even the sceptical man who is not really in love with the woman, who merely gets pleasure from her, says to his friends: “No, no, my dear fellow, she’s not at all a whore. I don’t say she hasn’t had an adventure or two in her time, but she’s not a woman one pays, she’d be a damned sight too expensive if she was. With her it’s fifty thousand francs or nothing.” The fact of the matter is that he himself has spent fifty thousand francs for the privilege of having her once, but she (finding a willing accomplice in the man himself, in the person of his self-esteem) has managed to persuade him that he is one of those who have had her for nothing. Such is society, where every being is double, and where the most thoroughly exposed, the most notorious, will be known to a certain other only as protected by a shell, by a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity. There were in Paris two thoroughly decent men whom Saint-Loup no longer greeted when he saw them and to whom he could not refer without a tremor in his voic
e, calling them exploiters of women: this was because they had both been ruined by Rachel.

  “There’s only one thing I blame myself for,” Mme de Marsantes murmured in my ear, “and that is for telling him that he wasn’t nice. Such an adorable, unique son, like no one else in the world—to have told him, the only time I see him, that he wasn’t nice to me! I’d sooner have been given a beating, because I’m sure that whatever pleasure he may be having this evening, and he hasn’t many, will be spoiled for him by that unfair word. But I mustn’t keep you, Monsieur, since you’re in a hurry.”

  Mme de Marsantes bade me good-bye anxiously. Those feelings concerned Robert, and she was sincere. But she ceased to be so on becoming a grand lady again: “I have been so interested, so happy, so charmed to have this little talk with you. Thank you! Thank you!”

  And with a humble air she fastened on me a look of ecstatic gratitude, as though my conversation had been one of the keenest pleasures she had experienced in her life. This charming expression went very well with the black flowers on her white patterned skirt; they were those of a great lady who knew her business.

  “I can’t leave at once. I must wait for M. de Charlus. I’m going with him.”

  Mme de Villeparisis overheard these last words. They appeared to vex her. Had the matter not been one which couldn’t involve a sentiment of that nature, it would have struck me that what seemed to be alarmed at that moment in Mme de Villeparisis was her sense of decency. But this hypothesis never even entered my mind. I was delighted with Mme de Guermantes, with Saint-Loup, with Mme de Marsantes, with M. de Charlus, with Mme de Villeparisis; I did not stop to reflect, and I spoke light-heartedly, and at random.

  “You’re leaving here with my nephew Palamède?” she asked me.

  Thinking that it might produce a highly favourable impression on Mme de Villeparisis if she learned that I was on intimate terms with a nephew whom she esteemed so greatly, “He has asked me to walk home with him,” I answered blithely. “I’m delighted. As a matter of fact, we’re better friends than you think, and I’ve quite made up my mind that we’re going to be better friends still.”

  From being vexed, Mme de Villeparisis seemed to have become worried. “Don’t wait for him,” she said to me with a preoccupied air. “He is talking to M. de Faffenheim. He’s already forgotten what he said to you. You’d much better go now quickly while his back is turned.”

  I was not myself in any hurry to join Robert and his mistress. But Mme de Villeparisis seemed so anxious for me to go that, thinking perhaps that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew, I bade her good-bye. Next to her M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One felt that the notion, omnipresent in all his limbs, of his vast riches, as though they had been smelted in a crucible into a single human ingot, gave an extraordinary density to this man who was worth so much. When I said good-bye to him he rose politely from his seat, and I sensed the inert and compact mass of thirty millions which his old-fashioned French breeding activated and raised up until it stood before me. I seemed to be looking at that statue of Olympian Zeus which Phidias is said to have cast in solid gold. Such was the power that a Jesuit education had over M. de Guermantes, over the body of M. de Guermantes at least, for it did not reign with equal mastery over the ducal mind. M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but did not even smile at other people’s.

  On my way downstairs I heard a voice calling out to me from behind: “So this is how you wait for me, is it?”

  It was M. de Charlus.

  “You don’t mind if we go a little way on foot?” he asked dryly, when we were in the courtyard. “We’ll walk until I find a cab that suits me.”

  “You wished to speak to me, Monsieur?”

  “Ah, yes, as a matter of fact there were some things I wanted to say to you, but I’m not so sure now whether I shall. As far as you are concerned, I am sure that they could be the starting-point for inestimable benefits. But I can see also that they would bring into my existence, at an age when one begins to value tranquillity, a great deal of time-wasting, all sorts of inconvenience. I ask myself whether you are worth all the pains that I should have to take with you, and I have not the pleasure of knowing you well enough to be able to say. I found you very unsatisfactory at Balbec, even when allowances are made for the stupidity inseparable from the image of the ‘bather’ and the wearing of the objects called espadrilles. Perhaps in any case you are not sufficiently desirous of what I could do for you to make it worth my while, for I must repeat to you quite frankly, Monsieur, that for me it can mean nothing but trouble.”

  I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This summary end to negotiations did not seem to be to his liking.

  “That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly. “There is nothing so agreeable as to put oneself out for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens, are all mere ersatz, surrogates, alibis. From the depths of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should prefer to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question. You must know yourself a little. Are you worth my trouble or not?”

  “I would not for anything in the world, Monsieur, be a cause of anxiety to you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you may be sure that everything that comes to me from you will give me very great pleasure. I am deeply touched that you should be so kind as to take an interest in me in this way and try to help me.”

  Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he thanked me for these words. Slipping his arm through mine with that intermittent familiarity which had already struck me at Balbec, and was in such contrast to the harshness of his tone, he went on:

  “With the want of consideration common at your age, you are liable to say things at times which would open an unbridgeable gulf between us. What you have said just now, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing that is capable of touching me, and of inducing me to do a great deal for you.”

  As he walked arm in arm with me and uttered these words, which, though tinged with disdain, were so affectionate, M. de Charlus now fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity, that piercing hardness which had struck me the first morning, when I saw him outside the casino at Balbec, and indeed many years before that, through the pink hawthorns, standing beside Mme Swann, whom I supposed then to be his mistress, in the park at Tansonville, now let it stray around him and examine the cabs which at this time of day were passing in considerable numbers, staring so insistently at them that several stopped, the drivers supposing that he wished to engage them. But M. de Charlus immediately dismissed them.

  “None of them is suitable,” he explained to me, “it’s all a question of their lamps, and the direction they’re going home in. I hope, Monsieur,” he went on, “that you will not in any way misinterpret the purely disinterested and charitable nature of the proposal which I am going to make to you.”

  I was struck by the way, even more than at Balbec, his diction resembled Swann’s.

  “You are intelligent enough, I dare say, not to imagine that it is inspired by ‘lack of connexions,’ by fear of solitude and boredom. I need not speak to you of my family, for I assume that a youth of your age belonging to the lower middle class” (he accentuated the phrase in a tone of self-satisfaction) “must know the history of France. It is the people of my world who read nothing and are as ignorant as lackeys. In the old days the King’s valets were recruited among the nobility; now the nobility are scarcely better than valets. But young bourgeois like you do read, and you must certainly know Michelet’s fine passage about my family: ‘I see them as being very great, these powerful Guermantes. And what is the poor little King of France beside them, shut up in his palace in Paris?’ As for what I am personally, t
hat, Monsieur, is a subject which I do not much care to talk about, but you may possibly have heard—it was alluded to in a leading article in The Times, which made a considerable impression—that the Emperor of Austria, who has always honoured me with his friendship, and is good enough to maintain cousinly relations with me, declared the other day in an interview which was made public that if the Comte de Chambord had had at his side a man as thoroughly conversant with the undercurrents of European politics as myself he would be King of France today. I have often thought, Monsieur, that there was in me, thanks not to my own humble gifts but to circumstances which you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth of experience, a sort of secret dossier of inestimable value, of which I have not felt myself at liberty to make use for my own personal ends, which would be a priceless acquisition to a young man to whom I would hand over in a few months what it has taken me more than thirty years to acquire, and which I am perhaps alone in possessing. I do not speak of the intellectual enjoyment which you would find in learning certain secrets which a Michelet of our day would give years of his life to know, and in the light of which certain events would assume an entirely different aspect. And I do not speak only of events that have already occurred, but of the chain of circumstances.” (This was a favourite expression of M. de Charlus’s, and often, when he used it, he joined his hands as if in prayer, but with his fingers stiffened, as though by this complexus to illustrate the said circumstances, which he did not specify, and the links between them.) “I could give you an explanation that no one has dreamed of, not only of the past but of the future.”