The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in a perpetual climbing movement, the family still plays an important part in certain stationary grades, such as the middle class and the semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing. The friendship shown me by her “aunt Villeparisis” and Robert had perhaps made me, for Mme de Guermantes and her friends, living always upon themselves and in the same little circle, the object of an attentive curiosity of which I had no suspicion.

  With these two kinsfolk she had a familiar, everyday, homely relationship of a sort, very different from what we imagine, in which, if we happen to be included, so far from our actions being ejected therefrom like a speck of dust from the eye or a drop of water from the windpipe, they are capable of remaining engraved, and will still be related and discussed years after we ourselves have forgotten them, in the palace in which we are astonished to find them preserved like a letter in our own handwriting among a priceless collection of autographs.

  People who are merely fashionable may close their doors against undue invasion. But the Guermantes door did not suffer from that. Hardly ever did a stranger have occasion to appear at it. If, for once in a way, the Duchess had one pointed out to her, she never dreamed of troubling herself about the social distinction that he might bring, since this was a thing that she conferred and could not receive. She thought only of his real merits. Both Mme de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup had testified to mine. And doubtless she would not have believed them if she had not at the same time observed that they could never manage to secure me when they wanted me, and that therefore I attached no importance to society, which seemed to the Duchess a sign that a stranger was to be numbered among what she called “agreeable people.”

  It was worth seeing, when one spoke to her of women for whom she did not care, how her face changed as soon as one named, in connexion with one of these, let us say her sister-in-law. “Oh, she’s charming!” the Duchess would say in an assured and judicious tone. The only reason she gave was that this lady had declined to be introduced to the Marquise de Chaussegros and the Princesse de Silistrie. She did not add that the lady had also refused to be introduced to herself, the Duchesse de Guermantes. This had nevertheless been the case, and ever since, the mind of the Duchess had been at work trying to unravel the motives of a woman who was so hard to know. She was dying to be invited to her house. People in society are so accustomed to being sought after that the person who shuns them seems to them a phoenix and at once monopolises their attention.

  Was the real motive in the mind of Mme de Guermantes for thus inviting me (now that I was no longer in love with her) that I did not seek the society of her relatives, although apparently sought after by them? I cannot say. In any case, having made up her mind to invite me, she was anxious to do me the honours of her house to the fullest extent and to keep away those of her friends whose presence might have dissuaded me from coming again, those whom she knew to be boring. I had not known to what to attribute her change of direction, when I had seen her diverge from her stellar path, come to sit down beside me, and invite me to dinner, the effect of unexplained causes: for want of a special sense to enlighten us in this respect, we imagine the people we know only slightly—as was my case with the Duchesse de Guermantes—as thinking of us only at the rare moments in which they set eyes on us. Whereas in fact this ideal oblivion in which we picture them as holding us is purely arbitrary. So much so that while in the silence of solitude, reminiscent of a clear and starlit night, we imagine the various queens of society pursuing their course in the heavens at an infinite distance, we cannot help an involuntary start of dismay or pleasure if there falls upon us from that starry height, like a meteorite engraved with our name which we supposed to be unknown on Venus or Cassiopeia, an invitation to dinner or a piece of wicked gossip.

  Perhaps from time to time when, following the example of the Persian princes who, according to the Book of Esther, made their scribes read out to them the registers in which were enrolled the names of those of their subjects who had shown zeal in their service, Mme de Guermantes consulted her list of the well-disposed, she had said to herself, on coming to my name: “A man we must ask to dine some day.” But other thoughts had distracted her until the moment she caught sight of me sitting alone like Mordecai at the palace gate; and, the sight of me having refreshed her memory, she wished, like Ahasuerus, to lavish her gifts upon me.

  (Beset by surging cares, a Prince’s mind

  Towards fresh matters ever is inclined)

  I must however add that a surprise of a totally different sort was to follow the one which I had had on hearing Mme de Guermantes ask me to dine with her. Since I had felt that it would show great modesty on my part, and gratitude also, not to conceal this initial surprise but rather to exaggerate my expression of the delight that it gave me, Mme de Guermantes, who was getting ready to go on to another, final party, had said to me, almost as a justification and for fear of my not being quite certain who she was since I appeared so astonished at being invited to dine with her: “You know I’m the aunt of Robert de Saint-Loup who is very fond of you, and besides, we’ve already met each other here.” In replying that I was aware of this I added that I also knew M. de Charlus, “who had been very kind to me at Balbec and in Paris.” Mme de Guermantes appeared surprised and her eyes seemed to turn, as though for a verification of this statement, to some much earlier page of her internal register. “What, so you know Palamède, do you?” This name took on a considerable charm on the lips of Mme de Guermantes because of the instinctive simplicity with which she spoke of a man who was socially so brilliant a figure but for her was no more than her brother-in-law and the cousin with whom she had grown up. And on the dim greyness which the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes represented for me this name Palamède shed as it were the radiance of long summer days when she had played with him as a girl in the garden at Guermantes. Moreover, in that long-forgotten period of their lives, Oriane de Guermantes and her cousin Palamède had been very different from what they had since become: M. de Charlus in particular, entirely absorbed in artistic pursuits which he had so effectively curbed in later life that I was amazed to learn that it was he who had painted the huge fan decorated with black and yellow irises which the Duchess was at this moment unfurling. She could also have shown me a little sonatina which he had once composed for her. I was completely unaware that the Baron possessed all these talents, of which he never spoke. Let me remark in passing that M. de Charlus did not at all relish being called “Palamède” by his family. That the form “Mémé” might not please him one could easily understand. These stupid abbreviations are a sign of the utter inability of the aristocracy to appreciate its own poetry (in Jewry, too, we may see the same defect, since a nephew of Lady Israels, whose name was Moses, was commonly known as “Momo”) at the same time as its anxiety not to appear to attach any importance to what is aristocratic. Now on this point M. de Charlus had more poetic imagination and a more blatant pride. But the reason for his distaste for “Mémé” could not be this, since it extended also to the fine name Palamède. The truth was that, considering himself, knowing himself, to be of princely stock, he would have liked his brother and sister-in-law to refer to him as “Charlus,” just as Queen Marie-Amélie and the Duc d’Orléans might speak of their sons and grandsons, brothers and nephews as “Joinville, Nemours, Chartres, Paris.”

  “What a humbug Mémé is!” she exclaimed. “We talked to him about you for hours, and he told us he would be delighted to make your acquaintance, just as if he had never set eyes on you. You must admit he’s odd, and—though it’s not very nice of me to say such a thing about a brother-in-law I’m devoted to and really do admire immensely—a trifle mad at times.”

  I was struck by the application of this last epithet to M. de Charlus, and thought to myself that this half-madness might perhaps account for certain things, such as his having
appeared so delighted with his proposal that I should ask Bloch to beat his own mother. I decided that, by reason not only of the things he said but of the way in which he said them, M. de Charlus must be a little mad. The first time one listens to a barrister or an actor, one is surprised by his tone, so different from the conversational. But, observing that everyone else seems to find this quite natural, one says nothing about it to other people, one says nothing in fact to oneself, one is content to appreciate the degree of talent shown. At the most one may think, of an actor at the Théâtre-Français: “Why, instead of letting his raised arm fall naturally, did he bring it down in a series of little jerks broken by pauses for at least ten minutes?” or of a Labori: “Why, whenever he opened his mouth, did he utter those tragic, unexpected sounds to express the simplest things?” But as everybody accepts these things a priori one is not shocked by them. In the same way, on thinking it over, one said to oneself that M. de Charlus spoke of himself very grandiloquently, in a tone which was not in the least that of ordinary speech. One felt that people should have been saying to him every other minute: “But why are you shouting so loud? Why are you so offensive?” But everyone seemed to have tacitly agreed that it was quite all right. And one took one’s place in the circle which applauded his perorations. But certainly there were moments when a stranger might have thought that he was listening to the ravings of a maniac.

  “But,” went on the Duchess with the faint insolence that went with her natural simplicity, “are you absolutely sure you’re not thinking of someone else? Do you really mean my brother-in-law Palamède? I know he loves mystery, but this seems a bit much.”

  I replied that I was absolutely sure, and that M. de Charlus must have misheard my name.

  “Well, I must leave you,” said Mme de Guermantes, as though with regret. “I have to look in for a moment at the Princesse de Ligne’s. You aren’t going on there? No? You don’t care for parties? You’re very wise, they’re too boring for words. If only I didn’t have to go! But she’s my cousin; it wouldn’t be polite. I’m sorry, selfishly, for my own sake, because I could have taken you there, and brought you back afterwards, too. Good-bye then; I look forward to seeing you on Friday.”

  That M. de Charlus should have blushed to be seen with me by M. d’Argencourt was all very well. But that to his own sister-in-law, who had so high an opinion of him besides, he should deny all knowledge of me, a knowledge that was perfectly natural since I was a friend of both his aunt and his nephew, was something I could not understand.

  I must end my account of this incident with the remark that from one point of view there was an element of true grandeur in Mme de Guermantes which consisted in the fact that she entirely obliterated from her memory what other people would have only partially forgotten. Had she never seen me waylaying her, following her, tracking her down on her morning walks, had she never responded to my daily salute with an irritated impatience, had she never sent Saint-Loup about his business when he begged her to invite me to her house, she could not have been more graciously and naturally amiable to me. Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.

  But if I was surprised by the modification that had occurred in her opinion of me, how much more did it surprise me to find an even greater change in my feelings for her! Had there not been a time when I could regain life and strength only if—always building new castles in the air!—I had found someone who would obtain for me an invitation to her house and, after this initial boon, would procure many others for my increasingly exacting heart? It was the impossibility of making any headway that had made me leave Paris for Doncières to visit Robert de Saint-Loup. And now it was indeed by the consequence of a letter from him that I was agitated, but on account this time of Mme de Stermaria, not of Mme de Guermantes.

  Let me add further, to conclude my account of this evening, that in the course of it there occurred an incident, contradicted a few days later, which surprised me not a little, which caused a breach between myself and Bloch, and which constitutes in itself one of those curious paradoxes the explanation of which will be found in the next part of this work. At this party at Mme de Villeparisis’s, Bloch kept on boasting to me about the friendly attentions shown him by M. de Charlus, who, when he passed him in the street, looked him straight in the face as though he recognised him, was anxious to know him personally, knew quite well who he was. I smiled at first, Bloch having expressed himself so violently at Balbec on the subject of the said M. de Charlus. And I supposed merely that Bloch, like his father in the case of Bergotte, knew the Baron “without actually knowing him,” and that what he took for a friendly glance was an absent-minded stare. But finally Bloch produced such circumstantial details, and appeared so confident that on two or three occasions M. de Charlus had wished to address him that, remembering that I had spoken of my friend to the Baron, who had asked me various questions about him as we walked together from this very house, I came to the conclusion that Bloch was not lying, that M. de Charlus had heard his name, realised that he was my friend, and so forth. And so, some time later, at the theatre one evening, I asked M. de Charlus if I might introduce Bloch to him, and, on his assenting, went in search of my friend. But as soon as M. de Charlus caught sight of him an expression of astonishment, instantly repressed, appeared on his face, where it gave way to a blazing fury. Not only did he not offer Bloch his hand but whenever Bloch spoke to him he replied in the rudest manner, in an irate and wounding tone. So that Bloch, who, according to his version, had received nothing until then from the Baron but smiles, assumed that I had disparaged rather than recommended him during the brief conversation which, knowing M. de Charlus’s liking for etiquette, I had had with him about my friend before bringing him up to be introduced. Bloch left us, exhausted and broken, like a man who has been trying to mount a horse which is constantly on the verge of bolting, or to swim against waves which continually fling him back on the shingle, and did not speak to me again for six months.

  The days that preceded my dinner with Mme de Stermaria, far from being delightful, were almost unbearable for me. For as a general rule, the shorter the interval that separates us from our planned objective the longer it seems to us, because we apply to it a more minute scale of measurement, or simply because it occurs to us to measure it. The Papacy, we are told, reckons by centuries, and indeed may perhaps not bother to reckon time at all, since its goal is in eternity. Mine being no more than three days off, I counted by seconds, I gave myself up to those imaginings which are the adumbrations of caresses, of caresses which one itches to be able to make the woman herself reciprocate and complete—precisely those caresses, to the exclusion of all others. And on the whole, if it is true that in general the difficulty of attaining the object of a desire enhances that desire (the difficulty, not the impossibility, for that suppresses it altogether), yet in the case of a desire that is purely physical, the certainty that it will be realised at a specific and fairly imminent point in time is not much more stirring than uncertainty; almost as much as anxious doubt, the absence of doubt makes intolerable the period of waiting for the pleasure that is bound to come, because it makes of that suspense an innumerably rehearsed accomplishment and, by the frequency of our proleptic representations, divides time into sections as minute as any that could be carved by anguished uncertainty.

  What I wanted was to possess Mme de Stermaria: for several days my desi
res had been actively and incessantly preparing my imagination for this pleasure, and this pleasure alone; any other pleasure (pleasure with another woman) would not have been ready, pleasure being but the realisation of a prior craving which is not always the same but changes according to the endless variations of one’s fancies, the accidents of one’s memory, the state of one’s sexual disposition, the order of availability of one’s desires, the most recently assuaged of which lie dormant until the disillusion of their fulfilment has been to some extent forgotten; I had already turned from the main road of general desires and had ventured along the path of a more particular desire; I should have had—in order to wish for a different assignation—to retrace my steps too far before rejoining the main road and taking another path. To take possession of Mme de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I had asked her to dine with me: this was the pleasure that I pictured to myself all the time. It would naturally have been destroyed if I had dined on that island without Mme de Stermaria; but perhaps as greatly diminished had I dined, even with her, somewhere else. Besides, the attitudes according to which one envisages a pleasure are prior to the woman, to the type of woman suitable thereto. They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and for that reason bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy, this or that woman, this or that setting, this or that room, which in other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt. Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.