The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  I should add that one of the guests was still missing, M. de Grouchy, whose wife, a Guermantes by birth, had arrived by herself, her husband being due to come straight from the country where he had been shooting all day. This M. de Grouchy, a descendant of his namesake of the First Empire, of whom it has been falsely said that his absence at the start of the Battle of Waterloo was the principal cause of Napoleon’s defeat, came of an excellent family which, however, was not good enough in the eyes of certain fanatics for blue blood. Thus the Prince de Guermantes, who was to prove less fastidious in later life as far as he himself was concerned, was in the habit of saying to his nieces: “What a misfortune for that poor Mme de Guermantes” (the Vicomtesse de Guermantes, Mme de Grouchy’s mother) “that she has never succeeded in marrying any of her children.” “But, uncle, the eldest girl married M. de Grouchy.” “I don’t call that a husband! However, they say that your uncle François has proposed to the youngest one, so perhaps they won’t all die old maids.”

  No sooner had the order to serve dinner been given than with a vast gyratory whirr, multiple and simultaneous, the double doors of the dining-room swung apart; a butler with the air of a court chamberlain bowed before the Princesse de Parme and announced the tidings “Madame is served,” in a tone such as he would have employed to say “Madame is dead,” which, however, cast no gloom over the assembly for it was with a sprightly air and as, in summer, at Robinson24 that the couples advanced one behind the other to the dining-room, separating when they had reached their places, where footmen thrust their chairs in behind them; last of all, Mme de Guermantes advanced towards me to be taken in to dinner, without my feeling the least shadow of the timidity that I might have feared, for, like a huntress whose muscular dexterity has endowed her with natural ease and grace, observing no doubt that I had placed myself on the wrong side of her, she pivoted round me so adroitly that I found her arm resting on mine and was at once naturally attuned to a rhythm of precise and noble movements. I yielded to them all the more readily because the Guermantes attached no more importance to them than does to learning a truly learned man in whose company one is less cowed than in that of a dunce. Other doors opened through which there entered the steaming soup, as though the dinner were being held in a skilfully contrived puppet-theatre, where, at a signal from the puppet-master, the belated arrival of the young guest set all the machinery in motion.

  Timid, rather than majestically sovereign, had been this signal from the Duke, to which that vast, ingenious, subservient and sumptuous clockwork, mechanical and human, had responded. The indecisiveness of the gesture did not spoil for me the effect of the spectacle that was attendant upon it. For I sensed that what had made it hesitant and embarrassed was the fear of letting me see that they had been waiting only for me to begin dinner and that they had been waiting for a long time, in the same way as Mme de Guermantes was afraid that, after looking at so many pictures, I would find it tiring and would be hindered from taking my ease among them if her husband engaged me in a continuous flow of introductions. So that it was the absence of grandeur in this gesture that disclosed the true grandeur which lay in the Duke’s indifference to the splendour of his surroundings, in contrast to his deference towards a guest, however insignificant in himself, whom he desired to honour.

  Not that M. de Guermantes was not in certain aspects thoroughly commonplace, showing indeed some of the absurd weaknesses of a man with too much money, the arrogance of an upstart which he certainly was not. But just as a public official or a priest sees his own humble talents multiplied to infinity (as a wave is by the whole mass of the sea which presses behind it) by the forces that stand behind him, the Government of France or the Catholic Church, so M. de Guermantes was borne up by that other force, aristocratic courtesy in its truest form. This courtesy excluded a large number of people. Mme de Guermantes would not have entertained Mme de Cambremer or M. de Forcheville. But the moment that anyone (as was the case with me) appeared eligible for admission into the Guermantes world, this courtesy disclosed a wealth of hospitable simplicity more splendid still, if possible, than those historic rooms and the marvellous furniture that remained in them.

  When he wished to give pleasure to someone, M. de Guermantes went about making him the most important personage on that particular day with an art and a skill that made the most of the circumstances and the place. No doubt at Guermantes his “distinctions” and “favours” would have assumed another form. He would have ordered his carriage to take me for a drive alone with himself before dinner. Such as they were, one could not help feeling touched by his courteous ways, as one is, when one reads the memoirs of the period, by those of Louis XIV when he replies benignly, with a smile and a half-bow, to someone who has come to solicit his favour. It must however, in both instances, be borne in mind that this “politeness” did not go beyond the strict meaning of the word.

  Louis XIV (with whom the sticklers for pure nobility of his day nevertheless find fault for his scant regard for etiquette, so much so that, according to Saint-Simon, he was only a very minor king, in terms of rank, by comparison with such monarchs as Philippe de Valois or Charles V) has the most meticulous instructions drawn up so that princes of the blood and ambassadors may know to what sovereigns they ought to give precedence. In certain cases, in view of the impossibility of arriving at an agreement, a compromise is arranged by which the son of Louis XIV, Monseigneur, shall entertain a certain foreign sovereign only out of doors, in the open air, so that it may not be said that in entering the palace one has preceded the other; and the Elector Palatine, entertaining the Duc de Chevreuse to dinner, in order not to have to give way to his guest, pretends to be taken ill and dines with him lying down, thus solving the difficulty. When M. le Duc avoids occasions when he must wait upon Monsieur, the latter, on the advice of the King, his brother, who is incidentally extremely attached to him, seizes an excuse for making his cousin attend his levee and forcing him to put on the royal shirt. But as soon as deeper feelings are involved, matters of the heart, this rule of duty, so inflexible when politeness only is at stake, changes entirely. A few hours after the death of this brother, one of the people whom he most dearly loved, when Monsieur, in the words of the Duc de Montfort, is “still warm,” we find Louis XIV singing snatches from operas, astonished that the Duchesse de Bourgogne, who can scarcely conceal her grief, should be looking so woebegone, and, anxious that the gaiety of the court shall be at once resumed, encouraging his courtiers to sit down to the card-tables by ordering the Duc de Bourgogne to start a game of brelan. Now, not only in his social or business activities, but in his most spontaneous utterances, his ordinary preoccupations, his daily routine, one found a similar contrast in M. de Guermantes. The Guermantes were no more susceptible to grief than other mortals; it could indeed be said that they had less real sensibility; on the other hand one saw their names every day in the social columns of the Gaulois on account of the prodigious number of funerals at which they would have felt it culpable of them not to have their presence recorded. As the traveller discovers, almost unaltered, the houses roofed with turf, the terraces which may have met the eyes of Xenophon or St Paul, so in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who was heart-warming in his graciousness and revolting in his hardness, a slave to the pettiest obligations and derelict as regards the most solemn pacts, I found still intact after more than two centuries that aberration, peculiar to the life of the court under Louis XIV, which transfers the scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality to questions of pure form.

  The other reason for the friendliness shown me by the Princesse de Parme was that she was convinced beforehand that everything that she saw at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, people and things alike, was of a superior quality to anything she had at home. It is true that in every other house she also behaved as if this was the case; not merely did she go into raptures over the simplest dish, the most ordinary flowers, but she would ask permission to send round next morning, for t
he purpose of copying the recipe or examining the variety of blossom, her head cook or head gardener, personages with large emoluments who kept their own carriages and above all their professional pretensions, and were deeply humiliated at having to come to inquire after a dish they despised or to take a cutting of a variety of carnation that was not half as fine, as variegated, did not produce as large a blossom as those which they had long been growing for her at home. But if, wherever she went, this astonishment on the part of the Princess at the sight of the most commonplace things was factitious, and intended to show that she did not derive from the superiority of her rank and riches a pride forbidden by her early instructors, habitually dissembled by her mother and intolerable in the sight of her Creator, it was, on the other hand, in all sincerity that she regarded the drawing-room of the Duchesse de Guermantes as a privileged place in which she could progress only from surprise to delight. To a certain extent, it is true, though not nearly enough to justify this state of mind, the Guermantes were different from the rest of society; they were more precious and rare. They had given me at first sight the opposite impression; I had found them vulgar, similar to all other men and women, but this was because before meeting them I had seen them, as I saw Balbec, Florence or Parma, as names. Naturally enough, in this drawing-room, all the women whom I had imagined as being like Dresden figures were after all more like the great majority of women. But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after first disappointing the imagination because they resembled their fellow-men rather more than their name, could subsequently, though to a lesser degree, hold out to one’s intelligence certain distinctive characteristics. Their physique, the colour—a peculiar pink that merged at times into purple—of their skins, a certain almost lustrous blondness of the finely spun hair even in the men, massed in soft golden tufts, half wall-growing lichen, half catlike fur (a luminous brilliance to which corresponded a certain intellectual glitter, for if people spoke of the Guermantes complexion, the Guermantes hair, they spoke also of the Guermantes wit, as of the wit of the Mortemarts), a certain social quality whose superior refinement—pre-Louis XIV—was all the more universally recognised because they promulgated it themselves—all this meant that in the actual substance, however precious it might be, of the aristocratic society in which they were to be found embedded here and there, the Guermantes remained recognisable, easy to detect and to follow, like the veins whose paleness streaks a block of jasper or onyx, or, better still, like the supple undulation of those tresses of light whose loosened hairs run like flexible rays along the sides of a moss-agate.

  The Guermantes—those at least who were worthy of the name—were not only endowed with an exquisite quality of flesh, of hair, of transparency of gaze, but had a way of holding themselves, of walking, of bowing, of looking at one before they shook one’s hand, of shaking hands, which made them as different in all these respects from an ordinary member of fashionable society as he in turn was from a peasant in a smock. And despite their affability one asked oneself: “Have they not indeed the right, though they waive it, when they see us walk, bow, leave a room, do any of those things which when performed by them become as graceful as the flight of a swallow or the droop of a rose on its stem, to think: ‘These people are of a different breed from us, and we are the lords of creation’?” Later on, I realised that the Guermantes did indeed regard me as being of a different breed, but one that aroused their envy because I possessed merits unknown to myself which they professed to prize above all others. Later still I came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere and that in them scorn or amazement could co-exist with admiration and envy. The physical flexibility peculiar to the Guermantes was twofold: on the one hand always in action, at every moment, so that if, for example, a male Guermantes were about to salute a lady, he produced a silhouette of himself formed from the tension between a series of asymmetrical and energetically compensated movements, one leg dragging a little, either on purpose or because, having been broken so often in the hunting-field, it imparted to his trunk in its effort to keep pace with the other a curvature to which the upward thrust of one shoulder gave a counterpoise, while the monocle was inserted in the eye and raised an eyebrow just as the tuft of hair on the forehead flopped downward in the formal bow; on the other hand, like the shape which wave or wind or wake have permanently imprinted on a shell or a boat, this flexibility was so to speak stylised into a sort of fixed mobility, curving the arched nose which, beneath the blue, protruding eyes, above the thin lips from which, in the women, there emerged a husky voice, recalled the fabulous origin attributed in the sixteenth century by the complaisance of parasitic and Hellenising genealogists to this race, ancient beyond dispute, but not to the extent which they claimed when they gave as its source the mythological impregnation of a nymph by a divine Bird.

  The Guermantes were no less idiosyncratic from the intellectual than from the physical point of view. With the exception of Prince Gilbert, the husband of “Marie-Gilbert” with the antiquated ideas, who made his wife sit on his left when they drove out together because her blood, though royal, was inferior to his own (but he was an exception and a perpetual laughing-stock, behind his back, to the rest of his family, for whom he provided an endless source of fresh anecdotes), the Guermantes, while living among the cream of the aristocracy, affected to set no store by nobility. The theories of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, it must be said, by virtue of being a Guermantes, had become to a certain extent something different and more attractive, put intelligence so much above everything else and were in politics so socialistic that one wondered where in her mansion could be the hiding-place of the genie whose duty it was to ensure the maintenance of the aristocratic way of life and who, always invisible but evidently lurking at one moment in the entrance hall, at another in the drawing-room, at a third in her dressing-room, reminded the servants of this woman who did not believe in titles to address her as “Madame la Duchesse,” and reminded this woman herself, who cared only for reading and was no respecter of persons, to go out to dinner with her sister-in-law when eight o’clock struck, and to put on a low-necked dress for the occasion.

  The same family genie represented to Mme de Guermantes the social duties of duchesses, at least of the foremost among them who like herself were also multimillionaires—the sacrifice to boring tea-parties, grand dinners, routs of every kind, of hours in which she might have read interesting books—as unpleasant necessities like rain, which Mme de Guermantes accepted while bringing her irreverent humour to bear on them, though without going so far as to examine the reasons for her acceptance. The curious coincidence whereby Mme de Guermantes’s butler invariably said “Madame la Duchesse” to this woman who believed only in the intellect did not appear to shock her. Never had it entered her head to request him to address her simply as “Madame.” Giving her the utmost benefit of the doubt one might have supposed that, being absent-minded, she caught only the word “Madame” and that the suffix appended to it remained unheard. Only, though she might feign deafness, she was not dumb. And the fact was that whenever she had a message to give to her husband she would say to the butler: “Remind Monsieur le Duc——”

  The family genie had other occupations as well, one of which was to inspire them to talk morality. It is true that there were Guermantes who went in for intellect and Guermantes who went in for morals, and that these two groups did not as a rule coincide. But the former—including a Guermantes who had forged cheques, who cheated at cards and was the most delightful of them all, with a mind open to every new and sensible idea—spoke even more eloquently about morals than the others, and in the same strain as Mme de Villeparisis, at the moments when the family genie expressed itself through the lips of the old lady. At corresponding moments one saw the Guermantes suddenly adopt a tone almost as antiquated and as affable as, and (since they themselves had more charm) more affecting than that of the Marquise, to say of a servant: “One feels that she has a thoroughly sound n
ature, she’s not at all a common girl, she must come of decent parents, she’s certainly a girl who has never gone astray.” At such moments the family genie adopted the form of a tone of voice. But at times it could reveal itself in the bearing also, in the expression on the face, the same in the Duchess as in her grandfather the Marshal, a sort of imperceptible convulsion (like that of the Snake, the genius of the Carthaginian family of Barca) by which my heart had more than once been made to throb, on my morning walks, when before I had recognised Mme de Guermantes I felt her eyes fastened upon me from the inside of a little dairy. This family genie had intervened in a situation which was far from immaterial not merely to the Guermantes but to the Courvoisiers, the rival faction of the family and, though of as noble stock as the Guermantes (it was, indeed, through his Courvoisier grandmother that the Guermantes explained the obsession which led the Prince de Guermantes always to speak of birth and titles as though they were the only things that mattered), their opposite in every respect. Not only did the Courvoisiers not assign to intelligence the same importance as the Guermantes, they had a different notion of it. For a Guermantes (however stupid), to be intelligent meant to have a sharp tongue, to be capable of saying scathing things, to give short shrift; but it meant also the capacity to hold one’s own equally in painting, music, architecture, and to speak English. The Courvoisiers had a less favourable notion of intelligence, and unless one belonged to their world, being intelligent was almost tantamount to “having probably murdered one’s father and mother.” For them intelligence was the sort of burglar’s jemmy by means of which people one did not know from Adam forced the doors of the most reputable drawing-rooms, and it was common knowledge among the Courvoisiers that you always had to pay in the long run for having “those sort” of people in your house. To the most trivial statements made by intelligent people who were not “in society” the Courvoisiers opposed a systematic distrust. Someone having once remarked: “But Swann is younger than Palamède,” Mme de Gallardon had retorted: “So he says, at any rate, and if he says it you may be sure it’s because he thinks it’s in his interest!” Better still, when someone said of two highly distinguished strangers whom the Guermantes had entertained that one of them had been sent in first because she was the elder: “But is she really the elder?” Mme de Gallardon had inquired, not positively as though that sort of person did not have an age, but as if, being very probably devoid of civil or religious status, of definite traditions, they were both more or less of an age, like two kittens of the same litter between which only a veterinary surgeon would be competent to decide. The Courvoisiers however, more than the Guermantes, maintained in a certain sense the integrity of the titled class thanks at once to the narrowness of their minds and the malevolence of their hearts. Just as the Guermantes (for whom, below the royal families and a few others like the Lignes, the La Trémoïlles and so forth, all the rest were a vague jumble of indistinguishable small-fry) were insolent towards various people of ancient stock who lived round Guermantes, precisely because they paid no attention to those secondary distinctions by which the Courvoisiers set enormous store, so the absence of such distinctions affected them little. Certain women who did not enjoy a very exalted rank in their native provinces but had made glittering marriages and were rich, pretty, beloved of duchesses, were for Paris, where people are never very well up in who one’s “father and mother” were, desirable and elegant imports. It might happen, though rarely, that such women were, through the medium of the Princesse de Parme, or by virtue of their own attractions, received by certain Guermantes. But towards these the indignation of the Courvoisiers was unrelenting. Having to meet at their cousin’s, between five and six in the afternoon, people with whose relatives their own relatives did not care to be seen mixing down in the Perche became for them an ever-increasing source of rage and an inexhaustible fount of rhetoric. Whenever, for instance, the charming Comtesse G——entered the Guermantes drawing-room, the face of Mme de Villebon assumed exactly the expression that would have befitted it had she been called upon to recite the line: