The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  “Strong is just the word for such an odorous author,” Mme de Guermantes broke in sarcastically. “If this poor boy ever found himself in his company I can quite understand that he got up his nostrils!”

  “I must confess, though, Ma’am,” the Duke went on, addressing the Princesse de Parme, “that quite apart from La Fille de Roland, in literature and even in music I’m terribly old-fashioned; no old junk can be too stale for my taste. You won’t believe me, perhaps, but in the evenings, if my wife sits down to the piano, I find myself calling for some old tune by Auber or Boieldieu, or even Beethoven! That’s the sort of thing I like. As for Wagner, he sends me to sleep at once.”

  “You’re wrong there,” said Mme de Guermantes. “In spite of his insufferable long-windedness, Wagner was a genius. Lohengrin is a masterpiece. Even in Tristan there are some intriguing passages here and there. And the Spinning Chorus in the Flying Dutchman is a perfect marvel.”

  “Aren’t I right, Babal,” said M. de Guermantes, turning to M. de Bréauté, “what we like is:

  The gatherings of noble companions

  Are all of them held in this charming haunt.26

  It’s delightful. And Fra Diavolo and the Magic Flute, and Le Chalet, and the Marriage of Figaro, and Les Diamants de la Couronne—there’s music for you! It’s the same thing in literature. For instance, I adore Balzac, Le Bal de Sceaux, Les Mohicans de Paris.”

  “Ah! my dear man, if you’re off on the subject of Balzac we’ll be here all night. Keep it for some evening when Mémé’s here. He’s even better, he knows it all by heart.”

  Irritated by his wife’s interruption, the Duke held her for some seconds under the fare of a menacing silence. Meanwhile Mme d’Arpajon had been exchanging with the Princesse de Parme some remarks about poetry, tragic and otherwise, which did not reach me distinctly until I caught the following from Mme d’Arpajon: “Oh, I quite agree with all that, I admit he makes the world seem ugly because he’s unable to distinguish between ugliness and beauty, or rather because his insufferable vanity makes him believe that everything he says is beautiful. I agree with your Highness that in the piece in question there are some ridiculous things, unintelligible, and errors of taste, and that it’s difficult to understand, that it’s as much trouble to read as if it was written in Russian or Chinese, because obviously it’s anything in the world but French; but still, when one has taken the trouble, how richly one is rewarded, it’s so full of imagination!”

  I had missed the opening sentences of this little lecture. I gathered in the end not only that the poet incapable of distinguishing between beauty and ugliness was Victor Hugo, but furthermore that the poem which was as difficult to understand as Chinese or Russian was a piece dating from the poet’s earliest period, and perhaps even nearer to Mme Deshoulières27 than to the Victor Hugo of the Légende des Siècles. Far from thinking Mme d’Arpajon ridiculous, I saw her (the first person at this table, so real and so ordinary, at which I had sat down with such keen disappointment), I saw her in my mind’s eye crowned with that lace cap, with the long spiral ringlets falling from it on either side, which was worn by Mme de Rémusat, Mme de Broglie, Mme de Saint-Aulaire, all those distinguished ladies who in their delightful letters quote with such learning and such aptness Sophocles, Schiller and the Imitation, but in whom the earliest poetry of the Romantics induced the alarm and exhaustion inseparable for my grandmother from the later verses of Stéphane Mallarmé.

  When the child appears, the family circle

  Applauds with loud cries . .

  “Mme d’Arpajon is very fond of poetry,” said the Princesse de Parme to her hostess, impressed by the ardent tone in which the speech had been delivered.

  “No, she doesn’t understand the first thing about it,” replied Mme de Guermantes in an undertone, taking advantage of the fact that Mme d’Arpajon, who was dealing with an objection raised by General de Beautreillis, was too intent upon what she herself was saying to hear what was being murmured by the Duchess. “She has become literary since she’s been forsaken. I may tell your Highness that it’s I who have to bear the brunt of it because it’s to me that she comes to complain whenever Basin hasn’t been to see her, which is practically every day. But it isn’t my fault, after all, if she bores him, and I can’t force him to go to her, although I’d rather he were a little more faithful, because then I shouldn’t see quite so much of her myself. But she drives him mad and I’m not surprised. She isn’t a bad sort, but she’s boring to a degree you can’t imagine. She gives me such a headache every day that I’m obliged to take a pyramidon tablet whenever she comes. And all this because Basin took it into his head for a year or so to go to bed with her. And on top of that to have a footman who’s in love with a little tart and goes about with a long face if I don’t ask the young person to leave her profitable pavement for half an hour and come to tea with me! Oh! life is really too tedious!” the Duchess languorously concluded.

  Mme d’Arpajon bored M. de Guermantes principally because he had recently become the lover of another woman, whom I discovered to be the Marquise de Surgisle-Duc. As it happened, the footman who had been deprived of his day off was at that moment waiting at table. And it struck me that, still disconsolate, he was doing it with some lack of composure, for I noticed that in handing the dish to M. de Châtellerault he performed his task so awkwardly that the young Duke’s elbow came in contact several times with his. The young Duke showed no sign of annoyance with the blushing footman, but on the contrary looked up at him with a smile in his clear blue eyes. This good humour seemed to me to betoken kindness on the guest’s part. But the insistency of his smile led me to think that, aware of the servant’s discomfiture, what he felt was perhaps a malicious amusement.

  “But, my dear, you know you’re not revealing any new discovery when you tell us about Victor Hugo,” went on the Duchess, this time addressing Mme d’Arpajon whom she had just seen turn round with a worried look. “You mustn’t expect to launch that young genius. Everybody knows that he has talent. What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the Légende des Siècles, I forget all their names. But in the Feuilles d’Automne, the Chants du Crépuscule, there’s much of a poet, a true poet. Even in the Contemplations,” went on the Duchess, whom none of her listeners dared to contradict, and with good reason, “there are still some quite pretty things. But I confess that I prefer not to venture further than the Crépuscule! And then in the finer poems of Victor Hugo, and there really are some, one frequently comes across an idea, even a profound idea.”

  And with just the right shade of feeling, bringing out the sorrowful thought with the full force of her intonation, projecting it somewhere beyond her voice, and fixing straight in front of her a charming, dreamy gaze, the Duchess slowly recited:

  “Sorrow is a fruit, God does not cause it to grow

  On a branch that is still too feeble to bear it.

  Or again:

  The dead last so short a time . . .

  Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust,

  Less quickly than in our hearts!”

  And, while a smile of disillusionment puckered her sorrowful lips with a graceful sinuosity, the Duchess fastened on Mme d’Arpajon the dreamy gaze of her lovely clear blue eyes. I was beginning to know them, as well as her voice, with its heavy drawl, its harsh savour. In those eyes and in that voice, I recognised much of the life of nature round Combray. Certainly, in the affectation with which that voice betrayed at times a rudeness of the soil, there was more than one element: the wholly provincial origin of one branch of the Guermantes family, which had for long remained more localised, more hardy, wilder, more combative than the rest; and then the ingrained habit of really distinguished people and people of intelligence who know that distinction does not lie in mincing speech, and the habit of nobles who fraternise more readily with their peasants than with the middle classes; peculiarities all of which the regal position of Mme de Guermantes enabled her to display more freel
y, to bring out in full fig. It appears that the same voice existed also in some of her sisters, whom she detested, and who, less intelligent than herself and almost humbly married, if one may use this adverb to speak of unions with obscure noblemen, holed up on their provincial estates, or, in Paris, in one of the dimmer reaches of Faubourg society, possessed this voice also but had curbed it, corrected it, softened it so far as lay in their power, just as it is very rarely that any of us has the courage of his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to resembling the most approved models. But Oriane was so much more intelligent, so much richer, above all, so much more in vogue than her sisters, she had, when Princesse des Laumes, cut so successful a figure in the company of the Prince of Wales, that she had realised that this discordant voice was an attraction, and had made it, in the social sphere, with the courage of originality rewarded by success, what in the theatrical sphere a Réjane or a Jeanne Granier (which implies no comparison, naturally, between the respective merits and talents of those two actresses) had made of theirs, something admirable and distinctive which possibly certain Réjane and Granier sisters, whom no one has ever known, strove to conceal as a defect.

  To all these reasons for displaying her local originality, Mme de Guermantes’s favourite writers—Mérimée, Meilhac and Halévy—had brought in addition, together with a respect for “naturalness,” a feeling for the prosaic by which she attained to poetry and a purely society spirit which called up distant landscapes before my eyes. Besides, the Duchess was fully capable, adding to these influences an artful refinement of her own, of having chosen for the majority of her words the pronunciation that seemed to her most “Ile-de-France,” most “Champenoise,” since, if not quite to the same extent as her sister-in-law Marsantes, she rarely strayed beyond the pure vocabulary that might have been used by an old French writer. And when one was tired of the composite patchwork of modern speech, it was very restful to listen to Mme de Guermantes’s talk, even though one knew it could express far fewer things—almost as restful, if one was alone with her and she restrained and clarified the flow of her speech still further, as listening to an old song. Then, as I looked at and listened to Mme de Guermantes, I could see, imprisoned in the perpetual afternoon of her eyes, a sky of the Ile-de-France or of Champagne spread itself, grey-blue, oblique, with the same angle of inclination as in the eyes of Saint-Loup.

  Thus, through these diverse influences, Mme de Guermantes expressed at once the most ancient aristocratic France, then, much later, the manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie might have enjoyed and found fault with Victor Hugo under the July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen taste for the literature that sprang from Mérimée and Meilhac. The first of these influences attracted me more than the second, did more to console me for the disappointments of my pilgrimage to and arrival in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so different from what I had imagined it to be; but even the second I preferred to the last. For, while Mme de Guermantes was almost involuntarily Guermantes, her Pailleronism,28 her taste for the younger Dumas were self-conscious and deliberate. As this taste was the opposite of my own, she furnished my mind with literature when she talked to me of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and never seemed to me so stupidly Faubourg Saint-Germain as when she talked literature.

  Moved by this last quotation, Mme d’Arpajon exclaimed: “‘These relics of the heart, they also have their dust!’—Monsieur, you must write that down for me on my fan,” she said to M. de Guermantes.

  “Poor woman, I feel sorry for her!” said the Princesse de Parme to Mme de Guermantes.

  “No, really, Ma’am, you mustn’t be soft-hearted, she has only got what she deserves.”

  “But—you’ll forgive my saying this to you—she does really love him all the same!”

  “Oh, not at all; she isn’t capable of it; she thinks she loves him just as she thought just now she was quoting Victor Hugo when she was reciting a line from Musset. Look,” the Duchess went on in a melancholy tone, “nobody would be more touched than myself by a true feeling. But let me give you an example. Only yesterday she made a terrible scene with Basin. Your Highness thinks perhaps that it was because he’s in love with other women, because he no longer loves her; not in the least, it was because he won’t put her sons up for the Jockey. Is that the behaviour of a woman in love? No! I will go further,” Mme de Guermantes added with precision, “she is a person of rare insensitivity.”

  Meanwhile it was with an eye sparkling with satisfaction that M. de Guermantes had listened to his wife talking about Victor Hugo “point-blank” and quoting those few lines. The Duchess might frequently irritate him, but at moments such as this he was proud of her. “Oriane is really extraordinary. She can talk about anything, she has read everything. She couldn’t possibly have guessed that the conversation this evening would turn on Victor Hugo. Whatever subject you take her on at, she’s ready for you, she can hold her own with the most learned scholars. This young man must be quite captivated.”

  “But do let’s change the subject,” Mme de Guermantes added, “because she’s dreadfully susceptible . . . You must think me very old-fashioned,” she went on, turning to me, “I know that nowadays it’s considered a weakness to care for ideas in poetry, poetry with some thought in it.”

  “Old-fashioned?” asked the Princesse de Parme, quivering with the slight shock produced by this new wave which she had not expected, although she knew that the Duchess’s conversation always held in store for her those continuous and delightful thrills, that breath-catching panic, that wholesome exhaustion after which her thoughts instinctively turned to the necessity of taking a footbath in a dressing cabin and a brisk walk to “restore her circulation.”

  “For my part, no, Oriane,” said Mme de Brissac, “I don’t in the least object to Victor Hugo’s having ideas, quite the contrary, but I do object to his seeking them in everything that’s monstrous. It was he who accustomed us to ugliness in literature. There’s quite enough ugliness in life already. Why can’t we be allowed at least to forget it while we’re reading? A distressing spectacle from which we should turn away in real life, that’s what attracts Victor Hugo.”

  “Victor Hugo is not so realistic as Zola though, surely?” asked the Princesse de Parme.

  The name of Zola did not stir a muscle on the face of M. de Beautreillis. The General’s anti-Dreyfusism was too deep-rooted for him to seek to give expression to it. And his benign silence when anyone broached these topics touched the layman’s heart as a proof of the same delicacy that a priest shows in avoiding any reference to your religious duties, a financier in taking pains not to recommend the companies which he himself controls, a strong man in behaving with lamblike gentleness and not hitting you in the jaw.

  “I know you’re related to Admiral Jurien de La Gravière,” Mme de Varambon, the lady-in-waiting to the Princesse de Parme, said to me with a knowing look. An excellent but limited woman, she had been procured for the Princess long ago by the Duke’s mother. She had not previously addressed me, and I could never afterwards, despite the admonitions of the Princess and my own protestations, get out of her mind the idea that I was in some way connected with the admiral-academician, who was a complete stranger to me. The obstinate persistence of the Princesse de Parme’s lady-in-waiting in seeing in me a nephew of Admiral Jurien de La Gravière was in itself quite an ordinary form of silliness. But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated sample of the numberless mistakes, more frivolous, more pointed, unwitting or deliberate, which accompany one’s name on the label which the world attaches to one. I remember a friend of the Guermantes who expressed a keen desire to meet me, and gave me as his reason that I was a great friend of his cousin, Mme de Chaussegros. “She’s a charming person, and so fond of you.” I scrupulously, though quite vainly, insisted on the fact that there must be some mistake, as I did not know Mme de Chaussegros. “Then it’s her sister you know; it comes to the same thing. She met you in Scotland.” I had never been to Scotland, and took
the fruitless trouble, in my honesty, to apprise my interlocutor of the fact. It was Mme de Chaussegros herself who had said that she knew me, and no doubt sincerely believed it, as a result of some initial confusion, for from that time onwards she never failed to greet me whenever she saw me. And since, after all, the world in which I moved was precisely that in which Mme de Chaussegros moved, my humility had neither rhyme nor reason. To say that I was an intimate friend of the Chaussegros family was, literally, a mistake, but from the social point of view it roughly corresponded to my position, if one can speak of the social position of so young a man as I then was. It therefore mattered not in the least that this friend of the Guermantes should tell me things that were untrue about myself, he neither lowered nor raised me (from the social point of view) in the idea which he continued to hold of me. And when all is said, for those of us who are not professional actors, the tedium of living always in the same character is dispelled for a moment, as if we were to go on the boards, when another person forms a false idea of us, imagines that we are friends with a lady whom we do not know and are reported to have met in the course of a delightful journey which we have never made. Errors that multiply themselves and are harmless when they do not have the inflexible rigidity of the one which had been committed, and continued for the rest of her life to be committed, in spite of my denials, by the imbecile lady-in-waiting to Mme de Parme, rooted for all time in the belief that I was related to the tiresome Admiral Jurien de La Gravière. “She’s not very strong in the head,” the Duke confided to me, “and besides, she ought not to indulge in too many libations. I fancy she’s slightly under the influence of Bacchus.” As a matter of fact Mme de Varambon had drunk nothing but water, but the Duke liked to seize opportunities for his favourite phrases.