The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  “The Princesse de Guermantes’s house is really very beautiful.”

  “Oh, it’s not very beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Next to the Princess herself, of course.”

  “Is the Princesse de Guermantes superior to the Duchesse de Guermantes?”

  “Oh! there’s no comparison.” (It is to be observed that, whenever people in society have the least touch of imagination, they will crown or dethrone, at the whim of their affections or their quarrels, those whose position appeared most solid and unalterably fixed.) “The Duchesse de Guermantes” (perhaps in not calling her “Oriane” he wished to set a greater distance between her and myself) “is delightful, far superior to anything you can have guessed. But really she is incommensurable with her cousin. The Princess is exactly what the people in the market-place might imagine Princess Metternich to have been, but la Metternich believed she had launched Wagner, because she knew Victor Maurel.31 The Princesse de Guermantes, or rather her mother, knew the man himself. Which is a distinction, not to mention the incredible beauty of the lady. And the Esther gardens alone!”

  “Can one not visit them?”

  “No, you would have to be invited, but they never invite anyone unless I intercede.”

  But at once withdrawing the bait of this offer after having dangled it in front of me, he held out his hand, for we had reached my door.

  “My role is at an end, sir. I will simply add these few words. Another person will perhaps offer you his affection some day as I have done. Let the present example serve for your instruction. Do not neglect it. Affection is always precious. What one cannot do alone in this life, because there are things which one cannot ask, or do, or wish, or learn by oneself, one can do in company, and without needing to be thirteen, as in Balzac’s Story of the Thirteen, or four, as in The Three Musketeers. Good-bye.”

  He must have been feeling tired and have abandoned the idea of going to look at the moonlight, for he asked me to tell his coachman to drive home. At once he made a sharp movement as though he had changed his mind. But I had already given the order, and, so as not to lose any more time, I went and rang my door-bell. It had not recurred to me for a moment that I had been meaning to tell M. de Charlus, on the subject of the German Emperor and General Botha, stories which had been such an obsession an hour ago but which his unexpected and crushing reception had sent flying far from my mind.

  On entering my room I saw on my desk a letter which Françoise’s young footman had written to one of his friends and had left lying there. Now that my mother was away, there was no liberty that he hesitated to take. I was even more at fault for taking the liberty of reading the letter which lay spread out before me with no envelope and (this was my sole excuse) seemed to be offering itself to my eyes.

  Dear Friend and Cousin,

  I hope this finds you in good health, and the same with all the young folk, particularily my young godson Joseph who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting but who I preffer to you all as being my godson, these relics of the heart they also have their dust, upon their blest remains let us not lay our hands. Besides dear friend and cousin who can say that tomorrow you and your dear wife my cousin Marie, will not both be cast hedlong down into the bottom of the sea, like the sailor clinging to the mast on high, for this life is but a dark valley. Dear friend I must tell you that my principal ocupation, which will astonish you I’m sure, is now poetry which I love passionately, for we must wile away the time. And so dear friend do not be too surprised if I have not ansered your last letter before now, in place of pardon let oblivion come. As you know, Madame’s mother has past away amid unspeakable sufferings which fairly exausted her as she saw as many as three doctors. The day of her internment was a great day for all Monsieur’s relations came in crowds as well as several Ministers. It took them more than two hours to get to the cemetry, which will make you all open your eyes pretty wide in your village for they certainly wont do as much for mother Michu. So all my life to come can be but one long sob. I am enjoying myself imensely with the motorcycle which Ive recently learned. What would you say my dear friends if I arrived suddenly like that at full speed at Les Ecorres. But on that head I shall no more keep silence for I feel that the frenzy of greif sweeps its reason away. I am associating with the Duchesse de Guermantes, poeple whose names you have never even heard in our ignorant villages. Therefore it is with pleasure that Im going to send the works of Racine, of Victor Hugo, of Pages Choisies de Chênedollé, of Alfred de Musset, for I would cure the land which give me birth of ignorance which leads innevitably to crime. I cant think of anything more to say to you and send you like the pelican wearied by a long flite my best regards as well as to your wife my godson and your sister Rose. May it never be said of her: And Rose she lived only as live the roses, as has been said by Victor Hugo, the sonnet of Arvers, Alfred de Musset all those great geniuses who because of that were sent to die at the steak like Joan of Arc. Hoping for your next missive soon, your loving cousin Périgot Joseph.

  We are attracted by any life which represents for us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered. Many of the things that M. de Charlus had told me had given a vigorous spur to my imagination and, making it forget how much the reality had disappointed it at Mme de Guermantes’s (people’s names are in this respect like the names of places), had swung it towards Oriane’s cousin. Moreover, M. de Charlus misled me for some time as to the imaginary worth and variety of society people only because he was himself misled. And this, perhaps, because he did nothing, did not write, did not paint, did not even read anything in a serious and thorough manner. But, superior as he was by several degrees to society people, if it was from them and the spectacle they afforded that he drew the material for his conversation, he was still not understood by them. Speaking as an artist, he could at the most bring out the deceptive charm of society people—but for artists only, in relation to whom he might be said to play the part played by the reindeer among the Eskimos: this precious animal plucks for them from the barren rocks lichens and mosses which they themselves could neither discover nor utilise, but which, once they have been digested by the reindeer, become for the inhabitants of the far North an assimilable form of food.

  To which I may add that the pictures which M. de Charlus drew of society were animated with plenty of life by the blend of his ferocious hatreds and his passionate affections—hatreds directed mainly against young men, adoration aroused principally by certain women.

  If among these the Princesse de Guermantes was placed by M. de Charlus upon the most exalted throne, his mysterious words about the “inaccessible Aladdin’s palace” in which his cousin dwelt were not sufficient to account for my stupefaction, speedily followed by the fear that I might be the victim of some bad joke concocted by someone who wanted to get me thrown out of a house to which I had gone without being invited, when, about two months after my dinner with the Duchess and while she was at Cannes, having opened an envelope the appearance of which had not led me to suppose that it contained anything out of the ordinary, I read the following words engraved on a card: “The Princesse de Guermantes, née Duchesse en Bavière, At Home, the——th.” No doubt to be invited to the Princesse de Guermantes’s was perhaps not, from the social point of view, any more difficult than to dine with the Duchess, and my slight knowledge of heraldry had taught me that the title of Prince is not superior to that of Duke. Besides, I told myself that the intelligence of a society woman could not be essentially so dissimilar from that of the rest of her kind as M. de Charlus made out. But my imagination, like Elstir engaged upon rendering some effect of perspective without reference to the notions of physics which he might quite well possess, depicted for me not what I knew but what it saw; what it saw, that is to say what the name showed it. Now, even before I had met the Duchess, the name Guermantes preceded by the title of Princess, like a note or a colour or a quantity profoundly modified by surrounding values, by the mathematical or aesthetic “s
ign” that governs it, had always evoked for me something entirely different. With that title, it is to be found chiefly in the memoirs of the days of Louis XIII and Louis XIV; and I imagined the town house of the Princesse de Guermantes as being regularly frequented by the Duchesse de Longueville and the great Condé, whose presence there rendered it highly improbable that I should ever enter it.

  In spite of whatever may stem from various subjective points of view, of which I shall have something to say later, in these artificial magnifications, the fact remains that there is a certain objective reality in all these people, and consequently a difference between them.

  How, in any case, could it be otherwise? The humanity with which we consort and which bears so little resemblance to our dreams is none the less the same that, in the memoirs and in the letters of eminent persons, we have seen described and have felt a desire to know. The utterly insignificant old man we meet at dinner is the same who wrote that proud letter to Prince Friedrich-Karl which we read with such emotion in a book about the war of 1870. We are bored at the dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and, because it is keeping us company, we are interested in a book. But the people in question are the same. We should like to have known Mme de Pompadour, who was so valuable a patron of the arts, and we should have been as bored in her company as among the modern Egerias at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so mediocre do we find them. The fact remains that these differences do exist. People are never completely alike; their behaviour with regard to ourselves, at, one might say, the same level of friendship, reveals differences which, in the end, counter-balance one another. When I knew Mme de Montmorency, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things to me, but if I asked her a favour she would use all her influence as unstintingly and as effectively as possible in order to obtain what I needed. Whereas another woman, Mme de Guermantes for example, would never have wished to hurt my feelings, never said anything about me except what might give me pleasure, showered on me all those tokens of friendship which formed the rich texture of the Guermantes’s moral life, but, if I asked her for the smallest thing above and beyond that, would not have moved an inch to procure it for me, as in those country houses where one has at one’s disposal a motor-car and a valet but where it is impossible to obtain a glass of cider for which no provision has been made in the arrangements for a party. Which was for me the true friend, Mme de Montmorency, so happy to ruffle my feelings and always so ready to oblige, or Mme de Guermantes, distressed by the slightest offence that might have been given me and incapable of the slightest effort to be of use to me? Similarly, it was said that the Duchesse de Guermantes spoke only about frivolities, and her cousin, intellectually so mediocre, invariably about interesting things. Types of mind are so varied, so conflicting, not only in literature but in society, that Baudelaire and Mérimée are not the only people who have the right to despise one another mutually. These distinctive characteristics form in each person a system of looks, words and actions so coherent, so despotic, that when we are in his or her presence it seems to us superior to the rest. With Mme de Guermantes, her words, deduced like a theorem from her type of mind, seemed to me the only ones that could possibly be said. And at heart I was of her opinion when she told me that Mme de Montmorency was stupid and kept an open mind towards all the things she did not understand, or when, having heard of some malicious remark made by that lady, she said: “So that’s what you call a kind woman. I call her a monster.” But this tyranny of the reality which confronts us, this self-evidence of the lamplight which turns the already distant dawn as pale as the faintest memory, disappeared when I was away from Mme de Guermantes and a different lady said to me, putting herself on my level and considering the Duchess as being far below either of us: “Oriane takes no interest, really, in anything or anybody,” or even (something that in the presence of Mme de Guermantes it would have seemed impossible to believe, so loudly did she herself proclaim the opposite): “Oriane is a snob.” Since no mathematical process would have enabled one to convert Mme d’Arpajon and Mme de Montpensier into commensurable quantities, it would have been impossible for me to answer had anyone asked me which of the two seemed to me superior to the other.

  Now, among the characteristics peculiar to the Princesse de Guermantes’s salon, the one most generally cited was an exclusiveness due in part to the Princess’s royal birth but more especially to the almost fossilised rigidity of the Prince’s aristocratic prejudices—which, incidentally, the Duke and Duchess had had no hesitation in deriding in front of me. This exclusiveness made me regard it as even more improbable that I should have been invited by this man who reckoned only in royal personages and dukes and at every dinner-party made a scene because he had not been put in the place to which he would have been entitled under Louis XIV, a place which, thanks to his immense erudition in matters of history and genealogy, he was the only person who knew. For this reason, many society people came down on the side of the Duke and Duchess when discussing the differences that distinguished them from their cousins. “The Duke and Duchess are far more modern, far more intelligent, they aren’t simply interested, like the other couple, in how many quarterings one has, their salon is three hundred years in advance of their cousins’,” were customary remarks, the memory of which made me tremble as I looked at the invitation card, since they made it all the more probable that it had been sent to me by some practical joker.

  If the Duke and Duchess had not been still at Cannes, I might have tried to find out from them whether the invitation I had received was genuine. This state of doubt in which I was plunged is not in fact, as I deluded myself for a time by supposing, a sentiment which a man of fashion would not have felt and which consequently a writer, even if he otherwise belonged to the world of society, ought to reproduce in order to be thoroughly “objective’’ and to depict each class differently. I happened indeed, only the other day, in a charming volume of memoirs, to come upon the record of uncertainties analogous to those which the Princesse de Guermantes’s card engendered in me. “Georges and I” (or “Hély and I”—I haven’t the book at hand to verify the reference) “were so longing to be asked to Mme Delessert’s that, having received an invitation from her, we thought it prudent, each of us independently, to make certain that we were not the victims of an April fool hoax.” And the writer is none other than the Comte d’Haussonville (he who married the Duc de Broglie’s daughter), while the other young man who “independently” tries to ascertain whether he is the victim of a hoax is, according to whether he is called Georges or Hély, one or other of the two inseparable friends of M. d’Haussonville, either M. d’Harcourt or the Prince de Chalais.

  The day on which the reception at the Princesse de Guermantes’s was to be held, I learned that the Duke and Duchess had returned to Paris the night before, and I made up my mind to go and see them that morning. But, having gone out early, they had not yet returned; I watched first of all from a little room, which had seemed to me to be a good look-out post, for the arrival of their carriage. As a matter of fact I had made a singularly bad choice of observatory, for I could scarcely see into our courtyard, but I caught a glimpse of several others, and this, though of no practical use to me, diverted me for a time. It is not only in Venice that one has these views on to several houses at once which have proved so tempting to painters; it is just the same in Paris. Nor do I cite Venice at random. It is of its poorer quarters that certain poor quarters of Paris remind one, in the morning, with their tall, splayed chimneys to which the sun imparts the most vivid pinks, the brightest reds—like a garden flowering above the houses, and flowering in such a variety of tints as to suggest the garden of a tulip-fancier of Delft or Haarlem planted above the town. And then the extreme proximity of the houses, with their windows looking across at one another over a common courtyard, makes of each casement the frame in which a cook sits dreamily gazing down at the ground below, or, further off, a girl is having her hair combed by an old woman with a witc
hlike face, barely distinguishable in the shadow: thus each courtyard provides the neighbours in the adjoining house, suppressing sound by its width and framing silent gestures in a series of rectangles placed under glass by the closing of the windows, with an exhibition of a hundred Dutch paintings hung in rows. True, from the Hôtel de Guermantes one did not have the same kind of views, but one had curious ones none the less, especially from the strange trigonometrical point at which I had placed myself and from which there was nothing to arrest one’s gaze, across the relatively featureless and steeply sloping intervening area, until the distant heights formed by the mansion of the Marquise de Plassac and Mme de Tresmes, extremely noble cousins of M. de Guermantes whom I did not know. Between me and this house (which was that of their father, M. de Bréquigny) nothing but blocks of buildings of low elevation, facing in every conceivable direction, which, without obstructing the view, prolonged the distance with their oblique planes. The red-tiled turret of the coach-house in which the Marquis de Frécourt kept his carriages did indeed end in a spire that rose rather higher, but was so slender that it concealed nothing, and reminded one of those picturesque old buildings in Switzerland which spring up in isolation at the foot of a mountain. All these vague and divergent points on which my eyes came to rest made Mme de Plassac’s house, actually quite near but misleadingly distant as in an Alpine landscape, appear as though it were separated from us by several streets or by a series of foothills. When its large rectangular windows, glittering in the sunlight like flakes of rock crystal, were thrown open to air the rooms, one felt, in following from one floor to the next the footmen whom it was impossible to see clearly but who were visibly shaking carpets, the same pleasure as when one sees in a landscape by Turner or Elstir a traveller in a stage-coach, or a guide, at different degrees of altitude on the Saint-Gothard. But from the vantage-point where I had placed myself I should have been in danger of not seeing M. or Mme de Guermantes come in, so that when in the afternoon I was free to resume my watch I simply stood on the staircase, from which the opening of the carriage-gate could not escape my notice, and it was on this staircase that I posted myself, although the Alpine beauties of the Hôtel de Bréquigny, so entrancing with their footmen rendered minute by distance and busily cleaning, were not visible from there. Now this wait on the staircase was to have for me consequences so considerable, and to reveal to me so important a landscape, no longer Turneresque but moral, that it is preferable to postpone the account of it for a little while by interposing first that of my visit to the Guermantes when I knew that they had come home.