“Since you give me leave, I shall send for you when I can.”
I dared not let her know that I was subordinating everything else to the chance of seeing Mme de Stermaria.
“It will have to be at short notice, unfortunately,” I went on, “I never know beforehand. Would it be possible for me to send round for you in the evenings when I’m free?”
“It will be quite possible soon, because I’m going to have an independent entrance. But just at present it’s impracticable. Anyhow I shall come round tomorrow or the next day in the afternoon. You needn’t see me if you’re busy.”
On reaching the door, surprised that I had not preceded her, she offered me her cheek, feeling that there was no need now for any coarse physical desire to prompt us to kiss one another. The brief relations in which we had just indulged being of the sort to which a profound intimacy and a heartfelt choice sometimes lead, Albertine had felt it incumbent upon her to improvise and add temporarily to the kisses which we had exchanged on my bed the sentiment of which those kisses would have been the symbol for a knight and his lady such as they might have been conceived by a Gothic minstrel.
When she had left me, this young Picarde who might have been carved on his porch by the sculptor of Saint-André-des-Champs, Françoise brought me a letter which filled me with joy, for it was from Mme de Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner for Wednesday. From Mme de Stermaria—that was to say, for me, not so much from the real Mme de Stermaria as from the one of whom I had been thinking all day before Albertine’s arrival. It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess—whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
Albertine had made me so late that the play had just finished when I entered Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing-room; and having little desire to be caught in the stream of guests who were pouring out, discussing the great piece of news, the separation, which was said to have been already effected, between the Duc de Guermantes and his wife, I had taken a seat on a bergère in the outer room while waiting for an opportunity to greet my hostess, when from the inner one, where she had no doubt been sitting in the front row, I saw emerging, majestic, ample and tall in a flowing gown of yellow satin upon which huge black poppies were picked out in relief, the Duchess herself. The sight of her no longer disturbed me in the least. One fine day my mother, laying her hands on my forehead (as was her habit when she was afraid of hurting my feelings) and saying: “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet Mme de Guermantes. You’re becoming a laughing-stock. Besides, look how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious to think about than waylaying a woman who doesn’t care a straw about you,” instantaneously—like a hypnotist who brings you back from the distant country in which you imagined yourself to be, and opens your eyes for you, or like the doctor who, by recalling you to a sense of duty and reality, cures you of an imaginary disease in which you have been wallowing—had awakened me from an unduly protracted dream. The rest of the day had been consecrated to a last farewell to this malady which I was renouncing; I had sung, for hours on end and weeping as I sang, the words of Schubert’s Adieu:
Farewell, strange voices call thee,
Sweet sister of the angels, far from me.
And then it was over. I had given up my morning walks, and with so little difficulty that I thought myself justified in the prophecy (which we shall see was to prove false later on) that I should easily grow accustomed, during the course of my life, to no longer seeing a woman. And when, shortly afterwards, Françoise had reported to me that Jupien, anxious to enlarge his business, was looking for a shop in the neighbourhood, wanting to find one for him (delighted, too, while strolling along a street which already from my bed I had heard luminously vociferous like a peopled beach, to see behind the raised iron shutters of the dairies the young milk-maids with their white sleeves), I had been able to begin those outings again. Nor did I feel the slightest constraint; for I was conscious that I was no longer going out with the object of seeing Mme de Guermantes—much as a married woman, who has taken endless precautions so long as she has a lover, from the day she breaks with him leaves his letters lying about, at the risk of disclosing to her husband an infidelity which ceased to alarm her the moment she ceased to be guilty of it.
What troubled me now was the discovery that almost every house sheltered some unhappy person. In one the wife was always in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her. In the next it was the other way about. In another a hard-working mother, beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, tried to conceal her sufferings from the eyes of the neighbours. Quite half of the human race was in tears. And when I came to know it I saw that it was so exasperating that I wondered whether it might not be the adulterous husband and wife (who were unfaithful only because their lawful happiness had been denied them, and showed themselves charming and loyal to everyone but their respective spouses) who were in the right. Presently I ceased to have even the excuse of being useful to Jupien for continuing my morning peregrinations. For we learned that the cabinet-maker in our courtyard, whose work-rooms were separated from Jupien’s shop only by the flimsiest of partitions, was shortly to be “given notice” by the Duke’s agent because his hammering made too much noise. Jupien could have hoped for nothing better. The workrooms had a basement for storing timber, which communicated with our cellars. He could keep his coal there, could knock down the partition, and would then have one huge shop. Indeed, since Jupien, finding the rent that M. de Guermantes was asking him exorbitant, allowed the premises to be inspected in the hope that, discouraged by his failure to find a tenant, the Duke would resign himself to accepting a lower offer, Françoise, noticing that, even at an hour when no prospective tenant was likely to call, the concierge left the door of the empty shop on the latch with the “To let” sign still up, scented a trap laid by him to entice the young woman who was engaged to the Guermantes footman (they would find a lovers’ retreat there) and to catch them red-handed.
However that might be, and for all that I had no longer to find Jupien a new shop, I still went out before lunch. Often, on these excursions, I met M. de Norpois. It would happen that, conversing as he walked with a colleague, he cast at me a glance which, after making a thorough scrutiny of my person, turned back towards his companion without his having smiled at me or given me any more sign of recognition than if he had never set eyes on me before. For, with these eminent diplomats, looking at you in a certain way is intended to let you know not that they have seen you but that they have not seen you and that they have some serious matter to discuss with the colleague who is accompanying them. A tall woman whom I frequently encountered near the house was less discreet with me. For although I did not know her, she would turn round to look at me, would wait for me, unavailingly, in front of shop windows, smile at me as though she were going to kiss me, make gestures indicative of complete surrender. She resumed an icy coldness towards me if anyone appeared whom she knew. For a long time now in these morning walks, according to what I had to do, even if it was the most trivial purchase of a newspaper, I chose the shortest way, with no regret if it was off the Duchess’s habitual route, and if on the other hand it did lie along that route, without either compunction or concealment, because it no longer appeared to me the forbidden road on which I extorted from an ungrateful woman the favour of setting eyes on her against her will. But it had never occurred to me that my recovery, in restoring me to a normal attitude towards Mme de Guermantes, would have a corresponding effect on her and make possible a friendliness, even a friendship, which no longer mattered to me. Until then, the efforts o
f the entire world banded together to bring me into touch with her would have been powerless to counteract the evil spell that is cast by an ill-starred love. Fairies more powerful than mankind have decreed that in such cases nothing can avail us until the day we utter sincerely in our hearts the formula: “I am no longer in love.” I had been vexed with Saint-Loup for not having taken me to see his aunt. But he was no more capable than anyone else of breaking a spell. So long as I was in love with Mme de Guermantes, the marks of cordiality that I received from others, their compliments, actually distressed me, not only because they did not come from her but because she would never hear of them. And yet even if she had known of them it would not have been of the slightest use to me. But even in the details of an attachment, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. There would be plenty of social success if people were taught upon these lines the art of succeeding.
As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her thoughts filled with the memory of friends whom I did not know and whom she would perhaps be meeting again presently at some other party, the Duchess caught sight of me on my bergère, genuinely indifferent and seeking only to be polite whereas while I was in love I had tried so desperately, without ever succeeding, to assume an air of indifference. She swerved aside, came towards me and, reproducing the smile she had worn that evening at the Opéra, which the painful feeling of being loved by someone she did not love no longer obliterated, “No, don’t move,” she said, gracefully gathering in her immense skirt which otherwise would have occupied the entire bergère. “You don’t mind if I sit down beside you a moment?”
She was taller than me, and further enlarged by the volume of her dress, and I felt myself almost touching her handsome bare arm, round which a faint and ubiquitous down exhaled as it were a perpetual golden mist, and the blonde coils of her hair which wafted their fragrance over me. Having barely room to sit down, she could not turn easily to face me, and so, obliged to look straight in front of her rather than in my direction, assumed the sort of soft and dreamy expression one sees in a portrait.
“Have you any news of Robert?” she inquired.
At that moment Mme de Villeparisis entered the room.
“Well, what a fine time you arrive when we do see you here for once in a way!”
And noticing that I was talking to her niece, and concluding, perhaps, that we were more intimate than she had supposed: “But don’t let me interrupt your conversation with Oriane,” she went on (for the good offices of the procuress are part of the duties of the perfect hostess). “You wouldn’t care to dine with her here on Wednesday?”
It was the day on which I was to dine with Mme de Stermaria, so I declined.
“Saturday, then?”
As my mother was returning on Saturday or Sunday, it would have been unkind not to stay at home every evening to dine with her. I therefore declined this invitation also.
“Ah, you’re not an easy person to get hold of.”
“Why do you never come to see me?” inquired Mme de Guermantes when Mme de Villeparisis had left us to go and congratulate the performers and present the leading lady with a bunch of roses upon which the hand that offered it conferred all its value, for it had cost no more than twenty francs. (This, incidentally, was as high as she ever went when an artist had performed only once. Those who gave their services at all her afternoons and evenings throughout the season received roses painted by the Marquise.) “It’s such a bore never to see each other except in other people’s houses. Since you won’t dine with me at my aunt’s, why not come and dine at my house?”
Various people who had stayed to the last possible moment on one pretext or another, but were at last preparing to leave, seeing that the Duchess had sat down to talk to a young man on a seat so narrow as just to contain them both, thought that they must have been misinformed, that it was not the Duchess but the Duke who was seeking a separation, on my account. Whereupon they hastened to spread abroad this intelligence. I had better grounds than anyone for being aware of its falsity. But I was myself surprised that at one of those difficult periods in which a separation is being effected but is not yet complete, the Duchess, instead of withdrawing from society, should go out of her way to invite a person whom she knew so slightly. The suspicion crossed my mind that it had been the Duke alone who had been opposed to her having me in the house, and that now that he was leaving her she saw no further obstacle to her surrounding herself with the people she liked.
A few minutes earlier I should have been amazed had anyone told me that Mme de Guermantes was going to ask me to come and see her, let alone to dine with her. However much I might be aware that the Guermantes salon could not present those distinctive features which I had extracted from the name, the fact that it had been forbidden territory to me, by obliging me to give it the same kind of existence that we give to the salons of which we have read the description in a novel or seen the image in a dream, made me, even when I was certain that it was just like any other, imagine it as quite different; between myself and it was the barrier at which reality ends. To dine with the Guermantes was like travelling to a place I had long wished to see, making a desire emerge from my head and take shape before my eyes, making acquaintance with a dream. At least I might have supposed that it would be one of those dinners to which the hosts invite someone by telling him: “Do come; there’ll be absolutely nobody but ourselves,” pretending to attribute to the pariah the alarm which they themselves feel at the thought of his mixing with their friends, and seeking indeed to convert into an enviable privilege, reserved for their intimates alone, the quarantine of the outcast, involuntarily unsociable and favoured. I felt on the contrary that Mme de Guermantes was anxious for me to taste the most delightful society that she had to offer me when she went on to say, projecting before my eyes as it were the violet-hued loveliness of a visit to Fabrice’s aunt and the miracle of an introduction to Count Mosca:
“You wouldn’t be free on Friday, now, for a small dinner-party? It would be so nice. There’ll be the Princesse de Parme, who’s charming, not that I’d ask you to meet anyone who wasn’t agreeable.”
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 am
ong 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.
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