“By the way, while I think of it, my uncle Charlus has something to say to you. I promised I’d send you round to him tomorrow evening.”
“I was just going to speak to you about him. But tomorrow evening I’m dining out with your aunt Guermantes.”
“Yes, there’s a full-scale blow-out tomorrow at Oriane’s. I’m not asked. But my uncle Palamède doesn’t want you to go there. You can’t get out of it, I suppose? Well, anyhow, go on to my uncle’s afterwards. I think he’s very anxious to see you. Surely you could manage to get there by eleven. Eleven o’clock, don’t forget. I’ll let him know. He’s very touchy. If you don’t turn up he’ll never forgive you. And Oriane’s parties are always over quite early. If you’re only going to dine there you can quite easily be at my uncle’s by eleven. Actually I ought to go and see Oriane, about getting a transfer from Morocco. She’s so nice about all that sort of thing, and she can get anything she likes out of General de Saint-Joseph, who’s the man in charge. But don’t say anything about it to her. I’ve mentioned it to the Princesse de Parme, everything will be all right. Interesting place, Morocco. I could tell you all sorts of things. Very fine lot of men out there. One feels they’re on one’s own level, mentally.”
“You don’t think the Germans are going to go to war over it?”
“No, they’re annoyed with us, as after all they have every right to be. But the Kaiser is out for peace. They’re always making us think they want war, to force us to give in. Pure bluff, you know, like poker. The Prince of Monaco, one of Wilhelm II’s agents, comes and tells us in confidence that Germany will attack us if we don’t give in. So then we give in. But if we didn’t give in, there wouldn’t be war in any shape or form. You have only to think what a cosmic thing a war would be today. It’d be a bigger catastrophe than the Flood and the Götterdämmerung rolled into one. Only it wouldn’t last so long.”
He spoke to me of friendship, affection, regret, although like all travellers of his sort he was going off the next morning for some months which he was to spend in the country and would only be staying a couple of nights in Paris on his way back to Morocco (or elsewhere); but the words which he thus let fall into the warm furnace of my heart this evening kindled a pleasant glow there. Our infrequent meetings, and this one in particular, have since assumed epoch-making proportions in my memory. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship that I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (and felt therefore some remorse at the thought), what he would have liked to inspire. Suffused still with the pleasure that I had had in seeing him canter towards me and come gracefully to a halt on arriving at his goal, I felt that this pleasure lay in my recognising that each of the movements which he had executed on the bench, along the wall, had its meaning, its cause, in Saint-Loup’s own personal nature perhaps, but even more in that which by birth and upbringing he had inherited from his race.
A certainty of taste in the domain not of aesthetics but of behaviour, which when he was faced by a novel combination of circumstances enabled the man of breeding to grasp at once—like a musician who has been asked to play a piece he has never seen—the attitude and the action required and to apply the appropriate mechanism and technique, and then allowed this taste to be exercised without the constraint of any other consideration by which so many young men of the middle class would have been paralysed from fear both of making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of strangers by a breach of propriety and of appearing over-zealous in those of their friends, and which in Robert’s case was replaced by a lofty disdain that certainly he had never felt in his heart but had received by inheritance in his body, and that had fashioned the attitudes of his ancestors into a familiarity which, they imagined, could only flatter and enchant those to whom it was addressed; together with a noble liberality which, far from taking undue heed of his boundless material advantages (lavish expenditure in this restaurant had succeeded in making him, here as elsewhere, the most fashionable customer and the general favourite, a position underlined by the deference shown him not only by the waiters but by all its most exclusive young patrons), led him to trample them underfoot, just as he had actually and symbolically trodden upon those crimson benches, suggestive of some ceremonial way which pleased my friend only because it enabled him more gracefully and swiftly to arrive at my side: such were the quintessentially aristocratic qualities that shone through the husk of this body—not opaque and dim as mine would have been, but limpid and revealing—as, through a work of art, the industrious, energetic force which has created it, and rendered the movements of that light-footed course which Robert had pursued along the wall as intelligible and charming as those of horsemen on a marble frieze. “Alas!” Robert might have thought, “was it worth while to have grown up despising birth, honouring only justice and intellect, choosing, outside the ranks of the friends provided for me, companions who were awkward and ill-dressed but had the gift of eloquence, only to find that the sole personality apparent in me which remains a treasured memory is not the one that my will, with the most praiseworthy effort, has fashioned in my likeness, but one that is not of my making, that is not myself, that I have always despised and striven to overcome; was it worth while to love my chosen friend as I have done, only to find that the greatest pleasure he derives from my company is that of discovering in it something far more general than myself, a pleasure which is not in the least (as he says, though he cannot seriously believe it) the pleasure of friendship, but an intellectual and detached, a sort of artistic pleasure?” This is what I now fear that Saint-Loup may at times have thought. If so, he was mistaken. If he had not (as he steadfastly had) cherished something more lofty than the innate suppleness of his body, if he had not been detached for so long from aristocratic arrogance, there would have been something more studied, more heavy-handed in this very agility, a self-important vulgarity in his manners. Just as a strong vein of seriousness had been necessary for Mme de Villeparisis to convey in her conversation and in her Memoirs a sense of the frivolous, which is intellectual, so, in order that Saint-Loup’s body should be imbued with so much nobility, the latter had first to desert his mind, which was straining towards higher things, and, reabsorbed into his body, to establish itself there in unconsciously aristocratic lines. In this way his distinction of mind was not inconsistent with a physical distinction which otherwise would not have been complete. An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. And I was well aware, too, that it was not merely a work of art that I was admiring in this young man unfolding along the wall the frieze of his flying course; the young prince (a descendant of Catherine de Foix, Queen of Navarre and grand-daughter of Charles VII) whom he had just left for my sake, the endowments of birth and fortune which he was laying at my feet, the proud and shapely ancestors who survived in the assurance, the agility and the courtesy with which he had arranged about my shivering body the warm woollen cloak—were not all these like friends of longer standing in his life, by whom I might have expected that we should be permanently kept apart, and whom, on the contrary, he was sacrificing to me by a choice that can be made only in the loftiest places of the mind, with that sovereign liberty of which Robert’s movements were the image and the symbol and in which perfect friendship is enshrined?
The vulgar arrogance that was to be detected in the familiarity of a Guermantes—as opposed to the distinction that it had in Robert, because hereditary disdain was in him only the outer garment, transmuted into an unconscious grace, of a genuine moral humility—had been brought home to me, not by M. de Charlus, in whom certain characteristic faults for which I had so far been unable to account were superimposed on his aristocratic habits, but by the Duc de Guermantes. And yet he too, in the general impression of commonness which had so repelled my grandmother when sh
e had met him years earlier at Mme de Villeparisis’s, showed glimpses of ancient grandeur of which I became conscious when I went to dine at his house the following evening.
They had not been apparent to me either in himself or in the Duchess when I had first met them in their aunt’s drawing-room, any more than I had discerned, on first seeing her, the differences that set Berma apart from her colleagues, although in her case the distinctive qualities were infinitely more striking than in any social celebrity, since they become more marked in proportion as the objects are more real, more conceivable by the intellect. And yet, however slight the shades of social distinction may be (and so slight are they that when an accurate portrayer like Sainte-Beuve tries to indicate the shades of difference between the salons of Mme Geoffrin, Mme Récamier and Mme de Boigne, they appear so alike that the cardinal truth which, unknown to the author, emerges from his investigations is the vacuity of that form of life), nevertheless, for the same reason as with Berma, when I had ceased to be dazzled by the Guermantes and their droplet of originality was no longer vaporised by my imagination, I was able to distil and analyse it, imponderable as it was.
The Duchess having made no reference to her husband at her aunt’s party, I wondered whether, in view of the rumours of divorce, he would be present at the dinner. But I was soon enlightened on that score, for through the crowd of footmen who stood about in the hall and who (since they must until then have regarded me much as they regarded the children of the evicted cabinet-maker, that is to say with more fellow-feeling perhaps than their master but as a person incapable of being admitted to his house) must have been asking themselves to what this social revolution could be due, I caught sight of M. de Guermantes, who had been watching for my arrival so as to receive me on his threshold and take off my overcoat with his own hands.
“Mme de Guermantes will be as pleased as Punch,” he said to me in a glibly persuasive tone. “Let me help you off with your duds.” (He felt it to be at once companionable and comic to use popular colloquialisms.) “My wife was just the least bit afraid you might defect, although you had fixed a date. We’ve been saying to each other all day: ‘Depend upon it, he’ll never turn up.’ I’m bound to say that Mme de Guermantes was a better prophet than I was. You are not an easy man to get hold of, and I was quite sure you were going to let us down.” And the Duke was such a bad husband, so brutal even (people said), that one felt grateful to him, as one feels grateful to wicked people for their occasional kindness of heart, for those words “Mme de Guermantes” with which he appeared to be spreading a protective wing over the Duchess, so that she might be one with him. Meanwhile, taking me familiarly by the hand, he set about introducing me into his household. Just as some common expression may delight us coming from the lips of a peasant if it points to the survival of a local tradition or shows the trace of some historic event, unknown, it may be, to the person who thus alludes to it, so this politeness on the part of M. de Guermantes, which he was to continue to show me throughout the evening, charmed me as a survival of habits many centuries old, habits of the seventeenth century in particular. The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero, or a skilful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo. Even with certain personages of the court of Louis XIV, when we find signs of courtesy in letters written by them to some man of inferior rank who could be of no service to them whatever, these letters leave us astonished because they reveal to us suddenly in these great noblemen a whole world of beliefs which they never directly express but which govern their conduct, and in particular the belief that they are bound in politeness to feign certain sentiments and to exercise with the most scrupulous care certain obligations of civility.
This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that may enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian. We are so astonished that bards long dead should have modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient Gaelic epic we come across one which we should have thought as most ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent has only to add to an ancient writer whom he is reconstructing more or less faithfully a few passages which, signed with a contemporary name and published separately, would seem agreeable merely; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once. The translator was capable only of a mediocre book, if that book had been published as his original work. Offered as a translation, it seems a masterpiece. The past is not fugitive, it stays put. It is not only months after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effectively influence its course, it is not only fifteen years after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still find the vital evidence which will throw light on it; after hundreds and thousands of years the scholar who has been studying the place-names and the customs of the inhabitants of some remote region may still extract from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus, which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, still dwells in the midst of the present, like a denser emanation, immemorial and stable. There was an emanation too, though far less ancient, of the life of the court, if not in the manners of M. de Guermantes, which were often vulgar, at least in the mind that controlled them. I was to experience it again, like an ancient odour, when I rejoined him a little later in the drawing-room. For I did not go there at once.
As we left the outer hall, I had mentioned to M. de Guermantes that I was extremely anxious to see his Elstirs. “I am at your service. Is M. Elstir a friend of yours, then? I’m mortified not to have known that you were so interested in him. I know him slightly, he’s an amiable man, what our fathers used to call an ‘honest fellow.’ I might have asked him to honour us with his company at dinner tonight. I’m sure he would have been highly flattered at being invited to spend the evening in your company.” Very untrue to the old world when he tried thus to assume its manner, the Duke then relapsed into it unconsciously. After inquiring whether I wished him to show me the pictures, he conducted me to them, gracefully standing aside for me at each door, apologising when, to show me the way, he was obliged to precede me, a little scene which (since the time when Saint-Simon relates that an ancestor of the Guermantes did him the honours of his house with the same punctilious exactitude in the performance of the frivolous duties of a gentleman) before reaching our day must have been enacted by many another Guermantes for many another visitor. And as I had said to the Duke that I would like very much to be left alone for a few minutes with the pictures, he discreetly withdrew, telling me that I should find him in the drawing-room when I had finished.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 174