To return to those artificial and dramatic decisions of hers, so like those of politicians, Mme de Guermantes was no less disconcerting to the Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in general and, more than anyone, the Princesse de Parme, in her habit of issuing unaccountable decrees behind which one sensed latent principles which impressed one all the more the less one was aware of them. If the new Greek Minister gave a fancy-dress ball, everyone chose a costume and wondered what the Duchess would wear. One thought that she would appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne, another suggested as probable the guise of Princess of Deryabar, a third Psyche. Finally a Courvoisier, having asked her: “What are you going as, Oriane?”, provoked the one response of which nobody had thought: “Why, nothing at all!”, which at once set every tongue wagging, as revealing Oriane’s opinion as to the true social position of the new Greek Minister and the proper attitude to adopt towards him, that is to say the opinion which ought to have been foreseen, namely that a duchess “wasn’t obliged” to attend the fancy-dress ball given by this new minister. “I don’t see that there’s any necessity to go to the Greek Minister’s. I don’t know him; I’m not Greek; why should I go to his house? I have nothing to do with him,” said the Duchess.
“But everybody will be there, they say it’s going to be charming!” cried Mme de Gallardon.
“But it’s just as charming sometimes to sit by one’s own fireside,” replied Mme de Guermantes.
The Courvoisiers could not get over this, but the Guermantes, without copying their cousin, approved: “Naturally, everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all the conventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she’s wrong to want to show that we do go rather too far in grovelling before these foreigners who appear from heaven knows where.”
Naturally, knowing the stream of comment which one or other attitude would not fail to provoke, Mme de Guermantes took as much pleasure in appearing at a party to which her hostess had not dared to count on her coming as in staying at home or spending the evening at the theatre with her husband on the night of a party to which “everybody was going,” or, again, when people imagined that she would eclipse the finest diamonds with some historic diadem, by stealing into the room without a single jewel, and in another style of dress than what had been wrongly supposed to be essential to the occasion. Although she was anti-Dreyfusard (while believing Dreyfus to be innocent, just as she spent her life in the social world while believing only in ideas), she had created an enormous sensation at a party at the Princesse de Ligne’s, first of all by remaining seated when all the ladies had risen to their feet as General Mercier entered the room, and then by getting up and asking for her carriage in a loud voice when a nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby showing that she did not consider that society was meant for talking politics in; and all heads had turned towards her at a Good Friday concert at which, although a Voltairean, she had refused to remain because she thought it indecent to bring Christ on the stage. We know how important, even for the great queens of society, is that moment of the year at which the round of entertainment begins: so much so that the Marquise d’Amoncourt, who, from a need to say something, a psychological quirk, and also from a lack of sensitivity, was always making a fool of herself, had actually replied to somebody who had called to condole with her on the death of her father, M. de Montmorency: “What perhaps makes it still sadder is that it should come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed with cards!” Well, at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, hurrying so as to make sure that she was not already engaged, she declined for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought: she was just setting off on a cruise in the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. The fashionable world was stunned, and, without any thought of following the Duchess’s example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one had ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called “the season.” The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many receptions, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opéra and Tuesdays at the Comédie-Française to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, but conveyed to them a similar impression of independence and charm. So that not a day passed on which somebody might not be heard to ask, not merely: “You’ve heard Oriane’s latest joke?” but “You know Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest” as on “Oriane’s latest joke” would follow the comment: “How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure Oriane?” Oriane’s latest might be, for instance, that, having to write on behalf of a patriotic society to Cardinal X——, Bishop of Mâcon (whom M. de Guermantes when he spoke of him invariably called “Monsieur de Mascon,” thinking this to be “old French”), when everyone was trying to imagine what form the letter would take, and had no difficulty as to the opening words, the choice lying between “Eminence” and “Monseigneur,” but was puzzled as to the rest, Oriane’s letter, to the general astonishment, began: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” following an old academic form, or: “My cousin,” this term being in use among the Princes of the Church, the Guermantes and crowned heads, who prayed to God to take each and all of them into “His fit and holy keeping.” To start people on the topic of an “Oriane’s latest” it was sufficient that at a performance at which all Paris was present and a most charming play was being given, when they looked for Mme de Guermantes in the boxes of the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Guermantes, countless other ladies who had invited her, they discovered her sitting by herself, in black, with a tiny hat on her head, in a stall in which she had arrived before the curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening to,” she explained, to the scandal of the Courvoisiers and the admiring bewilderment of the Guermantes and the Princesse de Parme, who suddenly discovered that the “fashion” of hearing the beginning of a play was more up to date, was a proof of greater originality and intelligence (which need not astonish them, coming from Oriane) than arriving for the last act after a big dinner-party and having put in an appearance at a reception. Such were the various kinds of surprise for which the Princesse de Parme knew that she ought to be prepared if she put a literary or social question to Mme de Guermantes, and because of which, during these dinner-parties at Oriane’s, Her Royal Highness never ventured upon the slightest topic save with the uneasy and enraptured prudence of the bather emerging from between two breakers.
Among the elements which, absent from the three or four other more or less equivalent salons that set the fashion for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, differentiated that of the Duchesse de Guermantes from them, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while reflecting the entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one of the least attractive was habitually furnished by one or two extremely good-looking women who had no other right to be there but their beauty and the use that M. de Guermantes had made of them, and whose presence revealed at once, as does in other drawing-rooms that of certain otherwise unaccountable pictures, that in this household the husband was an ardent appreciator of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for the Duke had a taste for tall women, at once statuesque and airy, of a type half-way between the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory; often fair, rarely dark, sometimes auburn, like the most recent, who was at this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Arpajon whom he had loved so well that for a long time he had obliged her to send him as many as ten telegrams daily (which slightly irritated the Duchess) and corresponded with her by carrier pigeon when he was at Guermantes,
and from whom moreover he had long been so incapable of tearing himself away that, one winter which he had had to spend at Parma, he travelled back regularly every week to Paris, spending two days in the train, in order to see her.
As a rule these handsome supernumeraries had been his mistresses but were no longer (as was Mme d’Arpajon’s case) or were on the point of ceasing to be. It may well have been that the glamour which the Duchess enjoyed in their eyes and the hope of being invited to her house, though they themselves came from thoroughly aristocratic backgrounds, if of the second rank, had prompted them, even more than the good looks and generosity of the Duke, to yield to his desires. Not that the Duchess would have placed any insuperable obstacle in the way of their crossing her threshold: she was aware that in more than one of them she had found an ally thanks to whom she had obtained countless things which she wanted but which M. de Guermantes pitilessly denied his wife so long as he was not in love with someone else. And so the reason why they were not received by the Duchess until their liaison was already far advanced lay principally in the fact that the Duke, each time he embarked on a love affair, had imagined no more than a brief fling, as a reward for which he considered an invitation from his wife excessive. And yet he found himself offering this as the price for far less, for a first kiss in fact, because he had met with unexpected resistance or, on the contrary, because there had been no resistance. In love it often happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, make us generous beyond the limits of what hope and self-interest had foreseen. But then the realisation of this offer was hindered by conflicting circumstances. In the first place, all the women who had responded to M. de Guermantes’s love, and sometimes even when they had not yet given themselves to him, he had one after another kept cut off from the world. He no longer allowed them to see anyone, spent almost all his time in their company, looked after the education of their children, to whom now and again, if one was to judge by certain striking resemblances later on, he had occasion to present a little brother or sister. And then if, at the start of the liaison, the prospect of an introduction to Mme de Guermantes, which had never been envisaged by the Duke, had played a part in the mistress’s mind, the liaison in itself had altered the lady’s point of view; the Duke was no longer for her merely the husband of the smartest woman in Paris, but a man with whom the new mistress was in love, a man moreover who had given her the means and the inclination for a more luxurious style of living and had transposed the relative importance in her mind of questions of social and of material advantage; while now and then a composite jealousy of Mme de Guermantes, into which all these factors entered, animated the Duke’s mistresses. But this case was the rarest of all; besides, when the day appointed for the introduction at length arrived (at a point when as a rule it had more or less become a matter of indifference to the Duke, whose actions, like everyone else’s, were more often dictated by previous actions than by the original motive which had ceased to exist), it frequently happened that it was Mme de Guermantes who had sought the acquaintance of the mistress in whom she hoped, and so greatly needed, to find a valuable ally against her dread husband. This is not to say that, except at rare moments, in their own house, when, if the Duchess talked too much, he let fall a few words or, more dreadful still, preserved a silence which petrified her, M. de Guermantes failed in his outward relations with his wife to observe what are called the forms. People who did not know them might easily be taken in. Sometimes in autumn, between racing at Deauville, taking the waters, and returning to Guermantes for the shooting, in the few weeks which people spend in Paris, since the Duchess had a liking for café-concerts, the Duke would go with her to spend the evening at one of these. The audience remarked at once, in one of those little open boxes in which there is just room for two, this Hercules in his “smoking” (for in France we give to everything that is more or less British the one name that it happens not to bear in England), his monocle screwed in his eye, a fat cigar, from which now and then he drew a puff of smoke, in his plump but finely shaped hand, on the ring-finger of which a sapphire glowed, keeping his eyes for the most part on the stage but, when he did let them fall upon the audience in which there was absolutely no one whom he knew, softening them with an air of gentleness, reserve, courtesy and consideration. When a song struck him as amusing and not too indecent, the Duke would turn round with a smile to his wife, would share with her, with a twinkle of good-natured complicity, the innocent merriment which the new song had aroused in him. And the spectators might believe that there was no better husband in the world than he, nor anyone more enviable than the Duchess—that woman outside whom every interest in the Duke’s life lay, that woman whom he did not love, to whom he had never ceased to be unfaithful; and when the Duchess felt tired, they saw M. de Guermantes rise, put on her cloak with his own hands, arranging her necklaces so that they did not get caught in the lining, and clear a path for her to the exit with an assiduous and respectful attention which she received with the coldness of the woman of the world who sees in such behaviour simply conventional good manners, at times even with the slightly ironical bitterness of the disabused spouse who has no illusion left to shatter. But despite these externals (another element of that politeness which has transferred duty from the inner depths to the surface, at a period already remote but which still continues for its survivors) the life of the Duchess was by no means easy. M. de Guermantes only became generous and human again for a new mistress, who would, as it generally happened, take the Duchess’s side; the latter saw the possibility arising for her once again of generosities towards inferiors, charities to the poor, and even for herself, later on, a new and sumptuous motor-car. But from the irritation which was provoked as a rule pretty rapidly in Mme de Guermantes by people whom she found too submissive, the Duke’s mistresses were not exempt. Presently the Duchess grew tired of them. As it happened, at that moment too the Duke’s liaison with Mme d’Arpajon was drawing to an end. Another mistress was in the offing.
No doubt the love which M. de Guermantes had borne each of them in succession would begin one day to make itself felt anew: in the first place this love, in dying, bequeathed them to the household like beautiful marble statues—beautiful to the Duke, become thus in part an artist, because he had loved them and was appreciative now of lines which he would not have appreciated without love—which brought into juxtaposition in the Duchess’s drawing-room their forms that had long been inimical, devoured by jealousies and quarrels, and finally reconciled in the peace of friendship; and then this friendship itself was an effect of the love which had made M. de Guermantes observe in those who had been his mistresses virtues which exist in every human being but are perceptible only to the carnal eye, so much so that the ex-mistress who has become “a good friend” who would do anything in the world for one has become a cliché, like the doctor or father who is not a doctor or a father but a friend. But during a period of transition, the woman whom M. de Guermantes was preparing to abandon bewailed her lot, made scenes, showed herself exacting, appeared indiscreet, became a nuisance. The Duke would begin to take a dislike to her. Then Mme de Guermantes had a chance to bring to light the real or imagined defects of a person who annoyed her. Known to be kind, she would receive the constant telephone calls, the confidences, the tears of the abandoned mistress and make no complaint. She would laugh at them, first with her husband, then with a few chosen friends. And imagining that the pity which she showed for the unfortunate woman gave her the right to make fun of her, even to her face, whatever the lady might say, provided it could be included among the attributes of the ridiculous character which the Duke and Duchess had recently fabricated for her, Mme de Guermantes had no hesitation in exchanging glances of ironical connivance with her husband.
Meanwhile, as she sat down to table, the Princesse de Parme remembered that she had thought of inviting Mme d’Heudicourt to the Opéra, and, wishing to be assured that this would not in any way offend Mme de Guermantes, was preparing to sound her.
At this moment M. de Grouchy entered, his train having been held up for an hour owing to a derailment. He made what excuses he could. His wife, had she been a Courvoisier, would have died of shame. But Mme de Grouchy was not a Guermantes for nothing. As her husband was apologising for being late, “I see,” she broke in, “that even in little things arriving late is a tradition in your family.”
“Sit down, Grouchy, and don’t let them fluster you,” said the Duke. “Although I move with the times, I must admit that the Battle of Waterloo had its points, since it brought about the Restoration of the Bourbons, and, better still, in a way that made them unpopular. But you seem to be a regular Nimrod!”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I did get quite a good bag. I shall take the liberty of sending the Duchess six brace of pheasant tomorrow.”
An idea seemed to flicker in the eyes of Mme de Guermantes. She insisted that M. de Grouchy must not give himself the trouble of sending the pheasants. And making a sign to the betrothed footman with whom I had exchanged a few words on my way from the Elstir room, “Poullein,” she told him, “you will go tomorrow and fetch M. le Comte’s pheasants and bring them straight back—you won’t mind, will you, Grouchy, if I make a few little presents. Basin and I can’t eat a dozen pheasants by ourselves.”
“But the day after tomorrow will be soon enough,” said M. de Grouchy.
“No, tomorrow suits me better,” the Duchess insisted.
Poullein had turned pale; he would miss his rendezvous with his sweetheart. This was quite enough for the diversion of the Duchess, who liked to appear to be taking a human interest in everyone.
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