“I might have been able to show you a very fine one,” Mme de Guermantes said to me amiably, still speaking of Hals, “the finest in existence, some people say, which was left to me by a German cousin. Unfortunately, it turned out to be ‘enfeoffed’ in the castle—you don’t know the expression? nor do I,” she added, with her fondness for jokes (which made her, she thought, seem modern) at the expense of the old customs to which nevertheless she was unconsciously but fiercely attached. “I’m glad you have seen my Elstirs, but I must admit I should have been a great deal more glad if I could have done you the honours of my Hals, of that ‘enfeoffed’ picture.”
“I know the one,” said Prince Von, “it’s the Grand Duke of Hesse’s Hals.”
“Quite so; his brother married my sister,” said M. de Guermantes, “and his mother and Oriane’s were first cousins as well.”
“But so far as M. Elstir is concerned,” the Prince went on, “I shall take the liberty of saying, without having any opinion of his work, which I do not know, that the hatred with which the Kaiser pursues him ought not, it seems to me, to be counted against him. The Kaiser is a man of marvellous intelligence.”
“Yes, I’ve met him at dinner twice, once at my aunt Sagan’s and once at my aunt Radziwill’s, and I must say I found him quite unusual. I didn’t find him at all simple! But there’s something amusing about him, something ‘forced’ ” (she detached the word) “like a green carnation, that is to say a thing that surprises me and doesn’t please me enormously, a thing it’s surprising that anyone should have been able to create but which I feel would have been just as well left uncreated. I trust I’m not shocking you?”
“The Kaiser is a man of astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake: if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.”
Everyone smiled.
“You set my mind at rest,” said the Duchess.
“I should be inclined to compare the Kaiser,” went on the Prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it were spelt with a “k”), never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist” (but the Prince said “arsheologist”) “we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it is not really old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if the Kaiser says to me of a play: ‘Prince, you must see it, it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity.”
“Norpois is in favour of an Anglo-French understanding, isn’t he?” said M. de Guermantes.
“What good would that do you?” asked Prince Von, who could not endure the English, with an air at once irritated and crafty. “The English are so schtubid. I know, of course, that it would not be as soldiers that they would help you. But one can judge them, all the same, by the schtubidity of their generals. A friend of mine was talking the other day to Botha, you know, the Boer leader. He said to my friend: ‘It’s terrible, an army like that. I rather like the English, as a matter of fact, but just imagine that I, a mere peassant, have beaten them in every battle. And in the last, when I was overpowered by a force twenty times the strength of my own, even while surrendering because I had to, I managed to take two thousand prisoners! That was all right because I was only a leader of an army of peassants, but if those poor fools ever have to stand up against a European army, one trembles to think what may happen to them!’ Besides, you have only to see how their King, whom you know as well as I do, passes for a great man in England.”
I scarcely listened to these stories, of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my favourite trains of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I lived on the surface, my hair well brushed, my shirt-front starched, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life.
“Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme de Guermantes, who felt that the German prince was wanting in tact, “I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world.”
“But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Prince, who was losing his temper and unable to see that he was giving offence, “you must admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is charming, excessively gentle and dim-witted. But still, there’s something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria …”
“He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess, “he’s a witty fellow.”
“He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good man on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends with, it’s the Kaiser’s dearest wish, but he insists on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-French rapprochement M. de Norpois preaches.”
“You know him, of course,” said the Duchess, turning to me, so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand, and thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on the contrary, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me.
“You’re quite mistaken,” replied the Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we’ve never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke about you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.”
M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious nature, those who, like me, had let themselves be taken in by his outward appearance of a Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak-tree, by the affecting sounds that emerged from his somewhat too tuneful lips, suspected real treachery when they learned of a slander uttered at their expense by a man whose words had always seemed so heartfelt. These slanders were frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent him from taking a liking to people, from praising those he liked and taking pleasure in showing willingness to help them.
“Not that I’m in the least surprised at his appreciating you,” said Mme de Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can quite understand,” she added, for the benefit of the rest of the party, alluding to a plan of marriage of
which I knew nothing, “that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old mistress, may not seem of very much use to him as a new wife. Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she hasn’t functioned for years now. Her only relations, if I may say so, are with God. She is more churchy than you would believe, and Boaz-Norpois can say, in the words of Victor Hugo:
How long a time since she with whom I slept,
O Lord, forsook my bed for yours!
Really, my poor aunt is like those avant-garde artists who have railed against the Academy all their lives, and in the end start a little academy of their own, or those unfrocked priests who fabricate a religion of their own. Might as well stick to the cloth, or not live together. But who knows,” went on the Duchess with a meditative air, “it may be in anticipation of widowhood—there’s nothing sadder than weeds one’s not entitled to wear.”
“Ah! if Mme de Villeparisis were to become Mme de Norpois, I really believe our cousin Gilbert would have a fit,” said General de Monserfeuil. “The Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he really is rather taken up with questions of birth and etiquette,” said the Princesse de Parme. “I went to spend a few days with them in the country, when the Princess, unfortunately, was ill in bed. I was accompanied by Petite.” (This was a nickname that was given to Mme d’Hunolstein because she was enormously stout.) “The Prince came to meet me at the foot of the steps, and pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the first floor, and then at the entrance to the reception rooms, stepping back to make way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how d’ye do, Mme d’Hunolstein’ (he always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to show that he didn’t have to come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,” said the Duke, who regarded himself as extremely modern, more contemptuous than anyone in the world of mere birth, and in fact a Republican, “that I haven’t many ideas in common with my cousin. Your Highness can imagine that we are about as much agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I should be of Gilbert’s opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise and then to make a marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh, when all’s said and done.” (These last words, which the Duke uttered as a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here quite superfluous. But he felt a perpetual need to say them which made him shift them to the end of a period if he had found no place for them elsewhere. They were for him, among other things, almost a question of prosody.) “Mind you,” he added, “the Norpois are excellent people with a good place, of good stock.”
“Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke fun at Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he does,” said Mme de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a family, no less than that of a wine, consisted in its age. But, less frank than her cousin and more subtle than her husband, she made a point of never in her conversation playing false to the Guermantes spirit, and despised rank in her speech while ready to honour it by her actions.
“But aren’t you even some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.”
“Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, and my grandmother comes from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t intermarried since Louis XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather distant.”
“Really, how interesting; I never knew that,” said the General.
“However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe, was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles, and as we ourselves are in a direct line of descent …”
There was at Combray a Rue de Saintrailles to which I had never given another thought. It led from the Rue de la Bretonnerie to the Rue de l’Oiseau. And as Saintrailles, the companion of Joan of Arc, had, by marrying a Guermantes, brought into the family that county of Combray, his arms were quartered with those of Guermantes at the base of one of the windows in Saint-Hilaire. I saw again a vision of dark sandstone steps, while a modulation of sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from that in which it simply meant the genial hosts with whom I was dining this evening. If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles had just opened up. I felt that it would be useless to explain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had lied by implication in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me: “You don’t know our little corner?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that I did know it, and it was only from good breeding that he did not press the question. Mme de Guermantes drew me out of my meditation.
“Really, I find all that sort of thing too deadly. I say, it’s not always as boring as this at my house. I hope you’ll soon come and dine again as a compensation, with no pedigrees next time,” she said to me in a low voice, incapable both of appreciating the kind of charm which I might find in her house and of having sufficient humility to be content to appeal to me simply as a herbarium filled with plants of another day.
What Mme de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my expectations was on the contrary what in the end—for the Duke and the General went on to discuss pedigrees now without stopping—saved my evening from being a complete disappointment. How could I have felt otherwise until now? Each of my fellow-guests at dinner, decking out the mysterious name under which I had merely known and dreamed of them at a distance in a body and a mind similar or inferior to those of all the people I knew, had given me the impression of a commonplace dullness which the view on entering the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of Hamlet. No doubt these geographical regions and that ancient past which put forest glades and Gothic belfries into their names had in a certain measure formed their faces, their minds and their prejudices, but survived in them only as does the cause in the effect, that is to say as a thing possible for the intelligence to perceive but in no way perceptible to the imagination.
And these old-time prejudices restored in a flash to the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry. Assuredly, the notions in the possession of the nobility which make them the scholars, the etymologists of the language not of words but of names (and even then only in comparison with the ignorant mass of the middle classes, for if at the same level of mediocrity a devout Catholic would be better able to stand questioning on the details of the liturgy than a free-thinker, on the other hand an anti-clerical archaeologist can often give points to his parish priest on everything connected even with the latter’s own church), those notions, if we are to keep to the truth, that is to say to the spirit, did not even have for these noblemen the charm that they would have had for a bourgeois. They knew perhaps better than I that the Du
chesse de Guise was Princess of Cleves, of Orléans, of Porcien, and all the rest, but they had known, long before they knew all these names, the face of the Duchesse de Guise which thenceforth that name reflected back to them. I had begun with the fairy, even if she was fated soon to perish; they with the woman.
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