In middle-class families one sometimes sees jealousies spring up if the younger sister marries before the elder. So the aristocratic world, Courvoisiers especially but Guermantes also, reduced its ennobled greatness to simple domestic superiorities, by virtue of a childishness which I had met originally (and this for me was its sole charm) in books. Is it not just as though Tallemant des Réaux were speaking of the Guermantes, and not of the Rohans, when he relates with evident satisfaction how M. de Guéménée cried to his brother: “You can come in here; this is not the Louvre!” and said of the Chevalier de Rohan (because he was a natural son of the Duc de Clermont): “At any rate he’s a prince.” The only thing that distressed me in all this talk was to find that the absurd stories which were being circulated about the charming adopted Grand Duke of Luxembourg found as much credence in this salon as they had among Saint-Loup’s friends. Plainly it was an epidemic that would not last longer than perhaps a year or two but had meanwhile infected everyone. People repeated the same old stories, or enriched them with others equally untrue. I gathered that the Princesse de Luxembourg herself, while apparently defending her nephew, supplied weapons for the assault. “You are wrong to stand up for him,” M. de Guermantes told me, as Saint-Loup had told me before. “Look, even leaving aside the opinion of our family, which is unanimous, you have only to talk to his servants, and they, after all, are the people who know us best. Mme de Luxembourg gave her little negro page to her nephew. The negro came back in tears: ‘Grand Duke beat me, me no bad boy, Grand Duke naughty man, just fancy!’ And I can speak with some knowledge, he’s Oriane’s cousin.”
I cannot, by the way, say how many times in the course of this evening I heard the word “cousin” used. On the one hand, M. de Guermantes, almost at every name that was mentioned, exclaimed: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin!” with the sudden delight of a man who, lost in a forest, reads at the ends of a pair of arrows pointing in opposite directions on a signpost, and followed by quite a low number of kilometres, the words: “Belvédère Casimir-Périer” and “Croix du Grand-Veneur,” and gathers from them that he is on the right road. On the other hand the word cousin was employed in a wholly different connexion (which was here the exception to the prevailing rule) by the Turkish Ambassadress, who had come in after dinner. Devoured by social ambition and endowed with a real power of assimilating knowledge, she would pick up with equal facility Xenophon’s story of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand or the details of sexual perversion among birds. It would have been impossible to catch her out on any of the most recent German publications, whether they dealt with political economy, mental aberrations, the various forms of onanism, or the philosophy of Epicurus. She was, incidentally, a dangerous person to listen to, for, perpetually in error, she would point out to you as being of the loosest morals women of irreproachable virtue, would put you on your guard against a man with the most honourable intentions, and would tell you anecdotes of the sort that seem always to have come out of a book, not so much because they are serious as because they are so wildly improbable.
She was at this period little received in society. For some weeks now she had been frequenting the houses of women of real social brilliance, such as the Duchesse de Guermantes, but in general had confined herself, of necessity, as regards the noblest families, to obscure scions whom the Guermantes no longer called on. She hoped to prove her social credentials by quoting the most historic names of the little-known people who were her friends. At once M. de Guermantes, thinking that she was referring to people who frequently dined at his table, quivered with joy at finding himself once more in sight of a landmark and uttered the rallying-cry: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin! I know him as well as I know my own name. He lives in the Rue Vaneau. His mother was Mlle d’Uzès.” The Ambassadress was obliged to admit that her specimen had been drawn from smaller game. She tried to connect her friends with those of M. de Guermantes by means of a detour. “I know quite well who you mean. No, it’s not those ones, they’re cousins.” But this reflux launched by the unfortunate Ambassadress ran but a little way. For M. de Guermantes, losing interest, answered: “Oh, then I don’t know who you’re talking about.” The Ambassadress offered no reply, for if she never knew anyone nearer than the “cousins” of those whom she ought to have known in person, very often these cousins were not even related at all. Then, from the lips of M. de Guermantes, would flow a fresh wave of “But she’s Oriane’s cousin!”—words which seemed to have for the Duke the same practical value in each of his sentences as certain epithets which the Roman poets found convenient because they provided them with dactyls or spondees for their hexameters.
At least the explosion of “But she’s Oriane’s cousin!” appeared to me quite natural when applied to the Princesse de Guermantes, who was indeed very closely related to the Duchess. The Ambassadress did not seem to care for this Princess. She said to me in an undertone: “She is stupid. No, she’s not so beautiful as all that. That reputation is usurped. Anyhow,” she went on, with an air at once considered, dismissive and decisive, “I find her extremely antipathetic.” But often the cousinship extended a great deal further, Mme de Guermantes making it a point of honour to address as “Aunt” ladies with whom it would have been impossible to find her an ancestress in common without going back at least to Louis XV; just as, whenever the “hardness” of the times brought it about that a multimillionairess married a prince whose great-great-grandfather had married, as had Oriane’s also, a daughter of Louvois, one of the chief joys of the fair American was to be able, after a first visit to the Hôtel de Guermantes, where she was, incidentally, somewhat coolly received and critically dissected, to say “Aunt” to Mme de Guermantes, who allowed her to do so with a maternal smile. But little did it matter to me what “birth” meant for M. de Guermantes and M. de Monserfeuil; in the conversations which they held on the subject I sought only a poetic pleasure. Without being conscious of it themselves, they procured me this pleasure as might a couple of farmers or sailors speaking of the soil or the tides, realities too little detached from their own lives for them to be capable of enjoying the beauty which personally I undertook to extract from them.
Sometimes, rather than of a race, it was of a particular fact, of a date, that a name reminded me. Hearing M. de Guermantes recall that M. de Bréauté’s mother had been a Choiseul and his grandmother a Lucinge, I fancied I could see beneath the commonplace shirt-front with its plain pearl studs, bleeding still in two globes of crystal, those august relics, the hearts of Mme de Praslin and of the Duc de Berry. Others were more voluptuous: the fine and flowing hair of Mme Tallien or Mme de Sabran.
Sometimes it was more than a simple relic that I saw. Better informed than his wife as to what their ancestors had been, M. de Guermantes had at his command memories which gave to his conversation a fine air of an ancient mansion, lacking in real masterpieces but still full of pictures, authentic, indifferent and majestic, which taken as a whole has an air of grandeur. The Prince d’Agrigente having asked why the Prince Von had said, in speaking of the Duc d’Aumale, “my uncle,” M. de Guermantes replied: “Because his mother’s brother, the Duke of Württemberg, married a daughter of Louis-Philippe.” At once I was lost in contemplation of a reliquary such as Carpaccio or Memling used to paint, from its first panel in which the princess, at the wedding festivities of her brother the Duc d’Orléans, appeared wearing a plain garden dress to indicate her ill-humour at having seen her ambassadors, who had been sent to sue on her behalf for the hand of the Prince of Syracuse, return empty-handed, down to the last, in which she has just given birth to a son, the Duke of Württemberg (the uncle of the prince with whom I had just dined), in that castle called Fantaisie, one of those places which are as aristocratic as certain families, for they too, outlasting a single generation, see attached to themselves more than one historical personage: in this one, notably, survive side by side memories of the Margravine of Bayreuth, of that other somewhat fantastic princess (the Duc d’Orléans’s sister), to
whom, it was said, the name of her husband’s castle made a distinct appeal, of the King of Bavaria, and finally of the Prince Von whose address it now in fact was, at which he had just asked the Duc de Guermantes to write to him, for he had succeeded to it and let it only during the Wagner festivals, to the Prince de Polignac, another delightful “fantasist.” When M. de Guermantes, to explain how he was related to Mme d’Arpajon, was obliged to go back, so far and so simply, along the chain formed by the joined hands of three or five ancestresses, to Marie-Louise or Colbert, it was the same thing again: in each of these cases, a great historical event appeared only in passing, masked, distorted, reduced, in the name of a property, in the Christian names of a woman, chosen for her because she was the granddaughter of Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie, considered no longer as King and Queen of France but only insofar as, in their capacity as grandparents, they bequeathed a heritage. (We see for other reasons in a glossary to the works of Balzac, where the most illustrious personages figure only according to their connexion with the Comédie Humaine, Napoleon occupying a space considerably less than that allotted to Rastignac, and occupying that space solely because he once spoke to Mlle de Cinq-Cygne.) Thus does the aristocracy, in its heavy structure, pierced with rare windows, admitting a scanty daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar but also the same massive and blind force as Romanesque architecture, embody all our history, immuring it, beetling over it.
Thus the empty spaces of my memory were covered by degrees with names which in arranging, composing themselves in relation to one another, in linking themselves to one another by increasingly numerous connexions, resembled those finished works of art in which there is not one touch that is isolated, in which every part in turn receives from the rest a justification which it confers on them in turn.
M. de Luxembourg’s name having been brought up again, the Turkish Ambassadress told us how, the young bride’s grandfather (he who had made that immense fortune out of flour and pasta) having invited M. de Luxembourg to lunch, the latter had written to decline, putting on the envelope: “M. So-and-so, miller,” to which the grandfather had replied: “I am all the more disappointed that you were unable to come, my dear friend, in that I should have been able to enjoy your society in privacy, for we were an intimate party and there would have been only the miller, his son, and you.”30 This story was not merely utterly distasteful to me, who knew how inconceivable it was that my dear M. de Nassau could write to his wife’s grandfather (whose fortune, moreover, he was expecting to inherit) and address him as “miller”; but furthermore its stupidity was glaring from the start, the word “miller” having obviously been dragged in only to lead up to the title of La Fontaine’s fable. But there is in the Faubourg Saint-Germain a silliness so great, when it is aggravated by malice, that everyone agreed that it was “well said” and that the grandfather, whom at once everyone confidently declared to have been a remarkable man, had shown a prettier wit than his grandson-in-law. The Duc de Châtellerault wanted to take advantage of this story to tell the one I had heard in the café: “Everyone had to lie down!”—but scarcely had he begun, or reported M. de Luxembourg’s pretension that in his wife’s presence M. de Guermantes ought to stand up, when the Duchess stopped him with the protest: “No, he’s very absurd, but not as bad as that.” I was privately convinced that all these stories at the expense of M. de Luxembourg were equally untrue, and that whenever I found myself face to face with any of the reputed actors or spectators I should hear the same denial. I wondered, however, whether the denial just uttered by Mme de Guermantes had been inspired by regard for truth or by pride. In any event the latter quality succumbed to malice, for she added with a laugh: “Not that I haven’t had my little snub too, for he invited me to luncheon, wishing to introduce me to the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, which is how he has the good taste to describe his wife when he’s writing to his aunt. I sent a reply expressing my regret, and adding: As for the ‘Grand Duchess of Luxembourg’ (in inverted commas), tell her that if she wants to come to see me I am at home every Thursday after five. I even had another snub. Happening to be in Luxembourg, I telephoned and asked to speak to him. His Highness was going into luncheon, had just risen from luncheon, two hours went by and nothing happened; so then I employed another method: ‘Will you tell the Comte de Nassau to come and speak to me?’ Cut to the quick, he was at the instrument that very minute.” Everyone laughed at the Duchess’s story, and at other analogous, that is to say (I am convinced of it) equally untrue stories, for a man more intelligent, kinder, more refined, in a word more exquisite than this Luxembourg-Nassau I have never met. The sequel will show that it was I who was right. I must admit that, in the midst of her scurrilous onslaught, Mme de Guermantes nevertheless did have a kind word for him.
“He wasn’t always like that,” she informed us. “Before he went off his head, like the man in the story-book who thinks he’s become king, he was no fool, and indeed in the early days of his engagement he used to speak of it in really quite a nice way, as an undreamed-of happiness: ‘It’s just like a fairy-tale; I shall have to make my entry into Luxembourg in a fairy coach,’ he said to his uncle d’Ornessan, who answered—for you know it’s not a very big place, Luxembourg: ‘A fairy coach! I’m afraid, my dear fellow, you’d never get it in. I should suggest that you take a goat-cart.’ Not only did this not annoy Nassau, but he was the first to tell us the story, and to laugh at it.”
“Ornessan is a witty fellow, and he has every reason to be; his mother was a Montjeu. He’s in a very bad way now, poor Ornessan.”
This name had the magic virtue of interrupting the flow of stale witticisms which otherwise would have gone on for ever. For M. de Guermantes went on to explain that M. d’Ornessan’s great-grandmother had been the sister of Marie de Castille Montjeu, the wife of Timoléon de Lorraine, and consequently Oriane’s aunt, with the result that the conversation drifted back to genealogies, while the imbecile Turkish Ambassadress breathed in my ear: “You appear to be very much in the Duke’s good books; have a care!” and, on my demanding an explanation: “I mean to say—verb. sap.—he’s a man to whom one could safely entrust one’s daughter, but not one’s son.” Now if ever, on the contrary, there was a man who was passionately and exclusively a lover of women, it was certainly the Duc de Guermantes. But error, untruth fatuously believed, were for the Ambassadress like a vital element out of which she could not move. “His brother Mémé, who is, as it happens, for other reasons altogether” (he ignored her) “profoundly uncongenial to me, is genuinely distressed by the Duke’s morals. So is their aunt Villeparisis. Ah, now, her I adore! There is a saint of a woman for you, the true type of the great ladies of the past. She’s not only virtue itself but reserve itself. She still says ‘Monsieur’ to the Ambassador Norpois whom she sees every day, and who, by the way, made an excellent impression in Turkey.”
I did not even reply to the Ambassadress, in order to listen to the genealogies. They were not all of them important. It happened indeed that one of the alliances about which I learned from M. de Guermantes in the course of the conversation was a misalliance, but one not without charm, for, uniting under the July Monarchy the Duc de Guermantes and the Duc de Fezensac with the two irresistible daughters of an eminent navigator, it gave to the two duchesses the unexpected piquancy of an exotically bourgeois, “Louisphilippically” Indian grace. Or else, under Louis XIV, a Norpois had married the daughter of the Duc de Mortemart, whose illustrious title, in that far-off epoch, struck the name Norpois, which I had found lacklustre and might have supposed to be recent, and engraved it deeply with the beauty of an old medal. And in these cases, moreover, it was not only the less well-known name that benefited by the association; the other, hackneyed by its very glitter, struck me more forcibly in this novel and more obscure aspect, just as among the portraits painted by a brilliant colourist the most striking is sometimes one that is all in black. The sudden mobility with which all these names seemed to me to have been endowed, as t
hey sprang to take their places by the side of others from which I should have supposed them to be remote, was due not to my ignorance alone; the to-ings and fro-ings which they were performing in my mind had been performed no less readily at those epochs in which a title, being always attached to a piece of land, used to follow it from one family to another, so much so that, for example, in the fine feudal structure that is the title of Duc de Nemours or Duc de Chevreuse, I might discover successively, crouching as in the hospitable abode of a hermit-crab, a Guise, a Prince of Savoy, an Orléans, a Luynes. Sometimes several remained in competition for a single shell: for the Principality of Orange the royal house of the Netherlands and MM. de Mailly-Nesle, for the Duchy of Brabant the Baron de Charlus and the royal house of Belgium, various others for the titles of Prince of Naples, Duke of Parma, Duke of Reggio. Sometimes it was the other way; the shell had been so long uninhabited by proprietors long since dead that it had never occurred to me that this or that name of a castle could have been, at an epoch which after all was comparatively recent, the name of a family. Thus, when M. de Guermantes replied to a question put to him by M. de Monserfeuil: “No, my cousin was a fanatical royalist; she was the daughter of the Marquis de Féterne, who played some part in the Chouan rising,” on seeing this name Féterne, which to me, since my stay at Balbec, had been the name of a castle, become, what I had never dreamed that it could possibly be, a family name, I felt the same astonishment as in reading a fairy-tale where turrets and a terrace come to life and turn into men and women. In this sense of the words, we may say that history, even mere family history, restores old stones to life. There have been in Parisian society men who played as considerable a part in it, who were more sought after for their distinction or for their wit, who were equally well born as the Duc de Guermantes or the Duc de La Trémoïlle. They have now fallen into oblivion because, as they left no descendants, their name, which we no longer hear, has an unfamiliar ring; at most, like the name of a thing beneath which we never think to discover the name of any person, it survives in some remote castle or village. The day is not distant when the traveller who, in the heart of Burgundy, stops in the little village of Charlus to look at its church, if he is not studious enough or is in too great a hurry to examine its tombstones, will go away ignorant of the fact that this name, Charlus, was that of a man who ranked with the highest in the land. This thought reminded me that it was time to go, and that while I listened to M. de Guermantes talking pedigrees, the hour was approaching at which I had promised to call on his brother. “Who knows,” I continued to muse, “whether one day Guermantes itself may appear nothing more than a place-name, save to the archaeologists who, stopping by chance at Combray and standing beneath the window of Gilbert the Bad, have the patience to listen to the account given them by Théodore’s successor or to read the Curé’s guide?” But so long as a great name is not extinct it keeps the men and women who bear it in the limelight; and doubtless to some extent the interest which the illustriousness of these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact that one can, starting from today, follow their ascending course, step by step, to a point far beyond the fourteenth century, and find the diaries and correspondence of all the forebears of M. de Charlus, of the Prince d’Agrigente, of the Princesse de Parme, in a past in which an impenetrable darkness would cloak the origins of a middle-class family, and in which we make out, in the luminous backward projection of a name, the origin and persistence of certain nervous characteristics, vices and disorders of one or another Guermantes. Almost pathologically identical with their namesakes of the present day, they excite from century to century the startled interest of their correspondents, whether these be anterior to the Princess Palatine and Mme de Motteville, or subsequent to the Prince de Ligne.
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