The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  However, my historical curiosity was faint in comparison with my aesthetic pleasure. The names cited had the effect of disembodying the Duchess’s guests—for all that they were called the Prince d’Agrigente or of Cystria—whose masks of flesh and unintelligence or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into ordinary mortals, so much so that I had made my landing on the ducal doormat not as upon the threshold (as I had supposed) but as at the terminus of the enchanted world of names. The Prince d’Agrigente himself, as soon as I heard that his mother had been a Damas, a granddaughter of the Duke of Modena, was delivered, as from an unstable chemical alloy, from the face and speech that prevented one from recognising him, and went to form with Damas and Modena, which themselves were only titles, an infinitely more seductive combination. Each name displaced by the attraction of another with which I had never suspected it of having any affinity left the unalterable position which it had occupied in my brain, where familiarity had dulled it, and, speeding to join the Mortemarts, the Stuarts or the Bourbons, traced with them branches of the most graceful design and ever-changing colour. The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful names—extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled—with which I learned only now that it was connected, a new and purely poetic sense and purpose. At the most, at the extremity of each spray that burgeoned from the exalted stem, I could see it flower in some face of a wise king or illustrious princess, like the sire of Henri IV or the Duchesse de Longueville. But as these faces, different in this respect from those of the party around me, were not overlaid for me by any residue of physical experience or social mediocrity, they remained, in their handsome outlines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names which at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached themselves from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed with no foreign or opaque matter the translucent, alternating, multicoloured buds which like the ancestors of Jesus in the old Jesse windows, blossomed on either side of the tree of glass.

  Already I had made several attempts to slip away, on account, more than for any other reason, of the insignificance which my presence in it imparted to the gathering, although it was one of those which I had long imagined as being so beautiful—as it would doubtless have been had there been no inconvenient witness present. At least my departure would allow the guests, once the interloper had gone, to form themselves into a closed group. They would be free to celebrate the mysteries for which they had assembled there, since it could obviously not have been to talk of Franz Hals or of avarice, and to talk of them in the same way as people talk in bourgeois society. They spoke nothing but trivialities, doubtless because I was in the room, and I felt with some compunction, on seeing all these pretty women kept apart, that I was preventing them by my presence from carrying on, in the most precious of its drawing-rooms, the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But M. and Mme de Guermantes carried the spirit of self-sacrifice so far as to keep postponing, by detaining me, this departure which I was constantly trying to effect. A more curious thing still, several of the ladies who had come hurrying, ecstatic, decked out in their finery, bespangled with jewels, only to attend a party which, through my fault, differed in essence from those that are given elsewhere than in the Faubourg Saint-Germain no more than one feels oneself at Balbec to be in a town that differs from what one’s eyes are accustomed to see—several of these ladies left, not at all disappointed, as they had every reason to be, but thanking Mme de Guermantes most effusively for the delightful evening which they had spent, as though on other days, those on which I was not present, nothing more occurred.

  Was it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all these people dressed themselves up and refused to allow middle-class women to penetrate into their so exclusive drawing-rooms—for dinners such as this, identical, had I been absent? The suspicion flashed across my mind for a moment, but it was too absurd. Plain commonsense enabled me to brush it aside. And then, if I had adopted it, what would have been left of the name Guermantes, already so debased since Combray?

  It struck me that these flower-maidens were, to a strange extent, easily pleased with another person, or anxious to please that person, for more than one of them, to whom I had not uttered during the whole course of the evening more than two or three casual remarks the stupidity of which had left me blushing, made a point, before leaving the drawing-room, of coming to tell me, fastening on me her fine caressing eyes, straightening as she spoke the garland of orchids that followed the curve of her bosom, what an intense pleasure it had been to her to make my acquaintance, and to speak to me—a veiled allusion to an invitation to dinner—of her desire to “arrange something” after she had “fixed a day” with Mme de Guermantes.

  None of these flower ladies left the room before the Princesse de Parme. The presence of the latter—one must never depart before royalty—was one of the two reasons, neither of which I had guessed, for which the Duchess had insisted so strongly on my remaining. As soon as Mme de Parme had risen, it was like a deliverance. Each of the ladies, having made a genuflexion before the Princess, who then raised her up from the ground, received from her in a kiss, and as it were a benediction which they had craved on their knees, the permission to ask for their cloaks and carriages. With the result that there followed, at the front door, a sort of stentorian recital of great names from the History of France. The Princesse de Parme had forbidden Mme de Guermantes to accompany her downstairs to the hall for fear of her catching cold, and the Duke had added: “There, Oriane, since Ma’am gives you leave, remember what the doctor told you.”

  “I think the Princesse de Parme was very pleased to dine with you.” I knew the formula. The Duke had come the whole way across the drawing-room in order to utter it for my benefit with an obliging, earnest air, as though he were handing me a diploma or offering me a plateful of biscuits. And I guessed from the pleasure which he appeared to be feeling as he spoke, and which brought so gentle an expression momentarily into his face, that the duties and concerns which it represented for him were of the kind which he would continue to discharge to the very end of his life, like one of those honorific and easy posts which one is still allowed to retain even when senile.

  Just as I was about to leave, the Princess’s lady-in-waiting reappeared in the drawing-room, having forgotten to take away some wonderful carnations, sent up from Guermantes, which the Duchess had presented to Mme de Parme. The lady-in-waiting was somewhat flushed, and one felt that she had just been receiving a scolding, for the Princess, so kind to everyone else, could not contain her impatience at the stupidity of her attendant. And so the latter picked up the flowers quickly and ran, but to preserve an air of nonchalance and independence, flung at me as she passed: “The Princess says I’m keeping her waiting; she wants to be gone, and to have the carnations as well. After all, I’m not a little bird, I can’t be in several places at once.”

  Alas! the rule of not leaving before royalty was not the only one. I could not depart at once, for there was another: this was that the famous prodigality, unknown to the Courvoisiers, with which the Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, excelled in entertaining their friends, was not only a material prodigality, of the kind that I had often experienced with Robert de Saint-Loup, but also a prodigality of charming words, of courteous gestures, a whole system of verbal elegance fed by a positive cornucopia within. But as this last, in the idleness of fashionable existence, remains unemployed, it overflowed at times, sought an outlet in a sort of fleeting effusion which was all the more intense, and which might, on the part of Mme de Guermantes, have led one to suppose a genuine affection. She did in fact feel it at the moment when she let it overflow, for she found then, in the society of the friend, man or woman, with whom she happened to be, a sort of intoxication, in no way sensual, similar to that which music produces in certain people; she would suddenly pluck a flower from her bodice, or a medallion, and present it to someone with whom she would have liked to prolong the ev
ening, with a melancholy feeling the while that such a prolongation could have led to nothing but idle talk, into which nothing could have passed of the nervous pleasure, the fleeting emotion, reminiscent of the first warm days of spring in the impression they leave behind them of lassitude and regret. As for the friend, it did not do for him to put too implicit a faith in the promises, more exhilarating than anything he had ever heard, tendered by these women who, because they feel with so much more force the sweetness of a moment, make of it, with a delicacy, a nobility of which normally constituted creatures are incapable, a compelling masterpiece of grace and kindness, and no longer have anything of themselves left to give when the next moment has arrived. Their affection does not outlive the exaltation that has dictated it; and the subtlety of mind which had then led them to divine all the things that you wished to hear, and to say them to you, will enable them just as easily, a few days later, to seize hold of your absurdities and use them to entertain another of their visitors with whom they will then be in the act of enjoying one of those “musical moments” which are so brief.

  In the hall where I asked the footmen for my snow-boots, which I had brought, not realising how unfashionable they were, as a precaution against the snow, a few flakes of which had already fallen, to be converted rapidly into slush, I felt, at the contemptuous smiles on all sides, a shame which rose to its highest pitch when I saw that Mme de Parme had not yet gone and was watching me put on my American “rubbers.” The Princess came towards me. “Oh! what a good idea,” she exclaimed, “it’s so practical! There’s a sensible man for you. Madame, we shall have to get a pair of those,” she said to her lady-in-waiting, while the mockery of the footmen turned to respect and the other guests crowded round me to inquire where I had managed to find these marvels. “With those on, you will have nothing to fear even if it starts snowing again and you have a long way to go. You’re independent of the weather,” the Princess said to me.

  “Oh! if it comes to that, your Royal Highness can rest assured,” broke in the lady-in-waiting with a knowing air, “it won’t snow again.”

  “What do you know about it, Madame?” came witheringly from the excellent Princesse de Parme, whose temper only the stupidity of her lady-in-waiting could succeed in ruffling.

  “I can assure your Royal Highness that it can’t snow again. It’s a physical impossibility.”

  “But why?”

  “It can’t snow any more, because they’ve taken the necessary steps to prevent it: they’ve sprinkled salt in the streets!”

  The simple-minded lady did not notice either the anger of the Princess or the mirth of the rest of her audience, for instead of remaining silent she said to me with a genial smile, paying no heed to my repeated denials of any connexion with Admiral Jurien de La Gravière: “Not that it matters, after all. Monsieur must have stout sealegs. What’s bred in the bone!”

  Having escorted the Princesse de Parme to her carriage, M. de Guermantes said to me, taking hold of my greatcoat: “Let me help you into your skin.” He had ceased even to smile when he employed this expression, for those that were most vulgar had for that very reason, because of the Guermantes affectation of simplicity, become aristocratic.

  An exhilaration relapsing only into melancholy, because it was artificial, was what I also, although quite differently from Mme de Guermantes, felt once I had finally left her house, in the carriage that was to take me to that of M. de Charlus. We can as we choose abandon ourselves to one or other of two forces, of which one rises in ourselves, emanates from our deepest impressions, while the other comes to us from without. The first brings with it naturally a joy, the joy that springs from the life of those who create. The other current, that which endeavours to introduce into us the impulses by which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is not accompanied by pleasure; but we can add a pleasure to it, by a sort of recoil, in an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom, into melancholy—whence the gloomy faces of so many men of the world, and all those nervous conditions which may even lead to suicide. Now, in the carriage which was taking me to M. de Charlus, I was a prey to this second sort of exaltation, very different from that which is given us by a personal impression, such as I had received in other carriages, once at Combray, in Dr Percepied’s gig, from which I had seen the spires of Martinville against the setting sun, another day at Balbec, in Mme de Villeparisis’s barouche, when I strove to identify the reminiscence that was suggested to me by an avenue of trees. But in this third carriage, what I had before my mind’s eye were those conversations that had seemed to me so tedious at Mme de Guermantes’s dinner-table, for example Prince Von’s stories about the German Emperor, General Botha and the British Army. I had just slid them into the internal stereoscope through the lenses of which, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as, endowed with a worldly spirit, we wish to receive our life only from other people, we give depth and relief to what they have said and done. Like a tipsy man filled with tender feeling for the waiter who has been serving him, I marvelled at my good fortune, a good fortune not recognised by me, it is true, at the actual moment, in having dined with a person who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were—upon my word—extremely witty. And, as I repeated to myself, with the Prince’s German accent, the story of General Botha, I laughed out loud, as though this laugh, like certain kinds of applause which increase one’s inward admiration, were necessary to the story as a corroboration of its hilariousness. Through the magnifying lenses, even those of Mme de Guermantes’s pronouncements which had struck me as being stupid (as for example the one about the Hals pictures which one ought to see from the top of a tram-car) took on an extraordinary life and depth. And I must say that, even if this exaltation was quick to subside, it was not altogether unreasonable. Just as there may always come a day when we are glad to know the person whom we despise more than anyone in the world because he happens to be connected with a girl with whom we are in love, to whom he can introduce us, and thus offers us both utility and agreeableness, attributes in which we should have supposed him to be permanently lacking, so there is no conversation, any more than there are personal relations, from which we can be certain that we shall not one day derive some benefit. What Mme de Guermantes had said to me about the pictures which it would be interesting to see, even from a tram-car, was untrue, but it contained a germ of truth which was of value to me later on.

  Similarly the lines of Victor Hugo which I had heard her quote were, it must be admitted, of a period earlier than that in which he became something more than a new man, in which he brought to light, in the order of evolution, a literary species hitherto unknown, endowed with more complex organs. In these early poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like Nature, with providing food for thought. His “thoughts” he at that time expressed in the most direct form, almost in the sense in which the Duke understood the word when, feeling it to be “old hat” and otiose for the guests at his big parties at Guermantes to append to their signatures in the visitors’ book a philosophico-poetical reflexion, he used to warn newcomers in a beseeching tone: “Your name, my dear fellow, but no ‘thoughts,’ please!” Now, it was these “thoughts” of Victor Hugo’s (almost as absent from the Légende des Siècles as “tunes,” as “melodies” are from Wagner’s later manner) that Mme de Guermantes admired in the early Hugo. Nor was she altogether wrong. They were touching, and already round about them, before their form had yet achieved the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes rendered them unassimilable to the lines that one can discover in a Corneille, for example, lines in which a romanticism that is intermittent, restrained, and thus all the more moving, has nevertheless in no way penetrated to the physical sources of life, modified the unconscious and generalisable organism in which the idea is latent. And so I had been wrong in confining myself, hitherto, to the later volumes of Hugo. Of the earlier ones, of co
urse, it was only with a fractional part that Mme de Guermantes embellished her conversation. But it is precisely by thus quoting an isolated line that one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold. The lines that had entered or returned to my mind during this dinner magnetised in turn, summoned to themselves with such force, the poems within which they were normally embedded, that my electrified hands could not hold out for longer than forty-eight hours against the force that drew them towards the volume in which were bound up the Orientales and the Chants du Crépuscule. I cursed Françoise’s footman for having made a present to his native village of my copy of the Feuilles d’Automne, and sent him off without a moment’s delay to buy me another. I read these volumes from cover to cover and found peace of mind only when I suddenly came across, awaiting me in the light in which she had bathed them, the lines which Mme de Guermantes had quoted to me. For all these reasons, conversations with the Duchess resembled the discoveries that we make in the library of a country house, out of date, incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, lacking in almost everything that we value, but offering us now and then some curious scrap of information, or even a quotation from a fine passage which we did not know and as to which we are glad to remember in after years that we owe our knowledge of it to a stately baronial mansion. We are then, as a result of having found Balzac’s preface to the Chartreuse, or some unpublished letters of Joubert, tempted to exaggerate the value of the life we led there, the barren frivolity of which we forget for this windfall of a single evening.