If in the eyes of the younger generations the Duchesse de Guermantes seemed to be of little account because she was acquainted with actresses and such people, the elder, the now old ladies of her family, still considered her to be an extraordinary personage, partly because they knew and appreciated her birth, her heraldic pre-eminence, her intimate friendships with what Mme de Forcheville would have called royalties, but even more because she despised the parties given by the family and was bored at them and her cousins knew that they could never count upon her attendance. Her connexions with the theatrical and political worlds, in any case only vaguely known in the family, merely had the effect of enhancing her rarity and therefore her prestige. So that while in political and artistic society she was regarded as a creature whom it was hard to define, a sort of unfrocked priestess of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who consorted with Under-Secretaries of State and stars of the theatre, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain itself if one was giving an important evening party one would say: “Is it worth while even asking Oriane? She won’t come. Perhaps one should, just for form’s sake, but one knows what to expect.” And if, at about half past ten, in a dazzling costume and with a hard glint in her eyes which bore witness to her contempt for all her female cousins, Oriane made her entrance, pausing first on the threshold with a sort of majestic disdain, and remained for a whole hour, this was even more of a treat for the old and noble lady who was giving the party than it would have been in the past for a theatrical manager who had obtained a vague promise from Sarah Bernhardt that she would contribute something to a programme, had the great actress, contrary to all expectation, turned up and recited, in the most unaffected and obliging way, not the piece which she had promised but twenty others. For although all the women there were among the smartest in Paris, the presence of this Oriane who was addressed in a condescending manner by Under-Secretaries and continued none the less (“intelligence governs the world”) to try to make the acquaintance of more and more of them, had had the effect which nothing could have achieved without her, of placing the dowager’s evening party in a class apart from and above all the other dowagers’ evening parties of the same season (to use another of those English expressions of which Mme de Forcheville was so fond) which she, Oriane, had not taken the trouble to attend.
As soon as I had finished talking to the Prince de Guermantes, Bloch seized hold of me and introduced me to a young woman who had heard a lot about me from the Duchesse de Guermantes and who was one of the most fashionable women of the day. Not only was her name entirely unknown to me, but it appeared that those of the various branches of the Guermantes family could not be very familiar to her, for she inquired of an American woman how it was that Mme de Saint-Loup seemed to be on such intimate terms with all the most aristocratic people in the room. Now the American was married to the Comte de Farcy, an obscure cousin of the Forchevilles, for whom Forcheville was the grandest name in the world. So she replied ingenuously: “Well, isn’t she a Forcheville by birth? And what could be grander than that?” But at least Mme de Farcy, though she naïvely believed the name of Forcheville to be superior to that of Saint-Loup, knew something about the latter. But to the charming lady who was a friend of Bloch and the Duchesse de Guermantes it was utterly unknown, and, being somewhat muddle-headed, she replied in all good faith to a young girl who asked her how Mme de Saint-Loup was related to their host, the Prince de Guermantes: “Through the Forchevilles,” a piece of information which the girl passed on as if she had known it all her life to one of her friends, a bad-tempered and nervous girl, who turned as red as a turkeycock the first time a gentleman said to her that it was not through the Forchevilles that Gilberte was connected with the Guermantes, with the result that the gentleman supposed that he had made a mistake, adopted the erroneous explanation himself and lost no time in propagating it. For the American woman dinner-parties and fashionable entertainments were a sort of Berlitz School. She heard the names and she repeated them, without having first learnt their precise value and significance. To someone who asked whether Tansonville had come to Gilberte from her father M. de Forcheville I heard the explanation given that, on the contrary, it was a property in her husband’s family, that Tansonville was a neighbouring estate to Guermantes and had belonged to Mme de Marsantes, that it had been heavily mortgaged and the mortgage paid off with Gilberte’s dowry. And finally, a veteran of the old guard having exchanged memories with me of Swann, friend of the Sagans and the Mouchys, and Bloch’s American friend having asked me how I had known Swann, the old man declared that this must have been in the house of Mme de Guermantes, not suspecting that what Swann represented for me was a country neighbour and a young friend of my grandfather. Mistakes of this kind have been made by the most distinguished men and are regarded as particularly serious in any society of a conservative temper. Saint-Simon, wishing to show that Louis XIV was of an ignorance which “sometimes made him fall, in public, into the most gross absurdities,” gives of this ignorance only two examples, which are that the King, not knowing either that Renel belonged to the family of Clermont-Gallerande or that Saint-Herem belonged to that of Montmorin, treated these two men as though they were of low extraction. But at least, in so far as concerns Saint-Herem, we have the consolation of knowing that the King did not die in error, for “very late in life” he was disabused by M. de La Rochefoucauld. “Even then,” adds Saint-Simon with a touch of pity, “it was necessary to explain to him what these houses were, for their names conveyed nothing to him.”
This forgetfulness, which with its vigorous growth covers so rapidly even the most recent past, this encroaching ignorance, creates as its own counter-agent a minor species of erudition, all the more precious for being rare, which is concerned with genealogies, the true social position of people, the reasons of love or money or some other kind for which they have allied or misallied themselves in marriage with this family or that, an erudition which is highly prized in all societies where a conservative spirit rules, which my grandfather possessed in the highest degree with regard to the middle classes of Combray and of Paris and which Saint-Simon valued so highly that when he comes to celebrate the marvellous intelligence of the Prince de Conti, before speaking of the recognised branches of knowledge, or rather as though this were the first of them all, he praises him as “a man of a very fine mind, enlightened, just, exact, wide-ranging; vastly well read and of a retentive memory; skilled in genealogies, their chimeras and their realities; of a politeness variously accommodated to rank and merit, rendering all those courtesies that the princes of the blood owe but no longer render and even explaining why he acted as he did and how the other princes exceeded their rights. The knowledge which he had gained from books and from conversation afforded him material for the most obliging comments possible upon the birth, the offices, etc.” In a less exalted sphere, in all that pertained to the bourgeois society of Combray and Paris, my grandfather possessed this same knowledge with no less exactitude and savoured it with no less relish. The epicures, the connoisseurs who knew that Gilberte was not a Forcheville, that Mme de Cambremer had not been born a Méséglise nor her nephew’s young wife a Valentinois, were already reduced in number. Reduced in number and perhaps not even recruited from among the highest aristocracy (it is not necessarily among devout believers, or even among Catholics of any kind, that you will find those who are most learned on the subject of the Golden Legend or the stained glass of the thirteenth century), but often from a minor aristocracy, whose scions have a keener appetite for the high society which they themselves can seldom approach and which the little time that they spend in it leaves them all the more leisure to study. Still, they meet together from time to time and enjoy making each other’s acquaintance and giving succulent corporate dinners, like those of the Society of Bibliophiles or the Friends of Rheims, at which the items on the menu are genealogies. To these feasts wives are not admitted, but the husbands, when they get home, remark: “A most interesting dinner. There was a M. de La Raspelière th
ere who kept us spell-bound with his explanation of how that Mme de Saint-Loup with the pretty daughter is not really a Forcheville at all. It was as good as a novel.”
The friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes was not only beautifully dressed and charming, she was also intelligent and conversation with her was agreeable, but for me rendered difficult by the novelty to my ears of the names not only of my interlocutress herself but also of most of the people she talked about, although they were the very people who formed the core of society today. The converse also was true: at her request I related various anecdotes of the past, and many of the names which I pronounced meant absolutely nothing to her, they had all sunk into oblivion (all those at least which had shone only with the individual brilliance of a single person and were not the surname, permanent and generic, of some famous aristocratic family, whose exact title even so the young woman seldom knew, having perhaps recently misheard a name at a dinner-party and proceeded to form quite wrong ideas about its pedigree) and she had for the most part never heard them mentioned, having, not merely because she was young but because she had not lived in France for long and when she first arrived had known nobody, only started to go into society some years after I myself had withdrawn from it. So that though for ordinary speech she and I used the same language, when it came to names our vocabularies had nothing in common. The name of Mme Leroi happened to fall from my lips, and by chance, thanks to some elderly admirer, himself an old friend of Mme de Guermantes, my interlocutress had heard of her. But only vaguely and inaccurately, as I saw from the contemptuous tone in which this snobbish young woman replied to me: “Yes, I know who you mean by Mme Leroi, an old friend of Bergotte’s, I believe,” a tone which barely concealed the comment: “a woman whom I should never have wished to have in my house.” I realised at once that the old friend of Mme de Guermantes, as a perfect man of the world imbued with the Guermantes spirit, one of the essential elements of which was not to appear to attach too much importance to aristocratic friendships, had thought it too stupid, too anti-Guermantes to say: “Mme Leroi, who was a friend of every Royalty and Duchess in Paris,” and had preferred to say: “She could be quite amusing. Let me tell you the retort she made to Bergotte one day.” But for people who are not already in the know information gleaned in this way from conversation is equivalent only to that which is doled out to the masses by the press and which makes them believe alternatively, depending upon the views of their newspaper, either that M. Loubet and M. Reinach are brigands or that they are great patriots. In the eyes of my interlocutress Mme Leroi had been something like Mme Verdurin as she was before her social transformation, but with less brilliance and with a little clan consisting of one member only, Bergotte. But at least this young woman, by pure chance, had heard the name of Mme Leroi, and she is one of the last of whom so much can be said. Today that name is utterly forgotten, nor is there any good reason why it should be remembered. It does not figure even in the index to the posthumous memoirs of Mme de Villeparisis, whose mind was so much occupied with the lady who bore it. And if the Marquise has omitted to mention Mme Leroi, this is less because in her lifetime that lady had been less than friendly towards her than because, once she was dead, no one was likely to take any interest in her, it is a silence dictated less by the social resentment of a woman than by the literary tact of an author. My conversation with Bloch’s fashionable friend was delightful, for she was an intelligent young woman; but this difference which I have described between our two vocabularies made it at the same time both awkward and instructive. For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it. And the result is that we see as always young the men and women whom we have known young, that those whom we have known old we retrospectively endow in the past with the virtues of old age, that we trust unreservedly in the credit of a millionaire and the influence of a reigning monarch, knowing with our reason, though we do not actually believe, that tomorrow both the one and the other may be fugitives stripped of all power. In a more restricted field, one that is purely social—as in a simpler problem which initiates a student into difficulties that are more complex but of the same order—the unintelligibility which, in my conversation with the young woman, resulted from the fact that the two of us had lived in the same world but with an interval of twenty-five years between us, gave me the impression, and might have strengthened within me the sense, of History.
And indeed this ignorance of people’s true social position which every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in all the glory of the moment as though the past had never existed, which makes it impossible for an American woman just landed in Europe to see that in an age when Bloch was nobody M. de Charlus was socially supreme in Paris and that Swann, who put himself out to please M. Bontemps, had himself been treated with every mark of friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance, which exists not only in new arrivals but also in those who have always frequented adjacent but distinct regions of society, is itself also invariably an effect—but an effect operative not so much upon a whole social stratum as within individuals—of Time. No doubt we ourselves may change our social habitat and our manner of life and yet our memory, clinging still to the thread of our personal identity, will continue to attach to itself at successive epochs the recollection of the various societies in which, even if it be forty years earlier, we have lived. Bloch the guest of the Prince de Guermantes remembered perfectly well the humble Jewish environment in which he had lived at the age of eighteen, and Swann, when he was no longer in love with Mme Swann but with a waitress at that same Colombin’s where at one time Mme Swann had thought it smart to go and drink tea (as she did also at the tea-room in the Rue Royale), Swann was very well aware of his own social value—he remembered Twickenham and had no doubt in his mind about the reasons for which he chose to go to Colombin’s rather than to call on the Duchesse de Broglie, and he knew also that, had he been a thousand times less “smart” than he was, he would not have become the slightest bit smarter by frequenting Colombin’s or the Ritz, since anybody can go to these places who pays. And no doubt the friends, too, of Bloch or of Swann remembered the little Jewish coterie or the invitations to Twickenham and thus, as though they, the friends, were other not very clearly defined “I’s” of the two men, made no division in their memories between the fashionable Bloch of today and the sordid Bloch of the past, between the Swann who in his latter days could be seen at Colombin’s and the Swann of Buckingham Palace. But these friends were to some extent Swann’s neighbours in life, their own lives had developed along lines near enough to his own for their memories to be fairly full of him, whereas other men who were more remote from Swann—at a greater distance measured not perhaps socially but in terms of intimacy, which caused their knowledge of him to be vaguer and their meetings with him rarer—possessed of him recollections that were less numerous and in consequence conceptions that were less fixed. And after thirty years a comparative stranger of this kind no longer has any precise recollection with the power to change the value of the person whom he has before his eyes by prolonging him into the past. In the last years of Swann’s life I had heard people, even people in society, say when his name was mentioned, as though this had been his title to fame: “You mean the Swann who goes to Colombin’s?” And now, with reference to Bloch, even those who ought to have known better might be heard to inquire: “The Guermantes Bloch? The Bloch who is such a friend of the Guermantes?” These errors which split a life in two and, by isolating his present from his past, turn some man whom one is talking about into another, a different man, a creation of yesterday, a man who is no more than the condensation of his current habits (whereas the real man bears within himself an awareness, linking him to the past, of the continuity
of his life), these errors, though they too, as I have said, are a result of the passage of Time, are not a social phenomenon but one of memory. And at that very moment I was presented with an example, of a different variety, it is true, but all the more impressive for that, of this forgetfulness which modifies for us our image of a human being. Long ago a young nephew of Mme de Guermantes, the Marquis de Villemandois, had behaved towards me with a persistent insolence which had obliged me to retaliate by adopting an equally insulting attitude towards him, so that tacitly we had become as it were enemies. This man, while I was engaged in my reflexions upon Time at the Princesse de Guermantes’s party, asked someone to introduce him to me, saying that he thought that I had known some of his family, that he had read articles of mine and wanted to make, or re-make, my acquaintance. Now it is true to say that with age he had become, like many others, serious instead of rude and frivolous and that he had lost much of his former arrogance, and it is also true that I was a good deal talked about now, though on the strength of some very slight articles, in the circles which he frequented. But these motives for his cordiality, for his making advances to me, were only secondary. The principal motive, or at least the one which permitted the others to come into play, was that—either because he had a worse memory than I or because in the past, since I was then for him a much less important personage than he for me, he had paid less attention to my ripostes than I to his attacks—he had completely forgotten our feud. At most my name recalled to him that he must have seen me, or some member of my family, in the house of one of his aunts. And being uncertain whether he was being introduced to me for the first time or whether we were old acquaintances, he made haste to talk to me about the aunt in whose house he was sure that we had met, remembering that my name had often been mentioned there and not remembering our quarrels. A name: that very often is all that remains for us of a human being, not only when he is dead, but sometimes even in his lifetime. And our notions about him are so vague or so bizarre and correspond so little to those that he has of us that we have entirely forgotten that we once nearly fought a duel with him but remember that, when he was a child, he used to wear curious yellow gaiters in the Champs-Elysées, where he, on the contrary, in spite of our assurances, has no recollection of ever having played with us.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 386