In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  On entering the drawing-room, I saw the fair girl whom I had supposed for twenty-four hours to be the girl of whom Saint-Loup had spoken to me. It was she who asked the Duchess to “reintroduce” me to her. And indeed, the moment I came into the room I had the impression that I knew her quite well, an impression which the Duchess however dispelled by saying: “Oh! so you’ve met Mlle de Forcheville before?” For, on the contrary, I was certain that I had never been introduced to any girl of that name, which would certainly have struck me, so familiar was it in my memory ever since I had been given a retrospective account of Odette’s love-affairs and Swann’s jealousy. In itself my twofold error as to the name, in having remembered “de l’Orgeville” as “d’Eporcheville” and in having reconstructed as “d’Eporcheville” what was in reality “Forcheville,” was in no way extraordinary. Our mistake lies in supposing that things present themselves as they really are, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable notion of them. But in reality this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world in a lopsided fashion. We repeat a name as we have heard it spoken until experience has corrected our mistake—something that does not always happen. Everyone at Combray had spoken to Françoise for twenty-five years of Mme Sazerat and Françoise continued to say “Mme Sazerin,” not from that deliberate and proud perseverance in error which was habitual with her, which was strengthened by our contradictions, and which was all that she had added of the egalitarian principles of 1789 to the France of Saint-André-des-Champs in her make-up (she claimed only one civic right, that of not pronouncing words as we did and of maintaining that “hotel,” “été” and “air” were of the feminine gender), but because she really did continue to hear “Sazerin.” This perpetual error, which is precisely “life,” does not bestow its countless forms merely upon the visible and the audible universe, but upon the social universe, the sentimental universe, the historical universe, and so forth. The Princesse de Luxembourg is no better than a prostitute in the eyes of the judge’s wife, which of course is of little consequence; what is of slightly more consequence is the fact that Odette is in Swann’s eyes a difficult woman to conquer, whence he builds up a whole romance which becomes all the more painful when he discovers his error; what is of even more consequence still, the French are thinking only of revenge in the eyes of the Germans. We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions. I should therefore have had no reason to be surprised when I heard the name Forcheville (and I was already wondering whether she was related to the Forcheville of whom I had so often heard) had not the fair girl said to me at once, anxious no doubt to forestall, tactfully, questions which would have been disagreeable to her: “Don’t you remember that you knew me well long ago … you used to come to our house … your friend Gilberte. I could see that you didn’t recognise me. I recognised you at once.” (She said this as if she had recognised me at once in the drawing-room, but the truth is that she had recognised me in the street and had greeted me, and later Mme de Guermantes informed me that she had told her, as something very comic and extraordinary, that I had followed her and brushed against her, mistaking her for a tart.) I did not discover until after her departure why she was called Mlle de Forcheville. After Swann’s death, Odette, who astonished everyone by her profound, prolonged and sincere grief, found herself an extremely rich widow. Forcheville married her, after making a long round of country houses and ascertaining that his family would acknowledge his wife. (The family raised some difficulties at first, but yielded to the material advantage of no longer having to provide for the expenses of a needy relative who was about to pass from comparative penury to opulence.) Shortly after this, an uncle of Swann’s, in whose hands the successive demise of innumerable relatives had accumulated an enormous inheritance, died, leaving the whole of his fortune to Gilberte who thus became one of the richest heiresses in France. But this was a time when in the aftermath of the Dreyfus case an anti-Semitic trend had arisen parallel to a growing trend towards the penetration of society by Jews. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would be a severe blow to anti-semitism. But, temporarily at least, a form of social anti-semitism was on the contrary enhanced and exacerbated thereby. Forcheville, who, like every petty nobleman, had derived from conversations in the family circle the certainty that his name was more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld, considered that, in marrying the widow of a Jew, he had performed a similar act of charity to that of a millionaire who picks up a prostitute in the street and rescues her from poverty and squalor. He was prepared to extend his bounty to Gilberte, whose prospects of marriage would be assisted by all her millions but hindered by that absurd name “Swann.” He declared that he would adopt her. We know that Mme de Guermantes, to the astonishment of her friends—which she enjoyed and was in the habit of provoking—had refused, after Swann’s marriage, to meet his daughter as well as his wife. This refusal had appeared all the more cruel inasmuch as what the possibility of marriage to Odette had long represented to Swann was the prospect of introducing his daughter to Mme de Guermantes. And doubtless he ought to have known, he who had already had so long an experience of life, that these scenes which we picture to ourselves are never realised for a diversity of reasons, among which there is one which meant that he seldom regretted his inability to effect that introduction. This reason is that, whatever the image may be—from the prospect of eating a trout at sunset, which makes a sedentary man decide to take the train, to the desire to be able to astonish the proud lady at a cash desk one evening by stopping outside her door in a magnificent carriage, which makes an unscrupulous man decide to commit murder or to long for the death of rich relatives, according to whether he is brave or lazy, whether he follows his ideas through or remains fondling the first link in the chain—the act which is destined to enable us to attain to it, whether the act be travel, marriage, crime or whatever, modifies us so profoundly that not merely do we cease to attach any importance to the reason which made us perform it, but the image conceived by the man who was not then a traveller, or a husband, or a criminal, or a recluse (who has set himself to work with the idea of fame and simultaneously lost all desire for fame), may perhaps never even once recur to his mind. Moreover, even if we are stubbornly determined to prove that our wish to act was not an idle one, it is probable that the sunset effect would fail to materialise, that feeling cold at that moment we would long for a bowl of soup by the fireside and not for a trout in the open air, that our carriage would fail to impress the cashier who perhaps for wholly different reasons had a great regard for us and in whom this sudden opulence would arouse suspicion. In short, we have seen Swann, once married, attach importance above all else to the relations of his wife and daughter with Mme Bontemps, etc.

  To all the reasons, derived from the Guermantes way of looking at social life, which had made the Duchess decide never to allow Mme and Mlle Swann to be introduced to her, we may add also that happy complacency with which people who are not in love dissociate themselves from that which they condemn in lovers and which is explained by their love. “Oh! I don’t get mixed up in all that. If it amuses poor Swann to behave idiotically and ruin his life, that’s his affair, but I’m not going to be dragged into that sort of thing; it may end very badly; I leave them to get on with it.” It is the suave man magno which Swann himself recommended to me with regard to the Verdurins, when he had long ceased to be in love with Odette and no longer cared about the little clan. It is what makes so wise the judgments of third persons with regard to passions which they themselves do not feel and the complications of behaviour which those passions bring about.

  Mme de Guermantes had in fact applied to the ostracism of Mme and Mlle Swann a perseverance that caused general surprise. When Mme Mole and Mme de Marsantes had begun to make friends with Mme Swann and to bring a quantity of s
ociety ladies to her house, Mme de Guermantes had not only remained intractable but had contrived to sabotage the lines of communication and to see that her cousin the Princesse de Guermantes followed her example. On one of the gravest days of the crisis during Rouvier’s ministry when it was thought that there was going to be war with Germany, I dined at Mme de Guermantes’s with M. de Bréauté and found the Duchess looking worried. I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, this was a manifestation of her fear of war, as when, appearing at the dinner-table one evening looking similarly pensive and barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody’s inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered solemnly: “I’m worried about China.” But a moment later Mme de Guermantes, herself volunteering an explanation of that preoccupied air which I had put down to fear of a declaration of war, said to M. de Bréauté: “I’m told that Marie-Aynard intends to launch the Swanns. I simply must go and see Marie-Gilbert tomorrow and get her to help me prevent it. Otherwise there’ll be no society left. The Dreyfus case is all very well. But then the grocer’s wife round the corner has only to call herself a nationalist and expect us to invite her to our houses in return.” And this remark was in such frivolous contrast to the one I expected to hear that I felt the same astonishment as a reader who, turning to the usual column of the Figaro for the latest news of the Russo-Japanese war, finds instead the list of people who have given wedding-presents to Mlle de Mortemart, the importance of an aristocratic marriage having relegated the battles on land and sea to the back of the paper. Moreover the Duchess had come to derive from this immoderate perseverance of hers a self-satisfied pride which she lost no opportunity of expressing. “Babal” she said, “maintains that we are the two most elegant people in Paris because he and I are the only two people who do not allow Mme and Mlle Swann to greet us. For he assures me that elegance consists in not knowing Mme Swann.” And the Duchess laughed heartily.

  However, when Swann was dead, it happened that her determination not to know his daughter had ceased to provide Mme de Guermantes with all the satisfactions of pride, independence, “self-government” and cruelty which she was capable of deriving from it and which had come to an end with the passing of the man who had given her the exquisite sensation that she was resisting him, that he could not compel her to revoke her decrees. Then the Duchess had proceeded to the promulgation of other decrees which, being applied to people who were still alive, could make her feel that she was free to act as she thought fit. She did not think about the Swann girl, but, when anyone mentioned her, she would feel a certain curiosity, as about some place that she had never visited, which was no longer suppressed by the desire to stand out against Swann’s pretensions. Besides, so many different sentiments may contribute to the formation of a single one that it could not be said that there was not a lingering trace of affection for Swann in this interest. No doubt—for at every level of society a worldly and frivolous life paralyses the sensibility and robs people of the power to resuscitate the dead—the Duchess was one of those people who require a personal presence—that presence which, like a true Guermantes, she excelled in protracting—in order to love truly, but also, and this is less common, in order to hate a little. So that often her friendly feeling for people, suspended during their lifetime by the irritation caused her by some action or other on their part, revived after their death. She then felt almost a longing to make reparation, because she pictured them now—though very vaguely—with only their good qualities, and stripped of the petty satisfactions, the petty pretensions, which had irritated her in them when they were alive. This imparted at times, notwithstanding the frivolity of Mme de Guermantes, something rather noble—mixed with much that was base—to her conduct. For, whereas three-quarters of the human race flatter the living and pay no attention to the dead, she often did after their deaths what those whom she had treated badly would have wished her to do while they were alive.

  As for Gilberte, all the people who were fond of her and had a certain respect for her dignity could rejoice at the change in the Duchess’s attitude towards her only by thinking that Gilberte, by scornfully rejecting advances coming after twenty-five years of insults, would be able to avenge them at last. Unfortunately, moral reflexes are not always identical with what common sense imagines. A man who, by an untimely insult, thinks that he has forfeited for ever all hope of winning the friendship of a person whom he cares about, finds that, on the contrary, he has thereby assured himself of it. Gilberte, who remained fairly indifferent to the people who were kind to her, never ceased to think with admiration of the insolent Mme de Guermantes, to ask herself the reasons for such insolence; once indeed (and this would have made all the people who were at all fond of her die of shame on her behalf) she had thought of writing to the Duchess to ask her what she had against a girl who had never done her any harm. The Guermantes had assumed in her eyes proportions which their birth would have been powerless to give them. She placed them not only above all the nobility, but even above all the royal houses.

  Some of Swann’s former women-friends took a great interest in Gilberte. When the aristocracy learned of her latest inheritance, they began to remark how well brought up she was and what a charming wife she would make. People said that a cousin of Mme de Guermantes, the Princesse de Nièvre, was thinking of Gilberte for her son. Mme de Guermantes hated Mme de Nièvre. She spread the word that such a marriage would be a scandal. Mme de Nièvre took fright and swore that she had never considered such a thing. One day, after lunch, as the sun was shining and M. de Guermantes was going to take his wife for a drive, Mme de Guermantes was arranging her hat in front of the mirror, her blue eyes gazing at their own reflexion and at her still golden hair, her maid holding in her hand various sunshades among which her mistress might choose. The sun was flooding in through the window and they had decided to take advantage of the fine weather to pay a visit to Saint-Cloud, and M. de Guermantes, all ready to set off with his pearl-grey gloves and topper, said to himself: “Oriane is really astounding still; I find her delicious,” and went on, aloud, seeing that his wife seemed to be in a good humour: “By the way, I have a message for you from Mme de Virelef. She wanted to ask you to the Opera on Monday, but as she’s having the Swann girl she didn’t dare, and asked me to explore the ground. I don’t express any opinion, I simply convey the message. But really, it seems to me that we might …” he added evasively, for, their attitude towards people being a collective one, springing up identically in each of them, he knew from his own feelings that his wife’s hostility to Mlle Swann had subsided and that she was curious to meet her. Mme de Guermantes settled her veil to her liking and chose a sunshade. “Just as you like. What difference do you suppose it makes to me? I see no objection to our meeting the child. You know quite well that I’ve never had anything against her. I simply didn’t want us to appear to be countenancing the dubious establishments of our friends. That’s all.” “And you were perfectly right,” replied the Duke. “You are wisdom incarnate, Madame, and you are more ravishing than ever in that hat.” “You’re very kind,” said Mme de Guermantes with a smile at her husband as she made her way to the door. But, before entering the carriage, she insisted on giving him a further explanation: “Lots of people call on the mother now. Besides, she has the sense to be ill for nine months of the year … Apparently the child is quite charming. Everybody knows that we were very fond of Swann. People will think it quite natural.” And they set off together for Saint-Cloud.

  A month later, the Swann girl, who had not yet taken the name of Forcheville, came to lunch with the Guermantes. They talked about a variety of things, and at the end of the meal, Gilberte said timidly: “I believe you knew my father quite well.” “Why, of course we did,” said Mme de Guermantes in a melancholy tone which proved that she understood the daughter’s grief and with a spurious intensity as though to conceal the fact that she was not sure whether she did remember the father very clearly. “We knew him very well, I rem
ember him very well.” (As indeed she might, seeing that he had come to see her almost every day for twenty-five years.) “I know quite well who he was, let me tell you,” she went on, as though she were seeking to explain to the daughter what sort of man her father had been and to provide her with some information about him, “he was a great friend of my mother-in-law and he was also very attached to my brother-in-law Palamède.” “He used to come here too, in fact he used to come to luncheon here,” added M. de Guermantes with ostentatious modesty and a scrupulous regard for accuracy. “You remember, Oriane. What a fine man your father was! One felt that he must come of a very decent family. As a matter of fact, I once saw his father and mother long ago. What excellent people they were, he and they!”