In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  Bloch questioned me, as I used to question people when I first entered society, and as I still occasionally did, about people I had once known socially, and who were now as distant, as far removed from everything, as those people in Combray I had so often found myself wanting to ‘place’ exactly. But I had thought of Combray as having such a different shape from anywhere else, one so impossible to confuse with all the others, that I could never manage to fit it into the jigsaw-map of France. ‘So the Prince de Guermantes won’t be able to tell me anything about Swann, nor about M. de Charlus?’ asked Bloch, whose manner of speaking I had borrowed for so long and who now often imitated mine. ‘Nothing at all. – But what made them so different? – You would have had to talk to them, but that’s impossible now, Swann’s dead and M. de Charlus is not far off it. But the differences were enormous.’ And while Bloch’s eyes shone with the thought of what these two wonderful individuals must have been like, I thought that I was probably exaggerating the pleasure I had taken in their company, it being something I had only ever felt when I was alone, and the impression of real differentiation taking place only in our imaginations. Did Bloch realize this? ‘Perhaps you’re giving me an idealized picture, he said to me; the lady of the house here, for instance, the Princesse de Guermantes, I know she’s no longer young, but it’s not so very long since you were going on to me about her incomparable charm, her marvellous beauty. Of course, I can see she’s terrifically grand, and she’s certainly got those extraordinary eyes you told me about, but in the end I don’t find her quite as incredible as you said. And obviously she’s aristocratic, but still…’ I had to tell Bloch that he was not talking about the same person. The Princesse de Guermantes had died and it was the former Mme Verdurin whom the Prince, ruined by the defeat of Germany, had married. ‘No, you’re wrong, I looked in this year’s Gotha,100 confessed Bloch to me naïvely, and I found the Prince de Guermantes, living in this mansion where we are now, and married to somebody terribly grand, hang on a minute while I remember, married to Sidonie, Duchesse de Duras, née des Baux.’ And this was right, Mme Verdurin, shortly after the death of her husband, had married the penniless old Duc de Duras, who had made her a cousin of the Prince de Guermantes and had died after two years of marriage. It had been a very useful transition for Mme Verdurin, and now by a third marriage she was Princesse de Guermantes and occupied an elevated position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which would have caused great astonishment at Combray, where the ladies of the rue de l’Oiseau, Mme Goupil’s daughter and Mme Sazerat’s step-daughter, before Mme Verdurin became Princesse de Guermantes, had pronounced the title ‘the Duchesse de Duras’ with snide giggles, as if Mme Verdurin were playing a role on the stage. In fact, their system of caste requiring that she should die Mme Verdurin, this title, which nobody imagined conferred any new social powers upon her, had rather a deleterious impact. ‘Getting herself talked about,’ the expression which, in all walks of life, is applied to a woman who has a lover, could also be applied in the Faubourg Saint-Germain to those who publish books, and among the respectable middle class of Combray to those who make marriages which, in one way or another, are ‘unequal’. After she had married the Prince de Guermantes, they had to say that he could not be a real Guermantes, and must be an impostor. Myself, I thought that there was something as distressing in this continuity of name and title, which meant that there was a Princesse de Guermantes once again, and that she had nothing to do with the one who had so cast her spell on me and who was no longer here and who, a defenceless corpse, had been robbed of her name, as seeing Princesse Hedwige’s101 possessions, like her country house, and everything she had owned, being enjoyed by another woman. Succession to a name is sad, like all succession, like all usurpation of property; yet wave after wave of new Princesses de Guermantes would continue to come for ever, uninterruptedly, or perhaps better, replaced in the job from one age to the next by a different woman, a single Princesse de Guermantes, timeless, unaware of death, indifferent to everything that changes and wounds our hearts, the name closing over those who from time to time sink beneath its always unchanging, immemorial placidity.

  Of course, even the outward changes to the faces that I had known were no more than the symbols of an interior change which had been going on from day to day; these people may have continued doing the same things, but as the idea they had of themselves and the people they saw shifted slightly from day to day, after a few years, while the names were still the same, the objects and people they loved were different, and they having become different people themselves it would have been very surprising if they had not had new faces.

  Among the people present there was a man of some distinction who had just given evidence in a famous trial, the only value of which lay in his high moral standards, which the judges and lawyers had unanimously accepted and which had resulted in the conviction of two people. So there was a stir of deferential curiosity when he entered. It was Morel. I was perhaps the only person there who knew that he had been kept simultaneously both by Saint-Loup and by a friend of Saint-Loup’s. Despite these memories, he greeted me with pleasure, if somewhat reservedly. He recalled the time when we had met at Balbec, memories which for him were full of the poetry and melancholy of youth.

  But there were also people there whom I could not recognize, for the reason that I had never met them before, for time had been working its chemistry in this drawing-room upon society as well as upon individuals themselves. This little world, in whose specific nature, defined by certain affinities which attracted to it all the great princely names of Europe and its power to keep all non-aristocratic elements at a distance, in which I thought I had found a tangible refuge for the Guermantes name, one which in the end gave it its reality, this little world, in its inner composition which I had believed was stable, had itself undergone profound alteration. The presence of people whom I had seen in quite different social settings, and who seemed destined never to penetrate into this one, was still not quite so surprising as the intimate familiarity with which they were received and addressed by their first names. A certain concatenation of aristocratic prejudices and snobberies, which had once kept at a distance anything that was not in harmony with the Guermantes name, had ceased to function.

  Some people (Tossizza, Kleinmichel) who, when I first started going into society, used to give grand dinners to which they invited only the Princesse de Guermantes, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princess of Parma, and who had an honoured place in those ladies’ houses, and were generally regarded as, and indeed quite possibly were, among the most firmly established members of society at that time, had disappeared without trace. Had they all been foreign members of diplomatic missions who had gone back to their countries? Perhaps a scandal, a suicide, an abduction had prevented them from reappearing in society, or they may even have been Germans. But their names owed their lustre only to their situation then and were no longer borne by anybody, nobody would even know whom I was talking about if I mentioned them, and if I did ever start to spell out a name, it merely made people think of flashy foreigners on the make. The people who, according to the old code, ought not to have been there turned out, to my great astonishment, to be close friends of others from extremely good families who had only come to be bored at the Princesse de Guermantes’s party because of their new friends. For if there was one thing which really characterized this social milieu, it was its prodigious capacity for coming down in the world.

  Whether relaxed or broken, the springs of the machine that kept people out no longer worked, and a thousand foreign bodies found their way in, removing all homogeneity, all standards and decorum, and all colour from society. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, like a senile dowager, made no response beyond a timid smile to the insolent servants who invaded her drawing-rooms, drank her orangeade and introduced her to their mistresses. Once again, the sensation of time’s slipping away, and a little part of my past disappearing with it, was aroused less vividly by the destruction of this cohe
rent whole (which the Guermantes salon had been) than by the very annihilation of the awareness of the thousand reasons, the thousand social gradations, why one man present today was naturally in his approved place, while another, rubbing shoulders with him, presented a suspicious appearance of novelty. This ignorance was not restricted to society, but encompassed politics and everything else. For memory is less long-lasting in individuals than life, in addition to which the very young, never having had the memories which their elders have lost, and now constituting a part of society, entirely legitimately, even in the genealogical sense, and people’s origins being forgotten or ignored, they accept them at the point in their elevation or descent where they happen to be, believing this to be how it has always been, that Mme Swann and the Princesse de Guermantes and Bloch had always been in the most elevated social position, that Clemenceau and Viviani had always been conservatives.102 And as some facts survive longer than others, and as the detested memory of the Dreyfus Affair enjoyed a vague persistence in their minds by virtue of what their fathers had told them about it, if one said that Clemenceau had been a Dreyfusard, they would say: ‘That’s not possible, you’re getting confused, he’s on completely the opposite side.’ Ministers with tarnished reputations and former prostitutes were now regarded as paragons of virtue. Someone having asked a young man from one of the best families if there was not some story about Gilberte’s mother, the young nobleman replied that it was true that in the first part of her life she had been married to an adventurer named Swann, but that she had subsequently married one of the most prominent men in society, the Comte de Forcheville. No doubt there were still several people in that drawing-room, the Duchesse de Guermantes, for instance, who would have smiled at that assertion (which in its denial of Swann’s social position seemed outrageous to me, even though I myself had in the past, at Combray, shared my great-aunt’s belief that Swann could not know ‘princesses’), and also some others who might have been there except that they hardly went out any more, the Duchesses de Montmorency, de Mouchy and de Sagan, who had been intimate friends of Swann’s and had never set eyes on this Forcheville, who was not received in society at the time when they still went out to parties. But the fact is that the society of those days, like the faces which are now altered, and the blonde hair replaced with white, no longer had any existence outside the memory of a few individuals, whose number was diminishing every day.

  During the war Bloch had stopped ‘going out’, stopped frequenting his old pre-war haunts, where he had cut such a sorry figure. On the other hand, he had not left off publishing those books of his, the absurd sophistry of which I was today doing my best to demolish so as not to be bogged down by it, works without originality but which provided young people, and a large number of fashionable women, with the impression of an unusually rarefied intellect, a sort of genius. It was thus after a complete break between his old and new social self, and in keeping with this new phase of his life, honoured and glorious, in a reconstituted society, that he had created the appearance of a great man. Young people naturally did not know that he was making his first entry into society at this advanced age, especially since the few names he had retained from his acquaintance with Saint-Loup enabled him to give his current prestige the illusion of infinite regress. At all events, he seemed to be one of those men of talent who have flourished in fashionable society in all epochs, and nobody dreamed that he had ever lived in any other way.

  The old assured me that everything about society had changed, that people were being received who would never have been received in their day, and, as people say, this was true and it was not. It was not true because they did not take account of the curve of time, which meant that those today saw new people at their point of arrival while the older generation remembered them at their point of departure. And when they, the old, had entered society, there were people who had just arrived there whose first steps on the ladder others again could remember. One generation is long enough to encompass the change, which in former times took centuries, by which a middle-class name like Colbert became an aristocratic one. And on the other hand it could be true, because when people’s social position changes, the most deeply rooted ideas and customs (as well as the fortunes and alliances of countries, and the hatreds between them) also change, and this includes even the principle of receiving only people who are chic. Snobbery not only changes its form, it could even disappear like the war, and radicals and Jews become members of the Jockey Club.

  If the new generations regarded the Duchesse de Guermantes as unimportant because of her friendship with actresses, etc., the now old ladies of her family still considered her an extraordinary individual, on the one hand because they knew everything about her birth, her heraldic primacy, her being on intimate terms with what Mme de Forcheville would have called royalties, but also because she did not bother to come to family gatherings, was bored by them, and they knew that they could never expect her at any of them. Her theatrical and political connections, which nobody knew very much about anyway, only increased her rarity, and therefore her prestige. So that while in artistic and political circles she was regarded as hard to define, a sort of defrocked member of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who associated with under-secretaries of state and stars of the stage, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain itself, if one were giving an evening party, one would say: ‘Is it even worth asking Oriane? She won’t come. We’d better, for form’s sake, I suppose, but we mustn’t expect anything.’ And if, at around half past ten, in a dazzling dress, a hard gleam in her eyes seeming to express her scorn for all her cousins, Oriane entered, pausing on the threshold with a sort of majestic disdain, and if she stayed for an hour, it was a greater occasion for the grand old lady who was giving the party than it would once have been for a theatre manager had Sarah Bernhardt, having made a vague promise of support which nobody thought would materialize, turned up and recited, with infinitely obliging kindness and a complete lack of affectation, not the one piece promised, but twenty others instead. Even though it was attended only by the most fashionable women, it was the presence of this Oriane, to whom private secretaries spoke condescendingly but who continued none the less (intellect rules the world) to try to make the acquaintance of more and more of them, which meant that this dowager’s party would be ranked over and above all the other dowagers’ parties of that season (as, again, Mme de Forcheville would have said), the ones which 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 great deal about me from the Duchesse de Guermantes, and who was one of the smartest women of the day. Her name was completely unknown to me, and those of the various Guermantes must not have been familiar to her, as she asked an American woman why it was that Mme de Saint-Loup seemed on such intimate terms with all the most glittering members of society in the room. Now this American was married to the Comte de Farcy, an obscure relation of the Forchevilles, for whom they represented all that was grandest in the world. She therefore replied, unaffectedly: ‘Wouldn’t it be because she is a Forcheville by birth? There’s nothing grander than that.’ But Mme de Farcy, although she naïvely thought the name of Forcheville was superior to that of Saint-Loup, at least knew what the latter meant. But the charming friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes was completely unaware of it and, being rather hare-brained, replied quite sincerely to a young girl who asked her how Mme de Saint-Loup was related to the master of the house, the Prince de Guermantes: ‘Through the Forchevilles’, information which the young girl passed on, as if she had always known it, to one of her friends, who, being nervy and cantankerous, turned as red as a turkey-cock the first time a gentleman told her that Gilberte was not related to the Guermantes through the Forchevilles, with the result that the gentleman thought he must be wrong, adopted the erroneous idea and lost no time in propagating it. Dinner-parties and fashionable gatherings were a sort of Berlitz school
for the American woman. She heard the names and repeated them without having first understood their value, and their precise significance. Somebody explained to another person, who asked whether Tansonville came to Gilberte from her father M. de Forcheville, that it did not come from him at all, that it was an estate belonging to her husband’s family, that Tansonville was close to Guermantes, and had belonged to Mme de Marsantes but, being heavily mortgaged, had been redeemed out of Gilberte’s dowry. Finally an elderly man, one of the old guard, having recalled the time when Swann was a friend of the Sagans and the Mouchys, and Bloch’s American friend having asked how I had known him, declared that I had met him in the house of Mme de Guermantes, not for a moment imagining that it was the country neighbour, the young friend of my grandfather, that he represented for me. Misapprehensions of this nature have been committed by the most famous men, and are regarded as particularly serious in all conservative circles. Saint-Simon, wishing to show that Louis XIV’s ignorance was such as to ‘make him fall sometimes, in public, into the most glaring absurdities’, gives us just two examples of this ignorance, to wit, first, that the King, not knowing that Renel was from the family of Clermont-Gallerande, nor that Saint-Herem was a Montmorin, treated the men as if they were of humble birth. As far as Saint-Herem is concerned we at least have the consolation of knowing that the sovereign did not die in that error, for he was disabused ‘very late in the day’ by M. de La Rochefoucauld. ‘Even then, adds Saint-Simon slightly pityingly, it had to be explained to him what these houses were, as their names meant nothing to him.’