One repercussion of this perennial forgetting, which so rapidly covers over the most recent past, of this invasive ignorance, is the creation of a minor branch of knowledge, all the more valuable for being seldom encountered, concerning itself with people’s genealogies, their true situation, the reasons of love, money or whatever for which they became allied, or misallied, with this or that family, knowledge prized in all societies where a conservative spirit rules, knowledge which my grandfather possessed in the highest degree, as it concerned the middle class of Combray and Paris, knowledge which Saint-Simon prized so much that at the point where he celebrates the wonderful intelligence of the Prince de Conti, before he even mentions learning, or rather as if this were its finest form, he praises him for having been ‘a very fine mind, luminous, just, precise, extensive, of infinite reading, who forgot nothing, and knew the genealogies, their chimeras and their realities, of a discriminating politeness that recognized rank and merit, doing everything that the princes of the blood should do, and no longer do; he even explained himself, and what he thought about their assumption of extra powers. The history he learned from books and from conversation provided him with the material to contribute the most helpful comments he could on matters of birth, offices, etc.’ As applied to a less glittering world, to everything pertaining to the middle class of Combray and Paris, my grandfather was no less precisely knowledgeable about the subject, and relished it no less eagerly. Connoisseurs and enthusiasts of this sort, who knew that Gilberte was not a Forcheville, nor Mme de Cambremer a Méséglise, nor the younger Mme de Cambremer a Valentinois, had become very few in number. Very few, perhaps not even recruited from the upper ranks of the aristocracy (it is not necessarily the devout, nor even Catholics, who are best-informed about the Golden Legend103 or thirteenth-century stained-glass windows), but often from a minor aristocracy, more keenly interested in something with which they have scarcely any contact, and which they have all the more leisure to study as they spend less time in it, but fond of getting together, meeting one another, giving delicious group dinners, like those of the Society of Bibliophiles or the Friends of Rheims Cathedral, dinners at which genealogies are savoured and appreciated. Wives are not admitted, but the husbands, when they get home, all say to their wives: ‘That was a most interesting dinner. There was a M. de La Raspelière there who kept us all spellbound as he explained how Mme de Saint-Loup, the one with the pretty daughter, is not a Forcheville at all. It’s just like a novel.’
The friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes was not only smart and charming, she was also intelligent, and conversation with her was enjoyable, but it was made difficult for me because it was not only my interlocutress herself whose name was new to me, but those of a great number of the people she was talking about and who currently made up the core of society. It is true, on the other hand, as she wanted to listen to what I had to say, that many of the names I mentioned will have meant absolutely nothing to her, they were all sunk in oblivion, or at least those who had shone only with the light of their own individual celebrity and were not the permanent, generic name of some famous aristocratic family (whose exact title the young woman seldom knew, making mistaken assumptions about birth or descent on the basis of names misheard at dinner the previous evening), and she had never, in most instances, heard them pronounced, having started moving in society (not only because she was still young, but because she had not long lived in France, and had not been received immediately) only some years after I myself had withdrawn from it. The name of Mme Leroi happened to fall from my lips, I do not know how, and by chance my interlocutress, thanks to some elderly friend of Mme de Guermantes who was an admirer of hers, had heard of her. But inaccurately, as I saw from the disdainful tone with which this snobbish young woman replied: ‘Yes, I know who Mme Leroi is, she’s an old friend of Bergotte,’ a tone which meant ‘a person whom I should never have wished to have under my roof’. I understood at once that the old friend of Mme de Guermantes, as a perfect gentleman, imbued with the Guermantes ethos, one of the characteristics of which was not to seem to attach any importance to aristocratic connections, had thought it too silly and too anti-Guermantes to say: ‘Mme Leroi, who was a friend of all royalty and of every duchess’, and had preferred to say: ‘She was very entertaining. Do you know what she said to Bergotte one day?’ Only, for people who do not have the requisite knowledge, information drawn from conversation like this is the equivalent of the stuff fed by the press to the people, so that they believe in turn, according to their newspaper, either that M. Loubet and M. Reinach are thieves or that they are great citizens. For my interlocutress, Mme Leroi had been a kind of Mme Verdurin, in her first manifestation, with less brilliance and with her little set limited to Bergotte alone. That young woman is, though, one of the last to have heard, by pure chance, the name of Mme Leroi. Nobody today any longer knows who she is, which is really as it should be. Her name does not even figure in the index to the posthumous memoirs of Mme de Villeparisis, whose thoughts were so often occupied with Mme Leroi. The Marquise did not talk about Mme Leroi, less because the latter had not been very well disposed towards her while she was alive than because nobody could be interested in her after her death, and her silence was dictated less by feminine social resentment than by the literary tact of the writer. My conversation with Bloch’s smart friend was charming, because the young woman was intelligent, but this difference between our two vocabularies made it both uneasy and instructive. It is in vain that we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to age, that the most solid of thrones and fortunes crumble, that fame is ephemeral, the manner by which we become aware, and so to speak take a snapshot of this moving universe, swept along by Time, contradictorily, immobilizes it. With the result that we see as still young the people whom we knew when they were young, while those who were old when we met them we retrospectively adorn in the past with the virtues of old age, that we trust unreservedly in the credit of a millionaire and in the support of a sovereign, understanding rationally, but not actually believing, that they may tomorrow be fugitives, stripped of power. In a more restricted field, one purely social, as in the case of a simple problem which leads on to difficulties more complex but still of the same order, the lack of intelligibility which resulted, in my conversation with the young woman, from the fact that we had lived in a certain society at twenty-five years’ distance from each other, gave me the impression, and might have strengthened within me the sense, of History. Moreover, it must be said that this ignorance of the true situation which every ten years makes individuals suddenly emerge in their current guise, as if the past never existed, which prevents a newly disembarked American woman from seeing that M. de Charlus had held the highest social position in Paris at a time when Bloch had had none, and that Swann, who put himself to such trouble for M. Bon-temps, had been treated with the greatest friendship by the Prince of Wales,104 this ignorance does not exist only among the newcomers, but among those who have always frequented adjacent sections of society, and this ignorance, in the latter as in the others, is also an effect (but this time operating upon the individual rather than the social stratum) of Time. There would doubtless be no point in our changing our social circle or our way of life, as our memory, by retaining the thread of our personal identity, attaches to it at successive periods the memory of the societies in which we have lived, even if forty years earlier. Bloch in the house of the Prince de Guermantes was perfectly aware of the modest Jewish surroundings in which he had lived at the age of eighteen, and Swann, when he no longer loved Mme Swann but a woman who served tea at the same Colombin’s where Mme Swann had for a while believed that it was chic to go, as she had of the tea-room in the rue Royale, Swann knew perfectly well his own social standing, remembered Twickenham;105 he was in no doubt at all about his reasons for going to Colombin’s rather than to the Duchesse de Broglie’s, and was perfectly aware that, had he himself been a thousand times less ‘chic’, whether he went to Colombin’s or t
o the Ritz would not have made him one iota more fashionable, as anyone who can pay may go to either. And Bloch’s friends or Swann’s probably also remembered the little Jewish circle or the invitations to Twickenham, and so friends, like the slightly distinct ‘selves’ of Swann and Bloch, did not separate in their memories the sordid Bloch of the past from the smart Bloch of today, or the Swann of Buckingham Palace from the Swann in his latter days at the Colombin. These friends though were, in a way, Swann’s neighbours in life; their own had developed on a line sufficiently close to his for their memory to be fairly full of him; but in the case of others less close to Swann, at a greater distance from him not so much socially as in terms of intimacy, who knew him more vaguely and met him less often, the less numerous memories had rendered their conception of him more wavering. Now, when it comes to comparative strangers like this, after thirty years one hardly remembers anything specific enough to extend back into the past and alter the worth of the person standing in front of one’s eyes. I had heard, during the last years of Swann’s life, even society people, when his name was mentioned say, as if it were his claim to notoriety: ‘You’re speaking of the Swann of Colombin’s?’ And I now heard even people who ought to have known better saying, when they were speaking of Bloch: ‘The Guermantes Bloch? The close friend of the Guermantes?’ These errors, which divide up a life and, by isolating its present, turn the man spoken of into another man, a different man, a creation of the day before, a man who is no more than the condensation of his current habits (although he carries within himself the continuity of his life which links him to the past), these errors too are dependent on Time, but they are not a social phenomenon but a phenomenon of memory. An example occurred at that very moment, not quite of the same sort of thing admittedly but all the more striking for that, of the way this forgetting modifies the way individuals appear to us. A long time ago, a young nephew of Mme de Guermantes, the Marquis de Villemandois, had been persistently insolent towards me, which had obliged me by way of reprisal to adopt an attitude in respect of him so insulting that we had tacitly become as it were enemies. While I was reflecting on Time at this party at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, he introduced himself to me, saying that he believed I had known his parents, that he had read articles by me and that he wished to make, or renew, my acquaintance. It is true that with age he had, like many others, lost his impertinence and become more serious, that he no longer had the same arrogance, and also that people were talking about me, though only on the strength of some rather slight articles, in the social circles in which he moved. But these reasons for his cordiality and his advances were only secondary. The principal reason, or at least the one which allowed the others to come into play, is that, either having a worse memory than me, or having paid less sustained attention to my retorts that I once did to his attacks, I then being a less important person in his eyes than he was in mine, he had entirely forgotten our hostilities. At the most, my name reminded him that he must have seen me, or some member of my family, at the house of one of his aunts. And being uncertain whether to introduce or to re-introduce himself, he hastened to mention his aunt, in whose house he was sure that he must have met me, recalling that people there often spoke of me, but not of our quarrels. A name, that is very often all that remains for us of an individual, not when he is dead even, but while he is still alive. And our conceptions of him are so vague and so bizarre, and correspond so little to those which we had of him in the past, that we have entirely forgotten that we came very close to fighting a duel with him, whereas we do remember that, as a child, he wore strange yellow leggings in the Champs-Élysées, where he, on the other hand, despite our assurances of it, has no memory of having played with us.
Bloch had come bounding into the room like a hyena. I thought: ‘He is welcome in drawing-rooms he could never have got into twenty years ago.’ But he was also twenty years older. He was nearer his death. So what benefit was it to him? Close up, in the translucency of a face in which, from further away and in poor light I had seen nothing but youthful gaiety (whether it actually still survived there or because I was evoking it), was visible the almost frightening, deeply anxious face of an old Shylock, waiting, with his make-up on, in the wings, just about to go on stage, already reciting his first line under his breath. In ten years, in drawing-rooms like this whose inertia will have made him a leading light, he will enter on crutches, people will address him as Maître, he will find it a chore to be obliged to go the La Trémoïlles. What benefit would this be to him?
From changes brought about in society I could all the more easily extract truths which were important and worthy to hold one part of my book together, as they were not in any way, as I would have been tempted to believe at the outset, peculiar to our time. At the time when, scarcely arrived in society myself, I first entered, even more of a newcomer than Bloch himself today, the Guermantes’ social circle, I must have regarded as an integral part of that circle elements absolutely different, recently incorporated, and which would have seemed curiously new to older members from whom I did not differentiate them, who in turn, believed by the dukes of that period always to have been members of the Faubourg, had either themselves been, or their fathers or their grandfathers had once been, newly elevated to their position. So much so that it was not the quality of men in the best society which rendered this society so glittering, but the fact of having been assimilated more or less completely by this society which made people, who fifty years later would all appear similar in standing, into society people. Even in the past to which I had traced the Guermantes name in order to give it its full grandeur, quite rightly, incidentally, as under Louis XIV the Guermantes, being practically royal, were much grander figures than they are today, the same phenomenon which I was noticing now used also to arise. Did they not then ally themselves with the Colbert family, for example, a family which today, it is true, seems very noble to us since to marry a Colbert seems a good match even for a La Rochefoucauld? Yet it is not because the Colberts, then ordinary middle-class folk, were noble that the Guermantes allied themselves with them, it is because the Guermantes allied themselves with them that they were ennobled. If the name of Haussonville dies with the present representative of that house, it will perhaps owe its lustre to its descent from Mme de Staël, although before the Revolution M. d’Haussonville, one of the first lords of the kingdom, regarded it as a source of pride that he could tell M. de Broglie that he was not acquainted with Mme de Staël’s father and was therefore no more able than M. de Broglie himself to introduce him, never for a moment imagining that their sons would one day marry, one the daughter and the other the grand-daughter of the authoress of Corinne. I realized, after what the Duchesse de Guermantes had said to me, that in those circles I might have played the part of an untitled man about town, whom people readily assume always to have had links with the aristocracy, such as Swann had at one time been, and before him M. Lebrun, M. Ampère, and all those friends of the Duchesse de Broglie, who herself, at the outset, was very far from being a member of the best society. The first times I dined with Mme de Guermantes how I must have shocked men like M. de Beauserfeuil, not so much by my mere presence, as by the remarks I made, indicating that I was entirely ignorant of the memories which constituted his past and which shaped the image he had of society! One day, when Bloch, grown very old, has a fairly long-standing memory of the Guermantes drawing-room as it presented itself to his eyes at this moment, he will feel just the same astonishment, just the same ill-humour at the presence of certain intrusions and certain displays of ignorance. Yet on the other hand, he would doubtless have acquired, and would dispense to those around him, those qualities of tact and discretion which I had thought the prerogative of men such as M. de Norpois, but which take fresh shape and become incarnate in those who seem to us more than anybody else to preclude them.
Again, the opportunity which had arisen for me to be admitted into the Guermantes circle had seemed something exceptional to me. But if I look
ed outside myself and my immediate social surroundings, I saw that this social phenomenon was not so isolated as had at first appeared to me, and that from the fountain-basin of Combray where I was born quite a number of water-jets turned out to have been raised in symmetry with me above the liquid mass which had fed them all. No doubt, circumstances always having something particular about them, and characters something individual, it was in a quite different manner that Legrandin, in his turn (through the curious marriage of his nephew), had penetrated into these circles, or that Odette’s daughter had married into them, or that Swann himself, and then finally I had come to them. For me, who had always been wrapped up in my own life, and seen it from within, Legrandin’s seemed to have no connection with mine, seemed to have followed quite opposite paths, in the same way as a stream in a deep valley does not see a divergent stream, even though, despite the deviations of its course, it issues into the same river. But taking a bird’s-eye view, as does the statistician, who disregards the reasons of sentiment or the unavoidable acts of imprudence which may lead to the death of any individual, and counts only the number of people who die per year, one would see that a number of individuals who shared the same social background, the depiction of which occupied the first part of this narrative, had ended up in a completely different one, and it is probable that, since an average number of marriages takes place each year in Paris, every other rich and cultivated middle-class circle would have contributed an approximately equal proportion of people like Swann, like Legrandin, like me and like Bloch, all of whom would be found flowing into the ocean of ‘high society’. Moreover, they recognized one another there, for if the young Comte de Cambremer astonished the whole of society with his distinction, his refinement, his sober elegance, I recognized in these – at the same time as in his winning looks and his burning desire to succeed – the same characteristics as those of his uncle Legrandin, that is, of an old friend, supremely middle-class for all his aristocratic appearance, of my parents.
In Search of Lost Time Page 35