‘But if she’s not dead, why don’t we see her any more, or her husband? asked a spinster who liked trying to be witty. – Well, I’ll tell you,’ replied her mother who, although in her fifties, never missed a party, ‘it’s because they’re old: people of that age don’t go out any more.’ Before one reached the cemetery it seemed there was a whole self-contained city of the old, its lamps permanently lit in the mist. Mme de Saint-Euverte put an end to the argument by saying that the Comtesse d’Arpajon had died a year ago, after a long illness, but that the Marquise d’Arpajon had also died since then, very quickly, ‘of something very ordinary’. A death which thereby resembled all these lives, and also thereby explained why it passed unnoticed, excused those who were confused. When she heard that Mme d’Arpajon really was dead, the spinster looked towards her mother with alarm, for she was afraid that learning of the death of one of her ‘contemporaries’ might ‘come as a blow’; in her mind she could already hear talk of her own mother’s death, with this explanation: ‘The death of Mme d’Arpajon had come as a great blow to her.’ But the spinster’s mother, on the contrary, felt as if she had won a victory in a competition against distinguished competitors every time that a person her age ‘disappeared’. Their deaths were the sole means by which she could still become pleasantly aware of her own life. The spinster noticed that her mother, who had not seemed sorry to say that Mme d’Arpajon was shut away in the sort of residence from which tired old people scarcely ever re-emerge, had been even less so to learn that the Marquise had entered the city after that, the one from which no traveller returns. This display of indifference on the part of her mother amused the spinster’s caustic mind. And later to entertain her girl-friends she told them a hilarious story of the light-hearted manner in which, as she claimed, her mother had rubbed her hands and said: ‘Well, goodness me, poor Mme d’Arpajon really does seem to be dead then.’ So even those who did not need this death in order to feel glad to be alive were made happy by it. For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits. This was not, though, how the death of M. Verdurin had been received by Elstir.
A lady left, because she had other parties to attend and had to go and have tea with two queens. It was that great society cocotte, whom I had known in the past, the Princess of Nassau. If it were not that she had lost some of her height, which gave her, her head now being less loftily poised than formerly, an air of having one foot in the grave, one could scarcely have said that she looked any older. She remained a Marie-Antoinette with her Austrian nose, her enchanting glance, well-preserved, embalmed by a thousand kinds of make-up adorably combined to give her face a tint of lilac. Hovering over her features was that confused and affectionate expression which indicated that she was obliged to leave, that she promised fondly to return, that she was slipping away quietly, but also that she was expected at a host of parties given by the best people. Born almost on the steps of a throne, married three times, kept for long periods and in luxury by great bankers, to say nothing of the countless fancies with which she had indulged herself, she bore lightly beneath her gown, mauve like her wonderful, round eyes and her painted face, the slightly confused memories of this crowded past. As she passed by me, slipping discreetly away, I greeted her. She recognized me, clasped me by the hand and fixed me with those round, mauve eyes which seemed to say: ‘How long it is since we saw one another! We must talk about it all another time.’ She gave my hand a forceful squeeze, not quite able to remember whether, one evening in her carriage as she was taking me back from the Duchesse de Guermantes’s house, there had not been some flirtation between us. She seemed, just to be on the safe side, to be alluding to something that had not happened, not a difficulty for her since she could appear deeply affected by a strawberry tart, and if ever she had to leave before the end of a piece of music, adopted an expression of despairing yet not final withdrawal. Uncertain, anyway, about the flirtation with me, her furtive squeeze of my hand did not delay her long and she spoke not a word to me. She merely looked at me, as I say, in a manner that signified: ‘It’s been so long!’ and in which one could see the succession of husbands and men who had kept her, and two wars, as her stellar eyes, like an astronomical clock carved into an opal, marked one after another all those solemn hours of the distant past which she rediscovered each time she meant to bid you a good-afternoon that was always in fact an apology. Then, leaving me, she started to trot towards the door, so that nobody would have to put themselves out for her and to show me that if she had not stopped to talk to me, it was because she was in a hurry, as well as to make up for the minute lost squeezing my hand and thus be on time for the Queen of Spain, with whom she was going to have tea alone. As she drew near to the door, I even thought she was going to break into a run. And she was, in fact, running towards her grave.
A stout lady greeted me, and during the short time she was speaking the most varied thoughts thronged my mind. I hesitated for a moment before replying to her, afraid that, recognizing people no better than I did, she might have thought that I was somebody else, then her confidence made me, on the contrary, out of fear that this might be somebody whom I had known extremely well, exaggerate the friendliness of my smile, while my looks continued to search her features for the name I could not find. As a candidate for the baccalaureate, in his uncertainty, fixes his eyes on the examiner’s face and hopes in vain to find there the answer for which he would do better to look in his own memory, I fixed my eyes on the features of the stout lady. They seemed to be those of Mme Swann, so my smile took on a more respectful quality, while my indecision began to diminish. Then a second later I heard the stout lady say: ‘You thought I was Mama, it’s true I am beginning to look very like her.’ And I recognized Gilberte.
We talked a great deal about Robert, Gilberte speaking of him in a deferential tone of voice, as if he had been a superior being whom she was anxious to show me she had admired and understood. We reminded one another how the ideas he used to expound in the old days about the art of warfare (for he had often repeated to her at Tansonville the same arguments that I had heard him expound at Doncières and after) had frequently, and on a great number of points, been proved right by the last war.
‘I can’t tell you how forcefully the slightest things he said to me at Doncières strike me now, as they did during the war. The last words of his that I heard, as we parted for the last time, were that he was expecting Hindenburg, as a Napoleonic general, to adopt one of the typically Napoleonic battle-plans, the one whose aim is to separate two enemies, perhaps, he added, the English and us. Now, scarcely a year after Robert’s death, a commentator for whom he had a profound admiration and who visibly exercised a major influence upon his military ideas, M. Henri Bidou,107 said that Hindenburg’s offensive in March 1918 was “the battle of separation of one concentrated army against two adversaries in linear formation, a manœuvre which the Emperor carried though successfully in 1796 in the Apennines, but which failed in Belgium in 1815”. A few minutes before, Robert had for my benefit compared battles to plays in which it is not always easy to see what the author meant, or where he may have changed his plan at some point along the way. If Robert had interpreted that German offensive of 1918 in this way, of course, he would not have been in agreement with M. Bidou. But other commentators think that it was Hindenburg’s success in the direction of Amiens, followed by his enforced halt, then his success in Flanders, then another halt, which made Amiens, and then Boulogne, accidental objectives that had not been designated in advance. And since anybody can reshape a play or a campaign, there are those who see in this offensive the beginnings of a lightning-like march on Paris, while others see it as a series of disorganized attacks designed to destroy the English army. And even if the orders given by the commander conflict with this or that conception, critics and commentators will always be free to say, as Mounet-Sully said to Coquelin108 when he tried to persuade him that Le Misanthrope was
not the melancholy drama he wanted to make it (for Molière, as his contemporaries attested, gave the part a comic interpretation and made audiences laugh at it): ‘Well, Molière was wrong then.’
‘And about aeroplanes, do you remember when he said (he always had such a good way of putting things): “Each army has to be a hundred-eyed Argus”? What a pity he wasn’t able to see his assertions proved true. – But he did, I replied, he knew that at the Battle of the Somme they started by blinding the enemy by putting his eyes out, destroying his aeroplanes and captive balloons. – Oh yes! that’s right.’ And since she lived now only for things of the mind, and as a result had become a bit pedantic: ‘And he used to claim that people would return to the ancient methods. Do you know that the Mesopotamian expeditions in this war’ (she must have read this, at the time, in Brichot’s articles) ‘are exactly the same, no changes at all, as the retreat in Xenophon? And that to move from the Tigris to the Euphrates, the English command used bellums, long, narrow boats, the local equivalent of gondolas, which the earliest Chaldeans also used?’ These words gave me a powerful sense of that stagnation of the past which in certain places is frozen indefinitely, through a kind of specific gravity, so that one can rediscover it exactly as it was.
‘There is one aspect of the war which he was beginning, I believe, to grasp, I said to her, that it is human, it has to be lived like love or hatred, it could be narrated like a novel, and that consequently if somebody goes round repeating that strategy is a science, it does nothing to help them understand war, because war is not strategic. The enemy has no more knowledge of our plans than we have of the ultimate intentions of the woman we love, and we may perhaps not even know these plans ourselves. Was it the Germans’ aim, in the March 1918 offensive, to take Amiens? We just don’t know. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and it was the way that events turned out, their advance in the west towards Amiens, that determined their plan. Even assuming that war were scientific, it would still have to be painted as Elstir painted the sea, the other way round, starting with illusions and beliefs which are then gradually rectified, in the same way as Dostoyevsky would tell the story of a life. But anyway war is quite definitely more medical than strategic, including unforeseen accidents the clinician was hoping to avoid, like the Russian Revolution.’
But I must admit that because of the books I had been reading at Balbec, not far from Robert, I was more impressed, during the fighting in France, to rediscover the word trenches in Mme de Sévigné, or in the Middle East, in connection with the siege of Kut-el-Amara (meaning Kut-the-emir, ‘just as we say Vaux-le-Vicomte and Bailleau-l’Évêque,’ the curé of Combray would have said, if he had extended his thirst for etymologies as far as Oriental languages), to see recurring, close to the name of Baghdad, the town of Basra, or Bassorah, mentioned so often in the Arabian Nights and which, each time he left Baghdad or before he returned there, was the port used for embarkation or disembarkation, long before General Townshend and General Gorringe, at the time of the Caliphs, by Sindbad the Sailor.
Throughout this conversation Gilberte had talked to me about Robert with a degree of deference which seemed directed more towards my former friend than towards her deceased husband. It was if she were saying: ‘I know how much you admired him. Please believe that I was capable of understanding what a superior being he was.’ And yet the love which she certainly no longer had for his memory was perhaps the distant cause of certain features of her present life. For example, Gilberte now had an inseparable friend in Andrée. And although the latter was beginning, thanks largely to her husband’s talent and her own intelligence, to penetrate, not of course into the Guermantes’ circle, but into a level of society infinitely smarter than the one she used to move in, people were very surprised that the Marquise de Saint-Loup should condescend to be her best friend. The fact that she was seemed to be a sign, on Gilberte’s part, of her fondness for what she took to be an artistic existence, and for what was undeniably a social decline. This explanation may be the true one. Another one, however, does come to my mind, always very much aware of the extent to which the images we see assembled somewhere are generally the reflection, or in some way or other the effect, of an earlier somewhat different but symmetrical grouping of other images, far removed from the second. My thought was that if Andrée, her husband and Gilberte were seen together every evening, it was perhaps because, so many years earlier, one might have seen Andrée’s future husband living with Rachel, then leaving her for Andrée. It is unlikely that Gilberte knew anything about it then, living as she did in a social world too remote and too elevated. But she must have found out about it later, when Andrée had risen and she herself had descended far enough for them to be able to notice one another. Then she must have been powerfully aware of the prestige of the woman for whom Rachel had been left by the man, no doubt extremely seductive, whom she had preferred to Robert. (The Princesse de Guermantes could be heard excitedly repeating, in a voice with a tinny rattle because of her false teeth: ‘Yes, that’s it, let’s get together, let’s make a set! I love these young people, so intelligent, so ready to join in! Oh, what a mushishian you are!’ And she stuck her great monocle in her round eye, half amused, half apologetic for not being able to sustain the gaiety for long, though she was determined to ‘join in’, to ‘make a set’, right to the bitter end.)
So perhaps the sight of Andrée reminded Gilberte of the youthful romance that her love for Robert had been, and also inspired in her a great respect for Andrée, who was still so deeply loved by a man who had been so much loved by Rachel, whom in turn Gilberte felt to have been more deeply loved by Robert than she herself had ever been. Or perhaps on the contrary those memories had nothing to do with Gilberte’s fondness for this artistic couple, and one had to look at it quite simply, as many did, as an illustration of two enthusiasms customarily inseparable among society women, for culture and for slumming. Gilberte perhaps had forgotten Robert as completely as I had forgotten Albertine, and even if she did know that it was Rachel whom the artist had left for Andrée she may never have thought, when she saw them, about something which never played any part in her liking for them. Whether my first explanation was not merely possible but true could have been discovered only through the testimony of those involved, the only recourse remaining in such cases, so long as they could bring to their confidences both insight and sincerity. But the first is rarely met with, and the second never. At all events, the sight of Rachel, now a celebrated actress, could not be very pleasant for Gilberte. I was therefore annoyed to learn that she was going to be reciting some verses in the course of the party, namely, it was announced, Musset’s ‘Le Souvenir’, and some fables by La Fontaine.
‘But what brings you to a crowded party like this? Gilberte asked me. It’s not at all how I think of you, running into you in this sort of shambles. In fact I’d expect to see you anywhere but at one of my aunt’s do’s. Because I’m afraid she is my aunt,’ she added pointedly, for having been Mme de Saint-Loup since slightly earlier than Mme Verdurin entered the family, she considered herself always to have been a Guermantes and to have been dishonoured by the misalliance her uncle had contracted by marrying Mme Verdurin and which, it is true, she had heard the family make fun of countless times in her presence, whereas it was naturally only behind her back that people talked about the misalliance Saint-Loup had contracted when he married her. Moreover she affected all the more disdain for this aunt with no breeding since, by one of those perverse impulses which make intelligent people want to escape their conventional manners, and also because of old people’s need for reminiscences, and lastly in an attempt to provide a past for her new smartness, the Princesse de Guermantes liked to say, talking about Gilberte: ‘Of course, it isn’t as if she was someone new to me, I knew the child’s mother very well, why, she was a great friend of my cousin Marsantes. It was in my house that she met Gilberte’s father. As for poor Saint-Loup, I knew all his family long ago, his uncle was a very close friend in the ol
d days at La Raspalière.’ ‘You see, the Verdurins weren’t bohemians at all,’ I would be told by people who had heard the Princesse de Guermantes saying things like this, ‘they’ve always been friends of de Saint-Loup’s family.’ I was probably the only person to know, through my grandfather, that the Verdurins were indeed not bohemians. But this was hardly because they had known Odette. But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been. ‘So, concluded Gilberte, since you do come down from your ivory tower sometimes, wouldn’t you prefer intimate little gatherings at my house, with just a few agreeable and intelligent people invited? Great soulless affairs like this one are not really designed for you. I saw you talking to my aunt Oriane, who has plenty of good qualities, but I don’t think it would be unfair, do you, to say that she’s hardly one of the intellectual elite.’
In Search of Lost Time Page 37