But one of Bloch’s friends having arrived late, Bloch had the pleasure of asking him whether he had ever heard Rachel, giving him an extraordinary account of her delivery, exaggerating it, and suddenly discovering, as he spoke, a curious pleasure in revealing this modernist diction to another person which he had not experienced at all in hearing it. Then Bloch, with exaggerated feeling, congratulated Rachel in his high-pitched voice and introduced his friend, who declared that he admired her above all others; and Rachel, who now knew ladies from the highest ranks of society, and unconsciously copied them, replied: ‘Oh, I’m terribly flattered, so honoured by your appreciation.’ Bloch’s friend asked her what she thought of La Berma. ‘Poor woman, it seems she’s in complete poverty. She wasn’t without, I won’t say talent, because at bottom she didn’t possess true talent, she only liked the most horrible things, but she had skill; her acting was more alive than other actresses’, and personally she was very decent, generous, ruined herself for other people, and now of course it’s been a long time since she’s earned anything at all, because for years the public hasn’t liked the sort of things she does… But anyway, she added with a laugh, I’m not really old enough to have heard her, naturally, except right at the end of her career when I was too young myself to form a judgment. – But wasn’t she a particularly good speaker of verse?’ ventured Bloch’s friend to flatter Rachel, who replied: ‘Oh, she couldn’t do it to save her life; it always came out sounding like prose, or Chinese, or Volapük, or anything except like a line of verse.’
But I was becoming aware that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts. Just as some author of the seventeenth century, who knew nothing of the French Revolution, or the discoveries of science, or the war, may be better than some writers of today, and just as even Fagon114 may have been as great a doctor as du Boulbon (superior genius compensating here for the shortfall in knowledge), so La Berma was, as they say, head and shoulders above Rachel, and time, by making Rachel a star at the same time as Elstir, had overrated a mediocrity and consecrated a genius.
It should come as no surprise that Saint-Loup’s former mistress should run La Berma down. She would have done it when she was young. Even if she would not have done it then, she certainly would now. If a society woman of the highest intelligence and with the kindest of natures becomes an actress, displays great talent in her new occupation, and meets with unalloyed success, one will be surprised, finding oneself in her company after some long time, to hear not her own way of speaking but the language of actresses, the special cattiness with which they refer to their colleagues, everything that rubs off on to a human being from the experience of ‘thirty years in the theatre’. Rachel had all this, and she did not start off in society.
‘Say what you like, it is wonderful, it has shape, it has character, it’s intelligent, nobody has ever spoken the lines like that,’ said the Duchesse, anxious in case Gilberte should start running it down. But she moved away towards another group to avoid a conflict with her aunt, who, none the less, went on to make a series of quite banal remarks to me about Rachel. Mme de Guermantes, in her declining years, had felt a new awakening of curiosity within her. She had nothing more to learn from society. The idea that she occupied the foremost position in it was as evident to her as the height of the blue sky above the earth. She did not believe there was any need to consolidate a position she deemed unshakeable. On the other hand, reading, going to the theatre, she would have wished each activity to go on for longer than it did; just as in the past, in the narrow little garden where one would drink orangeade, all that was most exquisite in the best society would come informally, among the scented breezes of evening and the haze of pollen, to sustain in her the taste for grand society, so now a different appetite made her want to know the reasons for this or that literary controversy, to know authors, even to know actresses. Her jaded mind demanded a new kind of nourishment. In order to get to know authors and actresses, she approached women with whom in the past she would not have wished to exchange cards, and who now turned their friendship with the editor of some review to good account in the hope of attracting the Duchesse to their houses. The first actress to be a guest thought that she was the only one in a remarkable setting, a setting which seemed less impressive to the second when she saw who had preceded her. The Duchesse, because on some evenings she received sovereigns, thought that her social position continued unchanged. In reality she, the only one who was truly of unalloyed blood, she who, having been born a Guermantes could sign herself ‘Guermantes-Guermantes’ when she did not sign herself ‘The Duchesse de Guermantes’, she who seemed something unusually precious even to her sisters-in-law, like a Moses saved from the waters, a Christ escaped into Egypt, a Louis XVII freed from the Temple, the purest of the pure, she had now, sacrificing no doubt to that hereditary need for spiritual nourishment which had brought about the social decline of Mme de Villeparisis, become herself a Mme de Villeparisis, at whose house snobbish women were afraid they might meet some unsuitable man or woman, and whom the younger people, seeing her present situation without knowing what had preceded it, imagined her to be a Guermantes from an inferior vintage, from an inferior year, a declassified Guermantes.
But since the best writers often cease, as old age approaches, or after an excess of production, to have any talent, society women may certainly be excused for no longer being witty after a certain time. Swann could no longer recognize in the harsh wit of the Duchesse de Guermantes the gentle humour of the Princesse de Laumes. Late in life, tiredness or even the least exertion made Mme de Guermantes say a huge number of silly things. Of course she was capable at any moment, as happened several times in the course of this party, of becoming once more the woman I had known and of making witty social observations. But alongside that, it frequently happened that, sparkling beneath the beautiful eyes, this conversation, which for so long had held intellectual sway over the most eminent men in Paris, still shone but, so to speak, emptily, to no effect. When the moment came for her to make a witty remark, she would pause for the same number of seconds as before, seemed to be hesitating, to be on the verge of production, but the joke that then appeared would be completely flat. Yet how few people noticed this! The continuity of the procedure made them believe in the continued survival of the wit, in the same way as people sometimes, superstitiously attached to some brand of pâtisserie, continue to order their petits fours from the same firm without noticing that they have become revolting. During the war, the Duchesse had already shown some signs of this diminution of her powers. If somebody said the word culture, she would stop him, smile, her eyes would light up, and she would come out with: ‘K-k-k-kultur’, which made her friends laugh, thinking this to be another illustration of the Guermantes wit. And indeed it was the same mould, the same intonation, the same smile as had delighted Bergotte, who for his part had also kept his characteristic sentence rhythms, his interjections, his ellipses, his epithets, though all in order to say nothing. But the newcomers were surprised and would sometimes say, if they had not chanced upon a day when she was funny and ‘in full possession of her faculties’, ‘How stupid she is!’
The Duchesse, it should be said, arranged matters so as to contain her slumming and not allow it to affect those members of her family from whom she derived her aristocratic aura. If, in order to fulfil her role as patroness of the arts, she had invited a minister or a painter to the theatre, and one or other had naïvely asked whether her husband or sister-in-law were not in the audience, the Duchesse, covering her nervousness with a bold show of hauteur, would arrogantly reply: ‘I have no idea. Once I leave my house, I have no knowledge of what my family does. As far as any politicians or artists are concerned, I am a widow.’ In this way she prevented over-attentive social climbers from being rebuffed – and herself from being reprimanded – by Mme de Marsantes and by Basin.
‘I can’t tell you what a tremendous pleasure it is to see you. Good heavens, when was the last time
I saw you?… – I was calling on Mme d’Agrigente, I often used to see you there. Naturally I used to go there often, dear boy, as Basin was in love with her at the time. You were always most likely to find me at the house of his most recent sweetheart, because he would say: “You must go and visit her, without fail.” Actually, I thought there was something a little inappropriate about the kind of “thank-you” calls he sent me to make once he had achieved his aim. I got used to it quite quickly, but the most boring thing about it was that I had to keep up the friendship after he had broken off the relationship. It always made me think of that line by Victor Hugo:
Emporte le bonheur and laisse-moi l’ennui115
‘Of course, as the poem goes on to say, I still entered with a smile, but really it wasn’t fair, he ought to have left me the right to be fickle where his mistresses were concerned, because once I had accumulated all of his rejects, I ended up not having an afternoon to myself. All the same, that seems a relatively pleasant period compared with the present. Of course, the fact that he has started deceiving me again can only be flattering, because it makes me feel younger. But I preferred his old way of doing it. You know, it’s been such a long time since he was last unfaithful to me that he couldn’t remember how to do it. Still, we get on all right together, we talk to each other, we’re even fond of each other, up to a point,’ the Duchesse said to me, fearful in case I should think that they had separated completely, rather as one says of somebody who is very ill: ‘But he can still speak quite well, I read to him for an hour this morning.’ She added: ‘I’ll go and tell him you’re here, he’d like to see you.’ And she went over to the Duc, who was sitting beside a lady on a sofa, deep in conversation. I was surprised to see that he was almost the same, merely with whiter hair, being still as majestic and as handsome as ever. But when he saw his wife coming to talk to him, he looked so furious that all she could do was retreat. ‘He is busy, I don’t know what he’s doing, you’ll see in a minute,’ Mme de Guermantes said to me, preferring to leave me to work things out for myself.
Bloch having come up to us and asked, on behalf of his American lady, the identity of a young duchess who was among the guests, I replied that she was the niece of M. de Bréauté, at which, as the name meant nothing to him, Bloch asked for further explanation. ‘Oh, Bréauté!’ exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, turning to me, ‘you remember all that, how ancient it all seems, how long ago! Well, he was a snob. These were people who lived near my mother-in-law’s house. Not of any interest to you, M. Bloch; though our friend here may be amused by it, since he knew all those people long ago, at the same time as I did,’ added Mme de Guermantes, gesturing towards me, and demonstrating by these words, in a number of ways, just how long a period of time had elapsed. Mme de Guermantes’s friendships and opinions had been so often renewed since then that she retrospectively thought of her charming Babal as a snob. In another connection, not only was he now a thing of the past, but, something I had never realized when in my first days in society I had taken him for one of the essential notables of Paris, someone who would always be associated with its social history, like Colbert with that of the reign of Louis XIV, he too bore the mark of his provincial origins, having been a country neighbour of the old Duchesse, which was the guise in which the Princesse de Laumes had made his acquaintance. Yet now Bréauté, stripped of his wit, and relegated to years so long ago that he dated them (which proved that he had since been entirely forgotten by the Duchesse) and to the neighbourhood of the Guermantes, was, which I could never have believed on that first evening at the Opéra-Comique when he had appeared to me like a god of the sea inhabiting his underwater lair, a link between the Duchesse and me, because she recalled that I had known him, therefore that I was a friend of hers, if not sprung from the same social world as her at least an inhabitant of the same social world as her for much longer than many of the people present, she recalled this, but so inaccurately as to have forgotten certain details which had seemed to me then to be essential, namely that I did not go to Guermantes, and was only a middle-class boy from Combray at the time when she came to Mlle Percepied’s nuptial mass, and that for the whole year after her appearance at the Opéra-Comique, despite all Saint-Loup’s entreaties she never invited me to her house. To me this seemed terribly important, because it was precisely at this point that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter. But to her it just seemed to be a part of the same ordinary life as always and, since after a certain point I had dined with her often and had also, even before that, been a friend of her aunt and her nephew, she was not entirely clear at what period our friendship had begun, and was unaware of the serious anachronism she was committing by making this friendship begin several years too soon. For this meant that I would have known the Mme de Guermantes of the name of Guermantes, which it was impossible to know, and that I would have been received within the name with the golden syllables, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, whereas I had quite simply been to dinner in the house of a lady who already by then meant nothing more to me than any other, and who had occasionally invited me, not to descend into the underwater kingdom of the Nereids, but to spend the evening in her cousin’s box at the theatre. ‘If you want to know about Bréauté, and it’s not really worth the bother, she added, turning to Bloch, ask our friend here (who is a hundred times more worth knowing): he must have dined at my house with him at least fifty times. Wasn’t it in my house that you met him? At any rate, that’s where you met Swann.’ I was as much surprised that she could have thought that I might have met M. de Bréauté anywhere else, and therefore that I might have moved in those circles before I met her, as I was to realize that she thought that it was in her house that I had met Swann. Less untruthfully than Gilberte, when she said of Bréauté: ‘He is an old country neighbour of mine, I do enjoy talking about Tansonville with him’ when in the past he never visited them at Tansonville, I could have said: ‘He was a country neighbour of ours who often used to come and see us in the evening’ of Swann, who in fact reminded me of things quite other than the Guermantes.
‘I don’t know what to tell you. He was a man who talked about nothing but royalty. He had a stock of odd anecdotes about some of the Guermantes, and my mother-in-law, and Mme de Varambon before she joined the Princess of Parma’s household. But who remembers Mme de Varambon these days? Our friend here, yes, he knew all those people, but all that’s gone now, they are not even names any longer, and what’s more they didn’t deserve to be remembered.’ And I realized, despite the unity which society appears to be, and in which in fact social relations reach their maximum concentration and everything is interconnected, that provinces remain within it, or at least that Time creates provinces, the names of which change, and which are no longer comprehensible to those who arrive there only when the pattern has altered. ‘She was a good lady who said things of unbelievable silliness,’ went on the Duchesse, who, insensitive to that poetry of the incomprehensible which is one of the effects of time, drew out the comic element in everything, anything that resembled the Meilhac116 type of literature, or that nourished the Guermantes wit. ‘There was a time when she had an obsession with taking a kind of cough drop they used to have then, which was called’ (she continued, laughing herself at the name once so special, so widely known, and now so unfamiliar to the people around her) ‘Géraudel pastilles. “Mme de Varambon, my mother-in-law, said to her, if you carry on wolfing those Géraudel pastilles like that you’ll give yourself a stomach ache. – But Mme la Duchesse, replied Mme de Varambon, how could they possibly give me a stomach ache when they go straight to the bronchial tubes?” And she’s also the one who said: “The Duchesse has a beautiful cow, so beautiful that people are always thinking it’s a bull.” ’ And Mme de Guermantes would happily have carried on telling stories about Mme de Varambon, of which we knew hundreds, but we realized that in Bloch’s ill-informed memory her name did not evoke any of the images which rose up for us as soon as Mme de Varambon
or M. de Bréauté or the Prince d’Agrigente were mentioned, and for that very reason, perhaps became endowed in his mind with a glamour which I knew to be exaggerated but which I could understand, although not because I had felt it myself, our own mistakes and our own absurdities rarely having the effect, even when we have seen through them, of making us more indulgent to those of others.
In Search of Lost Time Page 40