The reality, which was really quite insignificant, of this distant time was so lost that when somebody not far away from me asked whether the Tansonville estate had come to Gilberte from her father M. de Forcheville, somebody else replied: ‘Oh, no! It comes from her husband’s family. It’s all on the Guermantes side. Tansonville is very close to Guermantes. It belonged to Mme de Marsantes, the mother of the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Only it was very heavily mortgaged. So it was given to him as a wedding present and redeemed out of Mlle de Forcheville’s fortune.’ And another time, somebody to whom I mentioned Swann, trying to find a way of explaining what it meant to be a man of wit in that period, said: ‘Oh yes, the Duchesse de Guermantes told me some witticisms of his; he was an old gentleman whom you met at her house, I think?’117
The past had been so transformed in the Duchesse’s mind (or the demarcations which existed in mine had always been so absent from hers that things which had constituted events for me had passed unnoticed by her) that she could imagine that I had met Swann in her house and M. de Bréauté elsewhere, thus constructing for me a past as a figure in society which she extended back too far. For this sense of the passage of time that I had just acquired was one the Duchesse also possessed, in her case with an opposite illusion to mine of believing it to be shorter than it was, she, on the contrary, exaggerating it, making it go too far back, most notably in respect of that immeasurable line of demarcation between the time when she became first a name for me, then the object of my love – and the time when she had been no more to me than any other society woman. I went to her house only in this second period, when for me she was a different person. But in her own eyes, these differences did not exist, and she would not have thought it at all odd that I might have been in her house two years earlier, not knowing that she was a different person, even with a different door-mat, and her personality not revealing to her, as it did to me, any discontinuity.
I said to the Duchesse de Guermantes: ‘That reminds me of the first evening I went to the Princesse de Guermantes’s, when I thought I might not have been invited and that they would show me the door, and when you wore a red dress and red shoes. – Good heavens, that was all so long ago,’ said the Duchesse de Guermantes, thus accentuating my impression of the passage of time. She gazed melancholically into the middle distance, yet dwelt particularly on the red dress. I asked her to describe it for me, which she was glad to do. ‘You couldn’t wear something like that now. But it was the sort of dress we used to wear in those days. – But surely it was very pretty, wasn’t it?’ I said. She was always afraid of giving herself away by what she said, of saying something which might diminish her in other people’s eyes. ‘Oh, yes, I thought it was very pretty, myself. People don’t wear that sort of thing now because it isn’t done at present. But it’ll come back, all fashions come round again, in dresses, in music, in painting,’ she added forcefully, for she thought there was something rather original about this philosophy. But the sadness of growing old brought with it a sense of tiredness which her smile struggled to overcome: ‘Are you sure about the red shoes? I thought that they were gold.’ I assured her that they were for ever fixed in my mind, without saying anything about the circumstances which enabled me to be so certain. ‘It is very kind of you to remember that,’ she said to me fondly, for women refer to any recollection of their beauty as kindness, as artists do when you admire their work. Besides, however distant the past may be, when one is as capable a woman as the Duchesse, it need not have been forgotten. ‘Do you remember’, she said to me, as a way of thanking me for my memory of her dress and her shoes, ‘that we brought you home, Basin and I? You had a girl who was coming to see you after midnight. Basin laughed so much at the thought of somebody calling on you at that time of night.’ Albertine had indeed come to see me after the Princesse de Guermantes’s party. I remembered it as clearly as the Duchesse, although Albertine was as unimportant to me now as she would have been to Mme de Guermantes, if Mme de Guermantes had known that the girl because of whom I had not been able to go in was Albertine. Long after the poor departed have gone from our hearts, their insignificant dust continues to be mingled, to be used as an alloy, with the events of the past. And although we no longer love them, it sometimes happens that when we are describing a room, or a garden path, or a road, where at a certain time they once were, we are obliged, in order to fill the gap they occupied, to mention them, but without missing them, without naming them even, and without enabling anybody else to identify them. (Mme de Guermantes was hardly likely to have identified the girl who was due to visit me that evening, had never known who she was and only mentioned her because of the eccentricity of the time and the circumstances.) Such are the final, and unenviable, forms in which we survive.
If the judgments pronounced by the Duchesse on Rachel were, in themselves, ordinary, they none the less interested me in that they too marked a new hour on the dial. For the Duchesse had not forgotten, any more than had Rachel, the evening which the latter had spent in her house, but her memory had undergone no less of a transformation. ‘I must say, she told me, I’m all the more interested to hear her, and to hear her recite, because it was I who discovered her, saw how good she was, sang her praises and made people take notice of her at a time when she had no reputation and everybody thought she was ridiculous. Yes, my dear friend, it may come as a surprise to you, but the first place she ever performed in public was in my house! Oh yes, while all the so-called avant-garde, like my new cousin,’ pointing ironically towards the Princesse de Guermantes, who, in Oriane’s eyes, was still Mme Verdurin, ‘would have left her to die of hunger without condescending to hear her, I had decided that she was interesting, and I had offered her a fee to come and perform in my house in front of the most distinguished and influential audience I could get. I may say, though the phrase is a bit silly and pretentious, for in the end real talent doesn’t need any help, that I launched her. But of course she didn’t need me.’ I made a vague gesture of protest, and saw that Mme de Guermantes was quite ready to accept the opposite argument: ‘You disagree? You think talent needs supporting, needs someone to put it under the spotlight? You may be right, you know. It’s funny, Dumas used to tell me exactly the same thing, years ago. In this case I’m extremely flattered if I’ve been able to do anything, however small, obviously not to improve her talent, but to promote the reputation of an artist like her.’ Mme de Guermantes preferred to abandon her idea that talent will break through on its own, like an abscess, because the alternative was more flattering for her, but also because for some time now, receiving newcomers to society, and being generally tired, she had become almost humble, questioning other people and asking their opinions before forming one of her own. ‘I don’t need to tell you, she went on, that the intelligent public that calls itself society did not understand a word of what she did. They complained, they laughed. It was no good my saying to them: “This is new, this is interesting, it’s something that’s never been done before,” they didn’t believe me, as nobody has ever believed me about anything. It was just the same with the piece she gave, it was something by Maeterlinck, terribly well-known now, but then everybody thought it was absurd, except me, I thought it was wonderful. It does strike me as surprising, when I think about it, that a country girl like me, with only the same education as the other provincial girls, should have had such an instant affinity for things like that. I couldn’t have told you why, of course, but I liked it, it moved me; and Basin, who is not a sensitive soul, was struck by the effect that it had on me. He said to me: “I don’t want you listening to this nonsense any more, it’s making you ill.” And it was true, people think I’m an unfeeling woman, when really I’m just a bundle of nerves.’
At this moment an unexpected incident occurred. A footman came to tell Rachel that La Berma’s daughter and son-in-law were asking to speak to her. We have seen how La Berma’s daughter had resisted her husband’s wish that Rachel should be asked to invite them. But after the departur
e of the one guest, the young couple had grown increasingly annoyed as they sat with their mother, the thought that other people were enjoying themselves tormented them, and so, taking advantage of a moment when La Berma had retired to her room, spitting a little blood, they had hastily thrown on some smarter clothes, called a cab and come to the Princesse de Guermantes’s without an invitation. Rachel, surmising what had happened and secretly flattered, put on an arrogant tone of voice and told the footman that she could not be disturbed, that they should write a note to explain the purpose of their unusual approach. The footman returned bearing a card on which La Berma’s daughter had scribbled that she and her husband had been unable to resist their desire to hear Rachel, and begged to be allowed to enter. Rachel smiled at the transparency of their pretext and at her own triumph. She sent back word that she was very sorry but that she had finished her recital. The footmen in the ante-room, where the couple’s wait still continued, were already beginning to snigger at the two rejected supplicants. The shame of being snubbed, and her recollection of Rachel’s insignificance in comparison to her mother, drove La Berma’s daughter to pursue to its ultimate conclusion a process on which she had originally only ventured in a search for entertainment. She sent to ask whether Rachel, as a favour, might allow her, even though she had not been able to hear her, to shake her hand. Rachel was at that moment talking to an Italian prince, said to be fascinated by the attraction of her large fortune, the origin of which was somewhat concealed by her social connections; she summed up the reversal of position which now put the children of La Berma at her feet. After giving a comic account of the incident to everybody, she asked that the young couple be allowed to enter, which they did without needing to be asked twice, ruining at a stroke La Berma’s position in society, as they had destroyed her health. Rachel understood this, and also realized that gracious civility would give her a reputation in society for kindness and them a reputation for craven self-abasement, something which a denial would not have achieved. So she received them with exaggeratedly open arms, saying in the manner of an admired patroness able, for a moment, to ignore her grandeur: ‘Oh, you’re here, I’m so glad. The Princesse will be delighted.’ Unaware that in theatrical circles it was believed that the invitations came from her, she may perhaps have been afraid that by denying entry to La Berma’s children she might make them doubt, not her good-will, which would not have bothered her, but her influence. The Duchesse de Guermantes moved away instinctively, for the more anyone seemed to be striving for social acceptance, the more they sank in her esteem. She found nothing to respect in the present situation except Rachel’s kindness, and would have turned her back on La Berma’s children if they had been introduced to her. Rachel however was already composing in her head the gracious phrases with which she would crush La Berma backstage the following day: ‘I was heartbroken, mortified, that your daughter had to wait so long outside the door. If I had only realized! She sent me in card after card.’ She was delighted to deal La Berma this blow. Yet she might have shrunk from delivering it if she had known that it would be fatal. People like to have victims, but they like to let them stay alive, not put themselves in the wrong instead. Besides, what had she done that was wrong? A few days later she was to say, with a laugh: ‘It’s all a bit much, I wanted to be nicer to her children than she ever was to me, and because of that they’re practically saying I murdered her. The Duchesse will be my witness.’ It seems that, all the unpleasant emotions and all the artificiality of the theatrical life descending to their children without the concomitant relief of passionate work that the mothers had, the great actresses often die victims of domestic conspiracies woven around them, as happened to them so many times at the end of the plays in which they brusquely lifting his head, withacted.The Duchesse’s life, nevertheless, was very unhappy, and for a reason one incidental consequence of which was that the Duc, likewise, had started to move in lower social circles. Long tamed now by his advancing years, though still robust, he had ceased to be unfaithful to Mme de Guermantes, but had suddenly fallen in love with Mme de Forcheville, without anyone quite knowing how or when the liaison had started. (When one considered how old Mme de Forcheville must now be, it seemed extraordinary. But she may perhaps have started her life of affairs very young. And then there are women whom one sees each decade in a new incarnation, having new love affairs, sometimes when one had thought that they were dead, causing the despair of young wives who are abandoned for them by their husbands.)
But this liaison had assumed such proportions that the old man, imitating in this latest affair the manner in which he had conducted his earlier ones, sequestrated his mistress to the point that, if my love for Albertine had repeated, with major variations, Swann’s love of Odette, M. de Guermantes’s love for her recalled my love for Albertine. She was required to lunch and dine with him, he was always at her house; she paraded him in front of her friends, who without her would never have come into contact with the Duc de Guermantes, and who came there in order to meet him, somewhat as one might go to the house of a courtesan to meet a sovereign, her lover. Mme de Forcheville, of course, had long been part of society. But reverting late in life to being a kept woman, and kept by such a proud old man, who was nevertheless the person of importance in her household, she minimized her own position, trying to have only wraps which he liked and food which he liked, and flattering her friends by telling them that she had been talking to him about them, as if she were telling my great-uncle that she had been speaking about him to the Grand-Duc, who was sending him some cigarettes; in a word, she was tending, despite everything she had attained by achieving her social position, under the pressure of these new circumstances, to become once more, just as she had appeared to me in my childhood, the lady in pink. My uncle Adolphe, of course, had been dead for many years. But does the substitution around us of new people for those who were formerly there prevent us from starting the same life over again? She had doubtless adapted to the new circumstances out of cupidity, and also because having been much sought after in society as the mother of a marriageable daughter, and then dropped as soon as Gilberte had married Saint-Loup, she thought that the Duc de Guermantes, who would have done anything for her, would enlist a number of duchesses who would be delighted to do their friend Oriane a bad turn; and lastly perhaps because she was stimulated by the distress of the Duchesse, over whom a feminine feeling of rivalry made her glad to prevail.
The liaison with Mme de Forcheville, a liaison which was merely an imitation of his previous relationships, had just for the second time lost the Duc de Guermantes the presidency of the Jockey Club and a vacant seat in the Académie des Beaux-arts, just as the way of life of M. de Charlus, publicly linked with that of Jupien, had cost him the presidency of the Union, as well as that of the Société des amis du vieux Paris. The two brothers, so different in their tastes, had therefore come into disrepute through the same indolence, and the same lack of will, which were observable, but in a less unprepossessing fashion, in the Duc de Guermantes their grandfather, a member of the Académie française, but which, in the two grandsons, had allowed a natural taste in one, and what is regarded as not being such in the other, to damage their position in society.
Up until his death, Saint-Loup used faithfully to bring his wife to see her.118 Were the two of them not the heirs both of M. de Guermantes and of Odette, who would herself moreover be the principal heir of the Duc? Even the fastidious Courvoisier nephews, and Mme de Marsantes, the Princesse de Trania, came there in the hope of a legacy, without worrying about the pain that might cause to Mme de Guermantes, of whom of Odette, stung by her contempt, spoke very ill.
The old Duc de Guermantes no longer went out, for he spent all his days and his evenings with her. But today he did come for a moment to see her, despite the irritation of meeting his wife. I had not noticed him, and probably would not have recognized him if he had not been clearly pointed out to me. He was little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ru
in so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm. Lashed on all sides by the waves of suffering, of anger at suffering, and of the rising tide of death, by which he was surrounded, his face, crumbling like a block of stone, still kept the style, the hauteur I had always admired; it was worn away like one of those beautiful but half-obliterated classical heads with which we are still always glad to ornament a study. Only it seemed to belong to a period more ancient than before, not only because of the way in which its once more lustrous material had become rough and broken, but because an expression of subtlety and playfulness had been succeeded by an involuntary, an unconscious expression, constructed out of illness, the struggle against death, mere resistance and the difficulty of living. The arteries, all their suppleness gone, had given his once beaming face a sculptural rigidity. And although the Duc had no inkling of this, his neck, his cheeks, his forehead all displayed indications that the human being within, as if obliged to cling tenaciously to each minute, seemed to be buffeted by a tragic gale, while the white strands of his thinner but still magnificent hair lashed with their spume the flooded promontory of his face. And I realized that, like the strange, unique glints which only the approach of an all-engulfing storm gives to rocks normally a different colour, the leaden grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, foam-flecked grey of the swelling locks, the weak light still emanating from the scarcely seeing eyes, were not unreal colours, far from it, all too real, but uncanny, and borrowed from the palette and the lighting, inimitable in its terrifying and prophetic shades of darkness, of old age, and of the proximity of death.
In Search of Lost Time Page 41