In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  The Duc stayed no more than a few minutes, long enough for me to have understood that Odette, attentive to her younger suitors, was treating him with contempt. But the strange thing was that he who in the past had been almost ridiculous when he behaved like a stage-king had taken on a genuinely grand appearance, rather like his brother, whom old age, by stripping him of all inessentials, made him resemble. And he, once proud, like his brother although in a different way, seemed almost deferential, although also in a different way. For he had never undergone the same decline as his brother, reduced by forgetfulness brought on by illness to greeting with politeness people whom he would once have scorned to know. But he was very old, and as he tried painfully to pass through the door and descend the staircase on his way out, old age, which is really the most wretched human state and which hurls people from their life’s eminence as if they were kings in Greek tragedies, old age, by forcing him to stop on the via dolorosa that life becomes for the impotent and endangered, to wipe his dripping brow, to grope around as his eyes searched for a step which eluded him, because he really needed support for his faltering steps, and for his clouded eyes, giving him without his knowing it an air of gently and timidly imploring it from other people, more than august, old age had made him suppliant.

  Unable to do without Odette, in whose house he was always installed in the same armchair, from which old age and gout made it difficult to extricate himself, M. de Guermantes allowed her to receive friends who were only too happy to be presented to the Duc, to leave the conversation to him, to hear him talking about society in the old days, about the Marquise of Villeparisis, and the Duc de Chartres.

  Thus in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the apparently impregnable positions of the Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes and of Baron de Charlus had lost their inviolability, as all things change in this world, by the action of an internal principle which nobody had ever thought about: in the case of M. de Charlus this was his love for Charlie, which had made him a slave of the Verdurins, and led to the softening of his brain; in Mme de Guermantes, a taste for novelty and for art; in M. de Guermantes an exclusive love affair, like several similar ones he had already had in his life, but which the weakness of age rendered more tyrannical, and to the weaknesses of which the strict standards of the Duchesse’s salon, where the Duc no longer appeared and which anyway had almost ceased to function socially, could no longer oppose their denial, or work their social redemption. This is how the pattern of things changes in this world; how the focus of empires, registers of wealth, and titles to social positions, everything that seemed permanent is perpetually recast, and the eyes of a man may over the course of a lifetime contemplate the most complete change precisely in those places where it had appeared most impossible.

  From time to time, under the gaze of the old paintings assembled by Swann in a ‘collector’s’ arrangement which added a finishing touch to the antiquated, old-fashioned nature of this scene, with this very ‘Restoration’ Duc and this perfectly ‘Second Empire’ courtesan in one of the wraps he liked so much, the lady in pink would interrupt him with her bright chatter; he would stop dead and glare at her, fiercely. Perhaps he had come to realize that she too, like the Duchesse, sometimes said silly things; perhaps, in an old man’s hallucination, he thought that it was a badly timed witticism from Mme de Guermantes that had interrupted him, believing himself to be in the Guermantes hôtel, as chained animals might imagine for a moment that they are free in the deserts of Africa again. And brusquely lifting his head, with his little round yellow eyes, which had a wild animal gleam to them, he would fix her with one of the looks which had sometimes, when I was visiting Mme de Guermantes, and he thought she was talking too much, made me tremble. Thus the Duc stared for moment at the audacious lady in pink. But she stared back, her gaze not leaving his eyes, and at the end of a few moments which seemed very long to those watching, the vanquished old beast, remembering that he was not free at home with the Duchesse, in that Sahara whose entrance is marked by the door-mat at the top of the stairs, but in his cage in the Zoological Gardens at Mme de Forcheville’s, sank his head, from which still hung a thick mane, which might equally have been blond or white, back between his shoulders, and went on with his story. He seemed not to have taken in what Mme de Forcheville had tried to say, which usually did not make much sense anyway. He allowed her to have friends to dinner with him; but, out of a habit derived from his earlier affairs, which would have come as no surprise to Odette, used to the same thing from Swann, and which struck a sympathetic chord in me, as it reminded me of my life with Albertine, always insisted that these persons should leave early so that he might be the last to say good-night to Odette. Needless to say, he had scarcely left before she would go out to meet other people. But the Duc never suspected this, or preferred not to seem to suspect it: the eyesight of old men weakens as their hearing becomes less acute, their acumen grows dull, and tiredness itself causes them to relax their vigilance. At a certain age Jupiter is ineluctably transformed into a character out of Molière – not the Olympian lover of Alcmene, either, but a laughable Géronte.119 Moreover, Odette deceived M. de Guermantes, as she looked after him, without charm and without nobility. She was indifferent in this role as in all her others. Not because life had not frequently given her leading roles, but because she did not know how to play them. And in fact each time I tried to see her in the days following the party I was unsuccessful, for M. de Guermantes, in an attempt to satisfy the demands both of his health and of his jealousy, permitted her to attend only daytime parties, with the further condition that no dances were allowed. She frankly admitted to me the confinement in which she was kept, for several reasons. The principal one was that, although I had written only a few articles and published some essays, she had the idea that I was a well-known author, which even caused her naïvely to say, recalling the time when I used to go to the Allée des Acacias to see her pass by, and later when I used to go to her house: ‘Oh, if only I’d known that one day you’d be a great writer!’ Now, having heard that writers enjoy being with women because they can gather material, getting them to recount their love affairs, she now reverted, in order to interest me, to being a mere cocotte. She would tell me stories: ‘Well, once there was a man who was crazy about me and whom I was desperately in love with, too. We led a heavenly life. He had to travel to America, I was to be going with him. The day before the departure I decided it was better not to let a love which couldn’t always remain so perfect just slowly fade away. We had a last evening together, when he still thought I was going with him, then a night of mad passion; in his arms I felt infinite joy, and despair at the thought that I would never see him again. In the morning I went and gave my ticket to a traveller I didn’t know. He wanted me to let him pay for it at least. I replied: “No, you’re doing me such a favour by taking it, I don’t want any money.” ’ Then there was another story: ‘One day I was in the Champs-Élysées and M. de Bréauté, whom I’d only ever met once, started staring at me so insistently that I stopped and asked him why he thought he was looking at me like that. He replied: “I’m looking at you because you’ve got a ridiculous hat.” It was true. It was a little hat with pansies, fashions were ghastly then. But I was furious, I said to him: “I won’t allow you to speak to me like that.” It started to rain. I said to him: “I would only forgive you if you had a carriage. – Well, it happens that I do have one, and I shall accompany you. – No, I’ll be pleased to take your carriage, but I don’t want you.” I climbed into the carriage, he went off in the rain. But in the evening he turns up at my house. We had two years of wild love. Come and have tea with me some time and I’ll tell you how I met M. de Forcheville. In point of fact, she said with a melancholy expression, I have spent my life cloistered away, because all my great love affairs have been with men who were terribly jealous. I’m not talking about M. de Forcheville, as he was basically commonplace, and I have onlyever really been able to love intelligent men. But, you see, M. Swann was as jealo
us as the poor Duc is; and I do without everything for his sake because I know that he’s not happy at home. With M. Swann, I was madly in love with him, and I think it is fair enough to sacrifice dancing and society and everything else if it gives pleasure to the man you love, or even if it stops him worrying. Poor Charles, he was so intelligent, so fascinating, exactly the kind of man I liked best.’ And perhaps this was true. There had been a time when she had liked Swann, precisely the time when she was not ‘his type’. Indeed, to tell the truth, ‘his type’ was something that, even later, she had never been. Yet he had loved her so much then, and so painfully. He had been surprised, later, by that contradiction. But it need not be a contradiction if we think what a large proportion of the suffering in men’s lives is caused by women ‘who were not their type’. Perhaps there are a number of reasons for this; first, because they are not ‘your type’ one allows oneself, at the beginning, to be loved without loving, as a result of which one lets habit get a hold on one’s life which it would not have done with a woman who was ‘our type’ who, feeling herself desired, would have put up some resistance, would have agreed to meet only occasionally, and would not have made herself so much at home in every hour of our day that later, if love does come and we suddenly start to miss her, because of a quarrel or because she is travelling and has sent us no news, the pain of her absence tugs not at one bond but a thousand. Then, this habit is sentimental because there is no great physical desire at its heart, and if love does develop the mind works much harder: there is a romance instead of a need. We do not mistrust women who are not ‘our type’, we let them love us, and if we then come to love them, we love them a hundred times more than the others, without ever experiencing in their arms the satisfaction of gratified desire. For these reasons and many others, the fact that we have our greatest moments of unhappiness with women who are not ‘our type’ is not simply a product of that mocking destiny which brings our happiness into being only in the form which pleases us least. A woman who is ‘our type’ is rarely dangerous, for she wants nothing from us, she makes us content, rapidly leaves us, does not install herself in our lives, and what is dangerous and liable to create suffering in love is not the woman herself, it is her continuous daily presence, our constant curiosity about what she is doing; it is not the woman, it is habit.

  I was cowardly enough to say that it was kind and generous of her, but I knew how false this was, and how much of her openness was mingled with lies. I thought with horror, as she told me more and more of her adventures, of all that Swann had been unaware of, which would have made him suffer so much because he had made this one person the focus of his sensitivity, and which he almost certainly guessed, merely from the look in her eyes when she saw an unknown man, or woman, who attracted her. She did it, in the end, simply to give me what she thought were subjects for novels. She was wrong, not because she had not provided the reserves of my imagination with an abundance of material, but because this had been done in a much more involuntary fashion and by an act that I initiated myself as I drew out from her, without her knowledge, the laws of her life.

  M. de Guermantes kept his thunders solely for the Duchesse, to whose easy-going friendships Mme de Forcheville had not failed to draw his angry attention. So the Duchesse was very unhappy. It is true that M. de Charlus, with whom I discussed it once, claimed that the original faults had not been on his brother’s part, that the legend of the Duchesse’s purity had in reality been constructed over an incalculable number of cunningly dissimulated intrigues. I had never heard anybody else say that. In the eyes of almost everybody, Mme de Guermantes was a totally different woman. The universally accepted idea was that she had always been irreproachable. I was unable to decide which of these two ideas conformed to the truth, the truth which three out of four people are almost always unaware of. I remembered very clearly some blue-eyed roving glances from the Duchesse de Guermantes in the nave at Combray. But in truth neither of the ideas was refuted by these, each position being capable of giving them a different and equally acceptable meaning. In my foolishness, as a boy, I had taken them for a moment as looks of love aimed at me. Since then I had come to realize that they were merely the benevolent looks of a sovereign lady, like the one in the stained-glass windows of the church, towards her vassals. Had I now to believe that my first idea had been the right one, and that if the Duchesse had never subsequently spoken to me of love, this was because she was afraid of compromising herself with a friend of her aunt and her nephew rather than with an unknown boy encountered by chance in Saint-Hilaire de Combray?

  The Duchesse may have felt glad for a moment to feel that her past was more firmly grounded for being shared with me, but in answer to some questions which I put to her about the provincial background of M. de Bréauté, whom at the time I had scarcely distinguished from M. de Sagan or M. de Guermantes, she resumed her society woman stance, namely a scornful attitude towards society. While we were talking, the Duchesse showed me round the house. In the smaller sitting-rooms we found more intimate friends, who had preferred to get away from the throng in order to listen to the music. In a little Empire120 sitting-room, where a few men in black evening clothes were listening, sitting on sofas, there was, beside a cheval-glass supported by a figure of Minerva, a chaise longue, set at a right angle, but with a hollow interior, like a cradle, on which a young woman was stretched at full length. Her relaxed pose, which the entry of the Duchesse did not induce her to alter, contrasted with the wonderful brilliance of her Empire dress in a nacarat silk beside which the reddest fuchsias would have paled and on whose pearly fabric emblems and flowers seemed long ago to have been pressed, for their traces were still etched deep within it. She greeted the Duchesse with a slight inclination of her beautiful dark head. Although it was broad daylight, as she had requested that the tall curtains be drawn, in order to facilitate contemplation of the music, and so that people did not twist their ankles, an urn had been lighted on a tripod, and from it came a faint, iridescent gleam. In response to my question, the Duchesse de Guermantes told me this was Mme de Saint-Euverte. I then wanted to know what relation she was to the Mme de Saint-Euverte whom I had known. Mme de Guermantes told me that she was the wife of one of her great-nephews, seemed to think she might have been born a La Rochefoucauld, but denied ever having known the Saint-Euvertes herself. I reminded her of the evening party (which admittedly I only knew about from hearsay) at which, as the Princesse de Laumes, she had come upon Swann, but Mme de Guermantes swore that she had never been at that party. The Duchesse had always been a little untruthful, and was now much more so. Mme de Saint-Euverte, to her, was a social figure – now much diminished with time – whom she enjoyed repudiating. I did not press my case. ‘No, who you may have seen at my house, because he had a degree of wit, was the husband of the person you are talking about, whom I never had anything to do with. – But she didn’t have a husband. – You probably thought that because they were separated, but he was a great deal nicer than she was.’ It finally hit me that an enormous man, very tall, very strong, with completely white hair, whom I used to meet all over the place and whose name I had never known, was Mme de Saint-Euverte’s husband. He had died the previous year. As for the niece, I do not know whether it was because of a stomach complaint, or nerves, or phlebitis, or an imminent, recent or miscarried confinement, that she was listening to the music lying down and not moving for anybody. In all probability, proud of her gorgeous red silks, she thought that by lying on the chaise longue she would look rather like Mme Récamier.121 She had no idea that she was giving birth for me to a new blossoming of the Saint-Euverte name, which, after such a long interval, marked both the distance and the continuity of Time. It was Time that she was rocking in that hollow cradle, where the name of Saint-Euverte and Empire style were bursting into flower in red fuchsia silks. The Empire style was something that Mme de Guermantes declared she had always detested; that meant that she detested it now, which was true, for she followed fashion, although with
some delay. Without complicating matters by talking about David, whom she knew very little about, when she was very young she had thought M. Ingres the most boring conventional painter, then suddenly the most delectable of those revered by Art Nouveau, to the point that she began to detest Delacroix. By what stages she had retreated from worship to reprobation it does not really matter, since these are shifts in taste which are reflected by art critics ten years before they become topics of conversation among clever women. After having censured the Empire style, she apologized for talking to me about people as insignificant as the Saint-Euvertes and about silly issues like the provincial side of Bréauté, for she was as far from imagining why I was interested in these matters as Mme de Saint-Euverte-La Rochefoucauld, seeking the good of her stomach or an Ingres-like effect, was far from suspecting that her name had captivated me, her husband’s name, not the more glorious name of her parents, and that I saw it as her function, in this room full of symbols, to beguile and cradle Time.

  ‘But why am I talking to you about this nonsense? It can’t possibly interest you,’ exclaimed the Duchesse. She had spoken this sentence under her breath and nobody could have heard what she said. But one young man (who subsequently interested me as bearing a name once much more familiar to me than that of Saint-Euverte) got up with an expression of exasperation and moved further away in order to listen more intensely. For they were playing the Kreutzer Sonata,122 although having misread the programme, he thought that it was a piece by Ravel which somebody had told him was as beautiful as Palestrina, but hard to understand. In his impatient rush to change his place, he bumped in the semi-darkness into an escritoire, which did not pass without several people turning their heads, the simple exercise of looking over their shoulders providing a momentary interruption to the torture of ‘religiously’ listening to the Kreutzer Sonata. And Mme de Guermantes and I, the causes of this little scandal, quickly moved to another room. ‘Yes, how can these dreary little details interest a man of your calibre? It’s like just now, when I saw you talking to Gilberte de Saint-Loup. She’s not worth your attention. In my view that woman is just nothing, she’s not even a woman, she’s the most artificial, the most bourgeois thing I’ve ever seen’ (for the Duchesse’s aristocratic prejudices tinged even her defence of intellectuality). ‘Anyway, are you sure you ought you to be coming to places like this? Today I suppose I can understand, because there was the recitation by Rachel which probably interested you. But lovely as it was, she doesn’t give of her best in front of all these people. I’ll have you to lunch alone with her. Then you’ll see what she’s really like. She’s a hundred times better than anybody here. And after lunch she will recite some Verlaine for you. You’ll be astonished by it. But no, I can’t understand why you come to great soulless affairs like this. Unless of course you’re gathering material…’ she added dubiously, with a slight air of mistrust, but without risking anything further, as she was not very clear about what sort of thing constituted the improbable operation to which she was alluding.