When I had mentioned to Albertine, on our return from Balbec, that the Duchesse de Guermantes lived opposite us, in the same building, she had assumed, on hearing the proud title and great name, that more than indifferent, that hostile, contemptuous air which is the sign of an impotent desire in proud and passionate natures. Splendid though Albertine’s might be, the qualities that lay buried in it could develop only amid those trammels which are our personal tastes, or that bereavement of those of our tastes that we have been obliged to forgo, as in Albertine’s case snobbery: in other words, what are called aversions. Albertine’s aversion for society people occupied very little room in her nature, and appealed to me as an aspect of the revolutionary spirit—that is to say an embittered love for the nobility—engraved upon the obverse side of the French character to that which displays the aristocratic style of Mme de Guermantes. Albertine would perhaps not have given a thought to this aristocratic style, in view of the impossibility of achieving it, but remembering that Elstir had spoken to her of the Duchess as the best-dressed woman in Paris, her republican contempt for a duchess gave way to a keen interest in a fashionable woman. She was always asking me to tell her about Mme de Guermantes, and was glad that I should call on the Duchess to obtain advice about her own clothes. No doubt I could have got this from Mme Swann, and indeed I did once write to her with this intention. But Mme de Guermantes seemed to me to carry the art of dressing even further. If, on going down for a moment to see her, after making sure that she had not gone out and leaving word that I was to be warned as soon as Albertine returned, I found the Duchess swathed in the mist of a grey crepe de Chine gown, I accepted this aspect of her which I felt to be due to complex causes and to be quite unalterable, and steeped myself in the atmosphere which it exhaled, like that of certain late afternoons cushioned in pearly grey by a vaporous fog; if, on the other hand, her indoor gown was Chinese with red and yellow flames, I gazed at it as at a glowing sunset; these garmerits were not a casual decoration alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality like that of the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.
Of all the outdoor and indoor gowns that Mme de Guermantes wore, those which seemed most to respond to a specific intention, to be endowed with a special significance, were the garments made by Fortuny from old Venetian models. Is it their historical character, or is it rather the fact that each one of them is unique, that gives them so special a significance that the pose of the woman who is wearing one while she waits for you to appear or while she talks to you assumes an exceptional importance, as though the costume had been the fruit of a long deliberation and your conversation was somehow detached from everyday life like a scene in a novel? In the novels of Balzac, we see his heroines put on this or that dress on purpose when they are expecting some particular visitor. The dresses of today have less character, always excepting the creations of Fortuny. There is no room for vagueness in the novelist’s description, since the dress does really exist, its smallest details are as naturally preordained as those of a work of art. Before putting on one or another of them, the woman has had to make a choice between two garments that are not more or less alike but each one profoundly individual, and identifiable by name.
But the dress did not prevent me from thinking of the woman. Indeed, Mme de Guermantes seemed to me at this time more attractive than in the days when I was still in love with her. Expecting less of her (I no longer went to visit her for her own sake), it was almost with the relaxed negligence one exhibits when alone, with my feet on the fender, that I listened to her as though I were reading a book written in the language of long ago. I was sufficiently detached to enjoy in what she said that pure charm of the French language which we no longer find either in the speech or in the writing of the present day. I listened to her conversation as to a folk song deliciously and purely French; I understood why I should have heard her deriding Maeterlinck (whom in fact she now admired, out of feminine weak-mindedness, influenced by those literary fashions whose rays spread slowly), as I understood why Mérimée had derided Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Paul-Louis Courier, Victor Hugo, Meilhac, Mallarmé. I was well aware that the critic had a far more restricted outlook than his victim, but also a purer vocabulary. That of Mme de Guermantes, almost as much as that of Saint-Loup’s mother, was enchantingly pure. It is not in the bloodless pastiches of the writers of today who say au fait (for “in reality”), singulièrement (for “in particular”), étonné (for “struck with amazement”), and the like, that we recapture the old speech and the true pronunciation of words, but in conversing with a Mme de Guermantes or a Françoise. I had learned from the latter, when I was five years old, that one did not say “the Tarn” but “the Tar;” not “Beam” but “Bear.” The effect of which was that at twenty, when I began to go into society, I had no need to be taught there that one ought not to say, like Mme Bontemps, “Madame de Beam.”
It would not be true to say that the Duchess was unaware of this earthy and quasi-peasant quality that survived in her, or was entirely innocent of affectation in displaying it. But, on her part, it was not so much the false simplicity of a great lady aping the countrywoman, or the pride of a duchess bent upon snubbing the rich ladies who express contempt for the peasants whom they do not know, as the quasi-artistic preference of a woman who knows the charm of what she possesses and is not going to spoil it with a coat of modern varnish. In the same way, everybody used to know a Norman innkeeper, landlord of the “William the Conqueror” at Dives, who had carefully refrained—a rare thing indeed—from giving his hostelry the modern comforts of a hotel, and, albeit a millionaire, retained the speech and the smock of a Norman peasant and allowed you to enter his kitchen and watch him prepare with his own hands, as in a farmhouse, a dinner which was nevertheless infinitely better, and even more expensive, than in the most luxurious hotel.
All the local sap that survives in the old noble families is not enough; it must be embodied in a person of sufficient intelligence not to despise it, not to obliterate it beneath a society veneer. Mme de Guermantes, unfortunately clever and Parisian and, when I knew her, retaining nothing of her native soil but its accent, had at least, when she wished to describe her life as a girl, contrived for her speech one of those compromises (between what would have seemed too spontaneously provincial on the one hand or artificially literary on the other) which form the attraction of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette or of certain legends related by Chateaubriand in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. My chief pleasure was in hearing her tell some anecdote which brought peasants into the picture with herself. The historic names, the old customs, gave to these blendings of the castle with the village a distinctly attractive savour. Having stayed in contact with the lands where it was sovereign, a certain type of aristocracy remains regional, so that the simplest utterance unfolds under our eyes a whole map of France, historical and geographical.
If there was no affectation, no deliberate effort to fabricate a special language, then this style of pronunciation was a regular museum of French history displayed in conversation. “My great-uncle Fitt-jam” was not at all surprising, for we know that the Fitz-James family are proud to boast that they are French nobles and do not like to hear their name pronounced in the English fashion. One must, however, marvel at the touching docility of the people who had previously supposed themselves obliged to pronounce certain names phonetically, and who, all of a sudden, after hearing the Duchesse de Guermantes pronounce them otherwise, adopted a pronunciation which they could never have guessed. Thus the Duchess, who had had a great-grandfather attending on the Comte de Chambord, liked to tease her husband for having turned Orleanist by proclaiming: “We old Frochedorf people …” The visitor, who had always imagined that he was correct in saying “Frohsdorf,” at once turned his coat, and ever afterwards might be heard saying “Frochedorf.”
On one occasion when I asked Mme de Guermantes who a young blood was whom she had introduced to me as her nephew but whose name I had faile
d to catch, I was none the wiser when from the back of her throat the Duchess uttered in a very loud but quite inarticulate voice: “C‘est l’ … i Eon, frère à Robert. He claims to have the same shape of skull as the ancient Welsh.” Then I realised that she had said: “C’est le petit Léon,” and that this was the Prince de Leon, who was indeed Robert de Saint-Loup’s brother-in-law. “I know nothing about his skull,” she went on, “but the way he dresses, and I must say he does dress very well, is not at all in the style of those parts. Once when I was staying at Josselin, with the Rohans, we all went over to a place of pilgrimage to which peasants had come from pretty well every part of Brittany. A great hulking villager from Leon stood gaping at Robert’s brother-in-law in his beige breeches. ‘What are you staring at me like that for?’ said Leon, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am.’ The peasant admitted as much. ‘Well,’ said Leon, ‘I’m your Prince.’ ‘Oh!’ said the peasant, taking off his cap and apologising. ‘I thought you were an Englische.’”
And if, seizing this point of departure, I led Mme de Guermantes on to talk about the Rohans (with whom her own family had frequently intermarried), her conversation would become impregnated with a hint of the melancholy charm of the Breton “pardons,” the calvary processions, and (as that true poet Pampille would say) with “the pungent flavour of buckwheat pancakes cooked over a gorse fire.”
Of the Marquis du Lau (whose sad end is familiar—when, himself deaf, he used to be taken to call on Mme H—who was blind), she would recall the less tragic years when, after the day’s sport, at Guermantes, he would change into slippers before having tea with the King of England, to whom he did not regard himself as inferior, and with whom, as we see, he did not stand on ceremony. She described all this so picturesquely that she seemed to invest him with the plumed musketeer hat of the somewhat vainglorious gentlemen of Périgord.
But even in the mere designation of people Mme de Guermantes, having remained herself a countrywoman—which was her great strength—would take care to distinguish between different provinces, and place people within them, as a Parisian-born woman could never have done, and those simple names, Anjou, Poitou, Périgord, re-created landscapes in her conversation.
To revert to the pronunciation and vocabulary of Mme de Guermantes, it is in this aspect that the nobility shows itself truly conservative, with everything that the word implies in the sense of being at once slightly puerile, slightly dangerous, stubborn in its resistance to change, but at the same time diverting to an artist. I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window.
Unfortunately, I never had time to prolong these visits indefinitely, for I was anxious, as far as possible, not to return home after Albertine. But it was only in driblets that I was able to obtain from Mme de Guermantes that information as to her clothes which was of use in helping me to order costumes similar in style, so far as it was possible for a young girl to wear them, for Albertine.
“For instance, Madame, that evening when you dined with Mme de Saint-Euverte, and then went on to the Princesse de Guermantes, you had a dress that was all red, with red shoes, you were marvellous, you reminded me of a sort of great blood-red blossom, a glittering ruby—now, what was that dress called? Is it the sort of thing that a young girl can wear?”
The Duchess, imparting to her tired features the radiant expression that the Princesse des Laumes used to wear when Swann paid her compliments years ago, glanced quizzically and delightedly, with tears of merriment in her eyes, at M. de Bréauté who was always there at that hour and who sat beaming behind his monocle with an indulgent smile for this intellectual’s rigmarole because of the physical excitement of youth which seemed to him to underlie it. The Duchess appeared to be saying: “What’s the matter with him? He must be mad.” Then turning to me with a winning expression: “I wasn’t aware that I looked like a glittering ruby or a blood-red blossom, but I do indeed remember that I had on a red dress: it was red satin, which was being worn that season. Yes, a young girl can wear that sort of thing at a pinch, but you told me that your friend never went out in the evening. It’s a full evening dress, not a thing that she can put on to pay calls.”
What is extraordinary is that of the evening in question, which after all was not so very remote, Mme de Guermantes remembered nothing but what she had been wearing, and had forgotten a certain incident which nevertheless, as we shall see presently, ought to have mattered to her greatly. It seems that among men and women of action (and society people are men and women of action on a minute, a microscopic scale, but action none the less), the mind, overtaxed by the need to attend to what is going to happen in an hour’s time, commits very little to memory. As often as not, for instance, it was not with the object of deliberately misleading and making himself appear innocent of an error of judgment that M. de Norpois, when you reminded him of the prophecies he had uttered with regard to an alliance with Germany of which nothing had ever come, would say: “You must be mistaken, I have no recollection of it whatever, it isn’t like me, for in that sort of conversation I am always most laconic, and I would never have predicted the success of one of those coups d’éclat which are often nothing more than coups de tête and habitually degenerate into coups de force. It is beyond question that in the remote future a Franco-German rapprochement might come into being and would be highly profitable to both countries; nor would France have the worse of the bargain, I dare say; but I have never spoken of it because the time is not yet ripe, and if you wish to know my opinion, in asking our late enemies to join with us in solemn wedlock, I consider that we would be courting a grave setback and would receive some unpleasant shocks.” In saying this M. de Norpois was not being untruthful; he had simply forgotten. We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of the day. These change, and with them our memory undergoes alteration. Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less to an excess of ambition than to a deficiency of memory. As for society people, they remember very little.
Mme de Guermantes assured me that, at the party to which she had gone in a red dress, she did not remember Mme de Chaussepierre’s being present, and that I must be mistaken. And yet, heaven knows, the Chaussepierres had been present enough in the minds of both the Duke and the Duchess since then. For the following reason. M. de Guermantes had been the senior vice-president of the Jockey Club when the president died. Certain members of the club who were not popular in society and whose sole pleasure was to blackball the men who did not invite them to their houses launched a campaign against the Duc de Guermantes who, certain of being elected, and relatively indifferent to the presidency which was a small matter for a man in his social position, paid no attention. It was urged against him that the Duchess was a Dreyfusard (the Dreyfus case was long since over, but twenty years later people would still talk about it, and so far only two years had elapsed) and entertained the Rothschilds, that too much consideration had been shown of late to certain great international potentates like the Duc de Guermantes, who was half German. The campaign found sympathetic ears, clubs being always jealous of men who are in the public eye, and detesting big fortunes. Chaussepierre’s was by no means meagre, but nobody could be offended by it; he spent hardly a sou, the couple lived in a modest apartment, the wife went about dressed in black wool. A passionate music-lover, she did indeed give little afternoon parties to which many more singers were invited than to the Guermantes. But no one talked about these parties, which occurred without any refreshments, often in the absence of the husband, in the obscurity of the Rue de la Chaise. At the
Opera, Mme de Chaussepierre passed unnoticed, always among people whose names recalled the most “die-hard” element of the intimate circle of Charles X, but who were retiring and unsocial. On the day of the election, to the general surprise, obscurity triumphed over glitter: Chaussepierre, the second vice-president, was elected president of the Jockey, and the Duc de Guermantes was left sitting—that is to say, in the senior vice-president’s chair. Of course, being president of the Jockey means little or nothing to princes of the highest rank such as the Guermantes. But not to be president when it is your turn, to be passed over in favour of a Chaussepierre, whose wife’s greeting Oriane not only had refused to acknowledge two years earlier but had gone so far as to show offence at being greeted by such an obscure scarecrow, this the Duke did find hard to swallow. He pretended to be above such setbacks, asserting incidentally that it was his long-standing friendship with Swann that was at the root of it. Actually, his anger never cooled.
One curious thing was that nobody had ever before heard the Duc de Guermantes make use of the quite commonplace expression “well and truly;” but ever since the Jockey Club election, whenever anybody referred to the Dreyfus case, out would come “well and truly.” “Dreyfus case, Dreyfus case, it’s easy to say, and it’s a misuse of the term. It’s not a question of religion, it’s well and truly political.” Five years might go by without your hearing him say “well and truly” again, if during that time nobody mentioned the Dreyfus case, but if, at the end of five years, the name Dreyfus cropped up, “well and truly” would at once follow automatically. The Duke could not in any case bear to hear any mention of the case, “which has been responsible,” he would say, “for so many misfortunes,” although he was really conscious of one only: his failure to become president of the Jockey.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Page 4