The favorable stance adopted by the Duc and the Duchesse meant that people might henceforth have dropped the words “your poor father” to Gilberte when the occasion arose, had they not become pointless, since this was precisely the period when Forcheville adopted the young lady. She called Forcheville “father,” she charmed dowagers with her politeness and elegant manners, and people admitted that, while Forcheville had behaved admirably toward her, the little girl was very kind-hearted and had shown due gratitude. Doubtless because she sometimes wanted and felt able to show how much she felt at her ease in society, she had sought my approbation and had spoken of her real father in my hearing. But this was an exception, for no one dared pronounce Swann’s name in her presence. It so happened that on entering the salon, I had just recognized two drawings by Elstir which had previously been relegated to an upstairs display cabinet where I had only come across them by chance. Elstir was now in fashion. Mme de Guermantes could not console herself for having given so many of his pictures to her cousin, not because they had become fashionable but because now she appreciated them. In fact fashion is composed of the enthusiasm of a group of people of whom the Guermantes are typical. But she would not dream of buying more pictures by him, since in recent times they had been attaining ridiculously high prices. She wanted to have something at least by Elstir in her drawing-room and had had the two drawings brought down, declaring that she “preferred them to his paintings.” Gilberte recognized his style. “They look like Elstirs,” she said. “But they are,” replied the Duchesse, “it was precisely your . . . some friends of ours who advised us to buy them. They are admirable. In my opinion they are better than his paintings.” I had not heard this dialog when I went to look at the drawings, and said, “Oh look, it’s the Elstir that . . .” I saw Mme de Guermantes’s frantic signals. “Oh yes, it’s the Elstir that I admired upstairs. It looks much better here than on the landing. On the subject of Elstir, I mentioned him in an article in the Figaro yesterday. Did you read it?—You wrote an article in the Figaro?” exclaimed M. de Guermantes as violently as he would have exclaimed, “But she’s my cousin.—Yes, yesterday.—In the Figaro, are you sure? That would be surprising, for we each have our own copy, and if one of us missed it the other would have noticed it. Don’t you agree, Oriane, there was no article.” The Duc sent someone to fetch the Figaro and only accepted the truth when faced with the evidence, as if until that moment it was most likely that I had mistaken the newspaper for which I had written. “What? I don’t understand, do you mean you have written an article for the Figaro?” the Duchesse asked me, making an effort to speak of something of no interest to her. “Well, Basin, look here, you must read it later on.” “Oh no, the Duc is fine as he is with his great beard all over the newspaper,” said Gilberte, “and I shall read it myself as soon as I get home.—Yes, he’s taken to wearing a beard now that everyone is clean shaven, said the Duchesse, he never does what other people do. When we married he shaved off not just his beard but his mustache. The country folk who saw him thought that he was not French. At that time he was called the Prince des Laumes.—Is there still a Prince des Laumes?” asked Gilberte, who was interested in anything that concerned the people who had for so long refused to give her the time of day. “Oh no,” replied the Duchesse, with a melancholy, amorous air. “Such a lovely title! One of the finest titles in France!” said Gilberte, in one of those lapses into banality which inevitably escape the mouths of certain intelligent young women, as surely as the sun rises. “But it’s true, and I regret it as much as you. Basin would like his sister’s son to take it on, but it’s not the same thing; actually it would be possible, because it doesn’t have to be the elder son, it can pass from the elder to the younger. As I was saying, Basin was absolutely clean shaven; one day on a pilgrimage, do you remember, my dear,” she said to her husband, “that pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial? My brother-in-law Charlus, who rather likes to talk to the country folk, said to someone or other: ‘Where are you from, my friend?,’ and as he is very generous, he gave them a tip or offered to stand them a drink. For there’s nobody more grand but simple with it than Mémé. You could find him snubbing a duchess if she’s not enough of a duchess for him, and turn all his attention to a master of hounds. So I said to Basin: ‘Look, Basin, why don’t you talk to them a bit too.’ My husband, who rather lacks imagination . . .—Thank you, Oriane,” said the Duc without interrupting his reading of my article, in which he was immersed—“got hold of a local and repeated verbatim the words of his brother: ‘And you, where are you from?—I’m from les Laumes.—You are from les Laumes? Well then, I am your Prince.’ Then the countryman looked at Basin’s whiskerless features and replied: ‘Not true, you are an English.’” Thus in the Duchesse’s anecdotes one saw these great titles, like that of the Prince des Laumes, emerge in their true place, in their former state and their local color, as in certain books of hours one recognizes, amidst the medieval crowd, the steeple of Bourges. Some visiting cards left by a footman were brought in to her. “I don’t know what has possessed her, I do not know the woman. This is your doing, Basin. And yet you have scarcely made a success of this kind of relationship, my poor dear,” and then turning to Gilberte, she said: “I couldn’t begin to explain who she is, you certainly don’t know her, she’s called Lady Rufus Israel.” Gilberte blushed furiously: “I don’t know her,” she said (which was all the more false since Lady Israel, two years before Swann’s death, had made her peace with him and since then called Gilberte by her first name), “but I do know who she is from what people say, I know who you mean.” The fact is that Gilberte had become quite snobbish. Thus it happened one day, when a young lady who, whether from malice or from tactlessness, had asked her the name of her true rather than of her adoptive father, that Gilberte, in her confusion and in an attempt to disguise what she was forced to say, had pronounced the name as “Svann” instead of “Souann,” a change which some time later she realized was pejorative, since it turned an originally English name into a German name. And she had even added, abasing herself morally in order to enhance her social status: “I have heard so many different things about my birth that I prefer to know nothing.”
However ashamed of herself Gilberte must have been at certain moments when she thought of her parents (for even Mme Swann had seemed a good mother to her and had been one) at having adopted such an attitude to life, we must unfortunately suppose that its elements had doubtless been borrowed from her parents, for we do not create ourselves single-handed. But to the quantity of egoism given in the mother, a different portion of egoism, inherent in the father’s family, comes to accrue, which does not always imply an addition or even a simple multiplication, but which creates a new breed of egoism, infinitely more powerful and fearsome. And ever since the beginning of the world, since families where such a flaw exists in one form have become allied with families where the same flaw exists in another form, creating a particularly complete and detestable form in the child, the accumulated egoisms (to talk here only of egoism) would take on such force that the whole of humanity would be destroyed, if from the same ill there did not arise, capable of reducing it to its just proportions, natural restrictions analogous to those which prevent an infinite proliferation of protozoa from annihilating our planet or the monosexual fertilization of plants from leading to the asphyxiation of the rest of the vegetable kingdom, and so on. From time to time a virtue emerges to compose with this egoism a new and disinterested force. The combinations by means of which moral chemistry thus fixes and renders inoffensive down the generations elements which were becoming too dangerous are infinite and would be capable of giving an exciting variety to our family histories. What is more, the different kinds of egoism of the sort which Gilberte must have accumulated coexist with the most charming virtues, also inherited from the parents, which come for a moment to play their own individual, touching and entirely sincere part during the intervals. Doubtless Gilberte did not always go so far as she did on this occ
asion when she insinuated that she was perhaps the natural daughter of some great personage; but she did most often dissimulate her origins. Perhaps it was simply too unpleasant to confess them, and she preferred them to be related by others. Perhaps she really believed that she was hiding them, with that faltering belief which is still not doubt, as it reserves a possibility for what one desires and of which Musset gives an example when he speaks of “hoping in God.”8
“I do not know her personally,” continued Gilberte. Had she, however, in calling herself Mlle de Forcheville hoped that no one would know that she was Swann’s daughter? Perhaps hoping, where certain people were concerned, that this might in due course come to include almost everyone? She could not have harbored many illusions as to their present number and she must have known that many people would be whispering, “She’s Swann’s daughter.” But she knew it only with the kind of knowledge that tells us of people yielding to despair and letting themselves die of starvation while we go off to a ball, that is with a vague and distant knowledge, for which we have no desire to substitute a more precise knowledge based on first-hand experience. As distance makes things appear smaller, less precise and less dangerous, Gilberte thought it pointless that the discovery that she had been born a Swann should be made in her presence. Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance. Gilberte preferred not to be present when people discovered that she had been born a Swann. And as we are present to people whom we can picture, and since we can picture people reading their newspapers, Gilberte preferred the newspapers to call her Mlle de Forcheville. It is true that for those writings over which she did have some control, that is, her letters, she negotiated the transition for a while by signing G. S. Forcheville. The veritable hypocrisy of this signature was revealed far less by the suppression of the other letters of Swann’s name than by those of Gilberte’s name. Indeed, by reducing her innocent first name to a simple G., Mlle de Forcheville seemed to insinuate to her friends that the same amputation applied to the name of Swann was itself due only to the same desire for brevity. She even bestowed a particular importance on the S, giving it a kind of long tail that cut across the G, but one felt this to be as provisional and doomed to disappear as the one which, despite its length in the monkey, is absent in man.
Despite this, her snobbery retained an element of Swann’s intellectual curiosity. I remember that on the same afternoon she asked Mme de Guermantes if she might not have known M. du Lau, and when the Duchesse replied that he was unwell and unable to go out, Gilberte asked what he was like, for, she added, blushing slightly, she had heard so much about him. (The Marquis du Lau had in fact been one of Swann’s closest friends before the latter’s marriage and perhaps even Gilberte herself might have caught a glimpse of him, but at a time when she was not interested in those social circles.) “Might M. de Bréauté or the Prince d’Agrigente give me an idea?” she asked. “Oh not at all!” cried Mme de Guermantes, who had a fine sense of these provincial distinctions and was able to offer a sober portrait, albeit colored with the hoarse, gilded timbre of her voice and bathed in the warm light of her violet eyes. “No, not at all. Du Lau was a charming nobleman from the Périgord, with all the refinements but casual manners of the provinces. At Guermantes, when the King of England, who was a good friend of du Lau, was there, they had tea after the hunt; this was the time of day when du Lau used to take off his boots. Well, the presence of King Edward9 and all the grand dukes failed to impress him at all, he came back downstairs into the great salon of the Guermantes, wearing his thick woolen slippers. He felt that he was the Marquis du Lau d’Allemans who had no reason to feel inhibited by the King of England. It was he and the charming Quasimodo de Breteuil that I liked most of all. Besides, they were great friends of . . .” (she was about to say “your father” and stopped short). “No, that has no connection with Gri-Gri or Bréauté. He is an authentic Périgord nobleman. By the way, Mémé quotes a page from Saint-Simon about a Marquis d’Allemans, that’s absolutely him.” I quoted the first words of the portrait: “M. d’Allemans, who was one of the most distinguished members of the Périgord nobility, through his noble descent and through his own merit, was treated by everyone who lived there as judge and jury to whom everyone tended to appeal because of his honesty, his competence and his politeness, as well as being the cock of the walk in his province.—Yes, that sounds just like him,” said Mme de Guermantes, “especially as he was always as red as a coxcomb.—Yes, I remember having heard that description,” said Gilberte, without adding that she had heard it from her father, who was in fact a great admirer of Saint-Simon.
She also liked talking about the Prince d’Agrigente and M de Bréauté for another reason. The Prince d’Agrigente was of the house of Aragon by descent but their estate is held in the Poitou. As for his château, at least the one where he resided, it was not one of his family’s châteaux but came from the family of his mother’s former husband and was situated at roughly equal distance from Martinville and Guermantes. So Gilberte spoke of him and M. de Bréauté as country neighbors who reminded her of her former province. Objectively speaking, there was an element of deceit in these words, since it was only in Paris that she had come to know M. de Bréauté, through the Comtesse Molé, who was, it should be said, an old friend of her father. As for the pleasure of speaking of the countryside near Tansonville, it may have been sincere. Snobbery for some people is analogous to those sweet-tasting cordials which we lace with more active ingredients. Gilberte took an interest in some elegant lady because she owned some superb books and some Nattiers,10 which my former friend would certainly not have gone to see at the Bibliothèque Nationale or the Louvre, and I imagine that the attractions of Tansonville for Gilberte would have exerted their influence less through Mme Sazerat or Mme Goupil, despite their even greater proximity, than through M. d’Agrigente. “Oh poor Babal and Gri-Gri,” said Mme de Guermantes, “they are far more ill than du Lau, I’m afraid they won’t last long, either of them.”
When M. de Guermantes had finished reading my article he addressed me some rather muted compliments. He regretted the somewhat hackneyed form of my style, which was “as inflated and metaphorical as Chateaubriand’s outmoded prose”; on the other hand he congratulated me wholeheartedly for having found an “occupation”: “I like people to do something with their fingers and thumbs. I don’t like layabouts who always take themselves too seriously or get overexcited. Foolish breed!” Gilberte, who had lost no time in adopting society manners, declared how proud she was to be able to say that she was the friend of an author. “Just imagine how I shall tell everyone that I have the pleasure and the honor of knowing you.” “Wouldn’t you like to accompany us tomorrow to the Opéra Comique?” the Duchesse asked me, and I thought that this must be an invitation to the very bar where I had seen her for the first time and which had then seemed as inaccessible to me as the underwater realm of the Nereids.11 But I replied sadly: “No, I cannot go to the theater, I have lost a friend. She was very dear to me.” The tears nearly came to my eyes as I said it and yet for the first time I felt something akin to pleasure in talking about it. It was from that moment that I started to write to everyone to tell them of my great sorrow and to cease to feel it.
When Gilberte had left, Mme de Guermantes said to me: “You didn’t understand my signals, it was to stop you talking about Swann.” And as I excused myself, she said to her husband: “But I understand very well; I nearly mentioned him myself, I only just had time to cover up, it was awful, luckily I stopped in time. You know how embarrassing it is,” in order to diminish my fault a little by pretending to believe that I had complied with a propensity which was common to all and which was difficult to resist. “What am I supposed to
do about it?” replied the Duc. “All you have to do is have the drawings taken back upstairs again, since they make you think of Swann. If you don’t think about Swann, you won’t talk about him.”
The following day I received two letters of congratulation which astonished me considerably, one from Mme Goupil, a lady from Combray whom I had not seen for many years and to whom even in Combray I had hardly spoken more than two or three times. She had had a copy of the Figaro sent by a lending library. Thus when something of any note happens to us in life, we hear the news from people situated so far from our present acquaintances and so far back in our memory that they seem to be situated at a great distance, especially in terms of depth. A forgotten school-friend, who might have remembered himself to you on a dozen occasions, shows up but this does turn out to have its compensations. Thus it was that Bloch, whose opinion on my article I would have so liked to know, did not write to me. It is true that he had read the article and was to admit this to me later but only in a delayed reaction. The fact is that a few years later he himself wrote an article for the Figaro and wanted to inform me of the event immediately. As he too had benefited from what seemed to him to be a privilege, his need to pretend to be ignorant of my article having suddenly ceased, as if a compress had been released, he mentioned it to me, very differently from the way in which he wanted me to talk about his own: “I heard that you too had an article published,” he said. “But I didn’t think I should mention it to you, for fear of displeasing you, for one should not speak to one’s friends of the humiliating things that happen to them. And obviously it is humiliating to write for the newspaper of the sword and the cross, of ‘five o’clock’ tea parties, and other kinds of holy water.” His character had not changed, but his language had become less precious, as happens to certain writers who drop their mannerist style when they stop writing symbolist poems and start producing serialized novels.
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