CHAPTER 4
A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup
“oh, how incredible! said my mother. Listen, I know that at my age one should no longer be surprised by anything, but I assure you that nothing could surprise me more than the news in this letter.—Yes, but listen to me, I replied, I don’t know what it says, but whatever the news, it cannot be more amazing than what I have just learned from my letter. It’s a marriage. Robert de Saint-Loup is going to marry Gilberte Swann.—Ah!” my mother replied, “then that must be what I shall find in the other letter, the one that I haven’t opened yet, for I recognized your friend’s writing.” And my mother smiled at me with the tenderly concerned air that every event, however trivial, evoked in her if it affected human beings capable of suffering, remembering, and sharing others’ mourning. Thus my mother smiled and spoke to me with a gentle voice as if she feared that, if she treated the marriage lightly, this might disparage the melancholy feelings it was likely to evoke in Swann’s widow and his daughter, as well as Robert’s mother, preparing to be separated from her son, on to whom my mother, out of kindness and out of sympathy inspired by their kindness to me, projected her own sensitivity, at once filial, conjugal and maternal. “Wasn’t I right to tell you that you would find nothing more amazing? I asked her.—Well, actually, no, she replied gently, it is I who have the most extraordinary news, if not ‘la plus grande, la plus petite,’ for that quotation from Mme de Sévigné made by people who knew nothing else of her work exasperated your grandmother as much as ‘La jolie chose que c’est de faner.’1 We do not stoop to glean such common-or-garden Sévigné. This letter announces the marriage of the young Cambremer.—Oh, yes, I said, with no interest, to whom? But in any case the nature of the bridegroom has already removed from this marriage any element of excitement.—Unless the nature of the bride were to restore it?—And who is this bride?—Ah, if I tell you straight away you won’t have deserved it, come on, try a little harder,” said my mother, seeing that we had not yet reached Turin and wanting to leave me something substantial to get my teeth into, and something to wash it down with. “But how am I supposed to know? Is it someone brilliant? If Legrandin and his sister are pleased, we can be sure that it is a brilliant marriage.—I don’t know about Legrandin, but the person who has told me of the marriage says that Mme de Cambremer is delighted. I don’t know whether you will call it a brilliant marriage. For me it calls to mind those marriages from the days when a king could marry a shepherdess, except that the shepherdess is even less than a shepherdess, although very charming. Your grandmother would have been stupefied, if not displeased.—But whoever is this bride?—It is Mlle d’Oloron.—She sounds imposing, and most un-shepherdess-like, but I just don’t see who you mean. It’s a title that used to run in the Guermantes family.—Precisely, and it was granted by M. de Charlus to Jupien’s niece when he adopted her. She it is who is due to marry the young Cambremer.—Jupien’s niece! That’s impossible!—It is virtue rewarded. It’s a marriage from the end of a novel by George Sand,” said my mother. “It’s the wages of sin, it’s a marriage from the end of a novel by Balzac,” I thought. “After all, I said to my mother, when you come to think about it it is natural enough. It allows the Cambremers to drop anchor at the Guermantes’, where they never dared hope pitch their tent; what is more, the child, since she was adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable for the Cambremers since they had lost their own; and finally she is the adopted and, according to the Cambremers, probably the real—that is, the natural—daughter of someone whom they consider to be a prince of the blood. A bastard of an almost royal house has always been considered a flattering match by nobility, French or foreign. There is no need even to go back so far as the Lucinges,2 for only six months ago you will recall the marriage of one of Robert’s friends with that young lady whose sole claim to a place in society was that she was supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be the natural daughter of a sovereign prince.” My mother, while maintaining the caste distinctions of Combray according to which my grandmother would have been bound to be scandalized by this marriage, wanted above all to prove her mother’s good judgment, and added: “In fact the girl is perfection itself and your dear grandmother would not even have needed her enormous kindness and infinite indulgence to avoid severity in judging young Cambremer’s choice. Do you remember how distinguished she found the girl one day long ago when she called in to have her skirt mended. She was only a child then. And although now so to speak an old maid left ripening on the shelf, she is quite another woman, a thousand times more perfect. But your grandmother had taken that all in at a glance. She had found the great-niece of a waistcoat-maker more ‘noble’ than the Duc de Guermantes.” But even more than praise my grandmother, my mother needed to find that it was “better” for her not to be able to witness these events. This was the supreme aim of her affection, as if she were sparing her one last sorrow. “And yet,” my mother asked me, “would you believe that old father Swann, although it is true that you never knew him, could have thought that one day he would have a great-grandson or a great-granddaughter in whose veins would mingle the blood of old mother Moser, who used to say ‘Goot mornink, Chentlemen,’ and the blood of the Duc de Guise!3—Actually, Mama, it is even more extraordinary than you say. For the Swanns were very fine people, and given their son’s position, if only he had made a good marriage, then his daughter could have made an even finer one. But everything had to start from scratch again because he married a tart.—Oh, a tart, now really. We must have been cruel. I never believed everything people said about her.—Oh yes, she was a tart, and I’ll let you into some of the ‘family’ secrets one of these days.” Plunged in her day-dreams, my mother said: “The daughter of a man your father would never have allowed me to greet, and she’s marrying the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis, whom your father refused to allow me to call on at first, because he found her socially too grand for us!” She continued: “Mme de Cambremer’s son, to whom Legrandin so feared to recommend us because he didn’t find us classy enough, marrying the niece of a man who would never have dared come to see us without using the servants’ staircase! . . . After all, your poor grandmother was right, you remember, when she said that great aristocrats did things which would shock the petty bourgeoisie, and that Queen Marie-Amélie was spoiled for her by the advances which she had made to the Prince de Condé’s mistress to get her to persuade him to make a will in favor of the Duc d’Aumale.4 Do you remember how shocked she was to learn that for centuries the maidservants of the house of Gramont, who were veritable saints, bore the name of Corisande in memory of the liaison of a progenetrix of theirs with Henri IV?5 These things may also happen in the bourgeoisie, but they are more carefully hidden. Imagine how it would have amused your grandmother!” my mother said sadly—for the pleasures we were sad for my grandmother to miss were the simplest of life’s pleasures, a piece of news, a play, or even a mere “skit” that would have amused her. “Don’t you think that she would have been amazed? Yet I’m sure that these marriages would have shocked your grandmother, that she would have suffered, I think it’s better for her to have known nothing about them,” my mother continued, as she liked to think that, given my grandmother’s marvelously singular nature, she would have been most peculiarly struck by them and that her impressions would have been extraordinarily important. Formerly, faced with any sad and unpredictable event, the disgrace or ruin of one of our old friends, some public calamity like an epidemic, a war, or a revolution, my mother believed that it was probably better that my grandmother should never have known about it, for she would have been too upset and might not have been able to survive it. And when the subject was an event as shocking as these, my mother, from an emotional reaction opposite to that of the ill-willed, who prefer to hope that those whom they dislike have suffered more than people think, did not, in her affection for my grandmother, want to admit that anything sad or belittling might have happened to her. She continued to imagine my
grandmother beyond the reach of all ills, even the most unpredictable, thinking that the death of my grandmother had perhaps on balance been a blessing in sparing this so noble nature the all too ugly sight of modern times, which she would not have been able to accept. For optimism is the philosophy of the past. Since the events which actually happened, among all those which might have, are the only ones that we know, the harm that they have done us seems inevitable, and we credit them with being responsible for the little good which they have been unable to avoid bringing with them, imagining that without them it would never have come to pass. At the same time she tried to guess what my grandmother would have felt on learning the news, and simultaneously wanted to believe that our minds, being of a lower order than hers, were unable to guess it. “Just imagine,” my mother started to say, “how astonished your poor grandmother would have been!” And I felt that my mother suffered from not being able to pass on the news, sad that my grandmother would never know it, and found something unjust in the way life could bring to light facts which my grandmother would have found unbelievable, thus rendering false and incomplete after the event the knowledge of people and society that she had taken to her grave, the marriage of the young Jupien girl with Legrandin’s nephew having been of a nature to modify my grandmother’s general philosophy just as much as the news—if my mother had been able to convey it to her—that the problems of aerial navigation and wireless telegraphy, which my grandmother had believed insoluble, had been resolved. But we shall see that this desire to enable my grandmother to share in the benefits of our knowledge seemed to my mother yet too selfish. What I learned—for I had not been able to witness it all while in Venice—was that Mlle de Forcheville had been solicited by the Duc de Châtellerault and the Prince de Silistrie, while Saint-Loup had been trying to marry Mlle d’Entragues, daughter of the Duke of Luxembourg. This is what had happened. Mlle de Forcheville, with her hundred million francs, seemed to Mme de Marsantes an excellent match for her son. Her mistake was to say that she was a charming girl, that she had no idea whether she was rich or poor, and preferred not to know, but that even without a dowry it would be a boon for even the most discriminating young man to have such a wife. This was going rather far for a woman tempted only by the hundred million and indifferent to the rest. Everyone immediately realized that she had her own son in mind. The Princesse de Silestrie uttered shrieks of protest, expatiated on the grandeur of Saint-Loup, and proclaimed that if Saint-Loup married the daughter of Odette and a Jew, that would be the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. No matter how sure of herself she felt, Mme de Marsantes did not dare pursue her claim further, and withdrew in the face of these protestations by the Princesse de Silestrie, who immediately forwarded a proposal from her own son. Mme de Marsantes had cried out in protest only in order to reserve Gilberte for herself. However, unwilling to settle for failure, Mme de Marsantes had immediately turned to Mlle d’Entragues, the daughter of the Duke of Luxembourg. The latter party, with a mere twenty million francs to her name, was less suitable, but Mme de Marsantes made it publicly known that a Saint-Loup could not marry a Mlle Swann (the name of Forcheville was not even mentioned). Some time afterward, when someone tactlessly said that the Duc de Châtellerault was considering marriage with Mlle d’Entragues, Mme de Marsantes, who was unrivaled for her susceptibility, took umbrage, readjusted her fire, switched to Gilberte, had a proposal made on behalf of Saint-Loup and concluded the engagement forthwith.
The engagement elicited animated commentaries in the most diverse milieux. Several lady-friends of my mother’s, who had seen Saint-Loup in our house, called on her during her “visiting hours” to ascertain whether the fiancé was indeed the same person as my friend. Some people went so far as to claim that it was not the Cambremer-Legrandins who were involved in the other marriage. They had this on good authority, since the Marquise, née Legrandin, had denied it on the eve of the very day that the engagement was announced. I for my part wondered why M. de Charlus on the one hand and Saint-Loup on the other, who had both had occasion to write to me shortly beforehand and had spoken so amiably of their travel plans, whose execution would have prevented all possibility of such ceremonies, had made no mention of it. I concluded, without considering how people keep such matters secret until the last moment, that I was less their friend than I had thought, which, in the case of Saint-Loup, distressed me. And why indeed, having remarked that the friendliness and openness of the aristocracy, “peers and fellows on an equal footing,” was a charade, should I expect to be an exception? In the house of pleasure—in which men rather than women were increasingly procured for one’s pleasure—where M. de Charlus had surprised Morel and where the “vice-Madam,” a fervent reader of the Gaulois, who commented on events in high society, declared, when speaking to a stout gentleman who came to drink endless bottles of champagne in her establishment in the company of young men, because he wanted to develop his already considerable girth into an obesity certain to ensure that he would never be “caught up” in any war that might break out: “It appears that young Saint-Loup is ‘that way inclined’ and young Cambremer too! Pity their wives! In any case, if you know the betrothed pair, do please send them along, they will find their heart’s desire here, and help us earn a lot of money.” Upon which, the stout gentleman, although himself being “that way inclined,” protested, replying, on slightly snobbish grounds, that he often met Cambremer and Saint-Loup at his cousins’, the d’Ardonvilliers, and that they were great connoisseurs of women and very far from such “inclinations.” “Ah!” concluded the vice-Madam with a skeptical air, but possessing no proof, and remaining convinced that in our century the perversity of morals was second only to the libelous absurdities spread by gossip. Some people whom I hardly knew to speak to wrote to me and asked “what I thought” of these two marriages, absolutely as if they were conducting an inquiry into the height of the hats which women wore to the theater, or into the psychological novel. I was unable to face replying to these letters. Confronted with these two marriages, I did not think anything at all, but felt an immense sadness, as you do when two parts of your past existence, previously moored alongside you and in which perhaps from one day to the next you may have been harboring some half-hearted, secret investment, leave for ever, with all flags proudly flying, like two ships sailing for foreign parts. As for the parties themselves, they considered their marriages perfectly natural, since they themselves and not others were concerned. They had always had endless scorn for these “great marriages,” founded on some hidden flaw. And even the Cambremers, of such ancient but unpretentious lineage, would have been the first to forget Jupien and remember only the forgotten splendors of the house of d’Oloron, if an exception had not occurred in the shape of the person who should be most charmed by the marriage, the Marquise de Cambremer-Legrandin. For her spiteful character led her to prefer to humiliate her relatives rather than seek to bask in her own glory. Thus, since she did not love her son and had taken a premature dislike to her intended daughter-in-law, she declared that it would be a misfortune for a Cambremer to marry a person whose origins were more or less unknown, and whose teeth were exceptionally irregular. As for the propensity of the young Cambremer to frequent men of letters like Bergotte for example or even Bloch, it is easy to imagine why such a brilliant alliance should not have aggravated his snobbery, since seeing himself as the successor of the Ducs d’Oléron, “sovereign princes,” in the words of the press, made him sure enough of his grandeur to feel able to frequent anyone. And, on days when he did not worship some Highness or another, he left the lower nobility to join the ranks of the lower bourgeoisie. These notes in the press, especially concerning Robert de Saint-Loup, gave my friend a new grandeur, as they enumerated his royal ancestors, but one whose only effect was to sadden me further, as if he had become somebody else, the descendant of Robert le Fort6 rather than the friend who had so recently sat on the folding seat in the car so that I could have the more comfortable seat in the back; the fa
ct that I had been taken by surprise by his marriage to Gilberte, which suddenly surfaced in the letter which I had received, as unsuspected as a chemical precipitate, making them seem so different from how I had imagined them the day before, made me suffer, whereas I should have realized that he had been very busy and that society marriages often come to pass in this sudden fashion, and often in order to replace a previous, unsuccessful arrangement. And the sadness which I felt, as depressing as moving house and as bitter as jealousy, resulting from the abrupt and accidental clash caused by these two marriages, cut so deep that people would remind me of it later, as if, absurdly, I should be proud of it, as if it were quite the opposite of what I had felt at the time, a double, triple or even quadruple foreboding.
Those in society who had never taken any notice of Gilberte told me with an air of profound concern, “Ah! So she’s the one who is to marry Saint-Loup,” and cast on her the attentive eyes of people who not only avidly follow the events of Parisian life, but also seek instruction and believe in the profundity of their insight. On the other hand, those who had met only Gilberte observed Saint-Loup with extreme attentiveness and, despite often being people who hardly knew me, asked me to introduce them and returned from their introduction to the bridegroom brimming with festive joy, saying, “He is such a fine figure of a man.” Gilberte was convinced that the name of the Marquis de Saint-Loup was a thousand times greater than that of the Duc d’Orléans,7 but, as she belonged above all to a generation of (rather egalitarian) wits, she did not want to appear any less witty and took pleasure in calling herself mater semita, to which she added, in order to consummate her wit, “whereas for me he is my pater.”
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