When Mme Swann had gone back to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing; for even in the presence of only two people, as though commanding the attention of the full complement of ‘chums’, she raised her voice, she held forth, as she had so often seen the ‘Patronne’ do among the ‘little clan’ so as to ‘keep the conversation going’. The expressions which we have most recently borrowed being those we most like to use, at least for a time, Mme Swann sometimes chose the ones she had picked up from the few distinguished people whom her husband had not managed to avoid introducing to her (such as the mannerism of dropping the article or the demonstrative pronoun before an adjective describing a person), and sometimes more vulgar ones (for instance, ‘Isn’t it ducky!’, which one of her close friends was always saying); and these she tried to work into whatever stories she told, as was her wont since the days of the ‘little clan’. At the end of her stories, she would sometimes add, ‘I’m very fond of that story,’ or ‘Now, you must admit, that’s a lovely story!’, a habit which she had acquired, via her husband, from the Guermantes, whom she did not know.
After Mme Swann had left the dining-room, her husband, who had just come home, might then look in. ‘Is your mother alone now, Gilberte, do you happen to know? – No, she’s still got some of her ladies with her. – What? At seven o’clock in the evening! How dreadful! The poor dear must be exhausted. It’s quite odious. (At home I had been accustomed to hearing “odious” with a long o; but both Mme Swann and M. Swann gave the word a short one, making it into “oddious”.) Just think, he went on, turning to me, she’s been going since two this afternoon! And Camille tells me that there must have been twelve of them just between four and five! What am I saying, twelve? I think it was fourteen he said! I tell a lie, it was twelve – or was it? Anyway, when I came home just now, I had quite forgotten it was her at-home day, and when I saw all the carriages outside, I thought there must be a wedding in the house! And for the last few minutes, sitting in my study, I’ve heard nothing but the door-bell ringing. Given me quite a headache, I can tell you. Has she still got many of them with her? – No, just two now. – And who might they be, do you know? – Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps. – Ah, yes, the wife of the private secretary to the Minister for Works. – Well, I know her hubby works in a big minister’s office, like, but I don’t know what he is, Gilberte said, putting on a silly voice.
– Silly girl! You sound like a two-year-old. Works in a big office, indeed! He’s actually the private secretary to the Minister – that means he’s the boss of the whole thing! Or wait, no, what am I saying? I’m as silly as you are – he’s not just the private secretary, he’s the principal private secretary!
– Well, I dunno, do I? So a principal private secretary, that’s good, is it?’ Gilberte said, always ready to show indifference to whatever her parents took pride in, or possibly thinking to enhance the effect of their acquaintance with such an exalted personage by appearing not to attach much importance to it.
‘Good, is it?’ Swann exclaimed, preferring plainer speech to such modesty, which might have left me in some doubt. ‘I’ll have you know he’s next in importance to the Minister himself! Or actually he’s more important than the Minister, because he’s the one who’s in charge of everything. I’m told he’s a man of calibre, too, a first-rate man, a really distinguished person. Officer of the Legion of Honour. A fine fellow in all respects, and actually very handsome too.’
In fact, his wife had married him, against much opposition from within her family, because he was a ‘charmer’. The general effect of this person of superlative refinement may be judged from the fact that he had a silky fair beard, a pretty face, an adenoidal pronunciation, bad breath and a glass eye.
‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Swann said to me, that it’s really quite funny to see people like that in government circles these days. You see, they’re the Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, the epitome of your narrow-minded middle classes, priest-ridden reactionaries. Your late grandfather was very familiar, at least by sight and repute, with old Chenut – who never tipped a cabman more than twopence in his life, though he was wealthy for those days – and Baron Bréau-Chenut. They lost everything in the collapse of the Union Générale,34 which you’re too young to remember anything about, and since then they’ve had to pick up whatever pieces they can.
– He’s the uncle of a girl that used to go to my school. She was in one of the classes well below mine – ‘that Albertine’, everybody used to call her. I’m sure she’ll be very ‘fast’ one of these days, but at the moment she’s the funniest-looking thing.
– What an amazing daughter I’ve got! She knows everyone!
– No, I don’t know her. I just used to see her about and hear everybody shouting ‘Albertine, Albertine’ all the time. But Mme Bontemps I do know, and I can tell you I don’t fancy her much either.
– Well, you’re quite wrong there, my girl. Mme Bontemps is charming, pretty and intelligent. Witty, too. I’ll just pop in and say hello to her, ask her whether her husband thinks there’s going to be a war, and whether we can rely on King Theodosius. He’s very much in the know, so he must know a thing or two about that, wouldn’t you say?’
In earlier days, Swann would never have spoken in this way. But a similar change can be seen in the once unpretentious princess of royal blood who, ten years later, having eloped with a footman, then tries to re-enter society, only to sense that people are not very willing to frequent her; so she spontaneously adopts the conversational habits of boring old women who, when the name of a fashionable duchess is spoken in their hearing, instantly say, ‘She looked in to see me only yesterday’ and ‘I lead a very sheltered life these days, you know.’ Which shows how pointless it is to study human manners; they can be deduced from the laws of human psychology.
The Swanns were not immune from this foible, common to people whose circle of acquaintance is not as wide as they would like. A visit, an invitation, even a friendly word spoken by anyone who was at all noted they took to be an event which should be bruited abroad. If by some ill chance the Verdurins were in London when Odette happened to hold a dinner-party which was at all remarkable, there was always some way of making sure that a mutual friend would telegraph the news to them. The merest letter or even just a telegram which Odette might receive, if it was in any sense flattering, the Swanns were incapable of keeping to themselves. Friends were told about it; the document itself was circulated. The Swanns’ salon was reminiscent of those hotels in seaside resorts where they pin up messages on a notice-board.
Also, the people who had known the former Swann not just in a private capacity, as I had, but also in society, in the world of the Guermantes – where the highest standards of wit and charm were expected of everyone, except duchesses and Highnesses, and where even eminent men might be unwelcome if they were seen to be boring or vulgar – might have been surprised to discover that not only had the former Swann turned into someone whose ways of referring to people he was acquainted with were indiscreet, but that his criteria for choosing such people were also quite lax. How was it possible for him not to be exasperated by Mme Bontemps, who was so common and nasty? How could he possibly say she was a pleasant person? His memories of the Guermantes set should surely have prevented it. But in fact they abetted it. The Guermantes, unlike three-quarters of the world’s social sets, certainly had taste, and exquisite taste at that. But they also had snobbery, which makes for the possibility of momentary failures in the functioning of taste. In the case of someone who was not an indispensable member of their set, a Minister for Foreign Affairs, say, rather too full of his own Republicanism, or a garrulous Academician, their taste discriminated against him; Swann would commiserate with Mme de Guermantes at her having had to dine with such commensals at an embassy; and the whole Guermantes set infinitely preferred a fashionable man, a man of their own world, that is, devoid of any special talent, but with the Guermantes cast of mind. However, a grand-duchess o
r a princess of royal blood, by dining frequently at the house of Mme de Guermantes, would also be seen as being in the set, although by her lack of the Guermantes cast of mind she was not of it. But with the naïvety of the fashionable, since she was one of their number, they did their best to think she was good company, rather than knowing that it was because she was good company that she was one of their number. ‘She’s actually quite a nice woman,’ Swann would say in support of Mme de Guermantes, after H.R.H. had left. ‘And she’s even got a touch of comedy in her. I must say I doubt whether she has ever read the Critique of Pure Reason from cover to cover! Still, she’s not too bad.
– I agree entirely, the Duchesse de Guermantes would reply. Mind you, today she was a little bit shy. But you’ll see, she can be quite charming. – She’s much less of a bore than Mme XJ (this being the wife of the garrulous Academician, a quite outstanding woman) who keeps spouting books at you. – Oh, there’s no comparison!’ It was at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s that Swann had acquired his facility in saying such things, which he said in all sincerity; and it was an ability he had kept. It served him now with the people who visited his wife. He tried hard to see in them, and to like, the qualities which any human being shows if examined with a favourable bias, and not with the disdain of the fastidious; and nowadays he stressed the merits of Mme Bontemps as he had once stressed those of the Princess of Parma, who would really have been unacceptable to the Guermantes set, had not certain Highnesses benefited from preferential treatment – and even if the ones admitted had been expected to possess wit and a little charm. As has been seen, Swann had once enjoyed exchanging his social position for one which, in certain circumstances, suited him better; and all he was doing at present was adapting this practice to a more lasting situation. It is only people who are incapable of perceiving the composite nature of what seems at first sight indivisible who think that person and position are one. The same man, seen on different rungs of the social ladder at consecutive moments of his life, belongs to separate worlds, each of which is not necessarily more elevated than the previous one; and every time a new phase of living brings us into, or back into, a certain social circle which welcomes us with open arms, we quite naturally start to put down roots and become attached to it.
As for Mme Bontemps, when Swann spoke of her in such glowing terms, I think he was also quite pleased by the thought that my parents would know she was on visiting terms with his wife. It must be said, however, that the identity of the people with whom Mme Swann gradually came to be on such terms aroused more curiosity in my family than admiration. On hearing the name of Mme Trombert, my mother said:
‘Now there’s a new recruit! And she’ll bring in others.’
And she added, as though Mme Swann’s brisk and impetuous conquest of new acquaintances was a colonial war:
‘Now that the Tromberts are subdued, the neighbouring tribes will not hold out much longer.’
If she happened to pass Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us about it that evening:
‘I saw Mme Swann today in full battle order. She must have been launching an incursion into the lands of the Massechuto, the Singhalese or the Tromberts.’
When I mentioned all the new people I had seen at the Swanns’, a somewhat mixed and artificial society, many of whom had been rather unwilling to belong to it, and who derived from very different backgrounds, my mother could tell at once how they came to be there, and spoke of them as though they were spoils of war:
‘Brought back from an Expedition to Mme de This’s or Mme de That’s.’
In the case of Mme Cottard, my father was amazed that Mme Swann should think there was kudos to be got from the company of such a dowdy middle-class person: ‘Even allowing for the Professor’s position, I must say it’s beyond me.’ To my mother, on the other hand, it was quite clear: she knew that a woman could miss much of the pleasure to be got from graduating to circles different from those she moved in before, if she cannot inform her old acquaintances about the relatively more conspicuous acquaintances with whom she has replaced them. For this purpose, a witness is required, who shall be allowed into the world of new delights, as the blundering insect plunders a flower then flies off to visit others, to spread the news, or so it is hoped, sprinkling its random pollens of envy and admiration. Mme Cottard, perfect for this role, belonged to that special category of guests whom Mama, who had some of her father’s style of wit, called ‘Strangers to Speak in Sparta’.35 Besides, – apart from another reason which did not come to light until many years later – in inviting this friend, who was demure, reserved and well-meaning, to her splendid at-homes, Mme Swann had no need to fear she might be harbouring a traitor or a competitor. She knew the great number of middle-class blooms that this tireless worker, armed with her plumed hat and her little card-case, could pollinate in one busy afternoon. She knew how prolific this form of seeding could be; and, allowing for the law of averages, she was right to expect that, by the next day but one, this or that ‘regular’ of the Verdurins’ would have heard of the card left on her by the Commanding Officer of the Paris region, or even that M. Verdurin in person would be told that none other than the Chairman of the Turf Club, M. Le Hault de Pressagny, had included the Swanns in his party for the grand ball in honour of King Theodosius. She imagined that these two events, both of them flattering for herself, would be the only ones the Verdurins would learn of, for the particular concrete manifestations of fame which we like to picture and to which we aspire are few, given our penury of mind and our inability to imagine simultaneously more than one of the many blessings of fame, though we still harbour the vague hope of seeing them all descend upon us at once.
Besides, Mme Swann’s only successes so far had been in what is known as ‘the world of officialdom’. Fashionable ladies did not frequent her house. It was not that they were deterred by the presence of the Republic’s representatives. During the early years of my childhood, all who belonged to conservative society belonged also to fashionable society; no self-respecting salon would have countenanced admitting a Republican. Those who constituted this set were convinced that the impossibility of ever inviting an Opportunist,36 let alone an unspeakable Radical, was something which would last for ever, like oil-lamps and horse-trams. But after the manner of kaleidoscopes which are turned from time to time, society composes new designs by jumbling the order of elements which once seemed immutable. By the time I had taken my first communion, prim and proper ladies were being confronted, to their astonishment, with elegant Jewesses in some of the houses they frequented. These new designs in the kaleidoscope are made by what a philosopher would call a change of criterion. Another of these was to come with the Dreyfus Affair, at a time which was slightly later than my first entry into the world of Mme Swann, and again the kaleidoscope shuffled its little tinted shapes. All things Jewish were displaced, even the elegant lady, and hitherto nondescript nationalists came to the fore. The most brilliant salon in Paris was that of an ultra-Catholic Austrian prince. If instead of the Dreyfus Affair there had been a war with Germany, the kaleidoscope would have turned in a different direction. The Jews, who would have shown to everyone’s astonishment that they were patriotic, could have kept their position; and no one would have wished to go, or even admit to ever having gone, to the Austrian prince’s. Even so, each time society is briefly stable, those who make it up imagine that further change is ruled out, just as, having seen the advent of the telephone, they now wish to disbelieve in aeroplanes. And the philosophers of the daily press damn the former time, not only in its modes of pleasure, which they see as the epitome of decadence, but even in the work of its artists and thinkers, which they now see as worthless, as though it was inseparably linked to the constant inconstancies of the fashionable and the frivolous. The only thing that never changes is that there always appears to be ‘something changing in France’. In the days when I started frequenting Mme Swann’s world, the Dreyfus Affair had not yet happened, and certain notable Jews wer
e very influential, none more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife was an aunt of Swann’s. Lady Israels did not enjoy the same fashionable connections as her nephew once had; and he, though he must presumably have been her heir, had little enough contact with her, as he disliked her. However, she was the only relative of Swann’s who knew something of his real standing in the elegant world, the others being as ignorant in that respect as my own family had been for years. When one member of a family emigrates to high society – something which at the time seems to him a unique occurrence, but which with ten years’ hindsight he can see has been managed by more than one of the young men with whom he was brought up, albeit in a different way and for different reasons – he lives inside a twilight zone, a terra incognita, which is quite visible in its finest detail for all those who inhabit it, but which is dark and empty for all who do not have access to it, who may live alongside it without ever suspecting that it exists. No Reuter’s newsagency ever having informed Swann’s cousins about the people he mixed with, these ladies would exchange stories at family dinners about how they had – before the man’s wretched marriage, of course – ‘dutifully’ devoted their Sunday afternoon to visiting ‘cousin Charles’, who they thought was somewhat given to the poor relation’s envy of his betters and whom, with a pun on the title of Balzac’s Cousine Bette, they wittily dubbed ‘Cousin Batty’. If envy there was, it was on the part of Lady Israels, who knew perfectly well the identity of the people who lavished their friendship on him. Her husband’s family, who were as rich as the Rothschilds, had for some generations managed the affairs of the princes of Orléans. Lady Israels, who was hugely wealthy and very influential, had contrived to make sure that no one of her acquaintance would ever be at home to Odette. Only one person, the Comtesse de Marsantes, had disobeyed, and that secretly. One day, as Odette arrived to visit this lady, by an ill chance in swept Lady Israels. Mme de Marsantes, who was on tenterhooks, plucked up the cowardice of those who could just as well choose to be brave, and said nothing to Odette for the duration of her visit. This occurrence did nothing to inspire Odette to venture further into a zone of society which in any case was not the one to which she wished to belong. In her utter disregard for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Odette remained the untutored light-o’-love, quite different from the middle-class people who are minutely informed on the finer points of genealogy and whose longing for aristocratic connections, unrequited by life, can be assuaged only by perusal of an older generation’s memoirs. As for Swann, no doubt he went on being the lover who turns a blind and indulgent eye to a former mistress’s idiosyncrasies; and I would often hear Odette utter the most flagrant howlers about things social while Swann, moved either by a lingering fondness, or by the low esteem in which he now held her, or perhaps because he could no longer be bothered trying to improve her, sat by and did nothing to correct them. This may also have been a mode of the simplicity of manner which had had us fooled for so many years at Combray, and which, since he had kept up his separate connection with some of the most outstanding members of the Faubourg, made him reluctant to mar the conversation in his wife’s drawing-room by seeming to attach any importance to such people. In fact for Swann himself they were of less importance than ever, the centre of gravity of his life having shifted. So Odette, in her complete ignorance of society, went on saying, whenever a passing mention was made of the Princesse de Guermantes just after a mention of her cousin, the Duchesse de Guermantes, ‘I see! They’re princes now, are they? They’ve gone up in the world!’ If people referred to the Duc de Chartres as ‘the Prince’, she would put them right: ‘No, no, he’s not a prince, he’s a duke.’ Of the Duc d’Orléans, the son of the Comte de Paris, she would say, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, the son being above the father like that.’ Then, like the anglophile she was, she would add, ‘All these “Royals”! Isn’t it confusing!’ And once when someone asked her which of France’s old provinces the Guermantes family hailed from, she gave the name of a département, ‘From the Aisne.’
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 12