The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

Her soliloquy was interrupted by the voice of the waistcoat-maker downstairs, the same who had so delighted my grandmother once, long ago, when she had gone to pay a call on Mme. de Villeparisis, and now occupied no less exalted a place in Françoise’s affections. Having raised his head when he heard our window open, he had already been trying for some time to attract his neighbour’s attention, in order to bid her good day. The coquetry of the young girl that Françoise had once been softened and refined for M. Jupien the querulous face of our old cook, dulled by age, ill-temper and the heat of the kitchen fire, and it was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity and modesty that she bestowed a gracious salutation on the waistcoat-maker, but without making any audible response, for if she did infringe Mamma’s orders by looking into the courtyard, she would never have dared to go the length of talking from the window, which would have been quite enough (according to her) to bring down on her “a whole chapter” from the Mistress. She pointed to the waiting carriage, as who should say: “A fine pair, eh!” though what she actually muttered was: “What an old rattle-trap!” but principally because she knew that he would be bound to answer, putting his hand to his lips so as to be audible without having to shout:

“You could have one too if you liked, as good as they have and better, I dare say, only you don’t care for that sort of thing.”

And Françoise, after a modest, evasive signal of delight, the meaning of which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know; simplicity’s the rule in this house,” shut the window again in case Mamma should come in. These “you” who might have had more horses than the Guermantes were ourselves, but Jupien was right in saying “you” since, except for a few purely personal gratifications, such as, when she coughed all day long without ceasing and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her cold, that of pretending, with an irritating little titter, that she had not got a cold, like those plants that an animal to which they are wholly attached keeps alive with food which it catches, eats and digests for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily assimilable residue, Françoise lived with us in full community; it was we who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take on ourselves the task of concocting those little sops to her vanity out of which was formed—with the addition of the recognised rights of freely practising the cult of the midday dinner according to the traditional custom, which included a mouthful of air at the window when the meal was finished, a certain amount of loitering in the street when she went out to do her marketing, and a holiday on Sundays when she paid a visit to her niece—the portion of happiness indispensable to her existence. And so it can be understood that Françoise might well have succumbed in those first days of our migration, a victim, in a house where my father’s claims to distinction were not yet known, to a malady which she herself called “wearying”, wearying in the active sense in which the word ennui is employed by Corneille, or in the last letters of soldiers who end by taking their own lives because they are wearying for their girls or for their native villages. Françoise’s wearying had soon been cured by none other than Jupien, for he at once procured her a pleasure no less keen, indeed more refined than she would have felt if we had decided to keep a carriage. “Very good class, those Juliens,” (for Françoise readily assimilated new names to those with which she was already familiar) “very worthy people; you can see it written on their faces.” Jupien was in fact able to understand, and to inform the world that if we did not keep a carriage it was because we had no wish for one. This new friend of Françoise was very little at home, having obtained a post in one of the Government offices. A waistcoat-maker first of all, with the “chit of a girl” whom my grandmother had taken for his daughter, he had lost all interest in the exercise of that calling after his assistant (who, when still little more than a child, had shewn great skill in darning a torn skirt, that day when my grandmother had gone to call on Mme. de Villeparisis) had turned to ladies’ fashions and become a seamstress. A prentice hand, to begin with, in a dressmaker’s workroom, set to stitch a seam, to fasten a flounce, to sew on a button or to press a crease, to fix a waistband with hooks and eyes, she had quickly risen to be second and then chief assistant, and having formed a connexion of her own among ladies of fashion now worked at home, that is to say in our courtyard, generally with one or two of her young friends from the workroom, whom she had taken on as apprentices. After this, Jupien’s presence in the place had ceased to matter. No doubt the little girl (a big girl by this time) had often to cut out waistcoats still. But with her friends to assist her she needed no one besides. And so Jupien, her uncle, had sought employment outside. He was free at first to return home at midday, then, when he had definitely succeeded the man whose substitute only he had begun by being, not before dinner-time. His appointment to the “regular establishment” was, fortunately, not announced until some weeks after our arrival, so that his courtesy could be brought to bear on her long enough to help Françoise to pass through the first, most difficult phase without undue suffering. At the same time, and without underrating his value to Françoise as, so to speak, a sedative during the period of transition, I am bound to say that my first impression of Jupien had been far from favourable. At a little distance, entirely ruining the effect that his plump cheeks and vivid colouring would otherwise have produced, his eyes, brimming with a compassionate, mournful, dreamy gaze, led one to suppose that he was seriously ill or had just suffered a great bereavement. Not only was he nothing of the sort, but as soon as he opened his mouth (and his speech, by the way, was perfect) he was quite markedly cynical and cold. There resulted from this discord between eyes and lips a certain falsity which was not attractive, and by which he had himself the air of being made as uncomfortable as a guest who arrives in morning dress at a party where everyone else is in evening dress, or as a commoner who having to speak to a Royal Personage does not know exactly how he ought to address him and gets round the difficulty by cutting down his remarks to almost nothing. Jupien’s (here the comparison ends) were, on the contrary, charming. Indeed, corresponding possibly to this overflowing of his face by his eyes (which one ceased to notice when one came to know him), I soon discerned in him a rare intellect, and one of the most spontaneously literary that it has been my privilege to come across, in the sense that, probably without education, he possessed or had assimilated, with the help only of a few books skimmed in early life, the most ingenious turns of speech. The most gifted people that I had known had died young. And so I was convinced that Jupien’s life would soon be cut short. Kindness was among his qualities, and pity, the most delicate and the most generous feelings for others. But his part in the life of Françoise had soon ceased to be indispensable. She had learned to put up with understudies.

Indeed, when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a parcel or message, while seeming to pay no attention and merely pointing vaguely to an empty chair, Françoise so skilfully put to the best advantage the few seconds that he spent in the kitchen, while he waited for Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that the stranger went away without having ineradicably engraved upon his memory the conviction that, if we “did not have” any particular thing, it was because we had “no wish” for it. If she made such a point of other people’s knowing that we “had money” (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive articles, and said simply “have money”, “fetch water”), of their realising that we were rich, it was not because riches with nothing else besides, riches without virtue, were in her eyes the supreme good in life; but virtue without riches was not her ideal either. Riches were for her, so to speak, a necessary condition of virtue, failing which virtue itself would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so little between them that she had come in time to invest each with the other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to discover something edifying in riches.

As soon as she had shut the window again, which she did quickly—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on her “every conceivable insult”—Françoise began with many groans and sighs to put straight the kitchen table.

“There are some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my father’s valet; “I had a friend who used to be with them; he was their second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old pal, but his brother-in-law, who did his time in the Army with one of the Baron de Guermantes’s stud grooms. Does your mother know you’re out?” added the valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to hum the popular airs of the season, of peppering his conversation with all the latest witticisms.

Françoise, with the tired eyes of an ageing woman, eyes which moreover saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, made out not the witticism that underlay the words, but that there must be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of his speech and had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a joker. She smiled at him, therefore, with an air of benevolent bewilderment, as who should say: “Always the same, that Victor!” And she was genuinely pleased, knowing that listening to smart sayings of this sort was akin—if remotely—to those reputable social pleasures for which, in every class of society, people make haste to dress themselves in their best and run the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed the valet to be a friend after her own heart, for he never left off denouncing, with fierce indignation, the appalling measures which the Republic was about to enforce against the clergy. Françoise had not yet learned that our cruellest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports which may make us unhappy, taking care not to include any appearance of justification, which might lessen our discomfort, and perhaps give us some slight regard for a party which they make a point of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.

“The Duchess must be connected with all that lot,” said Françoise, bringing the conversation back to the Guermantes of the Rue de la Chaise, as one plays a piece over again from the andante. “I can’t recall who it was told me that one of them had married a cousin of the Duke. It’s the same kindred, anyway. Ay, they’re a great family, the Guermantes!” she added, in a tone of respect, founding the greatness of the family at once on the number of its branches and the brilliance of its connexions, as Pascal founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on the Authority of the Scriptures. For since there was but the single word “great” to express both meanings, it seemed to her that they formed a single idea, her vocabulary, like cut stones sometimes, shewing thus on certain of its facets a flaw which projected a ray of darkness into the recesses of her mind. “I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them that have their castle at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they must be kin to their cousin at Algiers, too.” My mother and I long asked ourselves who this cousin at Algiers could be until finally we discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of Angers. What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near. Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and especially that of place-names, was thickly strewn with errors. “I meant to talk to their butler about it. What is it again you call him?” she interrupted herself as though putting a formal question as to the correct procedure, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course, it’s Antoine you call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s the one who could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great scholar, you’ld say they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no response when you talk to him,” went on Françoise, who used “make response” in the same sense as Mme. de Sévigné. “But,” she added, quite untruthfully, “so long as I know what’s boiling in my pot, I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s. Whatever he is, he’s not a Catholic. Besides, he’s not a courageous man.” (This criticism might have led one to suppose that Françoise had changed her mind about physical bravery which, according to her, in Combray days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts. But it was not so. “Courageous” meant simply a hard worker.) “They do say, too, that he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all one hears. The servants never stay long there because of the lodge; the porters are jealous and set the Duchess against them. But it’s safe to say that he’s a real twister, that Antoine, and his Antoinesse is no better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing the name “Antoine” with a feminine ending that would designate the butler’s wife, was inspired, no doubt, in her act of word-formation by an unconscious memory of the words chanoine and chanoinesse. If so, she was not far wrong. There is still a street near Notre-Dame called Rue Chanoinesse, a name which must have been given to it (since it was never inhabited by any but male Canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise was, properly speaking, the contemporary. She proceeded, moreover, at once to furnish another example of this way of forming feminine endings, for she went on: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the Duchess that has Guermantes Castle. And it’s she that is the Lady Mayoress down in those parts. That’s always something.”

“I can well believe that it is something,” came with conviction from the footman, who had not detected the irony.

“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why, for folk like them to be Mayor and Mayoress, it’s just thank you for nothing. Ah, if it was mine, that Guermantes Castle, you wouldn’t see me setting foot in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a family who’ve got something to go on with, like Monsieur and Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on in this wretched town rather than get away down to Combray the moment they’re free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off retiring? They’ve got everything they want. Why wait till they’re dead? Ah, if I had only a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to keep me warm in winter, a fine time I’ld have of it at home in my brother’s poor old house at Combray. Down there you do feel you’re alive; you haven’t all these houses stuck up in front of you, there is so little noise at night-time, you can hear the frogs singing five miles off and more.”