The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, were it with a small party only, to these repasts at which I had at one time imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. They did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, which incidentally was exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of my hosts, friends to whom they presented me with a shade of benevolent patronage so marked (as a person for whom they had always had a sort of parental affection) that there was not one among them who would not have felt himself to be failing in his duty to the Duke and Duchess if he had given a ball without including my name on his list, and at the same time, while I sipped one of those Yquems which lay concealed in the Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed according to each of the different recipes which the Duke himself used to elaborate and modified with prudence. However, for one who had already set his knees more than once beneath the mystic board, the consumption of the latter was not indispensable. Old friends of M. and Mme. de Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, “with the tooth-picks”, as Mme. Swann would have said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of tilleul in the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden outside. There was no record of anything else, among the Guermantes, in these evenings in the garden, but orangeade. It had a sort of ritual meaning. To have added other refreshments would have seemed to be falsifying the tradition, just as a big at-home in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ceases to be an at-home if there is a play also, or music. You must be supposed to have come simply—though there be five hundred of you—to pay a call on, let us say, the Princesse de Guermantes. People marvelled at my influence because I was able to procure the addition to this orangeade of a jug containing the juice of stewed cherries or stewed pears. I took a dislike on this account to the Prince d’Agrigente, who was like all the people who, lacking in imagination but not in covetousness, take a keen interest in what one is drinking and ask if they may taste a little of it themselves. Which meant that, every time, M. d’Agrigente, by diminishing my ration, spoiled my pleasure. For this fruit juice can never be provided in sufficient quantities to quench one’s thirst for it. Nothing is less cloying than these transpositions into flavour of the colour of a fruit which when cooked seems to have travelled backwards to the past season of its blossoming. Blushing like an orchard in spring, or, it may be, colourless and cool like the zephyr beneath the fruit-trees, the juice lets itself be breathed and gazed into one drop by drop, and M. d’Agrigente prevented me, regularly, from taking my fill of it. Despite these distillations the traditional orangeade persisted like the tilleul. In these humble kinds, the social communion was none the less administered. In this respect, doubtless, the friends of M. and Mme. de Guermantes had, after all, as I had originally imagined, remained more different from the rest of humanity than their outward appearance might have misled me into supposing. Numbers of elderly men came to receive from the Duchess, together with the invariable drink, a welcome that was often far from cordial. Now this could not have been due to snobbishness, they themselves being of a rank to which there was none superior; nor to love of splendour; they did love it perhaps, but on less stringent social conditions might have been enjoying a glittering example of it, for on these same evenings the charming wife of a colossally rich financier would have given anything in the world to have them among the brilliant shooting-party she was giving for a couple of days for the King of Spain. They had nevertheless declined her invitation, and had come round without fail to inquire whether Mme. de Guermantes was at home. They were not even certain of finding there opinions that conformed entirely with their own, or sentiments of any great warmth; Mme. de Guermantes let fall now and then, on the Dreyfus Case, on the Republic, the Laws against Religion, or even in an undertone on themselves, their weaknesses, the dullness of their conversation, comments[comments] which they had to appear not to notice. No doubt, if they kept up their habit of coming there, it was owing to their superfine training as epicures in things worldly, to their clear consciousness of the prime and perfect quality of the social dish, with its familiar, reassuring, sappy savour, free from blend or taint, with the origin and history of which they were as well aware as she who served them with it, remaining more “noble” in this respect than they themselves imagined. Now, on this occasion, among the visitors to whom I was introduced after dinner, it so happened that there was that General de Monserfeuil of whom the Princesse de Parme had been speaking, while Mme. de Guermantes, of whose drawing-room he was one of the regular frequenters, had not known that he was going to be there that evening. He bowed before me, on hearing my name, as though I had been the President of the Supreme War Council. I had supposed it to be simply from some deep-rooted unwillingness to oblige, in which the Duke, as in wit if not in love, was his wife’s accomplice, that the Duchess had practically refused to recommend her nephew to M. de Monserfeuil. And I saw in this an indifference all the more blameworthy in that I seemed to have gathered from a few words let fall by the Princess that Robert was in a post of danger from which it would be prudent to have him removed. But it was by the genuine malice of Mme. de Guermantes that I was revolted when, the Princesse de Parme having timidly suggested that she might say something herself and on her own responsibility to the General, the Duchess did everything in her power to dissuade her. “But Ma’am,” she cried, “Monserfeuil has no sort of standing or influence whatever with the new Government. You would be wasting your breath.” “I think he can hear us,” murmured the Princess, as a hint to the Duchess not to speak so loud. Without lowering her voice: “Your Highness need not be afraid, he’s as deaf as a post,” said the Duchess, every word reaching the General distinctly. “The thing is, I believe M. de Saint-Loup is in a place that is not very safe,” said the Princess. “What is one to do?” replied the Duchess. “He’s in the same boat as everybody else, the only difference being that it was he who originally asked to be sent there. Besides, no, it’s not really dangerous; if it was, you can imagine how anxious I should be to help. I should have spoken to Saint-Joseph about it during dinner. He has far more influence, and he’s a real worker. But, as you see, he’s gone now. Still, asking him would be less awkward than going to this one, who has three of his sons in Morocco just now and has refused to apply for them to be exchanged; he might raise that as an objection. Since your Highness insists on it, I shall speak to Saint-Joseph—if I see him again, or to Beautreillis. But if I don’t see either of them, you mustn’t waste your pity on Robert. It was explained to us the other day exactly where he is. I’m sure he couldn’t wish for a better place.”

“What a pretty flower, I’ve never seen one like it; there’s no one like you, Oriane, for having such marvellous things in your house,” said the Princess de Parme, who, fearing that General de Monserfeuil might have overheard the Duchess, sought now to change the conversation. I looked and recognised a plant of the sort that I had watched Elstir painting. “I am so glad you like them; they are charming, do look at their little purple velvet collars; the only thing against them is—as may happen with people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed—they have a hideous name and a horrid smell. In spite of which I am very fond of them. But what is rather sad is that they are dying.” “But they’re growing in a pot, they aren’t cut flowers,” said the Princess. “No,” answered the Duchess with a smile, “but it comes to the same thing, as they’re all ladies. It’s a kind of plant where the ladies and the gentlemen don’t both grow on the same stalk. I’m like people who keep a lady dog. I have to find a husband for my flowers. Otherwise I shan’t have any young ones!” “How very strange. Do you mean to say that in nature...?” “Yes! There are certain insects whose duty it is to bring about the marriage, as they do with Sovereigns, by proxy, without the bride and bridegroom ever having set eyes on one another. And so, I assure you, I always tell my man to put my plant out in the window as often as possible, on the courtyard side and the garden side turn about, in the hope that the necessary insect will arrive. But the odds are too great. Fancy, he has first to have been seen by a person of the same species and the opposite sex, and he must then have taken it into his head to come and leave cards at the house. He hasn’t appeared so far, I believe my plant can still qualify for the white flower of a blameless life, but I must say a little immodesty would please me better. It’s just the same with that fine tree we have in the courtyard; he will die childless because he belongs to a kind that’s very rare in these latitudes. In his case, it’s the wind that’s responsible for consummating the marriage, but the wall is a trifle high.” “By Jove, yes,” said M. de Bréauté, “you ought to take just a couple of inches off the top, that will be quite enough. There are certain operations one ought to know how to perform. The flavour of vanilla we tasted in the excellent ice you gave us this evening, Duchess, comes from a plant called the vanilla tree. This plant produces flowers which are both male and female, but a sort of solid wall set up between them prevents any communication. And so we could never get any fruit from them until a young negro, a native of Réunion, by the name of Albins, which by the way is rather an odd name for a black man since it means ‘white’, had the happy thought of using the point of a needle to bring the separate organs into contact.” “Babal, you’re divine, you know everything,” cried the Duchess. “But you yourself, Oriane, have told me things I had no idea of,” the Princesse de Parme assured her. “I must explain to your Highness that it is Swann who has always talked to me all about botany. Sometimes when we were too bored to go to a tea-party or a concert we would set off for the country, and he would shew me extraordinary marriages between flowers, which was far more amusing than going to human marriages—no wedding-breakfast and no crowd in the sacristy. We never had time to go very far. Now that motor-cars have come in, it would be delightful. Unfortunately, in the interval he himself has made an even more astonishing marriage, which makes everything very difficult. Oh, Ma’am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by mere chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann’s. Faced with the alternatives of giving up my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person, I chose the former calamity. Besides, when it comes to that, there was no need to go quite so far. It seems that here, in my own little bit of garden, more odd things happen in broad daylight than at midnight—in the Bois de Boulogne! Only they attract no attention, because among flowers it’s all done quite simply, you see a little orange shower, or else a very dusty fly coming to wipe its feet or take a bath before crawling into a flower. And that does the trick!” “The cabinet the plant is standing on is splendid, too; it’s Empire, I think,” said the Princess, who, not being familiar with the works of Darwin and his followers, was unable to grasp the point of the Duchess’s pleasantries. “It’s lovely, isn’t it? I’m so glad Ma’am likes it,” replied the Duchess, “it’s a magnificent piece. I must tell you that I’ve always adored the Empire style, even when it wasn’t in fashion. I remember at Guermantes I got into terrible disgrace with my mother-in-law because I told them to bring down from the attics all the splendid Empire furniture Basin had inherited from the Montesquious, and used it to furnish the wing we lived in.” M. de Guermantes smiled. He must nevertheless have remembered that the course of events had been totally different. But, the witticisms of the Princesse des Laumes at the expense of her mother-in-law’s bad taste having been a tradition during the short time in which the Prince was in love with his wife, his love for the latter had been outlasted by a certain contempt for the intellectual inferiority of the former, a contempt which, however, went hand in hand with a considerable attachment and respect. “The Iénas have the same armchair with Wedgwood medallions, it’s a lovely thing, but I prefer my own;” said the Duchess, with the same air of impartiality as if she had been the possessor of neither of the articles under discussion. “I know, of course, that they’ve some marvellous things which I haven’t got.” The Princesse de Parme remained silent. “But it’s quite true; your Highness hasn’t seen their collection. Oh, you ought really to come there one day with me, it’s one of the most magnificent things in Paris. You’ld say it was a museum come to life.” And since this suggestion was one of the most “Guermantes” of the Duchess’s audacities, inasmuch as the Iénas were for the Princesse de Parme rank usurpers, their son bearing like her own the title of Duc de Guastalla, Mme. de Guermantes in thus launching it could not refrain (so far did the love that she bore for her own originality prevail over the deference due to the Princess de Parme) from casting at her other guests a smiling glance of amusement. They too made an effort to smile, at once frightened, bewildered, and above all delighted to think that they were being ear-witnesses of Oriane’s very “latest” and could carry it away with them “red hot”. They were only half shocked, knowing that the Duchess had the knack of strewing the ground with all the Courvoisier prejudices to achieve a vital success more thrilling and more enjoyable. Had she not, within the last few years, brought together Princesse Mathilde and that Duc d’Aumale who had written to the Princess’s own brother the famous letter: “In my family all the men are brave and the women chaste”? And inasmuch as Princes remain princely even at those moments when they appear anxious to forget that they are, the Duc d’Aumale and Princesse Mathilde had enjoyed themselves so greatly at Mme. de Guermantes’s that they had thereafter formed a defensive alliance, with that faculty for forgetting the past which Louis XVIII shewed when he took as his Minister Fouché, who had voted the death of his brother. Mme. de Guermantes was now nourishing a similar project of arranging a meeting between Princesse Murat and the Queen of Naples. In the meantime, the Princesse de Parme appeared as embarrassed as might have been the heirs-apparent to the Thrones of the Netherlands and Belgium, styled respectively Prince of Orange and Duke of Brabant, had one offered to present to them M. de Mailly Nesle, Prince d’Orange, and M. de Charlus, Duc de Brabant. But, before anything further could happen, the Duchess, whom Swann and M. de Charlus between them (albeit the latter was resolute in ignoring the Iénas’ existence) had with great difficulty succeeded in making admire the Empire style, exclaimed: “Honestly, Ma’am, I can’t tell you how beautiful you will think it! I must confess that the Empire style has always had a fascination for me. But at the Iénas’ it is really like a hallucination. That sort of—what shall I say—reflux from the Expedition to Egypt, and also the sweep forward into our own times from Antiquity, all those things that invade our houses, the Sphinxes that come to crouch at the feet of the sofas, the serpents coiled round candelabra, a huge Muse who holds out a little torch for you to play at bouillotte, or has quietly climbed on to the mantelpiece and is leaning against your clock; and then all the Pompeian lamps, the little boat-shaped beds which look as if they had been found floating on the Nile so that you expect to see Moses climb out of them, the classical chariots galloping along the bed tables....” “They’re not very comfortable to sit in, those Empire chairs,” the Princess ventured. “No,” the Duchess agreed, “but,” she at once added, insisting on the point with a smile: “I like being uncomfortable on those mahogany seats covered with ruby velvet or green silk. I like that discomfort of the warrior who understands nothing but the curule chair and in the middle of his principal drawing-room crosses his fasces and piles his laurels. I can assure you that at the Iénas’ one doesn’t stop to think for a moment of how comfortable one is, when one sees in front of one a great strapping wench of a Victory painted in fresco on the wall. My husband is going to say that I’m a very bad Royalist, but I’m terribly disaffected, as you know, I can assure you that in those people’s house one comes to love all the big ‘N’s and all the bees. Good gracious, after all for a good many years under our Kings we weren’t exactly surfeited with glory, and so these warriors who brought home so many crowns that they stuck them even on the arms of the chairs, I must say I think it’s all rather fetching! Your Highness ought really.” “Why, my dear, if you think so,” said the Princess, “but it seems to me that it won’t be easy.” “But Ma’am will find that it will all go quite smoothly[smoothly]. They are very good people, and no fools. We took Mme. de Chevreuse there,” added the Duchess, knowing the force of this example, “she was enchanted. The son is really very pleasant. I’m going to say something that’s not quite proper,” she went on, “but he has a bedroom, and more especially a bed in it, in which I should love to sleep—without him! What is even less proper is that I went to see him once when he was ill and lying in it. By his side on the frame of the bed was moulded a long Siren, stretched out at full length, a lovely thing with a mother-of-pearl tail and some sort of lotus flowers in her hand. I assure you,” went on Mme. de Guermantes, reducing the speed of her utterances to bring into even bolder relief the words which she had the air of modelling with the pout of her fine lips, drawing them out with her long expressive hands, directing on the Princess as she spoke a gentle, steady and searching gaze, “that with the palms and the golden crown at the side of it was most moving, it was just the arrangement of Gustave Moreau’s Death and the Young Man (your Highness must know that great work, of course).” The Princesse de Parme, who did not know so much as the painter’s name, made violent movements with her head and smiled ardently, in order to manifest her admiration for his picture. But the intensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light which is absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what people are trying to tell us. “A good-looking boy, I believe?” she asked. “No, for he’s just like a tapir. The eyes are a little those of a Queen Hortense on a screen. But he has probably come to the conclusion that it is rather absurd for a man to develop such a resemblance, and it is lost in the encaustic surface of his cheeks which give him really rather a Mameluke appearance. You feel that the polisher must call round every morning. Swann,” she went on, reverting to the bed of the young Duke, “was struck by the resemblance between this Siren and Gustave Moreau’s Death. But apart from that,” she added, her speech becoming more rapid though still serious, so as to provoke more laughter, “there was nothing really that could strike us, for it was only a cold in the head, and the young man made a marvellous recovery.” “They say he’s a snob?” put in M. de Bréauté, with a malicious twinkle, expecting to be answered with the same precision as though he had said: “They tell me that he has only four fingers on his right hand; is that so?” “G—ood g—racious, n—o,” replied Mme. de Guermantes with a smile of benign indulgence. “Perhaps just the least little bit of a snob in appearance, because he’s extremely young, but I should be surprised to hear that he was really, for he’s intelligent,” she added, as though there were to her mind some absolute incompatibility between snobbishness and intelligence. “He has wit, too, I’ve known him be quite amusing,” she said again, laughing with the air of an epicure and expert, as though the act of declaring that a person could be amusing demanded a certain expression of merriment from the speaker, or as though the Duc de Guastalla’s sallies were recurring to her mind as she spoke. “Anyway, as he never goes anywhere, he can’t have much field for his snobbishness,” she wound up, forgetting that this was hardly encouraging the Princesse de Parme to make overtures. “I cannot help wondering what the Prince de Guermantes, who calls her Mme. Iéna, will say if he hears that I’ve been to see her.” “What!” cried the Duchess with extraordinary vivacity. “Don’t you know that it was we who gave up to Gilbert” (she bitterly regretted that surrender now) “a complete card-room done in the Empire style which came to us from Quiou-Quiou, and is an absolute marvel! There was no room for it here, though I think it would look better here than it does with him. It’s a thing of sheer beauty, half Etruscan, half Egyptian....” “Egyptian?” queried the Princess, to whom the word Etruscan conveyed little. “Well, really, you know, a little of both. Swann told us that, he explained it all to me, only you know I’m such a dunce. But then, Ma’am, what one has to bear in mind is that the Egypt of the Empire cabinet-makers has nothing to do with the historical Egypt, nor their Roman with the Romans nor their Etruria....” “Indeed,” said the Princess. “No, it’s like what they used to call a Louis XV costume under the Second Empire, when Anna de Monchy and dear Brigode’s mother were girls. Basin was talking to you just now about Beethoven. We heard a thing of his played the other day which was really quite good, though a little stiff, with a Russian theme in it. It’s pathetic to think that he believed it to be Russian. In the same way as the Chinese painters believed they were copying Bellini. Besides, even in the same country, whenever anybody begins to look at things in a way that is slightly novel, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are totally incapable of seeing what he puts before them. It takes at least forty years before they can manage to make it out.” “Forty years!” the Princess cried in alarm. “Why, yes,” went on the Duchess, adding more and more to her words (which were practically my own, for I had just been expressing a similar idea to her), thanks to her way of pronouncing them, the equivalent of what on the printed page is called italics: “it’s like a sort of first isolated individual of a species which does not yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an individual endowed with a kind of sense which the human race of his generation does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance because I, on the contrary, have always loved any interesting production from the very start, however novel it might be. But really, the other day I was with the Grand Duchess in the Louvre and we happened to pass before Manet’s Olympia. Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many spears I’ve had to break for that picture, which I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody.” “And is the Grand Duchess well?” inquired the Princesse de Parme, to whom the Tsar’s aunt was infinitely more familiar than Manet’s model. “Yes; we talked about you. After all,” she resumed, clinging to her idea, “the fact of the matter is, as my brother-in-law Palamède always says, that one has between oneself and the rest of the world the barrier of a strange language. Though I admit that there’s no one it’s quite so true of as Gilbert. If it amuses you to go to the Iénas’, you have far too much sense to let your actions be governed by what that poor fellow may think, who is a dear, innocent creature, but really lives in a different world. I feel myself nearer, more akin to my coachman, my horses even, than to a man who keeps on harking back to what people would have thought under Philip the Bold or Louis the Fat. Just fancy, when he goes for a walk in the country, he takes a stick to drive the peasants out of his way, quite in a friendly spirit, saying: ‘Get on, clowns!’ Really, I’m just as much surprised when he speaks to me as if I heard myself addressed by one of the ‘recumbents’ on the old gothic tombs. It’s all very well that animated gravestone’s being my cousin; he frightens me, and the only idea that comes into my head is to let him stay in his Middle Ages. Apart from that, I quite admit that he’s never assassinated anyone.” “I’ve just been seeing him at dinner at Mme. de Villeparisis’s,” said the General, but without either smiling at or endorsing the Duchess’s pleasantries. “Was M. de Norpois there?” asked Prince Von, whose mind still ran on the Academy of Moral Sciences. “Why, yes;” said the General. “In fact, he was talking about your Emperor.” “It seems, the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he does not care for Elstir’s painting. Not that I’m saying this against him,” said the Duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s a remarkable piece of work. He is interesting while one’s sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman. It’s after the style of the Regents of the Hospital, by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow my nephew’s favourite expression,” the Duchess turned to myself, gently flapping her fan of black feathers. More than erect on her chair, she flung her head nobly backwards, for, while always a great lady, she was a trifle inclined to play the great lady also. I said that I had been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that to avoid confusing my mind, as my time was limited, I had left out Haarlem. “Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!” cried M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s Street in Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a tone of sufficiency, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen. “If it’s to be seen, I saw it!” “What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haarlem!” cried the Duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of an hour to spend in the place, they’re an extraordinary thing to have seen, those Halses. I don’t mind saying that a person who only caught a passing glimpse of them from the top of a tramway-car without stopping, supposing they were hung out to view in the street, would open his eyes pretty wide.” This utterance shocked me as indicating a misconception of the way in which artistic impressions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to imply that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine which takes instantaneous photographs.

M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me with so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me, gazed at the illustrious bearing of his wife, listened to what she was saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She rides rough-shod over everything! Our young friend can go home and say that he’s had before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere to-day.” Thus I beheld the pair of them, withdrawn from that name Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women, lingering, only, behind their contemporaries a little way, and that not evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg, where the wife has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband the misfortune to come down to the pinchbeck age of history, she remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-Philippe. That Mme. de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction and with all these good wines to help, almost a miracle. A Don John of Austria, an Isabella d’Este, situated for us in the world of names, have as little communication with the great pages of history as the Méséglise way had with the Guermantes. Isabella d’Este was no doubt in reality a very minor Princess, similar to those who under Louis XIV obtained no special place at Court. But seeming to us to be of a unique and therefore incomparable essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less in greatness, so that a supper-party with Louis XIV would appear to us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este we should find ourself, were we to meet her, gazing with our own eyes on a supernatural heroine of romance. Well, after we have, in studying Isabella d’Este, in transplanting her patiently from this world of fairyland into that of history, established the fact that her life, her thought contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness which had been suggested to us by her name, once this disappointment is complete we feel a boundless gratitude to this Princess for having had, of Mantegna’s paintings, a knowledge almost equal to that, hitherto despised by us and put, as Françoise would have said, lower than the dirt, of M. Lafenestre. After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Franz Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, to imagine the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through a hedge of giant aloes or manchineels, inhabitants who (sometimes indeed among the ruins of a Roman theatre and beneath a column dedicated to Venus) are engaged in reading Mérope or Alzire. And similarly, so remote, so distinct from, so far superior to the educated women of the middle classes whom I had known, the similar culture by which Mme. de Guermantes had made herself, with no ulterior motive, to gratify no ambition, descend to the level of people whom she would never know, had the character—meritorious, almost touching by virtue of being wholly useless—of an erudition in Phoenician antiquities in a politician or a doctor. “I might have shewn you a very fine one,” said Mme. de Guermantes, still speaking of Hals, “the finest in existence, some people say, which was left to me by a German cousin. Unfortunately, it turned out to be ‘enfeoffed’ in the castle—you don’t know the expression, nor I either,” she added, with her fondness for making jokes (which made her, she thought, seem modern) at the expense of the old customs to which nevertheless she was unconsciously but keenly attached. “I am glad you have seen my Elstirs, but, I must admit, I should have been a great deal more glad if I could have done you the honours of my Hals, this ‘enfeoffed’ picture.” “I know the one,” said Prince Von, “it’s the Grand Duke of Hesse’s Hals.” “Quite so; his brother married my sister,” said M. de Guermantes, “and his mother and Oriane’s were first cousins as well.” “But so far as M. Elstir is concerned,” the Prince went on, “I shall take the liberty of saying, without having any opinion of his work, which I do not know, that the hatred with which the Emperor pursues him ought not, it seems to me, to be counted against him. The Emperor is a man of marvellous intelligence.” “Yes, I’ve met him at dinner twice, once at my aunt Sagan’s and once at my aunt Radziwill’s, and I must say I found him quite unusual. I didn’t find him at all simple! But there is something amusing about him, something ‘forced’,” she detached the word, “like a green carnation, that is to say a thing that surprises me and does not please me enormously, a thing it is surprising that anyone should have been able to create but which I feel would have been just as well uncreated. I trust I’m not shocking you.” “The Emperor is a man of astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.” Everyone smiled. “You set my mind at rest,” said the Duchess. “I should be inclined to compare the Emperor,” went on the Prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it were spelt “arkeologist”), never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist” (but the Prince said “arsheologist”) “we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern sham, if it is not really old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if the Emperor says to me, of a play: ‘Prince, you must see that, it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity.” “Norpois is in favour of an Anglo-French understanding, isn’t he?” said M. de Guermantes. “What use would that be to you?” asked Prince Von, who could not endure the English, in a tone at once of irritation and cunning. “The English are so schtubid. I know, of course, that it would not be as soldiers that they would help you. But one can judge them, all the same, by the stupidity of their Generals. A friend of mine was talking the other day to Botha, you know, the Boer leader. He said to my friend: ‘It’s terrible, an army like that. I rather like the English, as a matter of fact, but just imagine that I, who am only a peasant, have beaten them in every battle. And in the last, when I gave way before a force twenty times the strength of my own, while I myself surrendered, because I had to, I managed to take two thousand prisoners! That was good enough, because I was only commanding an army of farmers, but if those poor fools ever have to stand up against a European army, one trembles to think what may happen to them!’ Besides, you have only to see how their King, whom you know as well as I do, passes for a great man in England.” I barely listened to these stories, stories of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my favourite train of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I dwelt in my skin, my well-brushed hair, my starched shirt-front, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life. “Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme. de Guermantes, who felt that the German Prince was wanting in tact, “I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world.” “But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Prince, who was losing his temper and did not see that he was giving offence, “You must admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is charming, exceedingly sweet and limited. But after all there is something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria....” “He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess. “He’s a clever fellow.” “He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good fellow on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends with, it’s the Emperor’s dearest wish, but he insists on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-French friendship M. de Norpois preaches.” “You know him, of course,” the Duchess said, turning to me, so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand, thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme. de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on the other hand, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me. “You are quite mistaken,” replied the Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we have never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke to us of you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.” M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious spirit, those people who had let themselves be taken in as I had by his outward appearance of a Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak-tree, by the sounds, easily modulated to pity, that emerged from his somewhat too tuneful lips, believed in a deliberate betrayal when they learned of a slander uttered at their expense by a man who had always seemed to put his whole heart into his speech. These slanders were frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent him from feeling attractions, from praising the people he liked and taking pleasure in shewing that he could be of use to them. “Not that I’m in the least surprised at his appreciating you,” said Mme. de Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can quite understand,” she added, for the benefit of the rest of the party, making allusion to a purpose of marriage of which I had heard nothing, “that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old mistress, may not seem of very much use to him as a young wife. Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she has ceased for years now to serve any practical purpose, she is more wrapped up in her devotions than anything else. Boaz-Norpois can say, in the words of Victor Hugo:

Voilà longtemps que celle avec qui j’ai dormi,

O Seigneur, a quitté ma couche pour la vôtre!

Really, my poor aunt is like the artists of the advanced guard who have stood out all their lives against the Academy, and in the end start a little academy of their own, or the unfrocked priests who get up a little private religion. They should either keep their frocks, or not stick to their profession. And who knows,” went on the Duchess with a meditative air, “it may be in preparation for her widowhood, there’s nothing sadder than the weeds one’s not entitled to wear.” “Ah! If Mme. de Villeparisis were to become Mme. de Norpois, I really believe our cousin Gilbert would take to his bed,” said General de Monserfeuil. “The Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he is, really, very much taken up with questions of birth and manners,” said the Princesse de Parme. “I went down to spend a few days with them in the country, when the Princess, unfortunately, was ill in bed. I was accompanied by Petite.” (This was a nickname that was given to Mme. d’Hunolstein because she was enormously stout.) “The Prince came to meet me at the foot of the steps, and pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the first floor, to the door into the reception rooms, and then, stepping back to make way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how d’ye do, Mme. d’Hunolsteins?’ (he always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to shew her that he had not come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.” “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,” said the Duke, who regarded himself as extremely modern, more contemptuous than anyone in the world of mere birth, and in fact a Republican, “that I have not many ideas in common with my cousin. Ma’am can imagine that we are just about as much agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I should be of Gilbert’s opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise, and then to make a marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh; what more can I say?” These last words, which the Duke uttered as a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here quite superfluous. But he felt a perpetual need to be saying them which made him postpone them to the end of a speech if he had found no place for them elsewhere. They were for him, among other things, almost a question of prosody. “Remember, though,” he added, “that the Norpois are gallant gentlemen with a good place, of a good stock.”

“Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke fun at Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he does,” said Mme. de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a family, no less than that of a wine, consisted in its age. But, less frank than her cousin and more subtle than her husband, she made a point of never in her conversation playing false to the Guermantes spirit, and despised rank in her speech while ready to honour it by her actions. “But aren’t you some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.” “Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, my grandmother came from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t intermarried since Louix XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather distant.” “I say, that’s interesting; I never knew that,” said the General. “However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe, was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles, and as we ourselves are in a direct line of descent....”

There was at Combray a Rue de Saintrailles, to which I had never given another thought. It led from the Rue de la Bretonnerie to the Rue de l’Oiseau. And as Saintrailles, the companion of Joan of Arc, had, by marrying a Guermantes, brought into that family the County of Combray, his arms were quartered with those of Guermantes at the foot of one of the windows in Saint-Hilaire. I saw again a vision of dark sandstone steps, while a modulation of sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from that in which it was used to signify the genial hosts with whom I was dining this evening. If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was so not merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build over what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles had just wrought in my mind. I felt that it would be useless to explain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had lied by implication in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me: “You don’t know our old wheedler?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that I did know him, and it was only from good breeding that he did not press the question.

Mme. de Guermantes drew me out of my meditation. “Really, I find all that sort of thing too deadly. Listen, it’s not always as boring as this at my parties. I hope that you will soon come and dine again as a compensation, with no pedigrees next time,” she murmured, incapable both of appreciating the kind of charm which I could find in her house and of having sufficient humility to be content to appeal to me only as a herbarium, filled with plants of another day.

What Mme. de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my expectations was on the contrary what in the end—for the Duke and the General went on to discuss pedigrees now without stopping—saved my evening from becoming a complete disappointment. How could I have felt otherwise until now? Each of my fellow-guests at dinner, smothering the mysterious name under which I had only at a distance known and dreamed of them with a body and with a mind similar or inferior to those of all the people I knew, had given me the impression of flat vulgarity which the view on entering the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of Hamlet. No doubt those geographical regions and that ancient past which put forest glades and gothic belfries into their names had in a certain measure formed their faces, their intellects and their prejudices, but survived in them only as does the cause in the effect, that is to say as a thing possible for the brain to extract but in no way perceptible to the imagination.