“To-night there’s a big party with a Chinese shadow show at the Princesse de Parme’s,” said the footman, “but we shan’t be going, because at five o’clock Madame is taking the train to Chantilly, to spend a few days with the Duc d’Aumale; but it’ll be the lady’s maid and valet that are going with her. I’m to stay here. She won’t be at all pleased, the Princesse de Parme won’t, that’s four times already she’s written to Madame la Duchesse.”
“Then you won’t be going down to Guermantes Castle this year?”
“It’s the first time we shan’t be going there: it’s because of the Duke’s rheumatics, the doctor says he’s not to go there till the hot pipes are in, but we’ve been there every year till now, right on to January. If the hot pipes aren’t ready, perhaps Madame will go for a few days to Cannes, to the Duchesse de Guise, but nothing’s settled yet.”
“And to the theatre, do you go, sometimes?”
“We go now and then to the Opéra, usually on the evenings when the Princesse de Parme has her box, that’s once a week; it seems it’s a fine show they give there, plays, operas, everything. Madame refused to subscribe to it herself, but we go all the same to the boxes Madame’s friends take, one one night, another another, often with the Princesse de Guermantes, the Duke’s cousin’s lady. She’s sister to the Duke of Bavaria. And so you’ve got to run upstairs again now, have you?” went on the footman, who, albeit identified with the Guermantes, looked upon masters in general as a political estate, a view which allowed him to treat Françoise with as much respect as if she too were in service with a duchess. “You enjoy good health, ma’am.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t for these cursed legs of mine! On the plain I can still get along” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in the streets, where Françoise had no objection to walking, in other words “on a plane surface”) “but it’s these stairs that do me in, devil take them. Good day to you, sir, see you again, perhaps, this evening.”
She was all the more anxious to continue her conversations with the footman after he mentioned to her that the sons of dukes often bore a princely title which they retained until their fathers were dead. Evidently the cult of the nobility, blended with and accommodating itself to a certain spirit of revolt against it, must, springing hereditarily from the soil of France, be very strongly implanted still in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of the genius of Napoleon or of wireless telegraphy without succeeding in attracting her attention, and without her slackening for an instant the movements with which she was scraping the ashes from the grate or laying the table, if she were simply to be told these idiosyncrasies of nomenclature, and that the younger son of the Duc de Guermantes was generally called Prince d’Oléron, would at once exclaim: “That’s fine, that is!” and stand there dazed, as though in contemplation of a stained window in church.
Françoise learned also from the Prince d’Agrigente’s valet, who had become friends with her by coming often to the house with notes for the Duchess, that he had been hearing a great deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle. d’Ambresac, and that it was practically settled.
That villa, that opera-box, into which Mme. de Guermantes transfused the current of her life, must, it seemed to me, be places no less fairylike than her home. The names of Guise, of Parme, of Guermantes-Bavière, differentiated from all possible others the holiday places to which the Duchess resorted, the daily festivities which the track of her bowling wheels bound, as with ribbons, to her mansion. If they told me that in those holidays, in those festivities, consisted serially the life of Mme. de Guermantes, they brought no further light to bear on it. Each of them gave to the life of the Duchess a different determination, but succeeded only in changing the mystery of it, without allowing to escape any of its own mystery which simply floated, protected by a covering, enclosed in a bell, through the tide of the life of all the world. The Duchess might take her luncheon on the shore of the Mediterranean at Carnival time, but, in the villa of Mme. de Guise, where the queen of Parisian society was nothing more, in her white linen dress, among numberless princesses, than a guest like any of the rest, and on that account more moving still to me, more herself by being thus made new, like a star of the ballet who in the fantastic course of a figure takes the place of each of her humbler sisters in succession; she might look at Chinese shadow shows, but at a party given by the Princesse de Parme, listen to tragedy or opera, but from the box of the Princesse de Guermantes.
As we localise in the body of a person all the potentialities of that person’s life, our recollections of the people he knows and has just left or is on his way to meet, if, having learned from Françoise that Mme. de Guermantes was going on foot to luncheon with the Princesse de Parme, I saw her, about midday, emerge from her house in a gown of flesh coloured satin over which her face was of the same shade, like a cloud that rises above the setting sun, it was all the pleasures of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that I saw before me, contained in that small compass, as in a shell, between its twin valves that glowed with roseate nacre.