In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (13 page)

I was longing to know exactly what had happened between the Prince and Swann, and to catch the latter, if he had not already gone home. “I don’t mind telling you,” the Duchess answered me when I spoke to her of this desire, “that I for my part am not over-anxious to see him, because it appears, from what I was told just now at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, that he wants me to make the acquaintance of his wife and daughter before he dies. God knows I’m terribly distressed that he should be ill, but in the first place I hope it isn’t as serious as all that. And besides, it isn’t a valid reason, because otherwise it would be really too easy. A writer with no talent would only have to say: ‘Vote for me at the Academy because my wife is dying and I wish to give her this last happiness.’ There would be no more entertaining if one was obliged to make friends with all the dying. My coachman might come to me with: ‘My daughter is seriously ill, get me an invitation to the Princesse de Parme’s.’ I adore Charles, and I should hate having to refuse him, and so I prefer to avoid the risk of his asking me. I hope with all my heart that he isn’t dying, as he says, but really, if it has to happen, it wouldn’t be the moment for me to make the acquaintance of those two creatures who have deprived me of the most agreeable of my friends for the last fifteen years, and whom he would leave on my hands without my even being able to make use of their society to see him, since he would be dead!”

Meanwhile M. de Bréauté had not ceased to brood upon the refutation of his story by Colonel de Froberville.

“I don’t question the accuracy of your version, my dear fellow,” he said, “but I had mine from a good source. It was the Prince de La Tour d’Auvergne who told me.”

“I’m surprised that a learned man like yourself should still say ‘Prince de La Tour d’Auvergne,’ ” the Duc de Guermantes broke in. “You know that he’s nothing of the kind. There is only one member of that family left: Oriane’s uncle, the Duc de Bouillon.”

“Mme de Villeparisis’s brother?” I asked, remembering that she had been Mlle de Bouillon.

“Precisely. Oriane, Mme de Lambresac is saying how-d’ye-do to you.”

And indeed, one saw from time to time, forming and fading like a shooting star, a faint smile directed by the Duchesse de Lambresac at somebody whom she had recognised. But this smile, instead of taking definite shape in an active affirmation, in a language mute but clear, was drowned almost immediately in a sort of ideal ecstasy which expressed nothing, while her head drooped in a gesture of blissful benediction, recalling that which a slightly senile prelate bestows upon a crowd of communicants. There was not the least trace of senility about Mme de Lambresac. But I was already acquainted with this particular type of old-fashioned distinction. At Combray and in Paris, all my grandmother’s friends were in the habit of greeting one another at a social gathering with as seraphic an air as if they had caught sight of someone of their acquaintance in church, at the moment of the Elevation or during a funeral, and were offering him a languid greeting which ended in prayer. At this point a remark made by M. de Guermantes was to complete the comparison that I was making. “But you have seen the Duc de Bouillon,” he said to me. “He was just leaving my library this afternoon as you came in, a short gentleman with white hair.” It was the man I had taken for a man of business from Combray, and yet, now that I came to think it over, I could see the resemblance to Mme de Villeparisis. The similarity between the evanescent greetings of the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother’s friends had begun to arouse my interest by showing me how in all narrow and closed societies, be they those of the minor gentry or of the great nobility, the old manners persist, enabling us to recapture, like an archaeologist, something of the upbringing, and the ethos it reflects, that prevailed in the days of the Vicomte d’Arlincourt and Loiisa Puget. Better still now, the perfect conformity in appearance between a petty bourgeois from Combray of his generation and the Duc de Bouillon reminded me of what had already struck me so forcibly when I had seen Saint-Loup’s maternal grandfather, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in a daguerreotype in which he was exactly similar, in dress, appearance and manner, to my great-uncle—that social, and even individual, differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch. The truth is that similarity of dress and also the reflexion of the spirit of the age in facial composition occupy so much more important a place in a person’s make-up than his caste, which bulks large only in his own self-esteem and the imagination of other people, that in order to realise that a nobleman of the time of Louis-Philippe differs less from an ordinary citizen of the time of Louis-Philippe than from a nobleman of the time of Louis XV, it is not necessary to visit the galleries of the Louvre.

At that moment, a Bavarian musician with long hair, whom the Princesse de Guermantes had taken under her wing, bowed to Oriane. She responded with a nod, but the Duke, furious at seeing his wife greet a person whom he did not know, who looked rather weird, and, so far as M. de Guermantes understood, had an extremely bad reputation, turned upon his wife with a terrible and inquisitorial air, as much as to say: “Who in the world is that barbarian?” Poor Mme de Guermantes’s position was already distinctly complicated, and if the musician had felt a little pity for this martyred wife, he would have made off as quickly as possible. But, whether from a desire not to submit to the humiliation that had just been inflicted on him in public, before the eyes of the Duke’s oldest and most intimate friends, whose presence there had perhaps been responsible to some extent for his silent bow, and to show that it was on the best of grounds and not without knowing her already that he had greeted the Duchesse de Guermantes, or whether in obedience to an obscure but irresistible impulse to commit a gaffe which drove him—at a moment when he ought to have trusted to the spirit—to apply the whole letter of the law of etiquette, the musician came closer to Mme de Guermantes and said to her: “Madame la Duchesse, I should like to have the honour of being presented to the Duke.” Mme de Guermantes was miserable in the extreme. But after all, even if she was a deceived wife, she was still Duchesse de Guermantes and could not appear to have been stripped of the right to introduce to her husband the people whom she knew. “Basin,” she said, “allow me to present to you M. d’Herweck.”

“I need not ask whether you are going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s tomorrow,” Colonel de Froberville said to Mme de Guermantes, to dispel the painful impression produced by M. d’Herweck’s ill-timed request. “The whole of Paris will be there.”

Meanwhile, turning towards the indiscreet musician with a single movement and as though he were carved out of a solid block, the Duc de Guermantes, drawing himself up, monumental, mute, wrathful, like Jupiter Tonans, remained thus motionless for some seconds, his eyes ablaze with anger and astonishment, his crinkly hair seeming to emerge from a crater. Then, as though carried away by an impulse which alone enabled him to perform the act of politeness that was demanded of him, and after appearing by his aggressive demeanour to be calling the entire company to witness that he did not know the Bavarian musician, clasping his white-gloved hands behind his back, he jerked his body forward and bestowed upon the musician a bow so profound, instinct with such stupefaction and rage, so abrupt, so violent, that the trembling artist recoiled, bowing as he went, in order not to receive a formidable butt in the stomach.

“Well, the fact is I shan’t be in Paris,” the Duchess answered Colonel de Froberville. “I must tell you (though I ought to be ashamed to confess such a thing) that I have lived all these years without seeing the stained-glass windows at Montfort-l’Amaury. It’s shocking, but there it is. And so, to make amends for my shameful ignorance, I decided that I would go and see them tomorrow.”

M. de Bréauté smiled a subtle smile. For he was well aware that, if the Duchess had been able to live all these years without seeing the windows at Montfort-l’Amaury, this artistic excursion had not all of a sudden taken on the urgent character of an “emergency” operation and might without danger, after having been put off for more than twenty-five years, be retarded for twenty-four hours. The plan that the Duchess had formed was simply the Guermantes way of decreeing that the Saint-Euverte establishment was definitely not a socially respectable house, but a house to which you were invited so that your name might afterwards be flaunted in the account in the
Gaulois
, a house that would award the seal of supreme elegance to those, or at any rate to her (should there be but one), who would not be seen there. The delicate amusement of M. de Bréauté, coupled with the poetical pleasure which society people felt when they saw Mme de Guermantes do things which their own inferior position did not allow them to imitate but the mere sight of which brought to their lips the smile of the peasant tied to his glebe when he sees freer and more fortunate men pass by above his head—this delicate pleasure could in no way be compared with the concealed but frantic delight which M. de Froberville instantaneously experienced.

The efforts that this gentleman was making so that people should not hear his laughter had made him turn as red as a turkey-cock, in spite of which it was with a running interruption of hiccups of joy that he exclaimed in a pitying tone: “Oh! poor aunt Saint-Euverte, she’ll make herself sick over it! No, the unhappy woman isn’t to have her duchess! What a blow! It’ll be the death of her!” He doubled up with laughter, and in his exhilaration could not help stamping his feet and rubbing his hands. Smiling out of one eye and one small corner of her lips at M. de Froberville, whose amiable intention she appreciated, though she found less tolerable the deadly boredom of his company, Mme de Guermantes finally decided to leave him.

“I say, I’m afraid I’m going to
have
to bid you goodnight,” she said to him as she rose with an air of melancholy resignation, and as though it grieved her. Beneath the magic spell of her blue eyes her gently musical voice made one think of the poetical lament of a fairy. “Basin wants me to go and talk to Marie for a while.”

In reality, she was tired of listening to Froberville, who went on envying her her visit to Montfort-l’Amaury, when she knew quite well that he had never heard of the windows before in his life, and besides would not for anything in the world have missed going to the Saint-Euverte party. “Good-bye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties—we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. At any rate we shan’t always be having to put on low-cut dresses. And yet one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our bones and worms on great occasions. Why not? Just look at old mother Rampillon—do you see any great difference between her and a skeleton in an open dress? It’s true that she has every right to look like that, for she must be at least a hundred. She was already one of those sacred monsters before whom I refused to bow the knee when I made my first appearance in society. I thought she had been dead for years; which for that matter would be the only possible explanation for the spectacle she presents. It’s most impressive and liturgical; quite
Campo Santo
!”

The Duchess had moved away from Froberville. He followed her: “Just one word in your ear.” Slightly irritated, “Well, what is it now?” she said to him stiffly. And he, having been afraid lest at the last moment she might change her mind about Montfort-l’Amaury: “I didn’t like to mention it for Mme de Saint-Euverte’s sake, so as not to upset her, but since you don’t intend to be there, I may tell you that I’m glad for your sake, because she has measles in the house!” “Oh, good gracious!” said Oriane, who had a horror of diseases. “But that wouldn’t matter to me, I’ve had it already. You can’t get it twice.” “So the doctors say. I know people who’ve had it four times. Anyhow, you are warned.” As for himself, the fictitious measles would have needed to attack him in reality and to chain him to his bed before he would have resigned himself to missing the Saint-Euverte party to which he had looked forward for so many months. He would have the pleasure of seeing so many smart people there, the still greater pleasure of remarking that certain things had gone wrong, and the supreme pleasure of being able for long afterwards to boast that he had mingled with the former and, exaggerating or inventing them, of deploring the latter.

I took advantage of the Duchess’s moving to rise also in order to make my way to the smoking-room and find out the truth about Swann. “Don’t believe a word of what Babal told us,” she said to me. “Little Molé would never poke her nose into a place like that. They tell us that to entice us. Nobody ever goes to them and they are never asked anywhere either. He admits it himself: ‘We spend the evenings alone by our own fireside.’ As he always says
we
, not like royalty, but to include his wife, I don’t press him. But I know all about it.” We passed two young men whose great and dissimilar beauty derived from the same woman. They were the two sons of Mme de Surgis, the latest mistress of the Duc de Guermantes. Both were resplendent with their mother’s perfections, but each in a different way. To one had passed, rippling through a virile body, the regal bearing of Mme de Surgis, and the same glowing, rufous, pearly paleness flooded the marmoreal cheeks of mother and son; but his brother had received the Grecian brow, the perfect nose, the statuesque neck, the eyes of infinite depth; composed thus of separate gifts, which the goddess had shared between them, their twofold beauty offered one the abstract pleasure of thinking that the cause of that beauty was something outside themselves; it was as though the principal attributes of their mother had been incarnated in two different bodies; this one was her stature and her complexion, the other her gaze, as Mars and Venus were only the Strength and the Beauty respectively of Jupiter. Full of respect though they were for M. de Guermantes, of whom they said: “He is a great friend of our parents,” the elder nevertheless thought that it would be wiser not to come up and greet the Duchess, of whose hostility towards his mother he was aware though without perhaps understanding the reason, and at the sight of us he slightly averted his head. The younger, who imitated his brother in everything, because, being stupid and moreover short-sighted, he did not dare to have his own opinion, inclined his head at the same angle, and the pair slipped past us towards the card-room, one behind the other, like a pair of allegorical figures.