The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  “I say, if you don’t mind, just one last word on the subject of the lady we were speaking about. You remember Elstir, the painter I met at Balbec?”

  “Why, of course I do.”

  “You remember how much I admired his work?”

  “I do, very well; and the letter we sent him.”

  “Well, one of the reasons—not one of the chief reasons, an incidental reason—why I should like to meet the said lady—you do know who I mean, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. All these digressions!”

  “Is that she has in her house at least one very fine picture by Elstir.”

  “Really, I never knew that.”

  “Elstir will probably be at Balbec at Easter; you know he now spends almost the entire year on that coast. I should very much like to have seen this picture before I leave Paris. I don’t know whether you’re on sufficiently intimate terms with your aunt: but couldn’t you manage, somehow, giving her so good an impression of me that she won’t refuse, to ask her to let me come and see the picture without you, since you won’t be there?”

  “Certainly. I’ll answer for her; leave it to me.”

  “Oh, Robert, I do like you.”

  “It’s very nice of you to like me, but it would be equally nice if you were to call me tu, as you promised, and as you began to do.”

  “I hope it’s not your departure that you two are plotting together,” one of Robert’s friends said to me. “You know, if Saint-Loup does go on leave, it needn’t make any difference, we shall still be here. It will be less amusing for you, perhaps, but we’ll do all we can to make you forget his absence!”

  The fact was that, just when it had been generally assumed that Robert’s mistress would be going to Bruges alone, the news came that Captain de Borodino, hitherto obdurate in his refusal, had given authority for Sergeant Saint-Loup to proceed on long leave to Bruges. What had happened was this. The Prince, extremely proud of his luxuriant head of hair, was an assiduous customer of the principal hairdresser in the town, who had started life as an apprentice to Napoleon III’s barber. Captain de Borodino was on the best of terms with the hairdresser, being, in spite of his majestic airs, extremely simple in his dealings with his inferiors. But the hairdresser, through whose books the Prince’s account had been running without payment for at least five years, swollen no less by bottles of “Portugal” and “Eau des Souverains,” curlingtongs, razors, and strops, than by the ordinary charges for shampooing, haircutting and the like, had a greater respect for Saint-Loup, who always paid on the nail and kept several carriages and saddle-horses. Having learned of Saint-Loup’s vexation at not being able to go with his mistress, he had spoken warmly about it to the Prince at a moment when he was trussed up in a white surplice with his head held firmly over the back of the chair and his throat menaced by a razor. This account of a young man’s amatory adventures won from the princely Captain a smile of Bonapartist indulgence. It is hardly probable that he thought of his unpaid bill, but the barber’s recommendation inclined him to good humour as much as a duke’s would have inclined him to bad. While his chin was still smothered in soap, the leave was promised and the warrant was signed that evening. As for the hairdresser, who was in the habit of boasting incessantly, and in order to be able to do so laid claim, with an astonishing faculty for lying, to exploits that were entirely fictitious, having for once rendered a signal service to Saint-Loup, not only did he refrain from publicly claiming credit for it, but, as if vanity were obliged to lie, and when there is no call to do so gives way to modesty, he never mentioned the matter to Robert again.

  All Robert’s friends assured me that, as long as I stayed at Doncières, or if I should come there again at any time, even though Robert was away, their horses, their quarters, their free time would be at my disposal, and I felt that it was with the greatest cordiality that these young men put their comfort and youth and strength at the service of my weakness.

  “Why at any rate,” they went on after insisting that I should stay, “don’t you come down here every year? You see how our humble life appeals to you! Besides, you’re so keen about everything that goes on in the regiment: quite the old soldier.”

  For I continued to ask them eagerly to classify the different officers whose names I knew according to the degree of admiration which they felt them to deserve, just as, in the old days, I used to make my schoolfriends classify the actors of the Théâtre-Français. If, in the place of one of the generals whom I had always heard mentioned at the head of the list, such as Galliffet or Négrier, one of Saint-Loup’s friends remarked, “But Négrier is one of the feeblest of our general officers,” and put in the new, untarnished, appetising name of Pau or Geslin de Bourgogne, I felt the same happy surprise as long ago when the outworn names of Thiron or Febvre were ousted by the sudden blossoming of the unfamiliar name of Amaury. “Better even than Négrier? But in what respect? Give me an example.” I should have liked there to exist profound differences even among the junior officers of the regiment, and I hoped, in the reason for these differences, to grasp the essence of what constituted military superiority. One of those whom I should have been most interested to hear discussed, because he was the one whom I had most often seen, was the Prince de Borodino. But neither Saint-Loup nor his friends, while giving him credit for being a fine officer who kept his squadron up to an incomparable pitch of efficiency, liked the man. Without speaking of him, naturally, in the same tone as of certain other officers, rankers and freemasons, who did not fraternise much with the rest and had, in comparison, an uncouth, barrack-room manner, they seemed not to include M. de Borodino among the other officers of noble birth, from whom indeed he differed considerably in his attitude even towards Saint-Loup. These, taking advantage of the fact that Robert was only an NCO, and that therefore his influential relatives might be grateful were he invited to the houses of superior officers on whom otherwise they would have looked down, lost no opportunity of having him to dine when any bigwig was expected who might be of use to a young cavalry sergeant. Captain de Borodino alone confined himself to his official relations (which for that matter were always excellent) with Robert. The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been made a Marshal and a Prince-Duke by the Emperor, into whose family he had subsequently married, and whose father had then married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a minister after the coup d’état, felt that in spite of all this he did not count for much with Saint-Loup and the Guermantes set, who in turn, since he did not look at things from the same point of view as they, counted for very little with him. He suspected that, for Saint-Loup, he—a kinsman of the Hohenzollerns—was not a true noble but the grandson of a farmer, but at the same time he regarded Saint-Loup as the son of a man whose countship had been confirmed by the Emperor—one of what were known in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as “touched-up” counts—and who had besought him first for a Prefecture, then for some other post a long way down the list of subordinates to His Highness the Prince de Borodino, Minister of State, who was styled on his letters “Monseigneur” and was a nephew of the sovereign.

  More than a nephew, possibly. The first Princesse de Borodino was reputed to have bestowed her favours on Napoleon I, whom she followed to the Isle of Elba, and the second hers on Napoleon III. And if, in the Captain’s placid countenance, one caught a trace of Napoleon I—if not his actual features, at least the studied majesty of the expression—the officer had, particularly in his melancholy and kindly gaze, in his drooping moustache, something that reminded one also of Napoleon III; and this in so striking a fashion that, when he asked leave, after Sedan, to join the Emperor in captivity, and was shown the door by Bismarck, before whom he had been brought, the latter, happening to look up at the young man who was preparing to leave the room, was instantly struck by the likeness and, reconsidering his decision, recalled him and gave him the authorisation which, in common with everyone else, he had just been refused.

  If the Prince de Borodino was not
prepared to make overtures either to Saint-Loup or to the other representatives of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in the regiment (whereas he frequently invited two subalterns of plebeian origin who were pleasant companions) it was because, looking down on them all from the height of his Imperial grandeur, he drew between these two classes of inferiors the distinction that one set consisted of inferiors who knew themselves to be such and with whom he was delighted to consort, being beneath his outward majesty of a simple, jovial nature, and the other of inferiors who thought themselves his superiors, a claim which he could not allow. And so, while all the other officers of the regiment made much of Saint-Loup, the Prince de Borodino, to whom the young man had been recommended by Marshal X——, confined himself to being kindly towards him in the matter of military duty, where Saint-Loup was in fact exemplary, but never had him to his house, except on one special occasion when he found himself practically compelled to invite him, and, since this occurred during my stay at Doncières, asked him to bring me too. I had no difficulty that evening, as I watched Saint-Loup sitting at his Captain’s table, in distinguishing, in their respective manners and refinements, the difference that existed between the two aristocracies: the old nobility and that of the Empire. The product of a caste whose faults, even if he repudiated them with all the force of his intellect, had been absorbed into his blood, a caste which, having ceased to exert any real authority for at least a century, no longer saw in the patronising affability which was part and parcel of its education anything more than an exercise, like horsemanship or fencing, cultivated without any serious purpose, as a diversion, Saint-Loup, on meeting representatives of that middle class which the old nobility so far despised as to believe that they were flattered by its intimacy and would be honoured by its informality, would cordially shake hands with any bourgeois to whom he was introduced, and whose name he had probably failed to catch, and as he talked to him (constantly crossing and uncrossing his legs, flinging himself back in his chair in an attitude of abandon, one foot in the palm of his hand) would call him “my dear fellow.” Belonging, on the other hand, to a nobility whose titles still preserved their meaning, possessed as they still were of the rich emoluments given in reward for glorious services and bringing to mind the record of high offices in which one is in command of numberless men and must know how to deal with men, the Prince de Borodino—not perhaps very distinctly or in the personal awareness of his conscious mind, but at any rate in his body, which revealed it by its attitudes and manners—regarded his rank as a prerogative that was still effective; those same commoners whom Saint-Loup would have slapped on the shoulder and taken by the arm he addressed with a majestic affability, in which a reserve instinct with grandeur tempered the smiling good-fellowship that came naturally to him, in a tone marked at once by a genuine kindliness and a stiffness deliberately assumed. This was due, no doubt, to his being not so far removed from the chancelleries and the Court itself, at which his father had held the highest posts, and where the manners of Saint-Loup, his elbow on the table and his foot in his hand, would not have been well received; but principally it was due to the fact that he was less contemptuous of the middle class since it was the great reservoir from which the first Emperor had chosen his marshals and his nobles and in which the second had found a Rouher or a Fould.

  Son or grandson of an Emperor though he might be, with nothing more important to do than to command a squadron, the preoccupations of his putative father and grandfather could not, of course, for want of an object on which to fasten themselves, survive in any real sense in the mind of M. de Borodino. But as the spirit of an artist continues, for many years after he is dead, to model the statue which he carved, so those preoccupations had taken shape in him, were materialised, incarnate in him, it was them that his face reflected. It was with the sharpness of the first Emperor in his voice that he addressed a reprimand to a corporal, with the dreamy melancholy of the second that he exhaled a puff of cigarette-smoke. When he passed in plain clothes through the streets of Doncières, a certain glint in his eyes, issuing from under the brim of his bowler hat, surrounded the Captain with the aura of a regal incognito; people trembled when he strode into the senior sergeant’s office, followed by the sergeant-major and the quartermaster, as though by Berthier and Masséna. When he chose the cloth for his squadron’s breeches, he fastened on the master-tailor a look capable of baffling Talleyrand and deceiving Alexander; and at times, in the middle of a kit inspection, he would pause, a dreamy look in his handsome blue eyes, and twist his moustache with the air of one building up a new Prussia and a new Italy. But a moment later, reverting from Napoleon III to Napoleon I, he would point out that the equipment was not properly polished, and insist on tasting the men’s rations. And at home, in his private life, it was for the wives of middle-class officers (provided they were not freemasons) that he would bring out not only a dinner service of royal blue Sèvres, fit for an ambassador (which had been given to his father by Napoleon, and appeared even more priceless in the commonplace house he inhabited on the avenue, like those rare porcelains which tourists admire with a special delight in the rustic china-cupboard of some old manor that has been converted into a comfortable and prosperous farmhouse), but other gifts of the Emperor also: those noble and charming manners, which too would have done wonders in a diplomatic post abroad (if for some it did not mean a lifelong condemnation to the most unjust form of ostracism merely to have a “name”), the easy gestures, the kindness, the grace, and, enclosing images of glory in an enamel that was also royal blue, the mysterious, illuminated, living reliquary of his gaze.

  And in regard to the social relations with the middle classes which the Prince had at Doncières, it may be appropriate to add the following. The lieutenant-colonel played the piano beautifully; the senior medical officer’s wife sang like a Conservatoire medallist. This latter couple, as well as the lieutenant-colonel and his wife, used to dine every week with M. de Borodino. They were certainly flattered, knowing that when the Prince went to Paris on leave he dined with Mme de Pourtalès, with the Murats and suchlike. “But,” they said to themselves, “he’s just a captain, after all; he’s only too glad to get us to come. Still, he’s a real friend to us.” But when M. de Borodino, who had long been pulling every possible wire to secure an appointment nearer Paris, was posted to Beauvais, he packed up and went, and forgot the two musical couples as completely as he forgot the Doncières theatre and the little restaurant to which he used often to send out for his lunch, and, to their great indignation, neither the lieutenant-colonel nor the senior medical officer, who had so often sat at his table, ever had so much as a single word from him for the rest of their lives.

  One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my grandmother to give her news of me and to suggest to her that, since there was a telephone service functioning between Paris and Doncières, she might make use of it to speak to me. In short, that very day she was to give me a call, and he advised me to be at the post office at about a quarter to four. The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at once, my immediate thought was that it was all very long and very inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like all of us nowadays, I found too slow for my liking, in its abrupt changes, the admirable sorcery whereby a few moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother’s case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and preoccupations of which we know nothing and of which he is about to inform us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear, at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained. And we are like the person in the fairy-tale for whom
a sorceress, at his express wish, conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of shedding tears, of gathering flowers, close by the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where she actually is at the moment. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke—occasionally for rather longer than seems to us necessary, I admit—the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces and who are our guardian angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously guard; the All-Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Danaïds of the unseen who incessantly empty and fill and transmit to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence to a loved one, in the hope that no one could hear us, cry brutally: “I’m listening!”; the ever-irritable hand-maidens of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.

  And as soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness filled with apparitions to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an abstract sound—the sound of distance overcome—and the voice of the dear one speaks to us.

  It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far away it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish, as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after long hours of travel, the woman whose voice was so close to my ear, I felt more clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near—in actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many are the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it has seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust.