If M. de Guermantes had been in such haste to present me, it was because the presence at a gathering of anyone not personally known to a royal personage is an intolerable state of things which must not be prolonged for a single instant. It was similar to the haste which Saint-Loup had shown to be introduced to my grandmother. By the same token, in a fragmentary survival of the old life of the court which is called social etiquette and is by no means superficial, wherein, rather, by a sort of outside-in reversal, it is the surface that becomes essential and profound, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes regarded as a duty more essential and more inflexible than those (all too often neglected by one at least of the pair) of charity, chastity, pity and justice, that of rarely addressing the Princesse de Parme save in the third person.
Failing the visit to Parma which I had never yet made (and which I had wanted to make ever since certain Easter holidays long ago), meeting its Princess—who, I knew, owned the finest palace in that unique city where in any case everything must be homogeneous, isolated as it was from the rest of the world within its polished walls, in the atmosphere, stifling as an airless summer evening on the piazza of a small Italian town, of its compact and almost cloying name—ought to have substituted in a flash, for what I had so often tried to imagine, all that did really exist at Parma, in a sort of fragmentary arrival there without having moved; it was, in the algebra of my imagined journey to the city of Giorgione,21 a simple equation, so to speak, with that unknown quantity. But if I had for many years past—like a perfumer impregnating a solid block of fat—saturated this name, Princesse de Parme, with the scent of thousands of violets, in return, when I set eyes on the Princess, who until then I would have sworn must be the Sanseverina herself, a second process began which was not, I may say, completed until several months had passed, and consisted in expelling, by means of fresh chemical combinations, all the essential oil of violets and all the Stendhalian fragrance from the name of the Princess, and implanting there in their place the image of a little dark woman taken up with good works and so humbly amiable that one felt at once in how exalted a pride that amiability had its roots. Moreover, while identical, barring a few points of difference, with any other great lady, she was as little Stendhalian as is, for example, in the Europe district of Paris, the Rue de Parme, which bears far less resemblance to the name of Parma than to any or all of the neighbouring streets, and reminds one not nearly so much of the Charterhouse in which Fabrice ends his days as of the concourse in the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Her amiability sprang from two causes. The first and more general was the upbringing which this daughter of kings had received. Her mother (not merely related to all the royal families of Europe but furthermore—in contrast to the ducal house of Parma—richer than any reigning princess) had instilled into her from her earliest childhood the arrogantly humble precepts of an evangelical snobbery; and today every line of the daughter’s face, the curve of her shoulders, the movements of her arms, seemed to repeat the lesson: “Remember that if God has caused you to be born on the steps of a throne you ought not to make that a reason for looking down upon those to whom Divine Providence has willed (wherefore His Name be praised) that you should be superior by birth and fortune. On the contrary, you must be kind to the lowly. Your ancestors were Princes of Cleves and Juliers from the year 647; God in His bounty has decreed that you should hold practically all the shares in the Suez Canal and three times as many Royal Dutch as Edmond de Rothschild; your pedigree in a direct line has been established by genealogists from the year 63 of the Christian era; you have as sisters-in-law two empresses. Therefore never seem in your speech to be recalling these great privileges, not that they are precarious (for nothing can alter the antiquity of blood, and the world will always need oil), but because it is unnecessary to point out that you are better born than other people or that your investments are all gilt-edged, since everyone knows these facts already. Be helpful to the needy. Give to all those whom the bounty of heaven has been graciously pleased to put beneath you as much as you can give them without forfeiting your rank, that is to say help in the form of money, even caring for the sick, but of course never any invitations to your soirées, which would do them no possible good and, by diminishing your prestige, would detract from the efficacy of your benevolent activities.”
And so, even at moments when she could not do good, the Princess endeavoured to demonstrate, or rather to let it be thought, by all the external signs of dumb-show, that she did not consider herself superior to the people among whom she found herself. She treated each of them with that charming courtesy with which well-bred people treat their inferiors and was continually, to make herself useful, pushing back her chair so as to leave more room, holding my gloves, offering me all those services which would demean the proud spirit of a commoner but are willingly rendered by sovereign ladies or, instinctively and from force of professional habit, by old servants.
The other reason for the amiability shown me by the Princesse de Parme was a more special one, yet in no way dictated by a mysterious liking for me. But for the moment I did not have time to get to the bottom of it. For already the Duke, who seemed in a hurry to complete the round of introductions, had led me off to another of the flower-maidens. On hearing her name I told her that I had passed by her country house, not far from Balbec. “Oh, I should have been so pleased to show you round it,” she said to me almost in a whisper as though to emphasise her modesty, but in a heartfelt tone filled with regret for the loss of an opportunity to enjoy a quite exceptional pleasure; and she added with a meaning look: “I do hope you will come again some day. But I must say that what would interest you even more would be my aunt Brancas’s place. It was built by Mansard and it’s the jewel of the province.” It was not only she herself who would have been glad to show me over her house, but her aunt Brancas would have been no less delighted to do me the honours of hers, or so I was assured by this lady who evidently thought that, especially at a time when the land showed a tendency to pass into the hands of financiers who had no idea how to live, it was important that the great should keep up the lofty traditions of lordly hospitality, by speeches which did not commit them to anything. It was also because she sought, like everyone in her world, to say the things that would give most pleasure to the person she was addressing, to give him the highest idea of himself, to make him think that he flattered people by writing to them, that he honoured those who entertained him, that everyone was longing to know him. The desire to give other people this comforting idea of themselves does, it is true, sometimes exist even among the middle classes. We find there that amiable disposition, in the form of an individual quality compensating for some other defect, not alas in the most trusty male friends but at any rate in the most agreeable female companions. But there it flourishes only in isolation. In an important section of the aristocracy, on the other hand, this characteristic has ceased to be individual; cultivated by upbringing, sustained by the idea of a personal grandeur that need fear no humiliation, that knows no rival, is aware that by being gracious it can make people happy and delights in doing so, it has become the generic feature of a class. And even those whom personal defects of too incompatible a kind prevent from keeping it in their hearts bear the unconscious trace of it in their vocabulary or their gesticulation.
“She’s a very kind woman,” said the Duc de Guermantes of the Princesse de Parme, “and she knows how to play the grande dame better than anyone.”
While I was being introduced to the ladies, one of the gentlemen of the party had been showing various signs of agitation: this was Comte Hannibal de Bréauté-Consalvi. Having arrived late, he had not had time to investigate the composition of the party, and when I entered the room, seeing in me a guest who was not one of the Duchess’s regular circle and must therefore have some quite extraordinary claim to admission, installed his monocle beneath the groined arch of his eyebrow, thinking that this would help him, far more than to see me, to discern what manner of man I was. H
e knew that Mme de Guermantes had (the priceless appanage of truly superior women) what was called a “salon,” that is to say added occasionally to the people of her own set some celebrity who had recently come into prominence by the discovery of a new cure for something or the production of a masterpiece. The Faubourg Saint-Germain had not yet recovered from the shock of learning that the Duchess had not been afraid to invite M. Detaille22 to the reception which she had given to meet the King and Queen of England. The clever women of the Faubourg were not easily consolable for not having been invited, so deliciously thrilling would it have been to come into contact with that strange genius. Mme de Courvoisier averred that M. Ribot had been there as well, but this was a pure invention designed to make people believe that Oriane was aiming at an embassy for her husband. To cap it all, M. de Guermantes, with a gallantry that would have done credit to Marshal Saxe, had presented himself at the stage door of the Comédie-Française and had persuaded Mlle Reichenberg to come and recite before the King, something that constituted an event without precedent in the annals of routs. Remembering all these unexpected happenings, which moreover had his entire approval, his own presence being both an ornament to and, in the same way as that of the Duchesse de Guermantes but in the masculine gender, an endorsement for any salon, M. de Bréauté, when he asked himself who I could be, felt that the field of inquiry was very wide. For a moment the name of M. Widor flashed before his mind, but he decided that I was too young to be an organist, and M. Widor not prominent enough to be “received.” It seemed on the whole more plausible to regard me simply as the new attaché at the Swedish Legation of whom he had heard, and he was preparing to ask me for the latest news of King Oscar, by whom he had several times been very hospitably received; but when the Duke, in introducing me, had mentioned my name to M. de Bréauté, the latter, finding the name to be completely unknown to him, had no longer any doubt that, since I was there, I must be a celebrity of some sort. It was absolutely typical of Oriane, who had the knack of attracting to her salon men who were in the public eye, in a ratio that of course never exceeded one in a hundred, otherwise she would have lowered its tone. Accordingly M. de Bréauté began to lick his chops and to sniff the air greedily, his appetite whetted not only by the good dinner he could count on, but by the character of the party, which my presence could not fail to make interesting and which would furnish him with an intriguing topic of conversation next day at the Duc de Chartres’s luncheon-table. He was not yet enlightened as to whether I was the man who had just been making those experiments with a serum against cancer, or the author of the new “curtain-raiser” then in rehearsal at the Théâtre-Français; but, a great intellectual, a great collector of “travellers’ tales,” he lavished on me an endless series of bows, signs of mutual understanding, smiles filtered through the glass of his monocle, either in the misapprehension that a man of standing would esteem him more highly if he could manage to instil into me the illusion that for him, the Comte de Bréauté-Consalvi, the privileges of the mind were no less deserving of respect than those of birth, or simply from the need to express and the difficulty of expressing his satisfaction, in his ignorance of the language in which he ought to address me, precisely as if he had found himself face to face with one of the “natives” of an undiscovered country on which his raft had landed, from whom, in the hope of ultimate profit, he would endeavour, observing with interest the while their quaint customs and without interrupting his demonstrations of friendship or forgetting to utter loud cries of benevolence like them, to obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for glass beads. Having responded as best I could to his joy, I shook hands with the Duc de Châtellerault, whom I had already met at Mme de Villeparisis’s and who observed that she was “a sharp customer.” He was typically Guermantes with his fair hair, his aquiline profile, the points where the skin of the cheeks was blemished, all of which may be seen in the portraits of that family which have come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as I was no longer in love with the Duchess, her reincarnation in the person of a young man offered me no attraction. I interpreted the hook made by the Duc de Châtellerault’s nose as if it had been the signature of a painter whose work I had long studied but who no longer interested me in the least. Next, I said good evening also to the Prince de Foix, and to the detriment of my knuckles, which emerged crushed and mangled, let them be caught in the vice of a German handclasp, accompanied by an ironical or good-natured smile, from the Prince von Faffenheim, M. de Norpois’s friend, who, by virtue of the craze for nicknames which prevailed in this circle, was known so universally as Prince Von that he himself used to sign his letters “Prince Von,” or, when he wrote to his intimates, “Von.” At least this abbreviation was understandable, in view of his triple-barrelled name. It was less easy to grasp the reasons which caused “Elizabeth” to be replaced, now by “Lili,” now by “Bebeth,” just as another world swarmed with “Kikis.” One can understand how people, idle and frivolous though they in general were, should have come to adopt “Quiou” in order not to waste the precious time that it would have taken them to pronounce “Montesquiou.” But it is less easy to see what they gained by nicknaming one of their cousins “Dinand” instead of “Ferdinand.” It must not be thought, however, that in the invention of nicknames the Guermantes invariably proceeded by curtailing or duplicating syllables. Thus two sisters, the Comtesse de Montpeyroux and the Vicomtesse de Vélude, who were both of them enormously stout, invariably heard themselves addressed, without the least trace of annoyance on their part or of amusement on other people’s, so long established was the custom, as “Petite” and “Mignonne.” Mme de Guermantes, who adored Mme de Montpeyroux, would, if the latter had fallen seriously ill, have flown to the sister with tears in her eyes and exclaimed: “I hear Petite is dreadfully bad!” Mme de l’Eclin, who wore her hair in bands that entirely hid her ears, was never called anything but “Hungry belly.”23 In some cases people simply added an “a” to the surname or Christian name of the husband to designate the wife. The most miserly, most sordid, most inhuman man in the Faubourg having been christened Raphael, his charmer, his flower springing also from the rock, always signed herself “Raphaela.” But these are merely a few specimens of countless rules to which we can always return later on if the occasion arises, and explain some of them.
I then asked the Duke to introduce me to the Prince d’Agrigente. “What! do you mean to say you don’t know the good Gri-gri!” exclaimed M. de Guermantes, and gave M. d’Agrigente my name. His own, so often quoted by Françoise, had always appeared to me like a transparent sheet of coloured glass through which I beheld, struck by the slanting rays of a golden sun, on the shore of the violet sea, the pink marble cubes of an ancient city of which I had not the least doubt that the Prince—who happened by some brief miracle to be passing through Paris—was himself, as luminously Sicilian and as gloriously weathered, the absolute sovereign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was introduced, and who wheeled round to bid me good evening with a ponderous nonchalance which he considered elegant, was as independent of his name as of a work of art that he owned without betraying in his person any reflexion of it, without, perhaps, ever having looked at it. The Prince d’Agrigente was so entirely devoid of anything princely, anything remotely reminiscent of Agrigento, that one was led to suppose that his name, entirely distinct from himself, bound by no ties to his person, had had the power of attracting to itself every iota of vague poetry that there might have been in this man, as in any other, and enclosing it, after this operation, in the enchanted syllables. If any such operation had been performed, it had certainly been done most efficiently, for there remained not an atom of charm to be drawn from this kinsman of the Guermantes. With the result that he found himself at one and the same time the only man in the world who was Prince d’Agrigente and of all the men in the world the one who was perhaps least so. He was, for all that, very glad to be what he was, but as a banker is glad to hold a number of shares in a m
ine, without caring whether the said mine answers to the charming name of Ivanhoe or Primrose, or is called merely the Premier. Meanwhile, as these introductions which have taken so long to recount but which, beginning as soon as I entered the room, had lasted only a few moments, were drawing to an end at last, and Mme de Guermantes was saying to me in an almost suppliant tone: “I’m sure Basin is tiring you, dragging you round like that from one person to the next. We want you to know our friends, but we’re a great deal more anxious not to tire you, so that you may come again often,” the Duke, with a somewhat awkward and timorous wave of the hand, gave the signal (which he would gladly have given at any time during the hour I had spent in contemplation of the Elstirs) that dinner might now be served.
The Guermantes Way Page 53
