And if but one is left, then that one will be me,
a line which for that matter was unknown to her. This Courvoisier had consumed, almost every Monday, éclairs stuffed with cream within a few feet of the Comtesse G——, but to no consequence. And Mme de Villebon confessed in secret that she could not conceive how her cousin Guermantes could allow a woman into her house who was not even in the second-best society of Châteaudun. “I really fail to see why my cousin should make such a fuss about whom she knows; she really has got a nerve!” concluded Mme de Villebon with a change of facial expression, now smilingly sardonic in its despair, to which, in a charade, another line of verse would have been applied, one with which she was no more familiar than with the first:
Thanks to the gods! Mischance outstrips my esperance.
We may here anticipate events to explain that the perseverance (which rhymes, in the following line, with esperance) shown by Mme de Villebon in snubbing Mme G——was not entirely wasted. In the eyes of Mme G—— it invested Mme de Villebon with a distinction so supreme, though purely imaginary, that when the time came for Mme G——’s daughter, who was the prettiest girl and the greatest heiress in the ballrooms of that season, to marry, people were astonished to see her refuse all the dukes in succession. The fact was that her mother, remembering the weekly snubs she had to endure in the Rue de Grenelle in memory of Châteaudun, could think of only one possible husband for her daughter—a Villebon son.
A single point at which Guermantes and Courvoisiers converged was the art (one, moreover, of infinite variety) of keeping distances. The Guermantes manners were not absolutely uniform throughout the family. And yet, to take an example, all of them, all those who were genuine Guermantes, when you were introduced to them proceeded to perform a sort of ceremony almost as though the fact that they had held out their hands to you were as significant as if they had been dubbing you a knight. At the moment when a Guermantes, were he no more than twenty, but treading already in the footsteps of his ancestors, heard your name uttered by the person who introduced you, he let fall on you as though he had by no means made up his mind to say “How d’ye do” to you a gaze generally blue and always of the coldness of a steel blade which he seemed ready to plunge into the deepest recesses of your heart. Which was as a matter of fact what the Guermantes imagined themselves to be doing, since they all regarded themselves as psychologists of the first water. They felt moreover that they enhanced by this inspection the affability of the salute which was to follow it, and would not be rendered you without full knowledge of your deserts. All this occurred at a distance from yourself which, little enough had it been a question of a passage of arms, seemed immense for a handclasp and had as chilling an effect in the latter case as it would have had in the former, so that when a Guermantes, after a rapid tour round the last hiding-places of your soul to establish your credentials, had deemed you worthy to consort with him thereafter, his hand, directed towards you at the end of an arm stretched out to its fullest extent, appeared to be presenting a rapier to you for a single combat, and that hand was on the whole placed so far in advance of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand that he was saluting. Certain Guermantes, lacking any sense of moderation, or being incapable of refraining from repeating themselves incessantly, went further and repeated this ceremony afresh every time they met you. Seeing that they had no longer any need to conduct the preliminary psychological investigation for which the “family genie” had delegated its powers to them and the result of which they had presumably kept in mind, the insistency of the piercing gaze preceding the handclasp could be explained only by the automatism which their gaze had acquired or by some hypnotic power which they believed themselves to possess. The Courvoisiers, whose physique was different, had tried in vain to acquire that searching gaze and had had to fall back upon a haughty stiffness or a hurried negligence. On the other hand, it was from the Courvoisiers that certain very rare Guermantes of the gentler sex seemed to have borrowed the feminine form of greeting. At the moment when you were presented to one of these, she made you a sweeping bow in which she carried towards you, almost at an angle of forty-five degrees, her head and bust, the rest of her body (which was very tall) up to the belt which formed a pivot, remaining stationary. But no sooner had she projected thus towards you the upper part of her person, than she flung it backwards beyond the vertical with a brusque withdrawal of roughly equal length. This subsequent withdrawal neutralised what appeared to have been conceded to you; the ground which you believed yourself to have gained did not even remain in your possession as in a duel; the original positions were retained. This same annulment of affability by the resumption of distance (which was Courvoisier in origin and intended to show that the advances made in the first movement were no more than a momentary feint) displayed itself equally clearly, in the Courvoisier ladies as in the Guermantes, in the letters which you received from them, at any rate in the first period of your acquaintance. The “body” of the letter might contain sentences such as one writes only (you would suppose) to a friend, but in vain might you have thought yourself entitled to boast of being in that relation to the lady, since the letter would begin with “Monsieur” and end with “Croyez, monsieur, à mes sentiments distingués.” After which, between this cold opening and frigid conclusion which altered the meaning of all the rest, there might (were it a reply to a letter of condolence) come a succession of the most touching pictures of the grief which the Guermantes lady had felt on losing her sister, of the intimacy that had existed between them, of the beauty of the place in which she was staying, of the consolation that she found in the charm of her grandchildren, in other words it was simply a letter such as one finds in printed collections, the intimate character of which implied, however, no more intimacy between yourself and the writer than if she had been Pliny the Younger or Mme de Simiane.
It is true that certain Guermantes ladies wrote to you from the first as “My dear friend,” or “Dear friend.” These were not always the most homely among them, but rather those who, living only in the society of kings and being at the same time “of easy virtue,” assumed in their pride the certainty that everything that came from them gave pleasure and in their corruption the habit of not grudging you any of the satisfactions they had to offer. However, since to have had a common great-great-grandmother in the reign of Louis XIII was enough to make a young Guermantes invariably refer to the Marquise de Guermantes as “Aunt Adam,” the Guermantes were so numerous a clan that, even with these simple rites, that for example of the form of greeting adopted on introduction to a stranger, there existed a wide divergence. Each sub-group of any refinement had its own, which was handed down from parents to children like the prescription for a liniment or a special way of making jam. Thus we have seen Saint-Loup’s handshake unleashed as though involuntarily as soon as he heard one’s name, without any participation by his eyes, without the addition of a nod or a bow. Any unfortunate commoner who for a particular reason—which in fact very rarely occurred—was presented to a member of the Saint-Loup sub-group would scratch his head over this abrupt minimum of a greeting, which deliberately assumed the appearance of non-recognition, wondering what in the world the Guermantes—male or female—could have against him. And he was highly surprised to learn that the said Guermantes had thought fit to write specially to the introducer to tell him how delighted he or she had been with the stranger, whom he or she looked forward to meeting again. As characteristic as the mechanical gestures of Saint-Loup were the complicated and rapid capers (which M. de Charlus condemned as ridiculous) of the Marquis de Fierbois, or the grave and measured paces of the Prince de Guermantes. But it is impossible to describe here the richness of this Guermantes choreography because of the sheer extent of the corps de ballet.
To return to the antipathy which animated the Courvoisiers against the Duchesse de Guermantes, the former might have ha
d the consolation of feeling sorry for her so long as she was still unmarried, for she was then of comparatively slender means. Unfortunately, at all times and seasons, a sort of fuliginous emanation, quite sui generis, enveloped and concealed from view the wealth of the Courvoisiers which, however great it might be, remained obscure. In vain might a young Courvoisier with an enormous dowry find a most eligible bridegroom; it invariably happened that the young couple had no house of their own in Paris, would “descend on” their parents-in-law, and for the rest of the year lived down in the country in the midst of a society that was unadulterated but undistinguished. Whereas Saint-Loup, who was up to the eyes in debt, dazzled Doncières with his carriage-horses, a Courvoisier who was extremely rich always went by tram. Similarly (though of course many years earlier) Mlle de Guermantes (Oriane), who had scarcely a penny to her name, created more stir with her clothes than all the Courvoisiers put together. The very scandalousness of her remarks was a sort of advertisement for her style of dressing and doing her hair. She had had the audacity to say to the Russian Grand Duke: “Well, sir, it appears you would like to have Tolstoy assassinated?” at a dinner-party to which none of the Courvoisiers, in any case ill-informed about Tolstoy, had been asked. They were no better informed about the Greek authors, if we may judge by the Dowager Duchesse de Gallardon (mother-in-law of the Princesse de Gallardon who at that time was still a girl) who, not having been honoured by Oriane with a single visit in five years, replied to someone who asked her the reason for this abstention: “It seems she recites Aristotle” (meaning Aristophanes) “in society. I won’t tolerate that sort of thing in my house!”
One can imagine how greatly this “sally” by Mlle de Guermantes on the subject of Tolstoy, if it enraged the Courvoisiers, delighted the Guermantes, and beyond them everyone who was not merely closely but even remotely attached to them. The Dowager Comtesse d’Argencourt (née Seineport), who entertained more or less everyone because she was a blue-stocking and in spite of her son’s being a terrible snob, retailed the remark to her literary friends with the comment: “Oriane de Guermantes, you know, she’s as sharp as a needle, as mischievous as a monkey, gifted at everything, does water-colours worthy of a great painter, and writes better verses than most of the great poets, and as for family, you couldn’t imagine anything better, her grandmother was Mlle de Montpensier, and she’s the eighteenth Oriane de Guermantes in succession, without a single misalliance; it’s the purest, the oldest blood in the whole of France.” And so the sham men of letters, the pseudo-intellectuals whom Mme d’Argencourt entertained, picturing Oriane de Guermantes, whom they would never have an opportunity of knowing personally, as something more wonderful and more extraordinary than Princess Bedr-el-Budur, not only felt ready to die for her on learning that so noble a person glorified Tolstoy above all others, but felt also a quickening in their hearts of their own love of Tolstoy, their longing to resist Tsarism. These liberal ideas might have languished in them, they might have begun to doubt their importance, no longer daring to confess to them, when suddenly from Mlle de Guermantes herself, that is to say from a girl so indisputably cultured and authoritative, who wore her hair flat on her forehead (a thing that no Courvoisier would ever have dreamed of doing), came this vehement support. A certain number of realities, good or bad in themselves, gain enormously in this way by receiving the adhesion of people who are in authority over us. For instance, among the Courvoisiers the rites of civility in a public thoroughfare consisted in a certain form of greeting, very ugly and far from affable in itself, which people nevertheless knew to be the distinguished way of bidding a person good-day, with the result that everyone else, suppressing their instinctive smiles of welcome, endeavoured to imitate these frigid gymnastics. But the Guermantes in general and Oriane in particular, while more conversant than anyone with these rites, did not hesitate, if they caught sight of you from a carriage, to greet you with a friendly wave, and in a drawing-room, leaving the Courvoisiers to give their stiff, self-conscious salutes, offered the most charming bows, held out their hands as though to a comrade with a smile from their blue eyes, so that suddenly, thanks to the Guermantes, there entered into the substance of stylish manners, hitherto rather hollow and dry, everything that one would naturally have liked and had forced oneself to eschew, a genuine welcome, the warmth of true friendliness, spontaneity. It is in a similar fashion (but by a rehabilitation which in this case is less justified) that the people who are most strongly imbued with an instinctive taste for bad music and for melodies, however commonplace, which have something facile and caressing about them, succeed, by dint of education in symphonic culture, in mortifying that appetite. But once they have arrived at this point, when, dazzled—and rightly so—by the brilliant orchestral colouring of Richard Strauss, they see that musician adopt the most vulgar motifs with a self-indulgence worthy of Auber, what those people originally admired finds suddenly in so high an authority a justification which delights them, and they wallow without qualms and with a twofold gratitude, when they listen to Salomé, in what it would have been impossible for them to admire in Les Diamants de la Couronne.
Authentic or not, Mlle de Guermantes’s apostrophe to the Grand Duke, retailed from house to house, provided an opportunity to relate with what excessive elegance Oriane had been turned out at the dinner-party in question. But if such splendour (and this is precisely what rendered it inaccessible to the Courvoisiers) springs not from wealth but from prodigality, the latter nevertheless lasts longer if it enjoys the constant support of the former, which then allows it to pull out all the stops. Now, given the principles openly paraded not only by Oriane but by Mme de Villeparisis, namely that nobility does not count, that it is ridiculous to bother one’s head about rank, that money doesn’t bring happiness, that intellect, heart, talent are alone of importance, the Courvoisiers were justified in hoping that, as a result of the training she had received from the Marquise, Oriane would marry someone who was not in society, an artist, an ex-convict, a tramp, a free-thinker, that she would enter for good and all into the category of what the Courvoisiers called “black sheep.” They were all the more justified in this hope because, inasmuch as Mme de Villeparisis was at that time going through an awkward crisis from the social point of view (none of the few bright stars whom I was to meet in her drawing-room had as yet reappeared there), she professed an intense horror of the society which thus excluded her. Even when she spoke of her nephew the Prince de Guermantes, whom she did still see, she never ceased mocking him because he was so infatuated with his pedigree. But the moment it became a question of finding a husband for Oriane, it was no longer the principles publicly paraded by aunt and niece that had guided the operation; it was the mysterious “family genie.” As unerringly as if Mme de Villeparisis and Oriane had never spoken of anything but rent-rolls and pedigrees instead of literary merit and depth of character, and as if the Marquise for the space of a few days, had been—as she would ultimately be—dead and in her coffin in the church at Combray, where each member of the family became simply a Guermantes, with a forfeiture of individuality and baptismal names attested on the voluminous black drapery of the pall by the single “G” in purple surmounted by the ducal coronet, it was on the wealthiest and the most nobly born, on the most eligible bachelor of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the eldest son of the Duc de Guermantes, the Prince des Laumes, that the family genie had fixed the choice of the intellectual, the rebellious, the evangelical Mme de Villeparisis. And for a couple of hours, on the day of the wedding, Mme de Villeparisis received in her drawing-room all the noble persons whom she had been in the habit of deriding, whom she even derided with the few bourgeois intimates whom she had invited and on whom the Prince des Laumes promptly left cards, preparatory to “cutting the painter” in the following year. And then, making the Courvoisiers’ cup of bitterness overflow, the same old maxims according to which intellect and talent were the sole claims to social pre-eminence began once more to be trotted out in the household of t
he Princesse des Laumes immediately after her marriage. And in this respect, be it said in passing, the point of view which Saint-Loup upheld when he lived with Rachel, frequented the friends of Rachel, would have liked to marry Rachel, entailed—whatever the horror that it inspired in the family—less falsehood than that of the Guermantes young ladies in general, extolling the intellect, barely allowing the possibility that anyone could question the equality of mankind, all of which led, when it came to the point, to the same result as if they had professed the opposite principles, that is to say to marrying an extremely wealthy duke. Saint-Loup, on the contrary, acted in conformity with his theories, which led people to say that he was treading in evil ways. Certainly from the moral standpoint Rachel was not altogether satisfactory. But it is by no means certain that, if she had been no more virtuous but a duchess or the heiress to many millions, Mme de Marsantes would not have been in favour of the match.
The Guermantes Way Page 55
