The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  “I’ve just been seeing him at dinner at Mme de Villeparisis’s,” said the General, but without either smiling at or endorsing the Duchess’s pleasantries.

  “Was M. de Norpois there?” asked Prince Von, whose mind still ran on the Academy of Moral Sciences.

  “Yes,” said the General. “In fact he was talking about your Emperor.”

  “It seems the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he doesn’t care for Elstir’s painting. Not that that’s anything against him,” said the Duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s an intriguing piece of work. He’s most interesting while one’s sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman. It’s modelled on The Women Regents of the Hospice, by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow one of my nephew’s favourite expressions,” the Duchess turned to me, gently flapping her black feather fan. More than erect on her chair, she flung her head nobly backwards, for, while always a great lady, she was a trifle inclined to act the part of the great lady too. I said that I had been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that to avoid getting everything muddled up, since my time was limited, I had left out Haarlem.

  “Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!” cried M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s View of Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a self-complacent tone, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen: “If it’s to be seen, I saw it!”

  “What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haarlem!” cried the Duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of an hour to spend in the place, they’re an extraordinary thing to have seen, those Halses. I don’t mind saying that a person who only caught a passing glimpse of them from the top of a tram without stopping, supposing they were hung out to view in the street, would open his eyes pretty wide.”

  This remark shocked me as indicating a misconception of the way in which artistic impressions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to imply that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine which takes snapshots.

  M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me with so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me, appraised his wife’s illustrious presence, listened to what she was saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She’s thoroughly at home in everything. Our young friend can go home and say that he’s had before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere else today.” Thus I beheld the pair of them, divorced from that name Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women, merely lagging a little behind their contemporaries, and that not evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the wife has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband the misfortune to come down to the pinchbeck age of the past, she remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-Philippe. That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction, and with the help of so many good wines, almost a miracle. A Don John of Austria, an Isabella d’Este, situated for us in the world of names, have as little communication with the great pages of history as the Méséglise way had with the Guermantes. Isabella d’Este was no doubt in reality a very minor princess, similar to those who under Louis XIV obtained no special place at Court. But because she seems to us to be of a unique and therefore incomparable essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less great than he, so that a supper-party with Louis XIV would appear to us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este we should find ourselves miraculously transported into the presence of a heroine of romance. Then, after having studied Isabella d’Este, after having transplanted her patiently from that magic world into the world of history, and discovered that her life, her thought, contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness which had been suggested to us by her name, once we have recovered from our disappointment we feel a boundless gratitude to that princess for having had a knowledge of Mantegna’s paintings almost equal to that, hitherto despised by us and put, as Françoise would have said, “lower than the dirt,” of M. Lafenestre. After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Franz Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, in order to visualise the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of its place-names and its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through a screen of giant aloes or manchineels, inhabitants who (sometimes indeed among the ruins of a Roman theatre and beneath a column dedicated to Venus) are engaged in reading Voltaire’s Mérope or Alzire. And, so remote, so distinct from, so superior to the educated women of the middle classes whom I had known, the similar culture by which Mme de Guermantes had made herself, with no ulterior motive, to gratify no ambition, descend to the level of people whom she would never know, had the praiseworthy character, almost touching in its uselessness, of a knowledge of Phoenician antiquities in a politician or a doctor.

  “I might have been able to show you a very fine one,” Mme de Guermantes said to me amiably, still speaking of Hals, “the finest in existence, some people say, which was left to me by a German cousin. Unfortunately, it turned out to be ‘enfeoffed’ in the castle—you don’t know the expression? nor do I,” she added, with her fondness for jokes (which made her, she thought, seem modern) at the expense of the old customs to which nevertheless she was unconsciously but fiercely attached. “I’m glad you have seen my Elstirs, but I must admit I should have been a great deal more glad if I could have done you the honours of my Hals, of that ‘enfeoffed’ picture.”

  “I know the one,” said Prince Von, “it’s the Grand Duke of Hesse’s Hals.”

  “Quite so; his brother married my sister,” said M. de Guermantes, “and his mother and Oriane’s were first cousins as well.”

  “But so far as M. Elstir is concerned,” the Prince went on, “I shall take the liberty of saying, without having any opinion of his work, which I do not know, that the hatred with which the Kaiser pursues him ought not, it seems to me, to be counted against him. The Kaiser is a man of marvellous intelligence.”

  “Yes, I’ve met him at dinner twice, once at my aunt Sagan’s and once at my aunt Radziwill’s, and I must say I found him quite unusual. I didn’t find him at all simple! But there’s something amusing about him, something ‘forced’ ” (she detached the word) “like a green carnation, that is to say a thing that surprises me and doesn’t please me enormously, a thing it’s surprising that anyone should have been able to create but which I feel would have been just as well left uncreated. I trust I’m not shocking you?”

  “The Kaiser is a man of astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake: if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.”

  Everyone smiled.

  “You set my mind at rest,” said the Duchess.

  “I should be inclined to compare the Kaiser,” went on the Prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it were spelt with a “k”), never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist” (but the Prince said “arsheologist”) “we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it is not really old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whet
her an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if the Kaiser says to me of a play: ‘Prince, you must see it, it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity.”

  “Norpois is in favour of an Anglo-French understanding, isn’t he?” said M. de Guermantes.

  “What good would that do you?” asked Prince Von, who could not endure the English, with an air at once irritated and crafty. “The English are so schtubid. I know, of course, that it would not be as soldiers that they would help you. But one can judge them, all the same, by the schtubidity of their generals. A friend of mine was talking the other day to Botha, you know, the Boer leader. He said to my friend: ‘It’s terrible, an army like that. I rather like the English, as a matter of fact, but just imagine that I, a mere peassant, have beaten them in every battle. And in the last, when I was overpowered by a force twenty times the strength of my own, even while surrendering because I had to, I managed to take two thousand prisoners! That was all right because I was only a leader of an army of peassants, but if those poor fools ever have to stand up against a European army, one trembles to think what may happen to them!’ Besides, you have only to see how their King, whom you know as well as I do, passes for a great man in England.”

  I scarcely listened to these stories, of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my favourite trains of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I lived on the surface, my hair well brushed, my shirt-front starched, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life.

  “Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme de Guermantes, who felt that the German prince was wanting in tact, “I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world.”

  “But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Prince, who was losing his temper and unable to see that he was giving offence, “you must admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is charming, excessively gentle and dim-witted. But still, there’s something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria . . .”

  “He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess, “he’s a witty fellow.”

  “He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good man on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends with, it’s the Kaiser’s dearest wish, but he insists on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-French rapprochement M. de Norpois preaches.”*

  “You know him, of course,” said the Duchess, turning to me, so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand, and thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on the contrary, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me.

  “You’re quite mistaken,” replied the Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we’ve never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke about you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.”

  M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious nature, those who, like me, had let themselves be taken in by his outward appearance of a Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak-tree, by the affecting sounds that emerged from his somewhat too tuneful lips, suspected real treachery when they learned of a slander uttered at their expense by a man whose words had always seemed so heartfelt. These slanders were frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent him from taking a liking to people, from praising those he liked and taking pleasure in showing willingness to help them.

  “Not that I’m in the least surprised at his appreciating you,” said Mme de Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can quite understand,” she added, for the benefit of the rest of the party, alluding to a plan of marriage of which I knew nothing, “that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old mistress, may not seem of very much use to him as a new wife. Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she hasn’t functioned for years now. Her only relations, if I may say so, are with God. She is more churchy than you would believe, and Boaz-Norpois can say, in the words of Victor Hugo:

  How long a time since she with whom I slept,

  O Lord, forsook my bed for yours!

  Really, my poor aunt is like those avant-garde artists who have railed against the Academy all their lives, and in the end start a little academy of their own, or those unfrocked priests who fabricate a religion of their own. Might as well stick to the cloth, or not live together. But who knows,” went on the Duchess with a meditative air, “it may be in anticipation of widowhood—there’s nothing sadder than weeds one’s not entitled to wear.”

  “Ah! if Mme de Villeparisis were to become Mme de Norpois, I really believe our cousin Gilbert would have a fit,” said General de Monserfeuil. “The Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he really is rather taken up with questions of birth and etiquette,” said the Princesse de Parme. “I went to spend a few days with them in the country, when the Princess, unfortunately, was ill in bed. I was accompanied by Petite.” (This was a nickname that was given to Mme d’Hunolstein because she was enormously stout.) “The Prince came to meet me at the foot of the steps, and pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the first floor, and then at the entrance to the reception rooms, stepping back to make way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how d’ye do, Mme d’Hunolstein’ (he always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to show that he didn’t have to come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,” said the Duke, who regarded himself as extremely modern, more contemptuous than anyone in the world of mere birth, and in fact a Republican, “that I haven’t many ideas in common with my cousin. Your Highness can imagine that we are about as much agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I should be of Gilbert’s opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise and then to make a marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh, when all’s said and done.” (These last words, which the Duke uttered as a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here quite superfluous. But he felt a perpetual need to say them which made him shift them to the end of a period if he had fo
und no place for them elsewhere. They were for him, among other things, almost a question of prosody.) “Mind you,” he added, “the Norpois are excellent people with a good place, of good stock.”

  “Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke fun at Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he does,” said Mme de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a family, no less than that of a wine, consisted in its age. But, less frank than her cousin and more subtle than her husband, she made a point of never in her conversation playing false to the Guermantes spirit, and despised rank in her speech while ready to honour it by her actions.

  “But aren’t you even some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.”

  “Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, and my grandmother comes from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t intermarried since Louis XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather distant.”

  “Really, how interesting; I never knew that,” said the General.

  “However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe, was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles, and as we ourselves are in a direct line of descent . . .”

  There was at Combray a Rue de Saintrailles to which I had never given another thought. It led from the Rue de la Bretonnerie to the Rue de l’Oiseau. And as Saintrailles, the companion of Joan of Arc, had, by marrying a Guermantes, brought into the family that county of Combray, his arms were quartered with those of Guermantes at the base of one of the windows in Saint-Hilaire. I saw again a vision of dark sandstone steps, while a modulation of sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from that in which it simply meant the genial hosts with whom I was dining this evening. If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles had just opened up. I felt that it would be useless to explain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had lied by implication in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me: “You don’t know our little corner?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that I did know it, and it was only from good breeding that he did not press the question. Mme de Guermantes drew me out of my meditation.