The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  These exclusions of the Baron’s were not always based on the resentments of a crackpot or the subtleties of an artist, but on the wiles of an actor. When he brought off, at the expense of somebody or something, an entirely successful tirade, he was anxious to let it be heard by the largest possible audience, but took care not to admit to the second performance the audience of the first who could have borne witness that the piece had not changed. He reconstituted his audience precisely because he did not alter his programme, and, when he had scored a success in conversation, would willingly have organised a tour and given performances in the provinces. Whatever the various motives for these exclusions, they did not merely annoy Mme Verdurin, who felt her authority as a hostess impaired; they also did her great damage socially, and for two reasons. The first was that M. de Charlus, even more touchy than Jupien, used to quarrel for no apparent reason with the people who were most suited to be his friends. Naturally, one of the first punishments that he could inflict upon them was that of not allowing them to be invited to a reception which he was organising at the Verdurins’. Now these pariahs were often people who ruled the roost, as the saying is, but who in M. de Charlus’s eyes had ceased to rule it from the day on which he had quarrelled with them. For his imagination, in addition to manufacturing faults in people in order to quarrel with them, was no less ingenious in stripping them of all importance as soon as they ceased to be his friends. If, for instance, the guilty person came of an extremely old family whose dukedom, however, dates only from the nineteenth century—the Montesquious for instance—from that moment all that counted for M. de Charlus was the seniority of the dukedom, the family becoming nothing. “They’re not even dukes,” he would exclaim. “It’s the title of the Abbé de Montesquiou which passed most irregularly to a collateral, less than eighty years ago. The present duke, if duke he can be called, is the third. You may talk to me if you like of people like the Uzès, the La Trémoïlles, the Luynes, who are tenth or fourteenth dukes, or my brother who is twelfth Duc de Guermantes and seventeenth Prince de Condom. Even if the Montesquious are descended from an old family, what would that prove, supposing that it were proved? They have descended so far that they’ve reached the fourteenth storey below stairs.” Had he on the contrary quarrelled with a gentleman who possessed an ancient dukedom, who boasted the most magnificent connexions, was related to ruling princes, but to whose line this distinction had come quite suddenly without any great length of pedigree, a Luynes for instance, the case was altered, pedigree alone counted. “I ask you—Monsieur Alberti, who does not emerge from the mire until Louis XIII! Why should we be impressed because court favour allowed them to pick up dukedoms to which they had no right?” What was more, with M. de Charlus the fall followed close upon the high favour because of that tendency peculiar to the Guermantes family to expect from conversation, from friendship, something that these are incapable of giving, as well as the symptomatic fear of becoming the object of slander. And the fall was all the greater the higher the favour had been. Now nobody had ever found such favour with the Baron as he had ostentatiously shown to Comtesse Mole. By what sign of indifference did she prove one fine day that she had been unworthy of it? The Countess herself always declared that she had never been able to discover. The fact remains that the mere sound of her name aroused in the Baron the most violent rage, provoked the most eloquent but the most terrible philippics. Mme Verdurin, to whom Mme Mole had been extremely amiable and who, as we shall see, was founding great hopes upon her, had rejoiced in anticipation at the thought that the Countess would meet in her house all the noblest names, as the Mistress said, “of France and of Navarre”: she at once proposed inviting “Madame de Mole.” “Goodness gracious me! I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world,” M. de Charlus had replied, “and if you, Madame, feel a desire to converse with Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme,11 I’m only too delighted, but let it be on an evening when I am not present. I could see as soon as you opened your mouth that we don’t speak the same language, since I was talking of aristocratic names and you come up with the most obscure names of lawyers, of crooked little commoners, evil-minded tittle-tattles, and of little ladies who imagine themselves patronesses of the arts because they echo an octave lower the manners of my Guermantes sister-in-law, like a jay trying to imitate a peacock. I must add that it would be positively indecent to admit to a celebration which I am pleased to give at Mme Verdurin’s a person whom I have with good reason excluded from my society, a goose of a woman devoid of birth, loyalty or wit who is foolish enough to suppose that she is capable of playing the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes, a combination which is in itself idiotic, since the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes are poles apart. It is as though a person should pretend to be at once Reichenberg and Sarah Bernhardt. In any case, even if it were not wholly incompatible, it would be extremely ridiculous. Even though I myself may smile at times at the exaggerations of the one and regret the limitations of the other, that is my right. But that little middle-class toad trying to inflate herself to the magnitude of two great ladies who at least always exhibit the incomparable distinction of blood, it’s enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh. The Mole! That is a name which must not be uttered in my hearing, or I shall be obliged to withdraw,” he concluded with a smile, in the tone of a doctor who, having the good of his patient at heart in spite of the patient himself, lets it be understood that he will not tolerate the collaboration of a homoeopath.

  In addition to this, certain persons whom M. de Charlus regarded as negligible might indeed be so for him but not for Mme Verdurin. M. de Charlus, from the height of his exalted birth, could afford to dispense with the most elegant people, the assemblage of whom would have made Mme Verdurin’s drawing-room one of the first in Paris. But Mme Verdurin was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the bus, not to mention the enormous setback that the social error of the Dreyfus case had inflicted upon her—though it had not been an unmixed bane. “I forget whether I’ve told you,” I might ask the reader, as one might ask a friend with regard to whom one has forgotten, after so many conversations, whether one has remembered or had a chance to tell him something, “how disapproving the Duchesse de Guermantes had been of certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the Affair, excluded fashionable women from their drawing-rooms and admitted others who were not fashionable, because they were in favour of a retrial or against it, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies as being lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social formalities above the national interest?” Whether I have done so or not, the attitude of the Duchesse de Guermantes at that time can easily be imagined, and indeed if we look at it in the light of subsequent history may appear, from the social point of view, perfectly correct. M. de Cambremer regarded the Dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the Intelligence Service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the French people, to pave the way for invasion. Literature being, apart from a few of La Fontaine’s fables, a closed book to the Marquis, he left it to his wife to show that the cruelly probing literature of the day had, by creating a spirit of disrespect, brought about a parallel upheaval. “M. Reinach and M. Hervieu are in league,” she would say. Nobody will accuse the Dreyfus case of having premeditated such dark designs upon Society. But there it certainly broke down barriers. Society people who refuse to allow politics into their world are as far-sighted as soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like sexual behaviour, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices. The reason that they were nationalists gave the Faubourg Saint-Germain the habit of entertaining ladies from another class of society; the reason vanished with nationalism, but the habit remained. Mme Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her house certain writers of distinction who for the moment were of no
use to her socially, because they were Dreyfusards. But political passions are like all the rest, they do not last. New generations arise which no longer understand them; even the generation that experienced them changes, experiences new political passions which, not being modelled exactly upon their predecessors, rehabilitate some of the excluded, the reason for exclusion having altered. Monarchists no longer cared, at the time of the Dreyfus case, whether a man had been republican, or even radical, or even indeed anti-clerical, provided he was anti-semitic and nationalist. Should a war ever come, patriotism would assume another form and if a writer was chauvinistic enough nobody would stop to think whether he had or had not been a Dreyfusard.

  It was thus that, from each political crisis, from each artistic revival, Mme Verdurin had picked up one by one, like a bird building its nest, the several scraps, temporarily unusable, of what would one day be her salon. The Dreyfus case had passed, Anatole France remained. Mme Verdurin’s strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble she took for her faithful, the marvellous dinners that she gave for them alone, without inviting anyone from fashionable society. Each of the faithful was treated at her table as Bergotte had been treated at Mme Swann’s. When a familiar guest of this sort becomes one fine day a famous man whom everyone wants to come and see, his presence in the house of a Mme Verdurin has none of the artificial, adulterated quality of an official banquet or a college feast with a menu by Potel and Chabot,12 but is like a delicious everyday meal which you would have found there in the same perfection on a day when there was no party at all. At Mme Verdurin’s, the cast was trained to perfection, the repertory most select; all that was lacking was an audience. And now that the public taste had begun to turn from the rational Gallic art of Bergotte and was developing a taste for exotic forms of music, Mme Verdurin, a sort of accredited representative in Paris of all foreign artists, would soon be making her appearance, by the side of the exquisite Princess Yourbeletieff, as an aged Fairy Godmother, grim but all-powerful, to the Russian dancers. This charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of critics protested, infected Paris, as we know, with a fever of curiosity less agonising, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused by the Dreyfus case. There too Mme Verdurin, but with a very different result socially, was to be in the vanguard. Just as she had been seen by the side of Mme Zola, immediately below the judges’ bench, during the trial in the Assize Court, so when the new generation, in their enthusiasm for the Russian ballet, thronged to the Opera, they invariably saw in a stage box Mme Verdurin, crowned with fantastic aigrettes, by the side of Princess Yourbeletieff. And just as, after the excitements of the law courts, people used to go in the evening to Mme Verdurin’s to meet Picquart or Labori in the flesh, and above all to hear the latest news, to learn what hopes might be placed in Zurlinden, Lou-bet, Colonel Jouaust, so years later, little inclined for sleep after the enthusiasm aroused by Sheherazade or the dances from Prince Igor, they would again repair to Mme Verdurin’s, where, under the auspices of Princess Yourbeletieff and their hostess, an exquisite supper brought together every night the dancers themselves, who had abstained from dinner in order to remain more elastic, their director, their designers, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, a permanent little nucleus around which, as round the supper-table of M. and Mme Helvétius, the greatest ladies in Paris and foreign royalty were not too proud to gather. Even those society people who professed to be endowed with taste and drew otiose distinctions between the various Russian ballets, regarding the production of Les Sylphides as somehow more “delicate” than that of Sheherazade, which they were almost prepared to attribute to the inspiration of Negro art, were enchanted to meet face to face these great theatrical innovators who, in an art that is perhaps a little more artificial than painting, had created a revolution as profound as Impressionism itself.

  To revert to M. de Charlus, Mme Verdurin would not have minded so much if he had placed on his Index only Mme Bontemps, whom she had picked out at Odette’s on the strength of her love of the arts, and who during the Dreyfus case had come to dinner occasionally with her husband, whom Mme Verdurin called “lukewarm” because he was not making any move for a fresh trial but who, being extremely intelligent, and glad to form relations in every camp, was delighted to show his independence by dining at the same table as Labori, to whom he listened without uttering a word that might compromise himself, but slipping in at the right moment a tribute to the honesty, recognised by all parties, of Jaurès. But the Baron had similarly proscribed several ladies of the aristocracy with whom Mme Verdurin, on the occasion of some musical festivity or fashion show, had recently formed an acquaintanceship and who, whatever M. de Charlus might think of them, would have been, far more than himself, essential ingredients in the formation of a fresh nucleus, this time aristocratic. Mme Verdurin had indeed been counting on this party to mingle her new friends with ladies of the same set whom M. de Charlus would be bringing, and had been relishing in advance the surprise of the former on meeting at the Quai Conti their own friends or relations invited there by the Baron. She was disappointed and furious at his veto. It remained to be seen whether, in these circumstances, the evening would result in profit or loss to herself. The loss would not be too serious if, at least, M. de Charlus’s guests proved so well-disposed towards her that they would become her friends in the future. In this case no great harm would be done, and sooner or later these two sections of the fashionable world, which the Baron had insisted upon keeping apart, could be brought together even if it meant excluding him on the evening in question. And so Mme Verdurin was awaiting the Baron’s guests with a certain trepidation. It would not be long before she discovered the frame of mind in which they were coming and could judge what sort of relationship she could hope to have with them. In the meantime she was taking counsel with the faithful, but, on seeing M. de Charlus enter the room with Brichot and myself, stopped short.