In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  One felt that if Swann and his parents had still been alive, the Duc de Guermantes would not have hesitated to recommend them for jobs as gardeners. And this is how the Faubourg Saint-Germain speaks to any bourgeois about other bourgeois, either to flatter him with the exception being made in his favour (for as long as the conversation lasts) or rather, or at the same time, to humiliate him. Thus it is that an anti-semite, at the very moment when he is smothering a Jew with affability, will speak ill of Jews, in a general fashion which enables him to be wounding without being rude.

  But, queen of the present moment, when she knew how to be infinitely amiable to you, and could not bring herself to let you go, Mme de Guermantes was also its slave. Swann might have managed at times to give the Duchess the illusion, in the excitement of conversation, that she was genuinely fond of him, but he could do so no longer. “He was charming,” said the Duchess with a wistful smile, fastening upon Gilberte a soft and kindly gaze which would at least, if the girl should prove to be a sensitive soul, show her that she was understood and that Mme de Guermantes, had the two been alone together and had circumstances permitted, would have loved to reveal to her all the depth of her sensibility. But M. de Guermantes, whether because he was indeed of the opinion that the circumstances forbade such effusions, or because he considered that any exaggeration of sentiment was a matter for women and that men had no more part in it than in the other feminine attributions, except for food and wine which he had reserved to himself, knowing more about them than the Duchess, felt it incumbent upon him not to encourage, by taking part in it, this conversation to which he listened with visible impatience.

  However, this burst of sensibility having subsided, Mme de Guermantes added with worldly frivolity, addressing Gilberte: “Why, he was not only a gggreat friend of my brother-in-law Charlus, he was also on very good terms with Voisenon” (the country house of the Prince de Guermantes), not only as though Swann’s acquaintance with M. de Charlus and the Prince had been a mere accident, as though the Duchess’s brother-in-law and cousin were two men with whom Swann had happened to become friendly through some fortuitous circumstance, whereas Swann had been on friendly terms with all the people in that set, but also as though Mme de Guermantes wanted to explain to Gilberte roughly who her father had been, to “place” him for her by means of one of those characteristic touches whereby, when one wants to explain how it is that one happens to know somebody whom one would not naturally know, or to point up one’s story, one invokes the names of his particular social sponsors.

  As for Gilberte, she was all the more glad to find the subject being dropped, in that she herself was only too anxious to drop it, having inherited from Swann his exquisite tact combined with a delightful intelligence that was recognised and appreciated by the Duke and Duchess, who begged her to come again soon. Moreover, with the passion for minutiae of people whose lives are purposeless, they would discern, one after another, in the people with whom they became acquainted, qualities of the simplest kind, exclaiming at them with the artless wonderment of a townsman who on going into the country discovers a blade of grass, or on the contrary magnifying as with a microscope, endlessly commenting upon and inveighing against the slightest defects, and often applying both processes alternately to the same person. In Gilberte’s case it was first of all upon her agreeable qualities that the idle perspicacity of M. and Mme de Guermantes was brought to bear: “Did you notice the way she pronounces certain words?” the Duchess said to her husband after the girl had left them; “it was just like Swann, I seemed to hear him speaking.” “I was just about to say the very same thing, Oriane.” “She’s witty, she has exactly the same cast of mind as her father.” “I consider that she’s even far superior to him. Think how well she told that story about the sea-bathing. She has a vivacity that Swann never had.” “Oh! but he was, after all, quite witty.” “I’m not saying that he wasn’t witty, I’m saying that he lacked vivacity,” said M. de Guermantes in a querulous tone, for his gout made him irritable, and when he had no one else upon whom to vent his irritation, it was to the Duchess that he displayed it. But being incapable of any clear understanding of its causes, he preferred to adopt an air of being misunderstood.

  This friendly attitude on the part of the Duke and Duchess meant that from now on, if the occasion arose, they would have said to her “your poor father,” but this would no longer do, since it was just about this time that Forcheville adopted the girl. She addressed him as “Father,” charmed all the dowagers by her politeness and distinction, and it was generally acknowledged that, if Forcheville had behaved admirably towards her, the child was very good-hearted and more than recompensed him. True, since she was able at times and anxious to show a great deal of naturalness and ease, she had reintroduced herself to me and had spoken to me about her real father. But this was an exception and no one now dared utter the name Swann in her presence.

  As it happened, on entering the drawing-room I had caught sight of two sketches by Elstir which formerly had been banished to a little room upstairs where I had seen them only by chance. Elstir was now in fashion. Mme de Guermantes could not forgive herself for having given so many of his pictures away to her cousin, not because they were in fashion, but because she now appreciated them. For fashion is composed of the collective infatuation of a number of people of whom the Guermantes are typical. But she could not think of buying other pictures by him, for they had now begun to fetch madly high prices. She was determined to have something at least by Elstir in her drawing-room and had brought down these two drawings which, she declared, she “preferred to his paintings.”

  Gilberte recognised the technique. “They look like Elstirs,” she said. “Why, yes,” replied the Duchess without thinking, “in fact it was your fa … some friends of ours who made us buy them. They’re admirable. To my mind, they’re superior to his paintings.”

  Not having heard this conversation, I went up to one of the drawings to examine it, and exclaimed: “Why, this is the Elstir that …” I saw Mme de Guermantes’s desperate signals. “Ah, yes, the Elstir that I admired upstairs. It looks much better here than in that passage. Talking of Elstir, I mentioned him yesterday in an article in the Figaro. Did you happen to read it?”

  “You’ve written an article in the Figaro!” exclaimed M. de Guermantes with the same violence as if he had exclaimed: “Why, she’s my cousin.”

  “Yes, yesterday.”

  “In the Figaro, are you sure? I can’t believe it. Because we each of us get our Figaro, and if one of us had missed it, the other would certainly have noticed it. That’s so, isn’t Oriane, there was nothing.”

  The Duke sent for the Figaro and only yielded to the evidence of his own eyes, as though up till then the probability had been that I had made a mistake as to the newspaper for which I had written.

  “What’s that? I don’t understand. So you’ve written an article in the Figaro!” said the Duchess, making an obvious effort in speaking of something that did not interest her. “Come, Basin, you can read it afterwards.”

  “No, the Duke looks so nice like that with his great beard dangling over the paper,” said Gilberte. “I shall read it as soon as I get home.”

  “Yes, he wears a beard now that everybody else is clean-shaven,” said the Duchess. “He never does anything that other people do. When we were first married, he shaved not only his beard but his moustache as well. The peasants who didn’t know him by sight thought that he couldn’t be French. At that time he was called the Prince des Laumes.”

  “Is there still a Prince des Laumes?” asked Gilberte, who was interested in everything that concerned the people who had refused to acknowledge her existence during all those years.

  “Why, no,” the Duchess replied with a melancholy, caressing gaze.

  “Such a charming title! One of the finest titles in France!” said Gilberte, a certain sort of banality springing inevitably, as a clock strikes the hour, to the lips of certain quite intelligent persons.r />
  “Ah, yes, I’m sorry too. Basin would like his sister’s son to adopt it, but it isn’t the same thing; though it would be possible, since it doesn’t have to be the eldest son, it can be passed to a younger brother. I was telling you that in those days Basin was clean-shaven. One day, at a pilgrimage—you remember, my dear,” she turned to her husband, “that pilgrimage at Paray-le-Monial—my brother-in-law Charlus, who always enjoys talking to peasants, was saying to one after another: ‘Where do you come from?’ and as he’s extremely generous, he would give them something, take them off to have a drink. For nobody was ever at the same time simpler and more haughty than Meme. You’ll see him refuse to bow to a Duchess whom he doesn’t think duchessy enough, and heap kindnesses on a kennelman. So then I said to Basin: ‘Come, Basin, say something to them too.’ My husband, who is not always very inventive …” (“Thank you, Oriane,” said the Duke, without interrupting his reading of my article in which he was immersed) “… went up to one of the peasants and repeated his brother’s question in so many words: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘I’m from Les Laumes.’ ‘You’re from Les Laumes? Why, I’m your Prince.’ Then the peasant looked at Basin’s hairless face and replied: ‘That ain’t true. You’re an English.’”28

  In these little anecdotes of the Duchess’s, such great and eminent titles as that of Prince des Laumes seemed to stand out in one’s mind’s eye in their true setting, in their original state and their local colour, as in certain Books of Hours one recognises amid the mediaeval crowd the soaring steeple of Bourges.

  Some visiting-cards were brought to her which a footman had just left at the door. “I can’t think what’s got into her, I don’t know her. It’s to you that I’m indebted for this, Basin. Although that sort of acquaintance hasn’t done you much good, my poor dear,” and, turning to Gilberte: “I really don’t know how to explain to you who she is, you’ve certainly never heard of her, she’s called Lady Rufus Israels.”

  Gilberte flushed crimson: “No, I don’t know her,” she said (which was all the more untrue in that Lady Israels and Swann had been reconciled two years before the latter’s death and she addressed Gilberte by her Christian name), “but I know quite well, from hearing about her, who it is that you mean.”

  Gilberte was becoming very snobbish. Thus a girl having one day asked her out of tactlessness or malice what the name of her real, not her adoptive father was, in her confusion and as though to euphemise the name a little, instead of pronouncing it “Souann” she said “Svann,” a change, as she soon realised, for the worse, since it made this name of English origin a German patronymic. And she had even gone on to say, abasing herself with the object of self-enhancement: “All sorts of different stories have been told about my birth, but I’m not supposed to know anything about it.”

  Ashamed though Gilberte must have felt at certain moments, when she thought of her parents (for even Mme Swann represented for her, and was, a good mother), of such a way of looking at life, it must alas be borne in mind that its elements were doubtless borrowed from her parents, for we do not create ourselves of our own accord out of nothing. But to a certain quantity of egoism which exists in the mother, a different egoism, inherent in the father’s family, is admixed, which does not invariably mean that it is superadded, nor even precisely that it serves as a multiple, but rather that it creates a fresh egoism infinitely stronger and more redoubtable. And ever since the world began, ever since families in which some defect exists in one form have been intermarrying with families in which the same defect exists in another, thereby creating a peculiarly complete and detestable variety of that defect in the offspring, the accumulated egoisms (to confine ourselves, for the moment, to this defect) must have acquired such force that the whole human race would have been destroyed, did not the malady itself engender natural restrictions, capable of reducing it to reasonable proportions, comparable to those which prevent the infinite proliferation of the infusoria from destroying our planet, the unisexual fertilisation of plants from bringing about the extinction of the vegetable kingdom, and so forth. From time to time a virtue combines with this egoism to produce a new and disinterested force. The combinations by which, in the course of generations, moral chemistry thus stabilises and renders innocuous the elements that were becoming too powerful, are infinite, and would give an exciting variety to family history. Moreover, with these accumulated egoisms, such as must have existed in Gilberte, there may coexist some charming virtue of the parents; it appears for a moment to perform an interlude by itself, to play its touching part with an entire sincerity. No doubt Gilberte did not always go so far as when she insinuated that she was perhaps the natural daughter of some great personage; but as a rule she concealed her origins. Perhaps it was simply too painful for her to confess them and she preferred that people should learn of them from others. Perhaps she really believed that she was concealing them, with that dubious belief which at the same time is not doubt, which leaves room for the possibility of what we wish to be true, of which Musset furnishes an example when he speaks of hope in God.

  “I don’t know her personally,” Gilberte went on. Did she, in fact, when she called herself Mlle de Forcheville, expect that people would not know that she was Swann’s daughter? Some people, perhaps, who, she hoped, would in time become everybody. She could not be under any illusion as to their number at the moment, and doubtless knew that many people must be whispering: “That’s Swann’s daughter.” But she knew it only with that knowledge which tells us of people taking their lives in desperation while we are going to a ball, that is to say, a remote and vague knowledge for which we are at no pains to substitute a more precise knowledge based on direct observation. Gilberte belonged, during those years at least, to the most widespread variety of human ostriches, the kind that bury their heads not in the hope of not being seen, which they consider highly improbable, but in the hope of not seeing that they can be seen, which seems to them something to the good and enables them to leave the rest to chance. As distance makes things appear smaller, more indistinct, less dangerous, Gilberte preferred not to be near other people at the moment when they made the discovery that she was by birth a Swann. And as we are near the people whom we picture to ourselves, and we can picture people reading their newspaper, Gilberte preferred the newspapers to style her Mlle de Forcheville. It is true that with the writings for which she herself was responsible, her letters, she prolonged the transition for some time by signing herself “G. S. Forcheville.” The real hypocrisy in this signature was made manifest by the suppression not so much of the other letters of the name “Swann” as of those of the name “Gilberte.” For, by reducing the innocent Christian name to a simple “G,” Mlle de Forcheville seemed to insinuate to her friends that the similar amputation applied to the name “Swann” was due equally to the necessity of abbreviation. Indeed she gave a special significance to the “S,” extending it with a sort of long tail which ran across the “G,” but which one felt to be transitory and destined to disappear like the tail which, still long in the monkey, has ceased to exist in man.

  In spite of all this, there was something of Swann’s intelligent curiosity in her snobbishness. I remember that, in the course of that same afternoon, she asked Mme de Guermantes whether she could meet M. du Lau, and that when the Duchess replied that he was an invalid and never went out, Gilberte asked what he was like, for, she added with a faint blush, she had heard a great deal about him. (The Marquis du Lau had in fact been one of Swann’s most intimate friends before the latter’s marriage, and Gilberte may perhaps even have caught a glimpse of him, but at a time when she was not interested in such people.) “Would M. de Bréauté or the Prince d’Agrigente be at all like him?” she asked. “Oh! not in the least,” exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, who had a keen sense of these provincial differences and drew portraits that were sober and restrained but coloured by her husky, golden voice, beneath the gentle efflorescence of her violet-blue eyes. “No, not in the least. Du Lau was very mu
ch the Périgord squire, full of charm, with all the good manners and informality of his province. At Guermantes, when we had the King of England with whom du Lau was on the friendliest terms, we used to have a little meal after the men came in from shooting. It was the hour when du Lau was in the habit of going to his room to take off his boots and put on big woollen slippers. Well, the presence of King Edward and all the grand-dukes didn’t disturb him in the last, he came down to the great hall at Guermantes in his woollen slippers. He felt that he was the Marquis du Lau d’Allemans who had no reason to stand on ceremony with the King of England. He and that charming Quasimodo de Breteuil, they were the two I liked best. Actually they were great friends of …” (she was about to say “your father” and stopped short). “No, there’s no resemblance at all, either to Gri-gri or to Bréauté. He was the typical nobleman from Périgord. Incidentally, Meme quotes a page from Saint-Simon about a Marquis d’Allemans, and it’s just like him.”

  I recited the opening words of the portrait: “M. d’Allemans, who was a man of great distinction among the nobility of Périgord, through his own birth and through his merit, and was regarded by every soul alive there as a general arbiter to whom each had recourse because of his probity, his capacity and the suavity of his manners, as it were the cock of his province.”