In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  What I was to learn later on—for I had been unable to keep in touch with it all from Venice—was that Mlle de Forcheville’s hand had been sought both by the Duc de Châtellerault and by the Prince de Silistrie, while Saint-Loup was seeking to marry Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter.

  This is what had occurred. Mlle de Forcheville possessing a hundred million francs, Mme de Marsantes had decided that she would be an excellent match for her son. She made the mistake of saying that the girl was charming, that she herself had not the slightest idea whether she was rich or poor, that she did not wish to know, but that even without a dowry it would be a piece of good luck for the most exacting young man to find such a wife. This was going rather too far for a woman who was tempted only by the hundred million, which made her shut her eyes to everything else. People realised at once that she was thinking of the girl for her own son. The Princesse de Silistrie went round protesting loudly, expatiating on Saint-Loup’s social grandeur, and proclaiming that if he should marry the daughter of Odette and a Jew then it was the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mme de Marsantes, sure of herself as she was, dared not proceed further and retreated before the indignant protests of the Princesse de Silistrie, who immediately made a proposal on behalf of her own son. She had protested only in order to keep Gilberte for herself. Meanwhile Mme de Marsantes, refusing to own herself defeated, had turned at once to Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter. Having no more than twenty million, the latter suited her purpose less, but Mme de Marsantes told everyone that a Saint-Loup could not marry a Mlle Swann (there was no longer any mention of Forcheville). Some time later, somebody having thoughtlessly remarked that the Duc de Châtellerault was thinking of marrying Mlle d’Entragues, Mme de Marsantes, who was the most punctilious woman in the world, mounted her high horse, changed her tactics, returned to Gilberte, made a formal offer of marriage on Saint-Loup’s behalf, and the engagement was immediately announced.

  This engagement was to provoke keen comment in the most different social circles. Several of my mother’s friends, who had met Saint-Loup in our house, came to her “day,” and inquired whether the bridegroom was indeed the same person as my friend. Certain people went so far as to maintain, with regard to the other marriage, that it had nothing to do with the Legrandin-Cambremers. They had this on good authority, for the Marquise, nee Legrandin, had denied it on the very eve of the day on which the engagement was announced. I, for my part, wondered why M. de Charlus on the one hand, Saint-Loup on the other, each of whom had had occasion to write to me shortly before and had spoken in such friendly terms of various travel plans the realisation of which must have precluded the wedding ceremonies, had said nothing whatever to me about them. I came to the conclusion, forgetting the secrecy which people maintain until the last moment in affairs of this sort, that I was less their friend than I had supposed, a conclusion which, so far as Saint-Loup was concerned, saddened me. Though why, when I had already remarked that the affability, the egalitarian, “man-to-man” attitude of the aristocracy was all a sham, should I be surprised to find myself left out of it? In the establishment for women—where men were now to be procured in increasing numbers—in which M. de Charlus had spied on Morel, and in which the “assistant matron,”33 a great reader of the Gaulois, used to discuss the social gossip with her clients, this lady, while conversing with a stout gentleman who used to come to her to drink bottle after bottle of champagne with young men, because, being already very stout, he wished to become obese enough to be certain of not being called up should there ever be a war, declared: “It seems young Saint-Loup is ‘one of those,’ and young Cambremer too. Poor wives! In any case, if you know these bridegrooms, you must send them to us. They’ll find everything they want here, and there’s plenty of money to be made out of them.” Whereupon the stout gentleman, albeit he was himself “one of those,” indignantly retorted, being something of a snob, that he often met Cambremer and Saint-Loup at his cousins’ the Ardonvillers, and that they were great womanisers, and quite the opposite of “those.” “Ah!” the assistant matron concluded in a sceptical tone, but possessing no proof of the assertion, and convinced that in our century the perversity of morals was rivalled only by the absurd exaggeration of slanderous tittle-tattle.

  Certain people whom I no longer saw wrote to me and asked me “what I thought” of these two marriages, precisely as though they were conducting an inquiry into the height of women’s hats in the theatre or the psychological novel. I had not the heart to answer these letters. Of these two marriages I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one’s past existence, which have been anchored near to one, and upon which one has perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous flapping of pennants, for unknown destinations, like a pair of ships. As for the prospective bridegrooms themselves, their attitude towards their own marriages was perfectly natural, since it was a question not of other people but of themselves—though hitherto they had never tired of mocking at such “grand marriages” founded upon some secret taint. And even the Cambremer family, so ancient in its lineage and so modest in its pretensions, would have been the first to forget Jupien and to remember only the unimaginable grandeur of the House of Oloron, had not an exception appeared in the person who ought to have been most gratified by this marriage, the Marquise de Cambremer-Legrandin. Being spiteful by nature, she reckoned the pleasure of humiliating her family above that of glorifying herself. And so, not being enamoured of her son, and having rapidly taken a dislike to her future daughter-in-law, she declared that it was a calamity for a Cambremer to marry a person who had sprung from heaven knew where, and had such bad teeth. As for young Cambremer, who had already shown a propensity towards the society of men of letters such as Bergotte and even Bloch, it may be imagined that so brilliant a marriage did not have the effect of making him more of a snob than before, but that, feeling himself to have become the successor of the Ducs d’Oloron—“sovereign princes” as the newspapers said—he was sufficiently persuaded of his own grandeur to be able to mix with anyone he chose. And he deserted the minor nobility for the intelligent bourgeoisie on the days when he did not confine himself to royalty. The notices in the papers, especially when they referred to Saint-Loup, invested my friend, whose royal ancestors were endlessly enumerated, with a renewed grandeur which, however, could only sadden me, as though he had become someone else, the descendant of Robert the Strong rather than the friend who, only a little while since, had taken the folding seat in the carriage in order that I might be more comfortable in the back; the fact that I had had no previous suspicion of his marriage with Gilberte—the prospect of which had appeared to me suddenly, in my letter, so different from anything that I could have expected of either of them the day before, as unexpected as a chemical precipitate—pained me, whereas I ought to have reflected that he had had a great deal to do, and that moreover in the fashionable world marriages are often arranged thus all of a sudden, as a substitute for a different combination which has come to grief And the gloom, as dismal as the depression of moving house, as bitter as jealousy, that these marriages caused me by the accident of their sudden impact was so profound that people used to remind me of it later, congratulating me absurdly on my perspicacity, as having been, quite contrary to what it was at the time, a twofold, indeed a threefold and fourfold presentiment.

  The people in society who had taken no notice of Gilberte said to me with an air of solemn interest: “Ah! she’s the one who’s marrying the Marquis de Saint-Loup,” and studied her with the attentive gaze of people who not only relish all the social gossip of Paris but are anxious to learn and believe in the profundity of their observation. Those who on the other hand had known only Gilberte gazed at Saint-Loup with the closest attention, asked me (these were often people who scarcely knew me) to introduce them, and returned from the presentation to the bridegroom radiant with the joys of the festi
vity saying to me: “He’s a fine figure of a man.” Gilberte was convinced that the name “Marquis de Saint-Loup” was a thousand times grander than “Duc d’Orléans,” but since she was very much of her knowing generation, she did not want to appear less witty than others, and delighted in saying mater semita, to which she would add in order to show herself wittier still: “In my case, however, it’s my pater.”

  “It appears that it was the Princesse de Parme who arranged young Cambremer’s marriage,” Mamma said to me. And this was true. The Princess had known for a long time, through her charitable activities, on the one hand Legrandin whom she regarded as a distinguished man, on the other hand Mme de Cambremer who changed the subject whenever the Princess asked her whether it was true that she was Legrandin’s sister. The Princess knew how deeply Mme de Cambremer regretted having remained on the threshold of aristocratic high society without ever being invited in. When the Princess, who had undertaken to find a husband for Mlle d’Oloron, asked M. de Charlus whether he knew anything about an amiable and cultivated man called Legrandin de Méséglise (it was thus that M. Legrandin now styled himself), the Baron first of all replied in the negative, then suddenly the memory recurred to him of a man whose acquaintance he had made in the train one night and who had given him his card. He smiled a vague smile. “It’s perhaps the same man,” he said to himself. When he learned that the prospective bridegroom was the son of Legrandin’s sister, he said: “Why, that would be really extraordinary! If he took after his uncle, it wouldn’t alarm me; after all, I’ve always said that they made the best husbands.” “Who are they?” inquired the Princess. “Ah, madame, I could explain it all to you if we met more often. With you one can talk freely. Your Highness is so intelligent,” said Charlus, seized by a desire to confide which, however, went no further. The name Cambremer pleased him, although he did not like the boy’s parents; he knew that it was one of the four Baronies of Brittany and everything he could possibly have hoped for his adopted daughter; it was an old and respected name, with solid connexions in its native province. A prince would have been out of the question and, moreover, not altogether desirable. This was the very thing. The Princess then asked Legrandin to call. Physically he had changed considerably of late, on the whole for the better. Like those women who deliberately sacrifice their faces to the slimness of their figures and never stir from Marienbad, he had acquired the breezy air of a cavalry officer. He had taken up tennis at the age of fifty-five. In proportion as M. de Charlus had thickened and slowed down, Legrandin had become slimmer and brisker, the contrary effect of an identical cause. This velocity of movement had its psychological reasons as well. He was in the habit of frequenting certain low haunts where he did not wish to be seen going in or coming out: he would hurl himself into them.

  When the Princesse de Parme spoke to him of the Guermantes family and of Saint-Loup, he declared that he had known them all his life, making a sort of compound of the fact that he had always known by name the proprietors of Guermantes and the fact that he had met in person, at my aunt’s house, Swann, the father of the future Mme de Saint-Loup—although he had always refused to have anything to do with Swann’s wife and daughter at Combray. “Indeed, I travelled quite recently with the brother of the Duc de Guermantes, M. de Charlus. It was he who spontaneously engaged me in conversation, which is always a good sign, for it proves that a man is neither a strait-laced fool nor a pretentious snob. Oh, I know all the things that people say about him. But I never pay any attention to gossip of that sort. Besides, the private life of other people is not my business. He gave me the impression of having a sensitive nature and a cultivated mind.” Then the Princesse de Parme spoke of Mlle d’Oloron. In the Guermantes circle people waxed sentimental about the nobility of heart of M. de Charlus who, generous as always, was securing the future happiness of a penniless but charming girl. And the Duc de Guermantes, who suffered from his brother’s reputation, let it be understood that, fine as this conduct was, it was wholly natural. “I don’t know if I make myself clear, but everything in the affair is natural,” he said, with calculated maladroitness. His object was to indicate that the girl was a daughter of his brother whom the latter acknowledged. This accounted at the same time for Jupien. The Princesse de Parme hinted at this version of the story to show Legrandin that after all young Cambremer would be marrying something in the nature of Mlle de Nantes, one of those bastards of Louis XIV who were scorned neither by the Duc d’Orleans nor by the Prince de Conti.

  These two marriages which my mother and I discussed in the train that was taking us back to Paris had quite remarkable effects upon several of the characters who have figured in the course of this narrative. First of all upon Legrandin; needless to say, he swept like a hurricane into M. de Charlus’s town house, for all the world as though he were entering a house of ill-fame where he must on no account be seen, and also, at the same time, to display his mettle and to conceal his age—for our habits accompany us even into places where they serve no useful purpose—and scarcely anybody observed that M. de Charlus greeted him with a smile which was hard to detect and harder still to interpret; this smile was similar in appearance—though in fact it was precisely the opposite—to the smile which two men who are in the habit of meeting in the best society exchange if they happen to meet in what they regard as disreputable surroundings (such as the Elysée where General de Froberville, whenever he met Swann there in the old days, would assume, on catching sight of him, an expression of ironical and mysterious complicity appropriate between two habitués of the salon of the Princesse des Laumes who were compromising themselves by visiting M. Grévy). But what was rather remarkable was the genuine improvement in Legrandin’s character. For a long time past—ever since the days when I used to go as a child to spend my holidays at Combray—he had been surreptitiously cultivating relations with the aristocracy, productive at the most of an isolated invitation to a sterile house party. All of a sudden, his nephew’s marriage having supervened to join up these scattered fragments, Legrandin stepped into a social position to which, retroactively, his former relations with people who had known him only in private but had known him well, gave a sort of solidity. Ladies to whom people offered to introduce him revealed that for the last twenty years he had stayed with them in the country for a fortnight annually, and that it was he who had given them the beautiful old barometer in the small drawing-room. It also transpired that he had been photographed in “groups” which included dukes who were now related to him. But as soon as he had acquired this social position, he ceased to take advantage of it. This was not merely because, now that people knew that he was received everywhere, he no longer derived any pleasure from being invited, but because, of the two vices that had long struggled for mastery in him, the less natural, snobbishness, was now giving way to another that was less artificial, since it did at least show a sort of return, however circuitous, towards nature. No doubt the two are not incompatible, and a nocturnal prowl may be undertaken immediately after leaving a duchess’s party. But the dampening effect of age discouraged Legrandin from combining too many pleasures, from venturing out except well advisedly, and also made his enjoyment of the pleasures of nature fairly platonic, consisting chiefly in friendships, in time-consuming conversations, which, making him spend almost all his time among the people, left him very little for the life of society.

  Mme de Cambremer herself became almost indifferent to the friendly overtures of the Duchesse de Guermantes. The latter, obliged to see something of the Marquise, had noticed, as happens whenever we come to see more of our fellow creatures, that is to say as combinations of good qualities which we eventually discover and defects to which we eventually grow accustomed, that Mme de Cambremer was a woman endowed with an intelligence and culture which were little to my taste but which appeared remarkable to the Duchess. And so she often went to see Mme de Cambremer in the late afternoon and paid her long visits. But the fabulous charm which her hostess imagined to exist in the Duchesse d
e Guermantes vanished as soon as she found herself sought after by her, and she received her out of politeness rather than pleasure.

  A more striking change manifested itself in Gilberte, a change at once symmetrical with and different from that which occurred in Swann after his marriage. It is true that during the first few months Gilberte had been happy to open her doors to the most select society. It was doubtless only because of the inheritance that she invited the intimate friends to whom her mother was attached, but on certain days only when there was no one but themselves, segregated from the fashionable people, as though the contact of Mme Bontemps or Mme Cottard with the Princesse de Guermantes or the Princesse de Parme might, like that of two unstable powders, have produced irreparable catastrophes. Nevertheless the Bontemps, the Cottards and such, although disappointed to find themselves dining among themselves, were proud to be able to say: “We dined with the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” all the more so because she sometimes went so far as to invite with them Mme de Marsantes, who showed herself emphatically the “great lady” with her tortoiseshell and ostrich-feather fan—also in the interests of the legacy. She merely made a point of paying tribute from time to time to the discreet people whom one never sees except when they are invited, a word to the wise after which she could bestow upon the Cottards, the Bontemps and their ilk her most gracious and lofty salutation. Perhaps because of my “Balbec girlfriend,” by whose aunt I liked to be seen in these surroundings, I should have preferred to be included in that group. But Gilberte, in whose eyes I was now principally a friend of her husband and of the Guermantes (and who—perhaps even from the Combray days, when my parents did not call upon her mother—at the age when we do not merely add this or that to the value of things but classify them according to their species, had endowed me with the sort of prestige which one never afterwards loses), regarded these evenings as unworthy of me, and would say to me as I left: “It’s delightful to have seen you, but you must come the day after tomorrow; you’ll find my aunt Guermantes, and Mme de Poix; today it was just a few of Mamma’s friends, to please Mamma.” But this state of things lasted for a few months only, and then everything was totally transformed. Was this because Gilberte’s social life was fated to exhibit the same contrasts as Swann’s? However that may be, Gilberte had been for only a short time the Marquise de Saint-Loup (in the process of becoming, as we shall see, Duchesse de Guermantes)34 when, having attained to the most brilliant and most rarefied position, she decided that the name Guermantes was now embodied in her like a lustrous enamel and that, whatever the society she frequented, from now onwards she would remain for all the world the Duchesse de Guermantes—sharing, in short, the opinion of the character in the operetta who declares: “My name, I think, dispenses me from saying more.”35 Wherein she was mistaken, for the value of a title, like that of stocks and shares, rises with the demand and falls when it is offered in the market. Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position in society, like anything else, is not created once and for all, but, just as much as the power of an empire, is continually rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social or political history in the course of half a century. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup said to herself, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” and she knew that, the day before, she had refused three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name aggrandised the very unaristocratic people whom she entertained, by an inverse process the people whom she entertained diminished the name that she bore. Nothing can hold out against such trends; the greatest names succumb to them in the end. Had not Swann known a princess of the House of France whose drawing-room, because anyone at all was welcomed there, had fallen to the lowest rank? One day when the Princesse des Laumes had gone to pay a brief duty call on this Highness, in whose drawing-room she had found only nonentities, arriving immediately afterwards at Mme Leroi’s, she had said to Swann and the Marquis de Modène: “At last I find myself upon friendly soil. I have just come from Mme la Comtesse de X—, and there weren’t three faces I knew in the room.” At all events, Gilberte suddenly began to flaunt her contempt for what she had once so ardently desired, to declare that all the people in the Faubourg Saint-Germain were idiots, simply not worth meeting, and, suiting her actions to her words, ceased to meet them. People who did not make her acquaintance until after this period, and who, in the first stages of that acquaintance, heard her, by that time Duchesse de Guermantes, being very funny at the expense of the society in which she could so easily have moved, never inviting a single person from that society, and, if any of them, even the most brilliant, should venture into her drawing-room, yawning openly in their faces, blush now in retrospect at the thought that they themselves could ever have seen any glamour in the fashionable world, and would never dare to confess this humiliating secret of their past weaknesses to a woman whom they assume to have been, by an essential loftiness in her nature, incapable from the beginning of understanding such things. They hear her poking such delicious fun at dukes, and see her (which is more significant) matching her behaviour so entirely to her mockery! No doubt they do not think of inquiring into the causes of the accident which turned Mlle Swann into Mlle de Forcheville, Mlle de Forcheville into the Marquise de Saint-Loup, and finally into the Duchesse de Guermantes. Possibly it does not occur to them either that the effects of this accident would serve no less than its causes to explain Gilberte’s subsequent attitude, association with commoners not being regarded in quite the same light in which Mlle Swann would have regarded it by a lady who is addressed by all and sundry as “Madame la Duchesse” and, by other duchesses who bore her so much, as “cousin.” One is always ready to despise a goal which one has not succeeded in attaining, or has finally attained. And this contempt seems to us to form part of the character of people whom one did not know before. Perhaps, if we were able to go back over the years, we should find them devoured, more savagely than anyone, by those same weaknesses which they have succeeded so completely in disguising or conquering that we reckon them incapable not only of ever having been infected by them themselves but even of ever excusing them in others, because of their inability to imagine them. At all events, very soon the drawing-room of the new Marquise de Saint-Loup assumed its permanent aspect (from the social point of view at least, for we shall see what troubles were brewing in it in other respects). Now this aspect was surprising for the following reason. People still remembered that the most grandiose and glittering receptions in Paris, as brilliant as those given by the Princesse de Guermantes, had been those of Mme de Marsantes, Saint-Loup’s mother. At the same time, in recent years Odette’s salon, infinitely lower in the social scale, had been no less dazzling in its elegance and splendour. Saint-Loup, however, happy to have, thanks to his wife’s vast fortune, everything that he could desire in the way of comfort, wished only to rest quietly in his armchair after a good dinner with a musical entertainment by good performers. And this young man who had seemed at one time so proud and so ambitious invited to share his luxury old friends whom his mother would not have admitted to her house. Gilberte, for her part, put into practice Swann’s maxim: “Quality doesn’t matter, what I dread is quantity.” And Saint-Loup, very much on his knees before his wife, both because he loved her and because it was to her that he owed this extreme luxury, took care not to interfere with tastes that were so similar to his own. With the result that the great receptions that had been given year after year by Mme de Marsantes and Mme de Forcheville, principally with an eye to the establishing of their children in ostentatious splendour, gave rise to no receptions by M. and Mme de Saint-Loup. They had the best of saddle-horses on which to go out riding together, the finest of yachts in which to cruise—but they never took more than a couple of guests with them. In Paris, every evening, they would invite three or four friends to dine, never more; with the result that, by an un
foreseen but at the same time quite natural retrogression, the two vast maternal aviaries had been replaced by a silent nest.