To all the reasons, arising from the Guermantes’ manner of interpreting social affairs, which had decided the Duchesse never to have Mme and Mlle Swann introduced to her, we may also add the untroubled confidence with which people who are not in love keep their distance from anything they blame in lovers, explain it away by the fact that they are in love. “Oh I don’t have anything to do with all that; if it amuses poor Swann to play the fool and ruin his life that’s his business, but you never know with that kind of thing, it could all turn out for the worst, I let them get on with it.” This was the suave mari magno5 that Swann himself advised me to adopt toward the Verdurins when he had long since ceased to be Odette’s lover and was no longer interested in the little set. It is what allows third parties to render such wise verdicts on passions which they do not themselves feel and on the complicated behavior which these passions involve. Mme de Guermantes had in fact applied herself to ostracizing Mme and Mlle Swann with a tenacity that astonished people. When Mme Molé and Mme de Marsantes had started to frequent Mme Swann and to bring a great number of society ladies round to visit her, not only did Mme de Guermantes remain intractable but she managed to cut all their ties and to persuade her cousin the Princesse de Guermantes to follow suit. On one of the most serious days of crisis under Rouvier’s6 government, when it looked as if there would be war between France and Germany, I happened to be dining alone with M. de Bréauté at Mme de Guermantes’s, and found the Duchesse looking worried. I had imagined, since she tended to be preoccupied with politics, that she wished thereby to show her fear of a war, as one day when she had sat down to dinner with such a careworn expression and had responded in such terse monosyllables to someone who inquired timidly as to the source of her concern, she had answered with gravity, “I fret for China.” But now a little later Mme de Guermantes herself explained the preoccupied air which I had attributed to the fear of a declaration of war, saying to M. de Bréauté: “I hear that Marie-Aynard wants to offer the Swanns a place in society. I absolutely must go to see Marie-Gilberte tomorrow to ask her to help put a stop to that. Otherwise there will be no society left. The Dreyfus case is all very well. But then the grocer’s wife down the road only has to say she’s a nationalist and ask to be invited by us.” And hearing such a frivolous remark instead of the one that I expected, I felt the astonishment of a reader who looks in the usual place in the Figaro for the latest news of the Russo-Japanese war and finds himself faced instead with the list of people who contributed gifts to Mlle de Mortemart’s wedding list,7 the importance of an aristocratic marriage having pushed battles both on land and on sea to the back of the newspaper. Moreover, from her pride in this extravagantly protracted persistence, the Duchesse ultimately acquired feelings of satisfaction which she lost no opportunity to express. “Babal,” she said, “claims that we are the two most elegant people in Paris because only he and I refuse to be greeted by Mme and Mlle Swann. You see he is convinced that elegance consists in not knowing Mme Swann.” And the Duchesse laughed heartily.
However, after Swann’s death, it happened that her insistence on not inviting his daughter had provided Mme de Guermantes with all the satisfactions of pride, independence, “self-government” and persecution that she was able to enjoy, and that these satisfactions were terminated by the disappearance of the person who gave her the delicious sensation that she was resisting him and that he was unable to get her to annul her decrees. So the Duchesse had passed on to the promulgation of other decrees, which, applied to living persons, were able to make her feel that she was sole mistress of all her actions. She had not given a thought to the Swann girl, but when people mentioned her the Duchesse felt a curiosity, as for a place never visited, which was no longer obscured by her desire to resist Swann’s claims for attention. Besides, so many different feelings can come together to form one single feeling that it would be impossible to say whether one might not detect some affection for Swann in this concern. Doubtless—for at every level of society a frivolous social life paralyzes sensitivities and incapacitates our power to resuscitate the dead—the Duchesse was one of those people who need someone’s presence—that presence which as a true Guermantes she excelled at cultivating—if she were truly to love them, but also, more unusually, if she were to feel a little genuine hatred. So that often her kind feelings for people, interrupted during their lifetime by the irritation that one or other of their acts had occasioned, were revived by their death. She then experienced something approaching a desire for reparation, because she imagined them, however vaguely, with only their good qualities and free from the petty smugness and pretensions that had annoyed her during their lifetime. Despite Mme de Guermantes’s frivolity, this sometimes lent a rather noble quality—however mingled with baseness—to her behavior. For whereas three-quarters of the human race flatter the living and take no notice of the dead, she often put on a performance for those she had mistreated during their lifetime once they were dead.
As for Gilberte, no one who loved her and valued her self-respect could have failed to rejoice in the change in the Duchesse’s dispositions toward her, in so far as they hoped that Gilberte, by contemptuously repulsing advances coming after twenty-five years of offense, could be finally avenged. But unfortunately our moral reflexes are not always identical with the promptings of common sense. A person who thinks that some ill-judged insult has spoiled his chances with a person he holds dear, may find on the contrary that it has salvaged them. Gilberte, who was fairly indifferent toward people who were pleasant to her, could not stop thinking with admiration of the insolent Mme de Guermantes and, pondering the reasons for this insolence, even wanted to write to the Duchesse on one occasion, although this would have caused those who felt the least friendship for her to die of shame, to ask her what she had against a girl who had done her no wrong. The Guermantes had taken on in her eyes proportions that their nobility alone could not have given them. She placed them not only above all the nobility but even above all royalty.
A few ladies who had previously been friends of Swann looked after Gilberte very carefully. Her most recent inheritance became known in aristocratic circles, people noted her exquisite manners and her potential as a charming wife. People said that a cousin of Mme de Guermantes, the Princesse de Nièvre, was thinking of Gilberte for her son. Mme de Guermantes loathed Mme de Nièvre. She announced to all and sundry that such a marriage would be a scandal. Mme de Nièvre took fright and protested that she had never even thought of it. One day after luncheon, since it was fine and M. de Guermantes was due to go out with his wife, Mme de Guermantes was adjusting her hat in the mirror, gazing at her own blue eyes and her still blonde hair, while the chambermaid held out various parasols for her mistress to choose from. The window was bathed in sunlight and they had decided to make the most of the fine day by paying a visit to Saint-Cloud. M. de Guermantes, who was ready to leave, having donned his topper and his pearl-gray gloves, said to himself, “Oriane is still truly astonishing. I find her delicious.” And seeing that his wife seemed in good humor, he said: “By the way, I had a message for you from Mme de Virelef. She wanted to ask you to come to the opera on Monday. But, as she is taking the Swann girl, she dared not ask and begged me to test the water. I have no opinion, I am simply transmitting the message. Good heavens, I wonder if we might not . . .” he added evasively, for since their attitude toward any person was a collective attitude and arose identically in each of them, he knew within himself that his wife’s hostility toward Mlle Swann had abated and that she was curious to meet her. Mme de Guermantes finished adjusting her veil and chose a parasol. “But as you wish, what should it matter to me? I see no objection to our meeting the girl. You know perfectly well that I have never had anything against her. It was simply that I did not want us to appear to be making advances to my friends’ irregular connections. That’s all.” “And you were perfectly right,” replied the Duc. “You are the soul of wisdom, Madam, and what is more, you look ravishing in that hat.” �
�How very kind of you,” said Mme de Guermantes, smiling at her husband and moving toward the door. But before entering the carriage, she felt obliged to offer supplementary information: “There are so many people now who invite her mother, besides which she has the good sense to be ill for three-quarters of the year. They say the little girl is quite charming. Everyone knows that we were great friends of Swann. Everyone will find it perfectly natural.” And they left together for Saint-Cloud.
A month later Swann’s young daughter, who was not yet called Forcheville, was at luncheon with the Guermantes. They talked about all sorts of things; at the end of the luncheon, Gilberte said shyly, “I believe that you knew my father very well.” “But of course we did,” said Mme de Guermantes, with a melancholy air which proved that she understood the grief of a daughter and with an intentional overemphasis which made her appear to dissimulate the fact that she was not sure she could recall the father very precisely. “We knew him very well, I remember him very well indeed.” (And well she might have remembered him, indeed, since he had called on her every day for twenty-five years.) “I know perfectly well who he was, let me tell you,” she added, as if she were seeking to explain to the daughter who her father had been and to offer the girl new information about him, “he was a great friend of my mother-in-law and also well known to my brother-in-law Palamède.” “He used to visit us, too, and even came to luncheon,” added M de Guermantes, displaying both his modesty and his concern for detail. “I’m sure you remember, Oriane. What a good man your father was! How clear it was that he must spring from a worthy family! In fact I did once catch sight of his father and mother. What fine people they all were!” One felt that if the parents and their son had still been alive the Duc de Guermantes would have felt no hesitation in recommending them for employment as gardeners. But this is how the Faubourg Saint-Germain speaks to the bourgeoisie about anyone from the bourgeoisie, whether to flatter their listeners with the exception made in their favor for as long as the conversation lasts, or whether, preferably, to humiliate them at one and the same time. So it is when an anti-Semite tells a Jew of the faults of Jews in general while smothering him with affable remarks, thus enjoying being hurtful without seeming to be rude.
But since, when she saw you, she knew to perfection how to make you feel wanted and found it difficult to decide to allow you to leave, Mme de Guermantes was also a slave to this need for people’s presence. On occasion, in the heat of an animated conversation, Swann might have deluded the Duchesse into feeling that she felt friendship for him, but now he was no longer able. “He was charming,” said the Duchesse with a sad smile, casting an extremely tender gaze in Gilberte’s direction just in case the girl should happen to be a sensitive soul, to show her that she was understood and that if she had been alone with her and if circumstances had permitted, Mme de Guermantes would have loved to reveal to her the full extent of her sensitivity. But M. de Guermantes, whether because he felt that these were precisely the circumstances which failed to warrant such effusion or because he considered that any exaggerated expression of sentiment was a woman’s affair and that men had no more to do with this than with any other feminine concern except for menus and wine lists, which he had appropriated since he was better informed in these matters than the Duchesse, judged it wise not to encourage with any personal contribution a conversation that he listened to with visible impatience. Moreover, once her outburst of sensitivity had abated, Mme de Guermantes added a note of social frivolity by telling Gilberte: “Just fancy, let me tell you that he was a g-g-great friend of my brother-in-law Charlus and also very much at home at Voisenon (the Prince de Guermantes’s château),” not only as though Swann had happened to come to know M. de Charlus and the Prince quite by chance, as if the Duchesse’s brother-in-law and her cousin had been two men whom Swann had encountered on some random occasion, whereas Swann was on familiar terms with everyone in that same social circle, but also as though Mme de Guermantes had wanted Gilberte to understand what sort of a man her father was, to “place” him for her, through one of those typical reactions whereby, when we want to explain how we have met someone we are not supposed to know or want to make the account more striking, we invoke the patronage of someone else. As for Gilberte, she was all the happier to see the conversation falter since she wanted nothing better than to change tack, having inherited from Swann an exquisite tact and a charming intelligence which the Duc and the Duchesse recognized and appreciated, asking Gilberte to call again soon. Moreover, with that attention to detail typical of people whose lives have no aim, they sometimes descried in the people whom they frequented the most simple qualities, crying out in admiration with the naïve wonder of the town-dweller who discovers a blade of grass in the countryside or, on the contrary, magnifying their tiniest faults, as if under a microscope, with hair-splitting analyses and visceral objections, and often alternately in the same person. In Gilberte’s case it was at first her attractions which excited the idle perspicacity of M. and Mme de Guermantes: “Have you noticed the way she pronounces certain words,” the Duchesse asked her husband when she had left, “a typical Swann, it sounded like the man himself.—I was about to make the same remark as you, Oriane.—She has wit, she has exactly her father’s turn of phrase.—I find even that she is far superior. Just remember how well she told that story about the seaside, she has a brio that Swann did not have.—Oh but he was very witty, after all.—But I don’t mean that he wasn’t witty, I only said that he did not have such brio,” said M de Guermantes with a plaintive air, for his gout made him over-sensitive and, when there was nobody else to bear witness to his irritation, he displayed it to the Duchesse. But since he was unable to understand the deeper reasons, he preferred to affect a misunderstood air.
The Fugitive Page 21
