“I hear that it was the Princess of Parma who arranged the marriage of the young Cambremer,” said my mother, and it was true. For some time the Princess of Parma had known, on the one hand Legrandin through his works, and on the other hand, Mme de Cambremer, who changed the subject whenever the Princess asked her if she was really Legrandin’s sister. The Princess knew how disappointed Mme de Cambremer was at remaining on the fringes of high aristocratic society, without being invited inside. When the Princess of Parma, who had taken it upon herself to make a match for Mlle d’Oloron, asked M. de Charlus if he knew the identity of the pleasant, cultivated man who went under the name of Legrandin de Méséglise (for this was how Legrandin now styled himself), the Baron at first replied that he did not, then was suddenly struck by the memory of a man whom he had met one night in a train and who had left him his card. He smiled vaguely. “Perhaps it’s the same man,” he thought. When he learned that he was the son of Legrandin’s sister, he said: “Well, that would be quite extraordinary! If he took after his uncle, after all, that shouldn’t put me off, I have always said that they make the best husbands.—They? Who do you mean? asked the Princess.—Oh, Madam, I would willingly explain if we were better acquainted. You are someone it’s easy to talk to. Your Highness is so intelligent,” said Charlus, seized with a need to confide, but which he did not take further. He liked, if not the parents, at least the name of Cambremer, while knowing that it was one of the four baronies of Brittany and by far the best he could expect for his adoptive daughter; it was an ancient and honorable name, with good connections in the region. A prince would have been impossible, and actually not desirable. This was what was needed. Then the Princess summoned Legrandin. He had changed physically quite a bit in recent years, and rather to his advantage. Like those women who resolutely sacrifice their faces for the sake of a slim waistline and spend all their time at Marienbad, Legrandin had taken on the casual swagger of a cavalry officer. While M. de Charlus had become stouter and slower, Legrandin had become slimmer and quicker, the contrary effect of the same cause. Besides, his swiftness had its psychological reasons. He had become a regular client of certain houses of ill-fame. Since he did not wish to be seen entering or leaving them, he dashed in and out, and vanished. When the Princess of Parma spoke to him of the Guermantes or Saint-Loup, he declared that he had always known them, creating as it were an amalgam of the fact that he had always known the name of the Lords of Guermantes and the fact that he had made the acquaintance in person, at my aunt’s, of Swann, the father of the future Mme de Saint-Loup, that same Swann, one might add, whose wife and daughter Legrandin refused to frequent in Combray. “I even traveled recently in the company of M. de Charlus, the brother of the Duc de Guermantes. He spontaneously struck up a conversation with me, which is always a good sign, for it proves that he is neither a starched-shirt nor a pretentious fool. Oh! I am well aware of what they say about him. But I never believe that kind of thing. In any case other people’s private lives are none of my concern. He struck me as a sensitive man, with a truly cultivated soul.” Then the Princess of Parma mentioned Mlle d’Oloron. In Guermantes circles people were most affected by the noble heart of M. de Charlus, who, with his proverbial generosity, had secured the happiness of a poor but charming young lady. And the Duc de Guermantes, who suffered from his brother’s reputation, let it be understood that, however fine the action might seem, it was only natural. “I am not sure if you catch my meaning, but everything about this affair is natural,” he said, with an awkwardness exaggerated by his attempt to be subtle. But his aim was to suggest that the young lady was a daughter of his brother, who wished thus to acknowledge her. At a stroke, this accounted for Jupien too. The Princess of Parma favored this version in order to show Legrandin that Mlle de Cambremer, all things considered, would be marrying someone of the ilk of Mlle de Nantes, one of the bastard daughters of Louis XIV who were snubbed neither by the Duc d’Orléans nor the Prince de Conti.8
These two marriages, which my mother and I discussed in the train back to Paris, had fairly remarkable effects on some of the people who have so far figured in this story. First, on Legrandin; needless to say he dashed headlong into M. de Charlus’s mansion, for all the world as if he were entering a house of ill-fame where he did not wish to be recognized, but also simultaneously to display his bravado and dissimulate his age, for our habits persist even in situations where they are no longer of any use to us, and hardly anyone noticed that in greeting him M. de Charlus addressed him with a smile even more difficult to interpret than to detect; this smile was apparently the same—although actually exactly the opposite—as that exchanged by two men who habitually frequent high society if by chance they meet in dubious circumstances (for example at the Elysée Palace, where Général de Froberville, when in former times he used to meet Swann there, affected on noticing Swann that air of ironic and mysterious complicity appropriate to two familiars of the Princesse des Laumes compromised by meeting at M. Grévy’s).9 But what was rather remarkable was the real improvement in his character. Legrandin—ever since the days when as a child I went to spend my holidays in Combray—had long been cultivating aristocratic relations which at best yielded no more than the odd invitation to an unproductive stay in a resort. Suddenly, the marriage of his nephew having intervened to join these long-separated branches, Legrandin enjoyed a social situation to which in retrospect his former relations with people who had frequented him, however closely, only in private, gave a certain substance. Ladies to whom people wanted to introduce him made out that he had spent two weeks in the country with them every year for the last twenty years, and that it was he who had given them the charming antique barometer in the small drawing-room. He had by chance been involved in “circles” which included dukes who now became related to him. Yet as soon as he acquired his social position, he ceased to take advantage of it. It was not merely because once he was an official guest he no longer experienced any pleasure at being invited, but also, because of the two vices which had competed so long within him, the least natural, snobbery, gave way to the other, more natural one, since it marked a return, however devious, to nature. No doubt these two vices are not incompatible, and the back-streets of the suburbs may well be explored on the way home from a duchess’s shindig. But, cooling with age, Legrandin turned away from the accumulation of too many pleasures, from sallying forth without taking all due precaution, thus rendering his natural pleasures, consisting above all in friendship and time-consuming chatter, increasingly platonic, making him spend most of his time with the lower classes and leaving him little time for life in high society. Mme de Cambremer herself became relatively indifferent to the friendly advances of the Princesse de Guermantes. The latter, obliged to frequent the Marquise, had realized, as always happens when we spend more time with any fellow-beings, with their inevitable mixture of qualities which we finally discover and defects which we eventually accept, that Mme de Cambremer was a woman gifted with an intelligence and endowed with a culture which I for my part appreciated little, but which seemed remarkable to the Duchesse. Thus often toward nightfall she called on Mme Cambremer to pay her a lengthy visit. But the magical charm that Mme de Cambremer had imagined the Duchesse de Guermantes to possess evaporated as soon as she found herself solicited by the latter. And she invited her from politeness rather than pleasure. A more striking change, at once symmetrical with and different from that which had occurred in Swann after his marriage, became apparent in Gilberte. Certainly during the first few months Gilberte had taken pleasure in inviting the most select society. Doubtless it was only because of the inheritance that she invited the close friends who mattered to her mother, albeit on certain days only, when they came on their own, cloistered apart from people of fashion, as if the contact of people like Mme Bontemps or Mme Cottard with the Princesse de Guermantes or the Princess of Parma might, like that of two unstable compounds, have produced some irreparable catastrophe. None the less, the Bontemps, Cottards and company,
however disappointed at having to dine alone, were proud to be able to say, “We dined with the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” all the more so because Gilberte occasionally made so bold as to invite them at the same time as Mme de Marsantes, who, in the interests of the inheritance, cut a truly distinguished figure with her tortoiseshell and feather fan. She merely took care from time to time to sing the praises of those people discreet enough not to call unless invited, which announcement was intended as a gracious but haughty salutation for those who had ears to hear, such as Cottard, Bontemps and company. Perhaps because of my “young friend from Balbec,” whose aunt I would have liked to see me in these surroundings, I would have preferred to be invited to those evenings. But Gilberte, for whom I was now above all a friend of her husband and of the Guermantes (and who—perhaps way back in Combray, in the days when my parents would not speak to her mother—at an age when we not only attribute some particular quality to each and every thing but also classify them by species, had invested me with the sort of prestige which we never lose afterward), considered those evenings unworthy of me and would say to me as I was leaving: “I was very pleased to see you, but why don’t you come back tomorrow, you will meet my aunt Guermantes and Mme de Poix, today it was Mama’s friends, to keep Mama happy.” But this lasted only a few months, and soon everything was totally changed. Was this because Gilberte’s social life was bound to display the same contrasts as that of Swann? Be that as it may, Gilberte had not long been Marquise de Saint-Loup (and soon after, as we shall see, Duchesse de Guermantes) before, having achieved what was most spectacular and most difficult, thinking that the name of Guermantes was now incorporated within her like a gilded enamel and that whomsoever she frequented, she would remain the Duchesse de Guermantes for all and sundry (which was a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen “in the beginning,” it happens from day to day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup thought, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” in the knowledge that the night before she had turned down three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name enhanced the distinctly un-aristocratic circles which she entertained, by an inverse movement the circles which invited the Marquise devalued the name that she bore. Nothing resists such movements, the greatest names finally succumb. Had Swann not known a princess of the royal house of France whose salon, because anyone at all could be invited, had fallen to the lowest rung? One day when the Princesse des Laumes had felt duty-bound to spend a moment with her Highness, but had found nothing but the lowest sort of company, she had afterward visited Mme Leroi and had said to Swann and the Marquis de Modène: “At last I am out of enemy territory. I have just escaped from Mme la Comtesse de X., where there were no more than two or three friendly faces.”) Sharing in a word the opinion of the comic-opera character10 who declares, “My name excuses me, I think, from further explanation,” Gilberte started to show her contempt for what she had so desired, to declare that the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were fools unfit for company, and, matching words with deeds, did indeed cease to seek their company. People who first made her acquaintance only after this period, and, when they first met her, heard this Duchesse de Guermantes make fun of the society which she could so easily have frequented, or yawn openly in the face of any one of them, even the most brilliant, who ventured to call on her, blush retrospectively at having themselves found some prestige in high society, and would never dare confide the humiliating secret of their past weaknesses to a woman whom they believe, through the essential grandeur of her nature, to have always been incapable of understanding such weakness. They hear her mock dukes with such brio, and see her, even more significantly, acting in such close accord with her mockery! Doubtless they would not think of investigating the causes of the accident which turned Mlle Swann into Mlle de Forcheville, and Mlle de Forcheville into the Marquise de Saint-Loup and then the Duchesse de Guermantes. Nor perhaps would they guess that the effects of this accident would help no less than its causes to explain the later attitude of Gilberte, since she no longer regarded the frequentation of commoners in quite the same way as she would have when Mlle Swann, a lady addressed by everyone as “Mme la Duchesse,” but addressed by the duchesses whom she found tedious as “my dear cousin.” We are easily tempted to disdain an ambition which we have failed to fulfill or which we have satisfied and outgrown. And we suppose such disdain inherent even in people whom we did not know at the time. Perhaps if we could go back down the years, we would find these people ravaged, more furiously than anyone, by those same faults which they have managed so completely to hide or overcome that we consider them incapable not only of ever having been affected themselves but even of ever excusing them in others, since we assume that they are unable to imagine them. Meanwhile the salon of the new Marquise de Saint-Loup soon took on its definitive aspect (at least from a social viewpoint, for, as we shall see, all sorts of disturbances of a different nature would erupt there later). Yet this aspect was surprising for the following reason: people still remembered that the most sumptuous and refined receptions in Paris, as brilliant as those of the Princesse de Guermantes, were those of Mme de Marsantes, Saint-Loup’s mother. What is more, in recent times, Odette’s salon, although held in infinitely less esteem, had none the less been resplendent with luxury and elegance. Whereas Saint-Loup, who thanks to his wife’s fortune enjoyed all the comfort that he could wish, dreamed of nothing more than the tranquility of finishing a fine dinner in the company of artists playing him good music. And this young man, who had once appeared so proud and ambitious, invited to share these luxuries with friends to whom his mother would never have spoken. Gilberte for her part put into practice Swann’s words, “I care little for quality, but I fear quantity.” And Saint-Loup, who was completely at his wife’s feet, both because he loved her and because it was precisely to her that he owed this supreme luxury, took care not to interfere with her tastes, which so closely resembled his own. In this way Mme de Marsantes’s and Mme de Forcheville’s great receptions, given for years in order above all to set up their children as brilliantly as possible, did not generate any great receptions by M. and Mme de Saint-Loup. They had the finest horses for riding together, the finest yacht for their cruises—but they never invited more than two guests at a time. When in Paris they never had more than two or three friends to dinner; with the result that, by a process of unforeseen and yet natural regression, their two mothers’ great aviaries had been replaced by a silent nest.
The person who benefited least from these two unions was the young Mlle d’Oloron, who, already infected with typhoid fever on the day of her religious nuptials, dragged herself painfully to church and died a few weeks later. The obituary notice which followed shortly after her death mingled names like that of Jupien with almost all the great names of Europe, such as those of the Vicomte and the Vicomtesse de Montmorency, HRH the Comtesse de Bourbon-Soissons, the Prince of Modena-d’Este, the Vicomtesse d’Edumea, Lady Essex, and so on. Doubtless, even for those who knew that the departed was Jupien’s niece, this quantity of grand alliances was no surprise. The main thing above all is to have such grand relations. Then the casus foederis comes into play and the death of a petty commoner throws all of the princely families of Europe into mourning. But many of the young people of the new generations, not knowing how things really stood, apart from being liable to take Marie-Antoinette d’Oloron, Marquise de Cambremer, for a lady of the noblest birth, might have been liable to commit many another error on reading the obituary notice. Thus if their excursions through France had led them into th
e countryside near Combray, they might not have been astonished to see that Mme L. de Méséglise and the Comte de Méséglise were among the first of the mourners, alongside the Duc de Guermantes: the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way lie side by side. “Traditional aristocracy from the same region, perhaps intermarried for generations,” they might have thought. “Who knows, perhaps it’s a branch of the Guermantes which bears the name of the Comtes de Méséglise.” Yet the Comte de Méséglise bore no relation to the Guermantes at all and did not even belong to the world of the Guermantes, but rather to the world of the Cambremers, for the Comte de Méséglise, whose rapid social ascent had seen him spend only two years as Legrandin de Méséglise, was our old friend Legrandin. And no doubt of all false titles, no false title could have been more disagreeable to the Guermantes than this. They had been related in former times to the genuine Comtes de Méséglise, of whose line there remained only one woman, the daughter of obscure folk fallen on hard times, herself married to one of my aunt’s tenant farmers, who had become prosperous and bought Mirougrain from her. He had transformed his original name of Ménager into the appellation Ménager de Mirougrain, so that when people said that his wife’s maiden name was de Méséglise, they thought this meant that she had been born and bred at Méséglise just as her husband had been at Mirougrain.
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