In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  ‘You know, I have the impression that you never eat oysters, Mme de Villeparisis said to us one day, increasing the distaste I felt at that time, as I was more disgusted by the thought of the living flesh of oysters than I was by the sticky remains of jellyfish littering the beach at Balbec. You really should – they’re magnificent on this stretch of the coast! And I must tell my maid to fetch your letters when she goes down for mine. You mean to tell me your daughter writes to you every day! What on earth can you find to say to each other?’ To this my grandmother said nothing, perhaps because she could not bring herself to speak of it to someone incapable of sympathizing with Mme de Sévigné, whose words she would quote to my mother: ‘Each time I receive your letter, I wish straightway I could receive another one. They are the breath of life to me. Few people are worthy of understanding what I feel.’22 I was afraid she might even apply to Mme de Villeparisis the conclusion: ‘Of these happy few I seek the company, avoiding all others.’ My grandmother chose instead to praise the fruit sent up to us by Mme de Villeparisis the day before. It was so good that even the manager, mastering the discomfiture afforded by our disdain of his fruit-dishes, had said to me, ‘I’m just like you – I regale in fruit more than any other desert.’ My grandmother told her friend that she had savoured it even more because of the generally inferior quality of the fruit served in the hotel: ‘So I can’t honestly say, like Mme de Sévigné, that if we were perverse enough to want bad fruit, we should have to send to Paris. – Yes, of course, you’re reading Mme de Sévigné. I’ve seen you carrying her Letters about with you ever since you’ve been here (she was forgetting that she had never set eyes on my grandmother until their meeting in the doorway). So you don’t think all that concern for the daughter is just a bit overdone? If you ask me, she talks about it too much for it to be quite sincere. There’s a lack of naturalness in her.’ My grandmother, feeling that it was futile to disagree, and so as not to have to speak of things she loved to someone whose mind was closed to them, concealed her copy of Mme de Beausergent’s Mémoires by laying her handbag on top of the book.

  If Mme de Villeparisis happened to meet Françoise when the latter was going down (at ‘twelve o’clock time’ in Françoise’s parlance), wearing her neat cap and amid universal esteem, to lunch in the guests’ servants’ quarters, she would pause with her on the stairs and ask after us. When Françoise told us about it later, she would say, with an attempt to imitate Mme de Villeparisis’s voice, ‘And she said to me: “And be sure to not forget to tell them I was asking after them,” she said.’ Françoise was clearly convinced that she was faithfully reproducing the very words uttered by Mme de Villeparisis, though she distorted them no less than Plato distorted those of Socrates, or St John those of Christ. She was naturally very impressed by the interest which Mme de Villeparisis took in her. Not that she believed my grandmother, who she knew was lying out of class solidarity (these rich, always sticking together!), when she said Mme de Villeparisis had once been a great beauty. It was true there were very few vestiges left of this beauty; and to reconstruct from them the glory that was gone, Françoise would have had to be more of an artist than she was. To see how pretty an old woman once was, it is not enough just to look at each feature; they must be translated.

  ‘I must remember to ask her one day whether I’m wrong in thinking she’s got some family connection with the Guermantes,’ my grandmother said, to my indignation. What possible common origin could there be in two names which had entered my experience in such dissimilar ways, one of them via the low, undignified door of the everyday, the other through the golden portals of the imagination?

  For some days past, a tall and beautiful woman with red hair and a rather prominent nose had been seen about in a very grand carriage: the Princess of Luxembourg, who had come down from town to spend a few weeks in the vicinity. Her barouche had drawn up outside the hotel, a footman had come in to talk to the manager, had gone back to the carriage and had then carried in a magnificent basket of fruit which, like the Bay of Balbec itself, combined a range of seasons, as well as a card bearing the legend The Princess of Luxembourg and a few words added in pencil. Which princely traveller, living incognito in our hotel, was being sent such glaucous plums, their glowing roundness swelling to match the sea at that very moment, such translucent grapes hanging like a bright autumn day on their dried-up twig, pears of such celestial ultramarine? It was not possible that the person whom the Princess had been intending to visit was the old friend of my grandmother. And yet the following evening, Mme de Villeparisis sent us the bunch of cool golden grapes, with some plums and pears which we also recognized, although the plums, like the sea about dinner-time, had started to shade towards mauve, and the bluish surface of the pears now reflected patches of pink cloud. A few days later, we met Mme de Villeparisis at the end of the symphony concert given each morning down at the beach. I was convinced that the music I heard there (the prelude to Lohengrin, the overture to Tannhaüser, etc.) expressed the most exalted truths; and in my efforts to comprehend them I strove upwards, I yearned towards them, I drew the best out of my deepest self to offer up to them.

  We were coming up from the concert and turning our steps towards the hotel, pausing for a moment on the esplanade with Mme de Villeparisis, who told us she had ordered ‘rarebits’ and creamed eggs for our lunch, when I caught sight of the Princess of Luxembourg, still quite a way off, but coming in our direction. As she walked, she was almost leaning on a sunshade, in a way that gave to her tall and wonderful body a slight inclination, a long undulation, so much a part of women who were beautiful during the Second Empire, and whose drooping shoulders and raised back, whose gaunt hips and slow, fluid stride swayed a silky ripple through their whole person, as though an invisible, inflexible rod slanted through their bodies and they were trying at each step to drape themselves about it. When she went out for her morning stroll along the esplanade, it was always about the time when everyone else who had been down for a swim was coming back up for lunch; and her own lunch-time being half-past one, she never got back to her villa until long after the bathers had abandoned the esplanade, which stretched empty before her in the full glare of the sun. Mme de Villeparisis introduced my grandmother to her; but when it was my turn to be introduced, unable to remember my surname, she had to ask me what it was. She may actually never have known, or if she had, she had forgotten years before the name of the man to whom my grandmother had married her daughter. On hearing it now, Mme de Villeparisis seemed much struck by it. The Princess of Luxembourg, having shaken hands, stood chatting with the Marquise, glancing tenderly now and then at my grandmother and me with an expression full of the incipient kiss that rises to lips which smile at a baby with his nanny. Despite her wish not to appear to dwell in spheres far above ours, she must have misjudged the distance between us; and her eyes, not properly adjusted, overflowed with such loving sweetness that I would not have been surprised if she had reached out a hand and patted us, as though we were a brace of docile animals poking our heads through the railings at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne. This idea of being animals in the Zoo was instantly underlined for me. It was the hour when hawkers of sweets, cakes and other delicacies haunt the esplanade, barking their wares in strident tones. At a loss to show her good-will towards us in a fitting manner, the Princess stopped the next one who came along. All he had left was a little loaf of rye-bread, the sort you feed to the ducks. The Princess took it, saying to me, ‘This is for your grandmother.’ But she then handed it to me, with a smile full of feeling: ‘You be the one to give it to her,’ meaning no doubt that my enjoyment would be greater if nobody came between me and the animals. Other hawkers having gathered round us, she filled my pockets with all sorts of things, little surprise packets tied with string, rolled wafers, babas, barley sugars: ‘These are for you to eat. But you must let your grandmother have some too.’ The hawkers were paid, at the Princess’s behest, by the little black boy in a red satin suit who always walked behind
her, to the amazement of the whole sea-front. Taking leave of Mme de Villeparisis, she proffered us a hand once again, trying to show that she treated her friends and the friends of her friends exactly alike, and that she had not lost the common touch. This time, however, her expression was aimed at not quite so lowly a level in the hierarchy of creatures; and the equality she shared with us was notified to my grandmother in the doting motherly smile with which one takes leave of a small boy when pretending he is a grown-up. My grandmother, by a vast stride of evolution, had stopped being a duck or an antelope and had turned into what Mme Swann would have termed, in her best English, a ‘baby’. Having taken her leave of us, the Princess of Luxembourg, with the slow undulations of her magnificent figure, took up again her interrupted stroll along the sun-drenched esplanade, her whole person winding itself round the rolled-up blue and white sunshade she held in her hand, as a snake coils about a wand. She was my very first Highness, not counting Princesse Mathilde, who in any case had nothing high and mighty about her. My second one, as will be seen, was to astonish me just as much by her graciousness. I was to become acquainted with one mode of the civility of the great the very next day, when Mme de Villeparisis gave us this report: ‘She thought you were both just charming. She’s a woman of great discernment, and her heart’s in the right place. She’s quite unlike your ordinary Highness or Royal – she’s a woman of genuine qualities.’ To which she added, with an expression of conviction, very pleased at being able to say so: ‘I expect she would be delighted to meet you again.’

  I was even more struck by something else Mme de Villeparisis said that very forenoon, shortly after the Princess of Luxembourg had left us, and which had nothing to do with civility.

  ‘Aren’t you the son of the department head at the Ministry? Well, I must say I hear your father is a charming man. And he’s off on a nice trip at present.’

  A few days before, a letter from my mother had told us that my father and his travelling companion M. de Norpois had lost all their luggage.

  ‘It has turned up, or rather it was never lost in the first place. You’ll never guess what happened,’ Mme de Villeparisis said, seeming inexplicably better informed than either of us about the details of my father’s journey. ‘I think your father will return home early, next week, since he will probably decide not to go on to Algeciras. However, he does want to have one day longer in Toledo, being a great admirer of one of Titian’s students – the name escapes me, but if you want to see his best things, you’ve got to go there.’

  I was left wondering by what strange chance Mme de Villeparisis was able, given the dark and distant glass through which she looked at the rudimentary, insignificant and uncertain doings of the host of people known to her, to focus on my father through a tiny area of lens of such prodigious magnification that she could gaze in close-up and with so much detail at what was charming about him, the unforeseen circumstances obliging him to change his plans, his difficulties with the Spanish Customs, his liking for El Greco, and, with the scale of her vision thus increased, see a single man so huge among so many tiny ones, like Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter painted with his superhuman stature because he is with a mere female mortal.23

  My grandmother took leave of Mme de Villeparisis outside the hotel, so that we could enjoy a little more of the sea-air before lunch-time, of which we would be informed by beckonings through the glass screens. We heard a chorus of shouts: the young mistress of the King of the South Seas, having just been down for a bathe, was coming back up for lunch.

  ‘Is that not an outrage!’ exclaimed the bâtonnier from Cherbourg, who happened to be passing. ‘It’s enough to make a man want to shake the dust of France off his feet for good!’

  The wife of the notary from Le Mans was gazing spellbound at the alleged queen.

  ‘I wish I could tell you how it irritates me when Mme Blandais stares at those people like that, the bâtonnier said to the First President. I feel like giving her a good slap across the face. It’s people like her that make people take an interest in riff-raff like that. And of course riff-raff love it when people take an interest in them. Tell her husband, would you, to tell her it’s ridiculous. I for one will certainly not be going out with them again if they look as though they’re fascinated by a couple in fancy dress!’

  The advent of the Princess of Luxembourg, on the day when her barouche had stood outside the hotel while the fruit was being delivered, had not been overlooked by the wives of the notary, the bâtonnier and the First President, who for some time had been much exercised on the question of whether that old Mme de Villeparisis, whom everyone treated with such consideration, was a genuine marquise, rather than just an adventuress quite undeserving, as the ladies would have loved to learn, of all the bowing and scraping. Each time Mme de Villeparisis walked through the vestibule, the wife of the First President, always on the look-out for loose women, set aside her embroidery and inspected her in a way that moved her two friends to irresistible laughter.

  ‘I make no apology, she said with pride, for believing the worst of people! I’m never convinced anyone’s an honest woman until I’ve set eyes on their birth certificate and their marriage lines. So I’ve got a few little inquiries to make – you mark my words.’

  Every day, the ladies gathered in their mirthful group.

  ‘What have you learned?’

  On the evening of the Princess of Luxembourg’s arrival, the wife of the First President put a finger to her lips.

  ‘I’ve got something for you.

  – Isn’t our Mme Poncin wonderful! I’ve never seen anyone as – What have you got?

  – What have I got? Just a female with dyed hair, if you don’t mind, made-up to the eyeballs, and with a carriage that smacked of ‘immoral earnings’ a mile away, the kind that sort of woman always has, and who turned up a while ago asking to see our alleged marquise!

  – Goodness me! Oh dear, oh dear! Would you believe it! It must be that woman we saw, bâtonnier, don’t you remember? We certainly thought she looked pretty fishy, but we didn’t know she was looking for the Marquise. A woman with a Negro, wasn’t it?

  – Precisely.

  – Well, is that so? And do you happen to know her name?

  – Oh, yes. I picked up her card, pretending to think it was someone else’s. She purports to be called the ‘Princess of Luxembourg’! Didn’t I tell you I could smell a rat? Isn’t it charming to have to rub shoulders with the likes of the Baronne d’Ange!’24 The bâtonnier quoted Mathurin Régnier and Macette25 in the ear of the First President.

  It should not be thought that this was a misunderstanding of short duration, like those which arise in the second act of a musical comedy and are resolved in the final scene. Whenever the Princess of Luxembourg, who was a niece of the King of England and the Emperor of Austria, came to fetch Mme de Villeparisis so that they could take carriage-exercise together, they could not help looking like a pair of retired demi-reps, of the sort whom it is difficult to avoid in fashionable resorts. Three-quarters of the gentlemen who belong to the Faubourg Saint-Germain are looked down on by many middle-class people as impecunious debauchees and wastrels (which of course some of them may well be) whom no honest man could mix with. In this, the middle class is too moral, as the defects of these gentlemen would never prevent them from being welcomed with open arms in places where it will never be. The gentlemen in turn are so convinced that the middle class is aware of this that they affect a straightforward attitude towards their own doings, even going so far as to disapprove of those of their associates who are most hard-up; and this only reinforces the misunderstanding. If by some chance a gentleman from the Faubourg, whose great wealth happens to qualify him to be a director of the leading banking houses, has to mix with members of the lower middle classes, the latter, seeing for once a noble they think worthy of being one of themselves, are convinced that he would have nothing to do with a gambling bankrupt of a marquis, who they think, especially because he is such a likeable man,
must be quite out of favour with his class. They are taken aback when the duke who is the managing director of the enormous enterprise marries his son to the daughter of the gambling marquis, who happens to bear a name which is that of the oldest family in France, just as a sovereign will prefer to be father-in-law to the daughter of an erstwhile king rather than to the daughter of a present president of the Republic. This means that the view which the two worlds have of each other is as imaginary as the view which one seaside town has of another when they stand at opposite ends of the Bay of Balbec: from Rivebelle, it is just possible to see a little of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse; but that misleads Rivebelle into thinking its delights are visible from Marcouville, when they are more or less invisible.