After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.
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Overview
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9786050452471 |
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Publisher: | Marcel Proust |
Publication date: | 06/06/2016 |
Sold by: | StreetLib SRL |
Format: | eBook |
File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
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Date of Birth:
July 10, 1871Date of Death:
November 18, 1922Place of Birth:
Auteuil, near Paris, FrancePlace of Death:
Paris, FranceRead an Excerpt
The early-morning twitter of the birds sounded tame to Françoise. Every word from the maids' quartersmade her jump; their every footstep bothered her, and she was constantly wondering what they were doing. All this was because we had moved. It is true that the servants in our former home had made quite as much stir in their quarters on the top floor, but they were servants she knew, and their comings and goings had become friendly presences to her. Now she even made silence the object of her painful scrutiny. And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing in the street as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Françoise. And if I had made fun of her when she had been distressed at leaving an apartment building where we had been “so well thought of by everybody,” weeping as she packed her trunks in accordance with the rituals of Combray and declaring that our former home was superior to any other imaginable, I, who found it as difficult to assimilate new surroundings as I found it easy to abandon old ones, nonetheless felt a close sympathy with our old servant when I realized that the move to a building where the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits had driven her to a state close to total decline. She alone could understand my feelings; this was certainly not the case with her young footman; for him, a person as remote from the Combray world as it was possible to be, moving into a new district was like taking a holiday in which the novelty of the surroundings provided the same sense of relaxation as an actual journey; he felt he was in the country, and a headcold gave him the delightful sensation, as if he had been a victim of a draft from the ill-fitting window of a railway carriage, of having seen something of the world; every time he sneezed, he rejoiced that he had found such a select position, having always wanted to work for people who traveled a great deal. And so it was not to him I went, but straight to Françoise; and because I had laughed at her tears over a departure that had not affected me in the least, she now showed a frosty indifference to my misery, because she shared it. The so- called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear it when other people flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves. Françoise, who would not allow the least of her own troubles to pass unobserved, would turn her head away if I was suffering, so that I should not have the satisfaction of seeing my suffering pitied, let alone noticed. This is what happened when I tried to talk to her about our move. What is more, she was obliged, two days later, to return to our former home to collect some clothes that had been forgotten in the move, while I, as a result of the same move, was still running a temperature and, like a boa constrictor that has just swallowed an ox, was feeling painfully swollen by the sight of a long sideboard that my eyes needed to “digest”; and Françoise, with a woman's inconstancy, returned home saying that she thought she was going to choke to death on our old boulevard, that she had gone “all around the houses” to get there, that never had she seen such awkward stairs, that she would not go back there to live for all the world, not if you were to offer her a fortune unlikely hypothesesand that everything (meaning everything to do with the kitchen and the hallways) was far better appointed in our new home. And this new home, it is time to explainand to add that we had moved into it because my grandmother was far from well (though we kept this reason from her) and needed cleaner airwas an apartment that formed part of the Hôtel de Guermantes.
At an age when Names, offering us the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other, to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name, it is not only to cities and ruins that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, nor is it only the physical world that they spangle with differences and people with marvels, it is the social world as well: so every historic house, every famous residence or palace, has its lady or its fairy, as forests have their spirits and rivers their deities. Sometimes, hidden deep in her name, the fairy is transformed by the needs of our imaginative activity through which she lives; this is how the atmosphere surrounding Mme de Guermantes, after existing for years in my mind only as the reflection of a magic-lantern slide and of a stained-glass window, began to lose its colors when quite different dreams impregnated it with the bubbling water of fast-flowing streams.
However, the fairy wastes away when we come into contact with the actual person to whom her name corresponds, for the name then begins to reflect that person, who contains nothing of the fairy; the fairy can reappear if we absent ourselves from the person, but if we stay in the person's presence the fairy dies forever, and with her the name, as with the Lusignan family,1 which was fated to become extinct on the day when the fairy Mélusine should die. So the Name, beneath the successive retouchings that might eventually lead us to discover the original handsome portrait of an unknown woman we have never met, becomes no more than the mere photograph on an identity card to which we refer when we need to decide whether we know, whether or not we should acknowledge a person we encounter. But should a sensation from the distant pastlike those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them2enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tintforgotten, mysterious, and freshof the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. Yet, on the contrary, each of the moments that composed it, in order to create something original, a unique blend, was using those colors from the past that now elude us, colors that, for instance, are still able to fill me with sudden delight, should the name Guermantesassuming for a second after so many years the ring it had for me, so different from its present resonance, on the day of Mlle Percepied's marriagechance to restore to me the mauve color, so soft, too bright and new, that lent the smoothness of velvet to the billowing scarf of the young Duchesse, and made her eyes like inaccessible and ever-flowering periwinkles lit by the blue sun of her smile. And the name Guermantes, belonging to that period of my life, is also like one of those little balloons that have been filled with oxygen or some other gas: when I manage to puncture it and free what it contains, I can breathe the Combray air from that year, that day, mingled with the scent of hawthorns gusted from the corner of the square by the wind, announcing rain, and at times driving the sunlight away, at others letting it spread out on the red wool carpet of the sacristy and tingeing it brightly to an almost geranium pink with that “Wagnerian” softness of brio, which preserves the nobility of a festive occasion. Yet, even apart from rare moments such as this one, when we can suddenly feel the original entity give a stir and resume its shape, chisel itself out of syllables that have become lifeless, if in the dizzy whirl of daily life, where they serve merely the most practical purposes, names have lost all their color, like a prismatic top that revolves too fast and seems only gray, when, on the other hand, we reflect upon the past in our daydreams and seek to grasp it by slowing down and suspending the perpetual motion in which we are carried along, we can see the gradual reappearance, side by side but utterly distinct from one another, of the successive tints that a single name assumed for us in the course of our existence.
Of course, what shape this name Guermantes projected for me when my nurseknowing no more, probably, than I today, in whose honor it had been composedrocked me to sleep with that old song “Gloire à la Marquise de Guermantes,” or when, several years later, the veteran Maréchal de Guermantes filled my nursemaid with pride by stopping in the Champs-Élysées and exclaiming, “A fine child you have there!,” giving me a chocolate drop from his pocket bonbonnière, I cannot now say. Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer with me; they are external to me; all I can know about them, as with what we can know about events that took place before we were born, comes from other people's accounts. But after these earliest years, I can find a succession of seven or eight different figures spanning the time this name inhabited me; the first ones were the finest: gradually my dream, forced by reality to abandon a position that was no longer tenable, took up its position afresh, a little further back, until it was obliged to retreat even further. And as Mme de Guermantes changed, so did her dwelling place, itself born from that name fertilized from year to year by hearing some word or other that modified my dreams of it; the dwelling place itself mirrored them in its very masonry, which had become as much a mirror as the surface of a cloud or of a lake. A two-dimensional castle keep which was really no more than a strip of orange light where the lord and his lady, high up, decided upon life or death for their vassals, had been replacedright at the end of the “Guermantes way,” along which I used to follow the course of the Vivonne with my parents on all those sunny afternoonsby the land of bubbling streams where the Duchesse taught me to fish for trout and to recognize the names of the flowers whose purple-and-reddish clusters adorned the low walls of the neighboring garden plots; then it had become the hereditary property, the poetic domain from which the proud race of the Guermantes, like a mellowing, crenellated tower spanning the ages, was rising already over France, at a time when the sky was still empty in those places where Notre-Dame de Paris and Notre-Dame de Chartres were later to rise; a time when on the summit of the hill in Laon the cathedral nave had not been placed like the Ark of the Flood on the summit of Mount Ararat,3 full of patriarchs and judges anxiously leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of God has been appeased, carrying with it the species of plants that will multiply on earth, brimming over with animals spilling out even from the towers, where oxen, moving calmly around on the roofs, gaze down over the plains of Champagne; a time when the traveler who left Beauvais at close of day did not yet see, following him and turning with the bends in the road, the black branching wings of the cathedral spread out against the golden screen of sunset. It was, this “Guermantes,” like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape I could picture to myself only with difficulty and thereby longed all the more to discover, set amid real lands and roads that would suddenly become immersed in heraldic details, a few miles from a railway station; I recalled the names of the places around it as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me as the physical conditions necessaryin topographical sciencefor the production of an inexplicable phenomenon. I remembered the coats of arms painted beneath the windows of the church in Combray, their quarters filled, century after century, with all the lordly domains that this illustrious house had appropriated by marriage or gain from all the corners of Germany, Italy, and France: vast territories in the North, powerful cities in the South, assembled together to compose the name Guermantes and, losing their material form, to inscribe allegorically their sinople keep or castle triple-towered argent upon its azure field. I had heard of the famous Guermantes tapestries and could see them, medieval and blue, somewhat coarse, standing out like a cloud against the amaranth, legendary name beneath the ancient forest where Childebert so often went hunting,4 and it seemed to me that, without making a journey to see them, I might just as easily penetrate the secrets of the mysterious corners of these lands, this remoteness of the centuries, simply by coming into contact for a moment, in Paris, with Mme de Guermantes, the suzerain of the place and lady of the lake, as if her face and her words must possess the local charm of forests and streams and the same age-old characteristics as those recorded in the book of ancient customs in her archives. But then I had met Saint-Loup; he had told me that the house had borne the name Guermantes only since the seventeenth century, when his family had acquired it. They had lived, until then, in the neighborhood, and their title did not belong to the area. The village of Guermantes had taken its name from the château and had been built after it, and, so that the village should not destroy the view from it, building regulations that were still in force dictated the lines of its streets and set limits on the height of its houses. As for the tapestries, they were by Boucher,5 acquired in the nineteenth century by a Guermantes with artistic tastes and hung, along with mediocre hunting scenes that he had painted himself, in a particularly ugly drawing room done out in adrinople and plush. By revealing these things to me, Saint-Loup had introduced into the château elements that were foreign to the name Guermantes, and they no longer made it possible for me to go on extracting from its syllables alone the style in which it was built. Then the château reflected in its lake had disappeared from the depths of this name, and what had appeared to me around Mme de Guermantes as her dwelling had been her Paris house, the Hôtel de Guermantes, as limpid as its name, for no physical and opaque element intervened to disrupt and darken its transparency. Just as the word “church” signifies not merely the building but also the company of the faithful, the Hôtel de Guermantes included all those who shared in the life of the Duchesse, but these close friends I had never seen were for me merely famous and poetic names, and, knowing only persons who were themselves merely names as well, they only enlarged and protected the mystery surrounding the Duchesse by extending around her a vast halo, which at best grew dimmer as it increased in size.
In the parties she gave, since I could not imagine the guests as having bodies, mustaches, boots, as making any remark that was banal, or even original in a human and rational manner, this whirl of names, introducing less physical presence than a banquet of ghosts or a ball of specters around the statuette in Dresden china known as Mme de Guermantes, maintained a showcase transparency around her glass man- sion. Then, when Saint-Loup had told me various anecdotes about his cousin's chaplain and her gardeners, the Hôtel de Guermantes had becomeas some Louvre might have become in the pasta kind of castle surrounded, in the very center of Paris, by its lands, acquired by inheritance, by virtue of an ancient right that had oddly survived, and over which she still enjoyed feudal privileges. But this last dwelling had itself faded away by the time we had come to live right next to Mme de Villeparisis, in one of the apartments adjoining the one occupied by Mme de Guermantes in a wing of the Hôtel. It was one of those old houses, some of which may still exist, in which the main courtyard was often flankedalluvial deposits washed up by the rising tide of democracy or the legacy of bygone days when the various trades were grouped around the seigneurial dwellingby the backs of shops, premises like a bootmaker's or a tailor's, for instance (like those you see clustered around cathedrals when restorers have not had the aesthetic sense to remove them), together with a concierge who was also a cobbler, kept chickens, and grew flowersand, at the far end, in the main house, lived an aristocratic lady who, when she drove out in her old carriage and pair, her hat sporting a few nasturtiums that seemed to have escaped from the concierge's garden (with a footman at her coachman's side who got down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighborhood), dispensed smiles and little waves of the hand indiscriminately to the porter's children and to any middle-class tenants who happened to be passing, and between whom her disdainful affability and her egalitarian hauteur could not distinguish.
In the house to which we had moved, the aristocratic lady at the end of the courtyard was a duchesse, elegant and still young. Her name was Mme de Guermantes, and, thanks to Françoise, it was not long before I came to know something about her household. For the Guermantes (often referred to by Françoise as the people “below” or “downstairs”) constantly occupied her thoughts from the morning, when, as she did Mama's hair, unable to resist casting a forbidden, furtive glance into the courtyard, she would remark: “Oh, there go two Holy Sisters: they'll be for downstairs,” or “Oh! Just look at those pheasants in the kitchen window. No need to ask where they've come from. The Duc will have been out hunting”to the evening, when, handing me my nightclothes, she might chance to hear the sound of a piano or a snatch of song and would conclude: “Gay goings-on below, they've got company”; and in the steady set of her face, beneath her now whitened hair, a smile from her younger days, lively and demure, would for a second set each one of her features in its place and match them together in a carefully ordered readiness, as if to dance a quadrille.
But the moment in the Guermantes' day that most aroused Françoise's curiosity, that gave her the most satisfaction and also the most annoyance, was the moment when the doors of the carriage entrance opened and the Duchesse stepped into her barouche. This usually happened shortly after our servants had finished celebrating the solemn Passover feast that none might disturb, otherwise known as their midday meal, during which they were so “taboo” that not even my father would have dared to ring for them, in the full knowledge that not a single one of them would have stirred even if the bell had rung five times, and that he would have committed this breach of etiquette to no effect whatsoever, but not without detriment to himself. For Françoise (who, in her old age, lost no opportunity to assume “a suitable expression”) would not have failed to present him, for the rest of the day, with a face covered with little red cuneiform markings, which was her way, indecipherable though it was, of displaying to the outside world the long record of her grievances and the underlying causes of her displeasure. She would enlarge upon these by addressing herself to no one in particular, but not in a way that made what she said at all clear. And this is what she meantin the belief that for us it was exasperating, “mortifying,” “vexing” as she put itwhen she talked about saying “low mass” for us the whole blessed day.
The last rites completed, Françoise, who was at once, as in the early church, both celebrant and a member of the faithful, poured herself a final glass of wine, removed the napkin from her neck, and, wiping the traces of red liquid and coffee from her lips, folded it up and slipped it into its ring; she directed a doleful look of thanks to “her” young footman, who was ingratiating himself with her with a “Come, madame, a few more grapes, they're 'eavenly,” then went straight to open the window on the pretext that it was too hot “in this wretched kitchen.” As she turned the window knob and let in the air, she managed, at the same time, to steal a skillfully indifferent glance toward the back of the courtyard; from this she gained the stealthy assurance that the Duchesse was not yet ready to leave, and gazed longingly for a moment, with scornful and impassioned eyes, at the waiting carriage; once this second of attention had been paid to the things of this earth, she raised her eyes to heaven, whose purity she had already anticipated as she felt the mildness of the air and the warmth of the sun; at the corner of the roof, her gaze rested on the place where, each spring, there came to nest, immediately above my bedroom chimney, two pigeons like the ones that used to coo in her kitchen in Combray.
“Ah! Combray, Combray!” she would cry. (And the almost singing tone in which she declaimed this invocation, just as much as the Arlésienne purity of her features, could have made one suspect that Françoise was of southern origin, and that the lost homeland she was bewailing was simply a land of adoption. But one might have been wrong here, for it seems that no province is without its “south”; are there not any number of Bretons or Savoyards we come across whose speech has all the delightful transpositions of longs and shorts characteristic of the south?) “Ah! Combray, when will I see you again, my poor old home? When will I be able to spend every blessed hour of the day among your hawthorns, under our poor old lilacs, listening to the finches and the Vivonne murmuring away like someone whispering, instead of that wretched bell from the young master, who has me running up and down that dratted corridor every half-hour. And even then he thinks I don't come quick enough; but you'd need to hear the bell before he'd rung it, and if you're a minute late he ‘takes on' something dreadful. My poor old Combray! I dare say I'll be dead before I see you again, when they throw me like a stone into a hole in the ground. And I'll never smell your lovely white hawthorns again. It seems to me that what I'll be hearing in my final rest are those three rings of the bell, which put a curse on me when I was still alive.”
But she was interrupted by the voice of the waistcoat-maker in the courtyard below, the one whom my grandmother had found so agreeable in the past, when she had gone to pay a call on Mme de Villeparisis, and who now ranked no less highly in the affections of Françoise. The sound of our window opening had made him look up, and he had already spent some time trying to attract his neighbor's attention so that he could bid her good day. At this point, the flirtatiousness of the young girl Françoise had once been softened, for M. Jupien's benefit, the grumpy face of our old cook, weighed down by age, bad tem- per, and the heat of the stove, and it was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity, and demureness that she gracefully acknowledged the waistcoat-maker, but without a word to him; if she was infringing Mama's instructions by looking into the courtyard, she would not have dared to challenge them to the point of talking from the window, which would have entailed, as Françoise saw it, a “whole lecture” on the subject from her mistress. She pointed out the waiting carriage to Jupien with a gesture that seemed to convey, “A fine pair of horses there all right!” But what she actually muttered was, “What an old crate!,” and she did this mainly because she knew what his response was going to be: he would put his hand to his lips so that he would be audible without having to shout: “You could have one, too, if you wanted, more than just one perhaps, but you're not interested in that sort of thing.”
And Françoise, after a modest, furtive, and delighted gesture that conveyed something like, “Each to his own; but simplicity's the thing in this house,” closed the window in case Mama should enter the room. The “you” who might have owned more horses than the Guermantes meant us, but Jupien was right to use “you” in this way, because, apart from a few strictly personal indulgences (like pretending with an irritating giggle that she did not have a cold when she was coughing all the time and the whole household lived in fear of catching it), Françoise, like those plants that are completely attached to a particular animal and nourished by that animal with food it catches, eats, and digests for them, offering it to them in its final and easily assimilable residue, lived with us symbiotically; we were the ones who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, our position, had to take it upon ourselves to devise little ways of humoring her, which constitutedalong with the recognized right freely to practice the ritual of the midday meal according to ancient custom, including a breath of air at the window afterward, a certain amount of lingering when she went out to shop, and a Sunday visit to her niecethe portion of contentment without which her life could not be lived. So one can understand why Françoise had pined away during the first days of our move, a prey to a sicknessin a house where my father's claims to distinction were not yet knownwhich she herself called “ennui,” in the strong sense in which the word is used by Corneille, or in the letters of soldiers who end up by committing suicide because they “pine” too much for their fiancées or for their native villages. Françoise's ennui had been quickly remedied, in fact, by Jupien, because his attitude procured her an immediate sense of pleasure, no less keenly felt and more refined than it would have been had we decided to keep a carriage. “A good class of people, these Juliens”Françoise was always ready to assimilate new names into the ones she already knew“decent souls; it's written all over their faces.”
Indeed, Jupien was able to understand the situation and to let it be known that if we had no carriage it was because we had no wish for one. This friend of Françoise's had obtained a post in a government office and was seldom to be found at home. He had initially been a waistcoat-maker with the “slip of a girl” my grandmother had assumed to be his daughter, but it was no longer worthwhile for him to go on doing the job after the girl, who could already repair a torn skirt with great skill when she was little more than a child (at the time my grandmother paid her call on Mme de Villeparisis), had turned to ladies' dressmaking and become a skirt-maker. After a period as apprentice seamstress with a dressmaker, employed to stitch, to sew up a flounce, to secure a button or a press stud, and to fix a waistband with fasteners, she had quickly risen to become second, then chief assistant, and after creating her own clientele of ladies from the best circles, she now worked at home (to wit, in our courtyard), generally with one or two of her young friends from the dressmaker's workshop, whom she engaged as apprentices. So Jupien's presence was not really needed there any more. No doubt the little girl, now a grown woman, was often required to make waistcoats. But with her friends to help her, she no longer needed anyone else. And so Jupien, her uncle, had looked for a job elsewhere. At first his work had allowed him to get home for midday, but he then permanently replaced the man whose assistant he had been and could not return home until the evening meal. Fortunately, he was appointed to this “tenured position” several weeks after we had moved in, so that his kind attention lasted sufficiently long for Françoise to get through the difficulties of these early days without undue discomfort. At the same time, without underrating Jupien's value as an “interim palliative” for Françoise, I have to say that I did not initially take to him. From a few feet away, completely destroying the effect that his plump cheeks and florid complexion would have otherwise produced, his eyes, brimming with dreamy, woeful sympathy, created the impression that he either was very ill or had just suffered a major bereavement. Not only was this not the case, but as soon as he spokeperfectly well, in facthe tended to be cold and mocking. The disparity between his gaze and his speech produced an uncomfortable sense of falsity, and it seemed to embarrass him in the way that a guest wearing ordinary clothes at a party where everyone else is in evening dress is embarrassed, or, likewise, someone who has to speak to a member of royalty without knowing exactly how, and whose reaction to the dilemma is to use as few words as possible. There the comparison ends, because Jupien's way of speaking was, by contrast, charming.
Indeed, in the same way that his face was inundated by his eyes (and this passed unnoticed once you knew him), I soon discovered that he was a man of rare intelligence, one of the most spontaneously literary men who have come my way, in the sense that, although he was probably uneducated, he possessed, or had acquired, with the sole help of a few hastily scanned books, the most ingenious turns of phrase. The most gifted people I had known had died very young. And I was convinced that Jupien's life would be a short one. He had kindness, sympathy, and the most sensitive and generous feelings. His role in Françoise's life had soon ceased to be indispensable. She had learned the role for herself.
Even when a tradesman or a servant delivered a parcel to our door, while seeming to pay no attention to him and merely pointing him absently to a chair as she continued with her work, Françoise took such shrewd advantage of the few moments he spent in the kitchen awaiting Mama's instructions that only rarely did he depart without the certain knowledge ineradicably engraved in his mind that, “if we did not have one, it was because we had no wish for it.” And if it was so important to her that other people should know we “had money” (for she knew nothing about the use of what Saint-Loup called partitive articles and would say “have money,” “fetch water”6), that we were rich, it was not because wealth alone, wealth without virtue, was the supreme good for Françoise; but virtue without wealth was not her ideal, either. For her, wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see their qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfort from virtue and moral edification from wealth.
Once she had closed the window, fairly quickly (otherwise, it seemed, Mama would have given her “a real piece of her mind”), Françoise began with a sigh to clear the kitchen table.
“There are some Guermantes on the rue de la Chaise,” said our valet. “I had a friend who worked there. He was their second coachman. And I know someone, not my pal but his brother-in-law, who did his time in the army with one of the Baron de Guermantes's grooms. ‘So how's your father?'” added the valet, who had a habit of sprinkling his conversation with the latest witticisms, just as he liked to hum the latest popular tunes.
Françoise, with the weary look in her eyes of an aging woman, and viewing the world entirely from Combray, in a distant blur, grasped not the witticism in these words but the fact that they must be witty, since they were unrelated to the rest of the valet's remarks and had been uttered with strong emphasis by someone she knew to be a joker. So she smiled with dazzled benevolence, as if to say, “He doesn't change, our Victor!” Besides, she was pleased, because she knew that listening to wit of this kind was connected remotelyto those reputable social pleasures for which, in all classes of society, people are eager to dress up and risk catching cold. In fact, she regarded the valet as a good friend for her to have, since he was always angrily denouncing the dreadful measures the Republic was about to take against the clergy. Françoise had not yet grasped that our cruelest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who exaggerate or invent things that are likely to distress us, taking care not to present them in any justifiable light, which would diminish our distress and perhaps lead us to entertain some slight respect for an attitude they are anxious to display to us, to complete our torment, as being both hideous and unassailable.
“The Duchesse must be connected to all that,” said Françoise, resuming the remarks made about the Guermantes on the rue de la Chaise, as one takes up a piece of music again at the andante. “I can't remember who it was told me that one of them married a cousin of the Duc. But they all belong to the same ‘bracket.' A great family, those Guermantes!” she added with respect, attributing the greatness of the family both to the number of its members and to the brilliance of its reputation, as Pascal attributes the truth of religion to reason and the authority of the Scriptures. With the single word “great” as her only means of expressing both ideas, it seemed to her that these were one and the same, her vocabulary, like certain gemstones, thus presenting a flaw in places that projected darkness into the depths of her mind.
“I wonder if they're the ones with a château in Guermantes, ten miles from Combray? If they are, they've got to be related to their cousin in Algiers, too.” My mother and I were kept wondering for a long time who this cousin in Algiers might be, but we finally realized that by “Algiers” Françoise meant the city of Angers. The remote can be more familiar to us than the near. Françoise, who knew the name Algiers from some very nasty dates we were customarily sent at New Year's, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, particularly its toponymy, was strewn with errors. “I meant to ask their butler about it.... What is it they call him?” She broke off, as if she were consulting herself on a matter of protocol, then came out with the answer: “Oh yes! They call him Antoine,” as if “Antoine” had been some sort of title. “He's the one could tell me, but he's a real dandy that one, a great pedant; you'd think they'd cut off his tongue or that he'd forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no reply when you talk to him,” added Françoise, who used the expression “make reply” like Mme de Sévigné.7 “But,” she went on, untruthfully, “as long as I know what's cooking in my own pot, I don't bother about what's in other people's. Anyway, it's not Catholic. And he's not a courageous man, either.” (You would have thought from this estimation of the man that Françoise had revised her ideas about physical courage, which when she was in Combray she saw as reducing men to the level of wild beasts. But this was not the case. “Courageous” simply meant “hardworking.”) “They say he's as thievish as a magpie as well, but you can't always believe what you hear. Their staff are always leaving because of the concierge. He's jealous, and he sets the Duchesse against them. But that Antoine is a real idler, that's for sure, and his Antoinesse is no better,” continued Françoise, whose need to find a feminine form of the name “Antoine” for the butler's wife was no doubt unconsciously motivated in this grammatical invention by the memory of the words chanoine and chanoinesse. She was not entirely wrong in this. There is still a street called rue Chanoinesse, near Notre-Dame, a name given it (since it was only occupied by canons) by those Frenchmen in the past whose contemporary Françoise in fact was. She went on immediately to provide another example of this way of forming feminines, with the remark: “It's got to be the Duchesse who owns the Guermantes château. And she's the one who's mayoress down there. That's quite something.”
“I should think it is,” said the footman with conviction, having failed to detect the irony.
“You think so, do you, my boy? For people like them, being mayor or mayoress is not worth two cents. Now, if I had the Guermantes château, you wouldn't see me setting foot in Paris. Why on earth do important folk, well-off people like Monsieur and Madame, get it into their heads to stay in this wretched city when they could be going off to Combray the minute they're free and there's no one to stop them? What's stopping them from retiring? They're not short of anything. Why wait till they're dead? All I'd need would be a bit of plain food and enough wood to keep me warm in winter, and I'd have been off home to my brother's poor old place in Combray a long time ago. At least you feel alive there, without all these houses around you. It's so quiet you can hear the frogs singing at night for miles around.”
“That must be wonderful, madame,” the young footman broke out enthusiastically, as if this last detail had been as much a part of Combray as gondolas are of Venice.
A more recent arrival in the household than the valet, he would talk with Françoise about things that might be of interest not so much to himself as to her. And Françoise, who grimaced with resentment when she was treated as the cook, was particularly well disposed toward this footman (who referred to her as “the housekeeper”), in the same way that princes of the second rank are toward the well-meaning young men who treat them like royalty.
“At least you know what you're supposed to be doing there and what time of the year it is. Not like this place, where seeing one measly buttercup at holy Easter is like looking for one at Christmas. I can't even hear the tiniest bit of an angelus ring when I shift my old bones out of bed in the morning. Down there you can hear every hour strike. It's a only a poor old bell but you think, ‘My brother's on his way back from the fields now.' You can see the daylight fading, they ring the bells to bless the fruits of the earth, there's time to turn round before you light the lamp. In this place it's day, then it's night, and off you go to bed, with no more idea of what you've been doing than a dumb animal.”
“I hear that Méséglise is really pretty, too,” broke in the young footman, for whom the conversation was taking rather too abstract a turn, and who happened to remember hearing us talk at table about Méséglise. “Oh! Méséglise,” said Françoise with the broad smile that always came to her lips whenever she heard the names Méséglise, Combray, or Tansonville. They were so much part of her that whenever she encountered them outside herself, heard them in a conversation, she felt a similar sort of glee to that which a professor provokes among his students by alluding to some contemporary figure whose name they would never have expected to have fall upon their ears from the rostrum. Her pleasure also arose from the feeling that these places meant something to her that they did not for other people, old friends with whom one has experienced much; and she smiled at them as if she found something witty about them, because they contained a great deal of herself.
“You're right, my boy, Méséglise is quite a pretty place,” she went on with a gentle laugh, “but how have you heard of Méséglise?”
“How have I heard of Méséglise? But it's well known. People have told me about it many a time,” he replied with that criminal inexactitude of the informant who, whenever we try to assess objectively the possible importance for someone else of a thing that matters to us, makes it impossible for us to do so. “Ah! It's better down there, under the cherry trees, than it is in front of this stove, I can tell you.”
She even spoke to the servants of Eulalie as a good person. For, since Eulalie's death, Françoise had completely forgotten that she had liked her as little when she was alive as she liked anyone who had nothing to eat in the house, who was “starving to death” and who then, like a good-for-nothing and thanks to the bounty of the rich, started to “put on airs.” It no longer galled her that Eulalie had so skillfully managed, week after week, to ensure that she received her “tip” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never stopped singing her praises.
“So it was at Combray itself that you were with Madame's cousin, then?” asked the young footman. “That's right, with Mme Octave, a real saint, my dears, and a house where there was always more than enough, the very besta good woman she was, I can tell you, she didn't begrudge the partridges or the pheasants, or anything; five or six people to dinner and plenty of meat to go round, best-quality meat, too, white wine, red wine, the works.” (Françoise used the verb “begrudge” in the same way as La Bruyère.)8 “She always paid the damages, even if the family stayed for months, for donkey's years.” (There was nothing offensive intended toward us in this remark; Françoise belonged to an era when the word “damages” was not restricted to legal use and simply meant “expenses.”) “People didn't go away with empty stomachs, I can tell you! M. le Curé was always coming out with it: if there was ever a woman who could count on going straight to our good Lord, it was her. Poor Madame, I can hear that tiny voice of hers now: ‘Françoise, I eat nothing myself, as you know, but I want the food to be as nice for everyone else as if I did.' The food wasn't for her, of course not. You should have seen her, she weighed no more than a bag of cherries; there wasn't much of her. She'd never listen to a thing I said, she'd never see the doctor. Ah! You didn't gobble down your food in that house. She wanted her servants to be fed properly. And look at us, we hardly had time for a bite to eat this morning. It's all one big rush in this place.”
What exasperated her most were the slices of toast my father was in the habit of eating. She was convinced that he ate them out of affectation and to keep her “dancing attention.” “I have to admit,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw the likes of it.” He said this as if he had seen everything there was to see, and as if his range of experience included all countries and customs, among which the custom of eating toast was completely unknown. “Yes, yes,” muttered the butler, “but all that could come to an end, the workers are supposed to be going on strike in Canada, and the minister told Monsieur the other night that he'd got two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was no note of blame attached to the butler's remarks; not that he himself was not perfectly honest, but, because he thought that all politicians were dubious, the criminal misappropriation of public money seemed to him less serious than the pettiest case of larceny. It did not even occur to him that he might have misheard this historic remark, nor was he struck by the unlikelihood that the guilty party would have said it to my father without being asked to leave the house. But Combray philosophy did not allow Françoise to entertain the hope that strikes in Canada would have any effect on the consumption of toast. “Ah well, as long as the world is the way it is, there'll be masters to keep us on the trot, and servants to pander to their whims.” Notwithstanding this theory of perpetually trotting about, for the last quarter of an hour my mother, who probably did not have the same sense of time as Françoise in regard to the duration of the servants' midday meal, had been saying: “What on earth can they be up to? They've been at table for more than two hours.” And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, her footman, and the butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons and with no thought of answering it, but, rather, as the first sounds of instruments tuning up for the next part of a concert, when it is clear that there are only a few more minutes of the interval left to go. And so, when the bell rang again, more insistently, our servants began to take notice, and, judging that there was not much time left before they must take up their duties, when the bell rang once again, even more loudly this time, they each heaved a sigh and went their separate ways: the footman going down to smoke a cigarette outside; Françoise, after various remarks about us such as “They've really got the fidgets today,” up to the top floor to tidy her room; and the butler, after supplying himself with notepaper from my bedroom, to deal hurriedly with his private correspondence.
Despite the apparent haughtiness of their butler, Françoise had been able, from very early on, to inform me that the Guermantes did not occupy their hôtel because of some immemorial right, but were fairly recent tenants, and that the garden they overlooked on the side that was unknown to me was quite small and no different from all the other neighboring gardens; so I discovered at last that it contained no feudal gallows or fortified mill, no fishpond or pillared dovecote, no communal bakehouse, tithe barn, or fortress, no fixed bridges or drawbridges, not even flying bridges or toll bridges, no pointed towers, wall charters, or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when the bay at Balbec lost its mystery for me and became a nondescript part, interchangeable with any other, of the quantity of salt water spread over the globe, had suddenly restored it to something distinctive by revealing that it was the opal gulf Whistler painted in his Harmonies in Blue and Silver,9 so the name Guermantes had seen the last of the dwellings it evoked destroyed by Françoise's blows, when, one day, an old friend of my father's said to us, speaking of the Duchesse: “She has the highest status in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hers is the leading house in the Faubourg.” No doubt the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain counted as next to nothing beside all the other dwellings dreamed up in turn by my imagination. Yet this one, tooand it was to be the last however humble it was, possessed something that exceeded its material substance, some hidden quality of its own.
And it became all the more vital for me to be able to seek out in Mme de Guermantes's salon, among her friends, the mystery of her name, since I did not discover it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage. It is true that she had once appeared to me, in the church at Combray, in a momentary flash of transfiguration, with cheeks that were irreducible to, impervious to, the color of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, dislocating my shattered dream, like a god or a nymph changed into a swan or a willow and henceforth subjected to natural laws, gliding over the water or shaken by the wind. Yet scarcely had I left her presence when these vanished glints had come together again like the pink-and-green reflections of sunset behind the oar that has disturbed them, and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had been quick to appropriate my memory of the face. But now I often saw her at her window, in the courtyard, in the street; and if I did not manage to match the name Guermantes with her person, to think of her as Mme de Guermantes, I could at least put the blame on the failure of my mind to carry out completely the act I demanded of it; but she, too, our neighbor, seemed to be committing the same error, and committing it without a qualm, without any of my misgivings, without even suspecting that it was an error. Thus, in the way she dressed, Mme de Guermantes showed the same concern to follow fashion as if, in the belief that she had become a woman like any other, she had aspired to the sort of elegance in which ordinary women might equal or perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in the street look admiringly at a well-dressed actress; and in the morning, just as she was about to leave the house on foot, as if the opinion of people in the street, whose vulgarity she accentuated by parading her inaccessible life familiarly among them, might be there to pass judgment on her, I would see her in front of her mirror, where, with a conviction devoid of all pretense and irony, with passion, with ill-humor, with conceit, like a queen accepting the part of a servant girl in a comedy staged at court, she played out the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked the position of her veil, smoothed her cuffs, arranged her cape, as the divine swan goes through all the movements of his animal species, keeps his painted eyes on either side of his beak without any sign of movement in them, and then darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, behaving like a swan and forgetting that he is a god. But, like a traveler who is disappointed by his first impression of a city and who tells himself that he might perhaps penetrate its charm by visiting its museums, getting to know its inhabitants, and working in its libraries, I assured myself that, had I been a regular visitor to Mme de Guermantes's house, were I one of her circle, were I to enter into her life, I should then know what was really enclosed within the brilliant orange-colored envelope of her name, know it objectively, through the eyes of others, since, after all, my father's friend had said that the Guermantes were an exclusive set in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
The life I supposed them to be living stemmed from a source so different from anything I knew, and must, it seemed to me, be so special, that I could not have imagined the presence at the Duchesse's parties of the sort of people I had frequented so far, of people who really existed. For, incapable of suddenly changing their nature, they would have conducted conversations there in a way that was familiar to me; their partners would perhaps have stooped to answer them in the same human speech; and, in the course of an evening spent in the leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, there would have been moments identical to moments I had already experienced; but this was impossible. It is true that my mind was hampered by certain difficulties, and the presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the sacrament seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than that this leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was situated on the Right Bank and the fact that, every morning, from my bedroom, I could hear its carpets being beaten. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the Faubourg Saint-Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was purely ideal; I had a strong sense of its already being the Faubourg when I saw, spread out on the other side of this equator, the Guermantes doormat, of which my mother had been bold enough to say, having, like myself, caught sight of it one day when their door was open, that it was in a dreadful state.
Besides, how could their dining room, their dim gallery with its red plush furniture, which I could sometimes see from our kitchen window, have failed to possess for me the mysterious spell of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to form an essential part of it, to be geographically located within it, when to be invited into that dining room was to have gone into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to have breathed its air, since the people who sat down beside Mme de Guermantes on the leather sofa in the gallery before proceeding to table all belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain? No doubt, outside the Faubourg, at certain parties, majestically enthroned amid the vulgar herd of fashionable people, one might occasionally see one of those men who are no more than names, and who, when one tries to picture them, assume in turn the aspect of a tournament or of a royal forest. But here, in the leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the dim gallery, they were the only company. They were the columns, built with precious material, that upheld the temple. Even for intimate gatherings, it was from among them alone that Mme de Guermantes could select her guests, and in the dinner parties for twelve, assembled around the lavishly set table, they were like the golden statues of the apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle, symbolic and sanctifying pillars before the Lord's Table. As for the tiny patch of garden that lay behind high walls at the back of the house, where in summer Mme de Guermantes had liqueurs and orangeade served to her guests after dinner, how could I have failed to feel that to sit there between nine and eleven at night on its wrought-iron chairsthey had the same magic power as the leather sofaand not to breathe in the air peculiar to the Faubourg Saint- Germain, was as impossible as to take a siesta in the oasis of Figuig and not to be in Africa? Only imagination and belief can differentiate certain objects and people from the rest, and create a particular atmosphere. Alas, those picturesque sites, those natural features, those local curiosities and works of art of the Faubourg Saint-Germain would doubtless remain forbidden territory to me. So I made do with a twitch of excitement as I sighted from the open sea (without the least hope of ever landing), like a prominent minaret, like the first palm tree, like the first signs of exotic industry and vegetation, the well-trodden doormat of its shore.
But if for me the Hôtel de Guermantes began at the door to its entrance hall, its dependencies must have extended much farther in the estimation of the Duc de Guermantes, whoregarding all the tenants as farmers, villeins, acquisitors of national assets, whose views were of no importancestood shaving himself at his window in his nightshirt every morning, then came down into the courtyard, dressed, depending on the temperature, in his shirtsleeves, in pajamas, in a plaid jacket of unusual colors and a shaggy nap, in little light-colored waistcoats shorter than his jacket, and had one of his grooms lead past him at a trot some horse he had just purchased. On more than one occasion, the horse damaged Jupien's shopfront, and Jupien, to the Duc's indignation, demanded compensation. “If it were only out of respect for all the good work that Mme la Duchesse does here and in the parish,” said M. de Guermantes, “it's outrageous that this fellow should claim anything at all from us.” But Jupien had held his ground and appeared to be completely un-aware of what “good” the Duchesse had ever done. And yet she did do good, but, since we cannot do good to everyone at once, the memory of the help heaped on one person becomes a reason for not helping another, whose discontent is then all the more aroused. From other points of view that had nothing to do with good works, the neighborhood seemed to the Ducand this over a considerable areato be little more than an extension of his own courtyard, a longer track for his horses. After seeing how a newly purchased horse trotted on its own, he would have it harnessed and taken through all the streets in the area, the groom running alongside the carriage holding the reins, making it pass to and fro before the Duc, who stood there on the pavement, a giant, enormous in his light-colored clothes, a cigar between his teeth, his head in the air, his monocle alert, until the moment came when he jumped up onto the box, tried out the horse for himself, then set off with his new equipage to meet up with his mistress in the Champs-Élysées.
M. de Guermantes would bid good day in the courtyard to two couples who belonged more or less to his world: some cousins of his who, like working-class couples, were never at home to look after their children, since every morning the wife went off to study counterpoint and fugue at the Schola Cantorum, and the husband to carve wood and tool leather in his workshop; and then the Baron and the Baronne de Norpois, who were always dressed in black, she like a pew attendant and he like an undertaker, and who appeared several times a day on their way to church. They were the nephew and niece of the former ambassador we knew, whom my father had in fact met at the foot of the staircase without realizing where he was coming from; for, to my father's mind, such an important figure, who had consorted with the most eminent men in Europe and was probably quite indifferent to empty distinctions of social rank, was hardly likely to keep company with these obscure, clerical, and narrow-minded nobles. They were newcomers to the place; Jupien, who had come out into the courtyard to say something to the husband, who was in the process of greeting M. de Guermantes, called him “M. Norpois,” uncertain of his real title.
“So it's M. Norpois, is it? How very original! Just wait and see!
This individual will be calling you Citizen Norpois next!” exclaimed M. de Guermantes, turning to the Baron. He had finally found the opportunity to give vent to his rancor against Jupien, who addressed him as “Monsieur” and not as “M. le Duc.”
One day, when M. de Guermantes needed some advice that my father was professionally qualified to give, he had introduced himself with great courtesy. After that, he had often some neighborly service to ask of my father, and as soon as he saw him coming downstairs, his mind occupied by work and anxious to avoid meeting anyone, the Duc would leave his stable boys and come up to him in the courtyard, straighten the collar of his greatcoat with the obliging attentiveness he had inherited from a line of royal valets, take his hand and hold it in his own, stroking it even, to prove to him, with the shamelessness of a courtesan, that he did not begrudge him the honor of contact with his noble flesh, and then lead him off, extremely disgruntled, and bent only on escape, to the carriage entrance and out into the street. He had run into us and greeted us effusively one day, as he was setting out in the carriage with his wife; he must have told her my name, but what chance was there of her remembering either my name or my face? And, besides, what a feeble recommendation, to be pointed out merely as one of her tenants! It would have been more effective to meet the Duchesse at the house of Mme de Villeparisis, who had, as it happened, sent a message through my grandmother that I was to pay her a visit and, knowing that I had been intending to pursue a literary career, had added that I would meet various writers at her house. But my father felt that I was still rather young to go into society, and since the state of my health was a continuing cause of concern to him, he was not keen to provide me with fresh opportunities for leaving the house when I did not have to.
Since one of Mme de Guermantes's footmen spent a lot of time gossiping with Françoise, I heard the names of several of the salons she frequented, but was unable to picture any of them: once they were part of her life, the life I could see only through the screen of her name, were they not inconceivable?
“There's a big shadow-theater party tonight at the Princess of Parma's,” said the footman, “but we won't be going, because Madame is taking the five o'clock train to Chantilly and spending a couple of days with the Duc d'Aumale. But it's her maid and the valet who are going with her. I'm to stay here. She won't be at all pleased, will the Princess of Parma? She's written to Mme la Duchesse four times or more.”
“Then you're not off to the Guermantes château this year?”
“It's the first time we're not going. Because of M. le Duc's rheumatism; the doctor says he's not to go there again until they get a heating boiler installed, but we've been there every year so far, right through to January. If the boiler's not ready, Madame will probably go to Cannes for a few days, to the Duchesse de Guise's, but that's still to be decided.”
“And do you ever get to the theater?”
“We sometimes go to the Opéra. Sometimes when the Princess of Parma has her box. That's once a week. They do really good things there by all accountsplays, operas, everything. Mme la Duchesse didn't want to take out a subscription herself, but that doesn't stop us from going to the boxes of one or another of Madame's friends. It's often the Princesse de Guermantes, the wife of M. le Duc's cousin. She's sister to the Duc de Bavière.... So you're off again upstairs, are you?” said the footman. Although he was identified with the Guermantes, he regarded “masters” in general in a political light that allowed him to treat Françoise with as much respect as if she, too, were in service with a duchess. “I see you're in good health, madame.”
“Oh, if it weren't for these blasted legs of mine! I'm all right on the plain” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in the street, where Françoise was not averse to walkingin other words, on the flat) “but it's these dratted stairs. Goodbye, monsieur. Perhaps I'll see you again this evening.”
She was all the more eager to continue her conversations with the footman after he told her that the sons of dukes often bore a princely title, which they retained until the fathers were dead. Clearly the cult of nobility, accommodatingly mingled with a certain spirit of revolt against it, and springing hereditarily from the soil of France, must be strongly ingrained in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of Napoleon's genius or of wireless telegraphy without managing to attract her attention and without her pausing for a moment in her work as she cleared the grate or set the table, at the least hint of such details as learning that the younger son of the Duc de Guerman tes was generally called the Prince d'Oléron, would burst out with, “Isn't that lovely!” and stand there in wonder, as though in front of a stained-glass window.
Françoise had also learned from the Prince d'Agrigente's valet, who had become friendly with her because he often called round to deliver letters to the Duchesse, that there had been a great deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d'Ambresac, and that it was virtually settled.
The particular villa, the particular opera box into which Mme de Guermantes decanted her life were places I saw as no less magical than her home. The names Guise, Parma, Guermantes-Bavière differentiated from all others the holiday places to which the Duchesse went, the daily festivities that the track of her carriage wheels linked to her mansion. If they told me that the life of Mme de Guermantes consisted of a succession of such holidays and festivities, they enlightened me no further on the subject. Each name gave a different determination to the Duchesse's life, yet merely added a change of mystery without allowing any of its own mystery to escape, so that it simply moved about, protected by an impenetrable barrier, enclosed in a vase, amid the waves of other people's lives. The Duchesse could have lunch beside the Mediterranean at Carnival time, but in the villa of Mme de Guise, where the queen of Parisian society was no more, in her white piqué dress, and amid numerous princesses, than a guest like any other, yet on that account more moving still to me, more herself by being made new, like a prima ballerina who, in an elaborate dance figure, takes the place of each of her sister ballerinas in turn; she could look at shadow-theater performances, but at a party given by the Princess of Parma; she could listen to tragedy or opera, but from the Princesse de Guermantes's box.
Since we localize in a person's body all the potentialities of that person's life, the memory of the people they know and have just left or are on their way to meet, if, after discovering through Françoise that Mme de Guermantes was going on foot to luncheon with the Princess of Parma, I saw her coming down around midday in her flesh-colored satin dress, above which her face was of the same shade, like a cloud at sunset, what I saw before me were all the pleasures of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, contained in that small volume, as though between the lustrous pearl-pink valves of a shell.
My father had a friend at the ministry, a certain A.-J. Moreau, who, to distinguish himself from other people named Moreau, always took care to prefix his name with his two initials, and so became known as “A.-J.” for short. For some reason or other, this A.-J. found himself in possession of an orchestra ticket for a gala night at the Opéra; he sent the ticket to my father, and since La Berma, whom I had not seen onstage since my first disappointing experience, was to appear in an act of Phèdre, my grandmother saw to it that my father gave the ticket to me.
To tell the truth, I set no great store by this opportunity of seeing La Berma perform, which a few years earlier had thrown me into such a state of overexcitement. And it was not without a feeling of melancholy that I registered my indifference to something I had previously put before my health and peace of mind. My need to be able to contemplate closely the precious particles of reality glimpsed by my imagination had not diminished; it was not that. But I no longer imagined them to be found in the diction of a great actress; since my visits to Elstir, it was to certain tapestries, to certain modern paintings that I had transferred the inner allegiance I had formerly given to the acting and the tragic art of La Berma; since my allegiance and my enthusiasm no longer came to pay incessant worship to the diction and the stage presence of La Berma, the “double” I possessed of them in my heart had gradually shriveled away like those other “doubles” of the deceased in ancient Egypt, which needed to be nourished constantly in order to ensure the life of their souls. La Berma's art had become pathetically thin. It was no longer inhabited by a profundity of soul.
Table of Contents
Introduction | vii | |
A Note on the Translation | xv | |
Suggestions for Further Reading | xvii | |
Part I1 | ||
Part II307 | ||
Chapter 1309 | ||
Chapter 2342 | ||
Notes | 597 | |
Synopsis | 611 |
What People are Saying About This
It is marvelously about life. It reminds me of Dickens, Shakespeare, Moliere. Proust was, among other things, one of the great comic writers of all time.
There has never been anyone else of Proust's ability to show us things; Proust's pointing finger is unequaled.
Reading Group Guide
1. Time is a central concern for Proust, appearing first in the title and last as the final word of the novel. What is his vision of the past? Does he have a vision of the present? The future? Can the Narrator be said to be living in the past? Is he like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, with "jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today"?
2. The renowned translator of Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, originally grouped the opening section of In Search of Lost Time under the title "The Overture, " which includes two famous passages, the good night kiss and the evocative taste of the madeleine. Does this seem apt? If so, how might this fifty-odd page beginning prefigure what will transpire later? What would you expect to follow, given that an overture usually introduces the main themes of a musical work? What does it suggest about Proust's conception of literature and music?
3. The episode of the good night kiss strikes some readers as odd or contradictory: the Narrator's need for a kiss seems almost infantile, while his power of observation seems extraordinarily precocious. Considering that he is sent to bed at eight o'clock, how old do you think the Narrator is? Is it significant that his father suggests the Narrator be given the kiss he craves, whereas his mother is reluctant, saying "We mustn't let the child get into the habit . . ."? Is the fact that the Narrator succeeds in getting the kiss he wants a good thing or a bad thing? Why?
4. "The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup, " observed Samuel Beckett. Indeed the episode of the madeleine dipped in tea is the first (and most famous) of numerous instances of"involuntary memory" in the novel. A recognized psychological phenomenon triggered by smells, tastes, or sounds, involuntary memory vividly reproduces emotions, sensations, or images from the past. Why do you think readers and critics universally consider this scene to be pivotal? What does the Narrator think about the experience of involuntary memory? What might its function be in the scheme of In Search of Lost Time?
5. Another emblematic theme involves the recurring "little phrase" of music by Vinteuil that catches the ear of Swann at the Verdurin's salon and steals into his life. How do Vinteuil's compositions stir both Swann and the Narrator? In Proust's scheme of things, is music a higher art than painting or writing because it can produce involuntary memories? How does involuntary memory affect writing and painting? Is it unrelated to art except as a necessary catalyst?
6. In "Combray" we are introduced to the Narrator's family, their household, and their country home. Since Paris is the true heart of upper-class France, why do you think Proust chose to begin In Search of Lost Time elsewhere? What do we learn from the Narrator's description of his family's life and habits? Is the household dominated by men or by women? Does the Narrator's account seem accurate, or is it colored by his own ideas and preoccupations?
7. A madeleine dipped into a cup of tea first impelled Proust into the "remembrance of things past." Though Proust was a gourmet in his youth, in the final years of his life he subsisted mainly on fillets of sole, chicken, fried potatoes, ice cream, cakes, fruit, and iced beer. Consider how food and culinary happenings - from meals at the restaurant in the Grand Hotel in Balbec to dinners at La Raspelière and the Guermantes's in Paris - form an integral part of the work.
8. Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way are presented as mutually exclusive choices for promenades, with Swann's Way given primacy of place at the novel's outset. Where, metaphorically speaking, does Swann's Way seem to lead? What are the aesthetic signposts and milestones the Narrator points out? What does the landscape around Combray represent?
9. "I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature, " Proust once said. In his description of the area around Combray - and in many other places in the novel - the Narrator describes churches, and particularly steeples. Indeed, Howard Moss cites the steeple as one of Proust's most important symbols. In religious architecture, the steeple represents man's aspiration toward God, and by inference toward Art, the Proustian religion. What else might it suggest? Does it have a counterpart in nature?
10. Proust and the Narrator share an appreciation of gardens and flowers - Proust himself was eager to visit Monet's celebrated garden - and in a sense, all Combray can be seen as a garden. What associations does this evoke? How does the Narrator respond to natural beauty? What do flowers mean to him? How do we know?
11. Proust's work is filled with "doubling" - the most obvious being the identification of the author with a fictional self of the same name but with somewhat different characteristics. Is Swann a double of the Narrator? What qualities do they share? In what ways do they seem different? What is the importance of the fact that Swann is a Jew?
12. Louis Auchincloss questions the use of a fictional first person named "Marcel, " who is but isn't Proust. Marcel claims that he is neither a snob nor a homosexual, yet he is obsessed with both. Would Proust have strengthened Marcel's viewpoint by making it that of the young social climber that he himself so clearly was? Did he enhance or detract from Marcel's credibility by casting him as one of the few heterosexuals in the book? Does it matter that Marcel regards "inversion" as a dangerous vice? Did Proust?
13. "Swann in Love" might be thought of as a dress rehearsal for the Narrator's own performance, and Swann's passion for Odette establishes a model for various other love relationships that appear later in the book. Proust believed that all emotions and behavior obey certain psychological laws. E. M. Forster maintained that "Proust's general theory of human intercourse is that the fonder we are of people the less we understand them - the theory of the complete pessimist." Do you agree? How does Swann's love affair reflect this? What conclusions does the Narrator draw from his perception of Swann's experience? In what way does this differ from Swann's own view?
14. The Balbec sequence of Within a Budding Grove gathers a group of the novel's principal characters, many for the first time: Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus, and Albertine, to name three of the most important. Others begin to emerge in their true significance, like Elstir the painter. Why do you think Proust chose to bring them together in Balbec? In what ways does Balbec echo or amplify Combray? Is the little "society" of Balbec a preview in microcosm of Paris?
15. While writing In Search of Lost Time Proust often rummaged through his vast photographic collection of Belle Époque luminaries as a means of stimulating his memory. "You could see that his thoughts were following a kind of underground track, as if he were organizing everything into images before putting them into words, " recalled his maid Céleste Albaret. Indeed, the Baron de Charlus, in Within a Budding Grove, speaks of the special importance of photographs in preserving an unsullied moment of time past, before it has been altered by the present. Discuss how Proust used photographs in the story - just as he exploited the technology of trains, cars, and airplanes - as symbols of passing time.
16. In his landmark essay on Proust, Edmund Wilson praises the broad Dickensian humor and extravagant satire that animate vast sections of In Search of Lost Time, yet he goes on to call it "one of the gloomiest books ever written." Can you reconcile Wilson's remarks?
17. Critic Barbara Bucknall maintains that "no Proustian lover really cares at all for his beloved's feelings." Is this true? Would the Narrator agree? Would the author? Are there any happy or satisfied couples in In Search of Lost Time? Or is love in Proust inevitably a prelude to misunderstanding?
18. "Proust's stage [is] vaster than any since Balzac's, and packed with a human comedy as multifarious, " said Edith Wharton. Discuss Proust's depiction of the elaborate hierarchy of French society - from the old nobility of the Faubourg to la haute bourgeoisie, from rich and cultivated Jews to celebrated artists - that forms the great backdrop to In Search of Lost Time. What cracks appear in the aristocratic world of the Guermantes that make us realize it is slowly crumbling? What forces stand ready to propel Mme. Verdurin and her bourgeois salon upward on the social ladder? In recording this change is Proust, in fact, chronicling the birth of modern society?
19. The title Sodom and Gomorrah functions on many levels. What does it suggest about the nature of society? What new areas does it open up? How does the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah relate to Proust's characters? Since the very nature of In Search of Lost Time involves looking backward, should we expect a parallel between the Narrator and Lot's wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt?
20. Critics agree that Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of In Search of Lost Time. If the first three volumes represented the Overture and the first movement of Proust's great composition, with Balbec as an interlude, then the second movement begins here. What seems different? In what ways have the Narrator's preoccupations changed? Are these changes reflected in Proust's style or tone?
21. The Narrator's explicit initiation into the nature of homosexuality occurs while he is waiting in the courtyard of the Duchesse de Guermantes to observe the pollination of her orchid, from which he is distracted by Charlus and Jupien. What is the effect of this particular juxtaposition? Since flowers and insects have already been established as symbols of eros in nature, is this a veiled comment on the "unnatural"? Is the Narrator observing the two men in the same way as he observes the flower? Is his unconcern with being a voyeur connected to the writer's role as an observer of the world in all its aspects? Edith Wharton found the scene offensive and deemed it a lapse in Proust's "moral sensibility." Why?
22. Many crucial sexual scenes in Proust, including the one just mentioned, are witnessed through the "lenses" of windows, which become a commanding metaphor in the novel. Consider how Proust first introduces the window device by way of the magic lantern slides in Marcel's bedroom at Combray. How are windows analogous to Proust's notion of viewing life through a telescope, an instrument that propels images through dimensions of both space and time?
23. The Captive and The Fugitive show the Narrator acting out his own version of the grand passions he has observed so keenly and dispassionately in others. But when it comes to his own affairs, Howard Moss says that the Narrator's greatest lie is that he is objective with respect to Albertine. To whom is the Narrator lying, the reader or himself? Is he aware of his lack of perspective? If he is mistaken about one of the most important relationships in his life, can readers trust his observations about other subjects and people?