The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (215 page)

As for social activities, Mme de Guermantes enjoyed yet another arbitrarily theatrical pleasure in expressing thereon some of those unexpected judgments which whipped the Princesse de Parme into a state of perpetual and delicious surprise. In the case of this particular pleasure of the Duchess’s, it was not so much with the help of literary criticism as from the example of political life and the reports of parliamentary debates that I tried to understand in what it might consist. The successive and contradictory edicts by which Mme de Guermantes continually reversed the scale of values among the people of her world no longer sufficing to distract her, she sought also in the manner in which she ordered her own social behaviour, in which she accounted for her own most trifling decisions on points of fashion, to savour those artificial emotions, to fulfil those factitious obligations, which stir the feelings of parliaments and impress themselves on the minds of politicians. We know that when a minister explains to the Chamber that he believed himself to be acting rightly in following a line of conduct which does indeed appear quite straightforward to the commonsense person who reads the report of the sitting in his newspaper next morning, this commonsense reader nevertheless feels suddenly stirred and begins to doubt whether he has been right in approving the minister’s conduct when he sees that the latter’s speech was listened to in an uproar and punctuated with expressions of condemnation such as: “It’s most serious!” pronounced by a Deputy whose name and titles are so long, and followed in the report by reactions so emphatic, that in the whole interruption the words “It’s most serious!” occupy less room than a hemistich in an alexandrine. For instance in the days when M. de Guermantes, Prince des Laumes, sat in the Chamber, one used to read now and then in the Paris newspapers, although it was intended primarily for the Méséglise constituency, to show the electors there that they had not given their votes to an inactive or voiceless representative:

MONSIEUR DE GUERMANTES—BOUILLON, PRINCE DES LAUMES
: “This is serious!” (“
Hear, hear!
”
from the centre and some of the benches on the right, loud exclamations from the extreme left
.)

The commonsense reader still retains a glimmer of loyalty to the sage minister, but his heart is convulsed with a fresh palpitation by the first words of the speaker who rises to reply:

“The astonishment, it is not too much to say the stupor” (
keen sensation on the right side of the House
) “that I have felt at the words of one who is still, I presume, a member of the Government …” (
thunderous applause; several Deputies then rush towards the ministerial bench. The Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs, without rising from his seat, gives an affirmative nod
.)

This “thunderous applause” carries away the last shred of resistance in the mind of the commonsense reader: he regards as an insult to the Chamber, monstrous in fact, a way of proceeding which in itself is of no great significance. It may be some quite straightforward item, such as wanting to make the rich pay more than the poor, bringing to light some piece of injustice, preferring peace to war, but he will find it scandalous and will see it as an offence to certain principles to which in fact he had never given a thought, which are not engraved in the heart of man, but which move him strongly by reason of the acclamations which they provoke and the majorities which they assemble.

It must at the same time be recognised that this subtlety of the politician which served to explain to me the Guermantes circle, and other groups in society later on, is no more than the perversion of a certain nicety of interpretation often described by the expression “reading between the lines.” If in representative assemblies there is absurdity owing to the perversion of this quality, there is equally stupidity, through the lack of it, in the public who take everything literally, who do not suspect a dismissal when a high dignitary is relieved of his office “at his own request,” and say: “He cannot have been dismissed, since it was he who asked to go,” or a defeat when, in the face of the Japanese advance, the Russians by a strategic manoeuvre fall back on stronger positions, prepared in advance, or a refusal when, a province having demanded its independence from the German Emperor, he grants it religious autonomy. It is possible, moreover (to revert to these sittings of the Chamber), that when they open the Deputies themselves are like the commonsense person who will read the published report. Learning that certain workers on strike have sent their delegates to confer with a minister, they may ask themselves naïvely: “There now, I wonder what they can have been saying; let’s hope it’s all settled,” at the moment when the minister himself rises to address the House in a solemn silence which has already brought artificial emotions into play. The minister’s first words: “There is no necessity for me to inform the Chamber that I have too high a sense of what is the duty of the Government to have received a deputation of which the authority entrusted to me could take no cognisance,” produce a dramatic effect, for this was the one hypothesis which the commonsense of the Deputies had failed to foresee. But precisely because of its dramatic effect it is greeted with such applause that it is only after several minutes have passed that the minister can succeed in making himself heard, and on returning to his bench he will receive the congratulations of his colleagues. They are as deeply moved as on the day when the same minister failed to invite to a big official reception the chairman of the municipal council who supported the Opposition, and they declare that on this occasion as on the other he has acted with true statesmanship.

M. de Guermantes at this period of his life had, to the great scandal of the Courvoisiers, frequently been among the crowd of Deputies who came forward to congratulate the minister. I later heard it said that even at a time when he was playing a fairly important role in the Chamber and was being thought of in connexion with ministerial office or an embassy, he was, when a friend came to ask a favour of him, infinitely more simple, behaved politically a great deal less like a person of importance, than anyone else who did not happen to be Duc de Guermantes. For if he said that nobility was of no account, that he regarded his colleagues as equals, he did not believe it for a moment. He sought, and pretended to value, but really despised political position, and as he remained in his own eyes M. de Guermantes it did not envelop his person in that starchiness of high office which makes others unapproachable. And in this way his pride protected against every assault not only his manners, which were of an ostentatious familiarity, but also such true simplicity as he might actually possess.

To return to those artificial and dramatic decisions of hers, so like those of politicians, Mme de Guermantes was no less disconcerting to the Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in general and, more than anyone, the Princesse de Parme, in her habit of issuing unaccountable decrees behind which one sensed latent principles which impressed one all the more the less one was aware of them. If the new Greek Minister gave a fancy-dress ball, everyone chose a costume and wondered what the Duchess would wear. One thought that she would appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne, another suggested as probable the guise of Princess of Deryabar, a third Psyche. Finally a Courvoisier, having asked her: “What are you going as, Oriane?”, provoked the one response of which nobody had thought: “Why, nothing at all!”, which at once set every tongue wagging, as revealing Oriane’s opinion as to the true social position of the new Greek Minister and the proper attitude to adopt towards him, that is to say the opinion which ought to have been foreseen, namely that a duchess “wasn’t obliged” to attend the fancy-dress ball given by this new minister. “I don’t see that there’s any necessity to go to the Greek Minister’s. I don’t know him; I’m not Greek; why should I go to his house? I have nothing to do with him,” said the Duchess.

“But everybody will be there, they say it’s going to be charming!” cried Mme de Gallardon.

“But it’s just as charming sometimes to sit by one’s own fireside,” replied Mme de Guermantes.

The Courvoisiers could not get over this, but the Guermantes, without copying their cousin, approved: “Naturally, everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all the conventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she’s wrong to want to show that we do go rather too far in grovelling before these foreigners who appear from heaven knows where.”

Naturally, knowing the stream of comment which one or other attitude would not fail to provoke, Mme de Guermantes took as much pleasure in appearing at a party to which her hostess had not dared to count on her coming as in staying at home or spending the evening at the theatre with her husband on the night of a party to which “everybody was going,” or, again, when people imagined that she would eclipse the finest diamonds with some historic diadem, by stealing into the room without a single jewel, and in another style of dress than what had been wrongly supposed to be essential to the occasion. Although she was anti-Dreyfusard (while believing Dreyfus to be innocent, just as she spent her life in the social world while believing only in ideas), she had created an enormous sensation at a party at the Princesse de Ligne’s, first of all by remaining seated when all the ladies had risen to their feet as General Mercier entered the room, and then by getting up and asking for her carriage in a loud voice when a nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby showing that she did not consider that society was meant for talking politics in; and all heads had turned towards her at a Good Friday concert at which, although a Voltairean, she had refused to remain because she thought it indecent to bring Christ on the stage. We know how important, even for the great queens of society, is that moment of the year at which the round of entertainment begins: so much so that the Marquise d’Amoncourt, who, from a need to say something, a psychological quirk, and also from a lack of sensitivity, was always making a fool of herself, had actually replied to somebody who had called to condole with her on the death of her father, M. de Montmorency: “What perhaps makes it still sadder is that it should come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed with cards!” Well, at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, hurrying so as to make sure that she was not already engaged, she declined for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought: she was just setting off on a cruise in the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. The fashionable world was stunned, and, without any thought of following the Duchess’s example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one had ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called “the season.” The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many receptions, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opéra and Tuesdays at the Comédie-Française to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
, but conveyed to them a similar impression of independence and charm. So that not a day passed on which somebody might not be heard to ask, not merely: “You’ve heard Oriane’s latest joke?” but “You know Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest” as on “Oriane’s latest joke” would follow the comment: “How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure Oriane?” Oriane’s latest might be, for instance, that, having to write on behalf of a patriotic society to Cardinal X——, Bishop of Mâcon (whom M. de Guermantes when he spoke of him invariably called “Monsieur de Mascon,” thinking this to be “old French”), when everyone was trying to imagine what form the letter would take, and had no difficulty as to the opening words, the choice lying between “Eminence” and “Monseigneur,” but was puzzled as to the rest, Oriane’s letter, to the general astonishment, began: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” following an old academic form, or: “My cousin,” this term being in use among the Princes of the Church, the Guermantes and crowned heads, who prayed to God to take each and all of them into “His fit and holy keeping.” To start people on the topic of an “Oriane’s latest” it was sufficient that at a performance at which all Paris was present and a most charming play was being given, when they looked for Mme de Guermantes in the boxes of the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Guermantes, countless other ladies who had invited her, they discovered her sitting by herself, in black, with a tiny hat on her head, in a stall in which she had arrived before the curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening to,” she explained, to the scandal of the Courvoisiers and the admiring bewilderment of the Guermantes and the Princesse de Parme, who suddenly discovered that the “fashion” of hearing the beginning of a play was more up to date, was a proof of greater originality and intelligence (which need not astonish them, coming from Oriane) than arriving for the last act after a big dinner-party and having put in an appearance at a reception. Such were the various kinds of surprise for which the Princesse de Parme knew that she ought to be prepared if she put a literary or social question to Mme de Guermantes, and because of which, during these dinner-parties at Oriane’s, Her Royal Highness never ventured upon the slightest topic save with the uneasy and enraptured prudence of the bather emerging from between two breakers.

Among the elements which, absent from the three or four other more or less equivalent salons that set the fashion for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, differentiated that of the Duchesse de Guermantes from them, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while reflecting the entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one of the least attractive was habitually furnished by one or two extremely good-looking women who had no other right to be there but their beauty and the use that M. de Guermantes had made of them, and whose presence revealed at once, as does in other drawing-rooms that of certain otherwise unaccountable pictures, that in this household the husband was an ardent appreciator of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for the Duke had a taste for tall women, at once statuesque and airy, of a type half-way between the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory; often fair, rarely dark, sometimes auburn, like the most recent, who was at this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Arpajon whom he had loved so well that for a long time he had obliged her to send him as many as ten telegrams daily (which slightly irritated the Duchess) and corresponded with her by carrier pigeon when he was at Guermantes, and from whom moreover he had long been so incapable of tearing himself away that, one winter which he had had to spend at Parma, he travelled back regularly every week to Paris, spending two days in the train, in order to see her.