The fragmentary Gilberte of today listened to my request with a smile and then assumed a serious air as she gave it her consideration. I was pleased to see this, for it prevented her from paying attention to a group which it could hardly have been agreeable for her to observe. In this group was the Duchesse de Guermantes, deep in conversation with a hideous old woman whom I studied without being able to guess in the least who she was—she seemed to be a complete stranger to me. It was in fact to Rachel, that is to say to the actress, the famous actress now, who was going to recite some poems by Victor Hugo and La Fontaine in the course of this party, that Gilberte’s aunt was talking. For the Duchess, too long conscious that she occupied the foremost social position in Paris and failing to realise that a position of this kind exists only in the minds of those who believe in it and that many newcomers to the social scene, if they never saw her anywhere and never read her name in the account of any fashionable entertainment, would suppose that she occupied no position at all, now scarcely saw—except when, as seldom as possible, and then with a yawn, she paid a few calls—the Faubourg Saint-Germain which, she said, bored her to death, and instead did what amused her, which was to lunch with this or that actress whom she declared to be enchanting. In the new circles which she frequented, having remained much more like her old self than she supposed, she continued to think that to be easily bored was a mark of intellectual superiority, but she expressed this sentiment now with a positive violence which turned her voice into a hoarse bellow. When, for instance, I mentioned Brichot, “Tedious man!” she broke in, “how he has bored me for the last twenty years!,” and when Mme de Cambremer was heard to say: “You must re-read what Schopenhauer says about music,” the Duchess drew our attention to this phrase by exclaiming: “Re-read is pretty rich, I must say. Who does she think she’s fooling?” Old M. d’Albon smiled, recognising in this outburst a sample of the Guermantes wit. In Gilberte, who was more modern, it evoked no response. Daughter of Swann though she was, like a duckling hatched by a hen she was more romantically minded than her father. “I find that most touching,” she would say, or: “He has a charming sensibility.”
I told Mme de Guermantes that I had met M. de Charlus. She found him much more “altered” for the worse than in fact he was, for people in society make distinctions, in the matter of intelligence, not only between different members of their set between whom there is really nothing to choose in this respect, but also, in a single individual, between different phases of his life. Then she went on: “He has always been the image of my mother-in-law, but now the likeness is even more striking.” There was nothing very extraordinary in this resemblance: it is well known that women sometimes so to speak project themselves into another human being with the most perfect accuracy, with the sole error of a transposition of sex. This, however, is an error of which one can scarcely say: “felix culpa,” for the sex has repercussions upon the personality, so that in a man femininity becomes affectation, reserve touchiness and so on. Nevertheless, in the face, though it may be bearded, in the cheeks, florid as they are beneath their side-whiskers, there are certain lines which might have been traced from some maternal portrait. Almost every aged Charlus is a ruin in which one may recognise with astonishment, beneath all the layers of paint and powder, some fragments of a beautiful woman preserved in eternal youth. While we were talking, Morel came in. The Duchess treated him with a civility which disconcerted me a little. “I never take sides in family quarrels,” she said. “Don’t you find them boring, family quarrels?”
If in a period of twenty years, like this that had elapsed since my first entry into society, the conglomerations of social groups had disintegrated and re-formed under the magnetic influence of new stars destined themselves also to fade away and then to reappear, the same sequence of crystallisation followed by dissolution and again by a fresh crystallisation might have been observed to take place within the consciousness of individuals. If for me Mme de Guermantes had been many people, for Mme de Guermantes or for Mme Swann there were many individuals who had been a favoured friend in an era that preceded the Dreyfus Affair, only to be branded as a fanatic or an imbecile when the supervention of the Affair modified the accepted values of people and brought about a new configuration of parties, itself of brief duration, since later they had again disintegrated and re-formed. And what serves most powerfully to promote this renewal of old friendships, adding its influence to any purely intellectual affinities, is simply the passage of Time, which causes us to forget our antipathies and our disdains and even the reasons which once explained their existence. Had one analysed the fashionableness of the young Mme de Cambremer, one would have found that she was the niece of Jupien, a tradesman who lived in our house, and that the additional circumstance which had launched her on her social ascent was that her uncle had procured men for M. de Charlus. But all this combined had produced effects that were dazzling, while the causes were already remote and not merely unknown to many people but also forgotten by those who had once known them and whose minds now dwelt much more upon her present brilliance than upon the ignominy of her past, since people always accept a name at its current valuation. So that these drawing-room transformations possessed a double interest: they were both a phenomenon of the memory and an effect of Lost Time.
The Duchess still hesitated, for fear of a scene with M. de Guermantes, to make overtures to Balthy and Mistinguett, whom she found adorable, but with Rachel she was definitely on terms of friendship. From this the younger generation concluded that the Duchesse de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some sort of demi-rep who had never quite belonged to the best society. There were, it was true, a few reigning princes (the honour of whose familiar friendship two other great ladies disputed with her) whom Mme de Guermantes still took the trouble to invite to luncheon. But on the one hand kings and queens do not often come to see you and their acquaintances are sometimes people of no social position, and then the Duchess, with the superstitious respect of the Guermantes for old-fashioned protocol (for while well-bred people bored her to tears, she was at the same time horrified by any departure from good manners), would put on her invitation cards: “Her Majesty has commanded the Duchesse de Guermantes,” or “has deigned,” etc. And newcomers to society, in their ignorance of these formulae, inferred that their use was simply a sign of the Duchess’s lowly situation. From the point of view of Mme de Guermantes herself, this intimacy with Rachel signified perhaps that we had been mistaken when we supposed her to be hypocritical and untruthful in her condemnations of a purely fashionable life, when we imagined that in refusing to go and see Mme de Saint-Eu verte she acted in the name not of intelligence but of snobbery, finding the Marquise stupid only because, not having yet attained her goal, she allowed her snobbery to appear on the surface. But the intimacy with Rachel might also signify that the intelligence of the Duchess was no more than commonplace, but had remained unsatisfied and at a late hour, when she was tired of society, had driven her, totally ignorant as she was of the veritable realities of the intellectual life, to seek for intellectual fulfilment with a touch of that spirit of fantasy which can cause perfectly respectable ladies, thinking to themselves: “How amusing it will be!,” to end an evening with a prank which is in fact deadly dull: you go off and wake up some acquaintance and then, when you are in his room, you don’t know what to say, so, after standing awkwardly by his bed for a few moments in your evening clothes and realising how late it is, there is nothing left to do but go home to bed yourself.
One must add that the antipathy which the changeable Duchess had recently come to feel for Gilberte may have caused her to take a certain pleasure in receiving Rachel, a course of conduct which enabled her also to proclaim aloud one of the favourite Guermantes maxims, to wit, that the family was too numerous for its members to have to espouse one another’s quarrels (or even, some might have said, to take notice of one another’s bereavements), an independence, a spirit of “I can’t see that I am obliged” which had
been reinforced by the policy that it had been necessary to adopt with regard to M. de Charlus, who, had you followed him, would have involved you in hostilities with all your acquaintances.
As for Rachel, if the truth was that she had taken very great pains to form this friendship with the Duchesse de Guermantes (pains which the Duchess had failed to detect beneath a mask of simulated disdain and deliberate incivility, which had put her on her mettle and given her an exalted idea of an actress so little susceptible to snobbery), this was no doubt in a general fashion an effect of the fascination which after a certain time the world of high society exercises upon even the most hardened bohemians, a fascination paralleled by that which the same bohemians themselves exercise upon people in society, flux and reflux which correspond to—in the political order—the reciprocal curiosity, the desire to form a mutual alliance, of two nations which have recently been at war with each other. But Rachel’s desire had possibly a more particular cause. It was in Mme de Guermantes’s house, it was at the hands of Mme de Guermantes herself, that she had in the past suffered the most terrible humiliation of her life. This snub Rachel had with the passage of time neither forgotten nor forgiven, but the singular prestige which the event had conferred upon the Duchess in her eyes could never be effaced.
The conversation from which I was anxious to divert Gilberte’s attention was, in any case, presently interrupted, for the mistress of the house came in search of the actress to tell her that the moment for her recital had arrived. She left the Duchess and a little later appeared upon the platform.
Meanwhile at the other end of Paris there was taking place a spectacle of a very different kind. Mme Berma, as I have said, had invited a number of people to a tea-party in honour of her daughter and her son-in-law. But the guests were in no hurry to arrive. Having learnt that Rachel was to recite poetry at the Princesse de Guermantes’s (which utterly scandalised Berma, who from her own lofty position as a great artist looked down on Rachel as still no more than a kept woman who, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses which she wore on the stage, was allowed to appear in the plays in which she herself, Berma, took the leading roles—and scandalised her all the more because a rumour had run round Paris that, though the invitations were in the name of the Princesse de Guermantes, it was in effect Rachel who was acting as hostess in the Princess’s house), Berma had written a second time to certain faithful friends to insist that they should not miss her tea-party, for she was aware that they were also friends of the Princesse de Guermantes, whom they had known when she was Mme Verdurin. And now the hours were passing, and still nobody arrived to visit Berma. Bloch, having been asked whether he meant to come, had ingenuously replied: “No, I would rather go to the Princesse de Guermantes’s,” and this, alas! was what everyone in his heart of hearts had decided. Berma, who suffered from a deadly disease which had obliged her to cut down her social activities to a minimum, had seen her condition deteriorate when, in order to pay for the luxurious existence which her daughter demanded and her son-in-law, ailing and idle, was unable to provide, she had returned to the stage. She knew that she was shortening her days, but she wanted to give pleasure to her daughter, to whom she handed over the large sums that she earned, and to a son-in-law whom she detested but flattered—for she feared, knowing that his wife adored him, that if she, Berma, did not do what he wanted, he might, out of spite, deprive her of the happiness of seeing her child. This child, with whom secretly the doctor who looked after her husband was in love, had allowed herself to be persuaded that these performances in Phèdre were not really dangerous for her mother. She had more or less forced the doctor to tell her this, or rather of all that he had said to her about her mother’s health she had retained only this in her memory, the truth being that, in the midst of various objections of which she had taken no notice, he had remarked that he saw no grave harm in Berma’s appearing on the stage. He had said this because he had sensed that in so doing he would give pleasure to the young woman whom he loved, perhaps also from ignorance and also because he knew that the disease was in any case incurable, since a man readily consents to cut short the agony of an invalid when the action that will have this effect will be advantageous to himself—and perhaps also from the stupid idea that acting made Berma happy and was therefore likely to do her good, a stupid idea which had appeared to him to be corroborated when, having been given a box by Berma’s daughter and son-in-law and having deserted all his patients for the occasion, he had found her as extraordinarily charged with life on the stage as she seemed to be moribund if you met her off it. And indeed our habits enable us to a large degree, enable even the organs of our bodies, to adapt themselves to an existence which at first sight would appear to be utterly impossible. Have we not all seen an elderly riding-master with a weak heart go through a whole series of acrobatics which one would not have supposed his heart could stand for a single minute? Berma in the same way was an old campaigner of the stage, to the requirements of which her organs had so perfectly adapted themselves that she was able, by deploying her energies with a prudence invisible to the public, to give an illusion of good health troubled only by a purely nervous and imaginary complaint. After the scene in which Phèdre makes her declaration of love to Hippolyte Berma herself might be conscious only of the appalling night which awaited her as a result of her exertions, but her admirers burst into tumultuous applause and said that she was more wonderful than ever. She would go home in terrible pain, happy nevertheless because she brought back to her daughter the blue banknotes which, with the playfulness of a true child of the footlights, she had the habit of squeezing into her stockings, whence she would draw them out with pride, hoping for a smile, a kiss. Unfortunately these banknotes merely made it possible for her son-in-law and her daughter to make new embellishments to their house, which was next door to Berma’s own: hence constant hammering, which interrupted the sleep of which the great actress was so desperately in need. According to the latest change in fashion, or to conform to the taste of M. de X———— or M. de Y———— whom they hoped to attract to their house, they altered every room in it. And Berma, realising that sleep, which alone would have deadened her pain, had gone for good, would resign herself to lying awake, not without a secret contempt for this determination to be smart which was hastening her death and making her last days an agony. That these were its consequences was no doubt in part the reason why she despised this social ambition, contempt being a natural form of revenge upon something that does us harm and that we are powerless to prevent. But there was another reason, which was that, conscious of her own genius and having learnt at a very early age the meaninglessness of all these decrees of fashion, she for her part had remained faithful to tradition, which she had always respected and of which she was herself an embodiment, and which caused her to judge things and people as she would have judged them thirty years earlier, to judge Rachel, for example, not as the well-known actress that she was today, but as the little tart that she had once been. Berma was, one must add, no better natured than her daughter, for it was from her mother that the young woman had derived, through heredity and through the contagion of an example which an only too natural admiration had rendered more than usually potent, her egotism, her pitiless mockery, her unconscious cruelty. But all this Berma had sacrificed to her daughter and in this way she had liberated herself from it. However, even if Berma’s daughter had not incessantly had workmen in her house, she would have tired her mother out just the same, since inevitably youth with its powers of attraction, its ruthless and inconsiderate strength, tires out old age and ill health, which overtax themselves in the effort to keep up with it. Every day there was yet another luncheon party, and Berma would have been condemned as selfish had she deprived her daughter of this pleasure, or even had she refused to be present herself at entertainments where the prestige of the famous mother was counted upon as a means of drawing to the house, not without difficulty, certain recent acquaintances who needed to be coaxed. And even a
way from home her attendance at a social function might be “promised” to these same acquaintances as a way of doing them a civility. So that the poor mother, seriously engaged in her intimate dialogue with the death that was already installed within her, was compelled to get up early in the morning and drag herself out of the house. Nor was this enough. At about this time Réjane, in the full blaze of her talent, made some appearances on the stage in foreign countries which had an enormous success, and the son-in-law decided that Berma must not allow herself to be put in the shade; determined that his own family should pick up some of the same easily acquired glory, he forced his mother-in-law to set out on tours on which she was obliged to have injections of morphine, which might at any moment have killed her owing to the condition of her kidneys.