If, however, the Duchess indulged a taste for the society of her inferiors, she was careful to confine this activity within strict limits and not allow it to contaminate those members of her family from whom she derived the gratification of an aristocratic pride. If at the theatre, for instance, in order to fill her role of patroness of the arts, she had invited a minister or a painter and her guest had been so ingenuous as to ask whether her sister-in-law or her husband were not in the audience, the Duchess, with a superb assumption of lofty indifference which concealed her alarm, would haughtily reply: “I have not the slightest idea. As soon as I leave my house, I know nothing of what my family is doing. For politicians, for artists, whoever they may be, I am a widow.” In this way she sought to prevent the too eager social climber from drawing upon himself a snub and upon her a reprimand from Mme de Marsantes or from Basin.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you,” said the Duchess. “Good heavens, when was it that I saw you last?” “I believe it was at Mme d’Agrigente’s—I was paying a call and I found you there, as I often did.” “But of course, I was constantly going there, my dear boy, since Basin was in love with her in those days. And calling on Basin’s sweetheart of the moment was always where my friends were most likely to find me, because he used to say: ‘I shall expect you to visit her without fail.’ I must admit that there seemed to me to be a slight impropriety in these ‘digestive visits’ on which he used to send me to thank the lady for her entertainment of him. But I quite soon grew accustomed to them. The tiresome thing was, however, that I was obliged to continue my relations with his mistress after he had broken off his own. I was always reminded of the line in Victor Hugo:
Take away the happiness and leave the boredom to me.
Naturally—you remember how the poem goes on—‘I entered smiling none the less,’ but it really was not fair, he ought to have left me the right to be inconstant, for in the end I accumulated so many of his discards that I had not a single afternoon to myself. Still, compared with the present that epoch now seems to me relatively agreeable. That he has started to be unfaithful again is, of course, something that I can only find flattering, it almost makes me feel younger. But I preferred his old way of doing it. Unfortunately, he was so out of practice that he had forgotten how to set about it. However, in spite of it all we are on excellent terms, we talk to each other, we are even quite fond of each other”—this the Duchess added because she was afraid that I might think that she and her husband were completely separated, rather as one says apropos of someone who is desperately ill: “But he is still able to speak, I read to him this morning for an hour.” “I will tell him you are here,” she continued, “he will be delighted to see you.” And she went towards the Duke, who was sitting on a sofa in conversation with a lady. I observed with admiration that, except that his hair was whiter, he had scarcely changed, being still as majestic and as handsome as ever. But seeing his wife approach to speak to him he assumed an air of such fury that she had no alternative but to retreat. “I can’t interrupt him just now, I don’t know what he is doing, we shall see presently,” said Mme de Guermantes, preferring to leave me to form my own conclusions.
Bloch now came up to us and on behalf of his American inquired the identity of a young duchess who was at the party. I replied that she was a niece of M. de Bréauté, which caused Bloch, as this name meant nothing to him, to ask for further explanations. “Bréauté!” the Duchess exclaimed, turning to me. “You remember all that, of course. How ancient it seems now, how far away! Well,”—this to Bloch—“Bréauté was a snob. They were people who lived near my mother-in-law in the country. This couldn’t possibly interest you, Monsieur Bloch—though it may amuse this young man, who knew all that world long ago when I was in the midst of it myself.” This last remark referred to me, and by it Mme de Guermantes brought home to me in a number of different ways how long was the time that had elapsed. First, her own friendships and opinions had so greatly changed since that period that now, in retrospect, she looked upon her charming Babal as a snob. And then, not only was he now seen at the other end of a great vista of time, but—and of this I had been quite unaware when at my first entry into society I had supposed him to be one of the quintessential notabilities of Paris, who would for ever remain associated with its social history as Colbert with the history of the reign of Louis XIV—he too bore the stamp of a provincial origin, he was a country neighbour of the old Duchess and it was as such that the Princesse des Laumes had made his acquaintance. Moreover this Bréauté, stripped of his wit and relegated to a distant past for which he himself provided a date (which proved that between then and now he had been entirely forgotten by the Duchess) and to the countryside near Guermantes, was—and this too I would never have thought possible that first evening at the Opéra, when he had appeared to me in the guise of a marine deity dwelling in his glaucous cavern—a link between the Duchess and myself, because she remembered that I had known him and therefore had been a friend of hers, if not of the same social origin as herself at any rate an inhabitant of the same social world for very much longer than a great many people who were at the party today, she remembered this and yet remembered it so hazily that she had forgotten certain details which to me on the contrary had then seemed to be of prime importance, such as that I never went to Guermantes and at the time when she came to Mile Percepied’s nuptial mass was merely a boy of a middle-class Combray family, and that, in spite of all Saint-Loup’s entreaties, throughout the year which followed her apparition at the Opéra she had never invited me to her house. To me this seemed to be of supreme importance, for it was precisely during this brief period that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes had appeared to me to be a paradise into which I should never enter. But for her, her life then was merely a part like any other of her normal, commonplace life, and as from a certain moment onwards I had dined often at her house and had also, even before that date, been a friend of her aunt and of her nephew, she no longer knew exactly at what period our friendship had begun and was unaware of the grave anachronism that she was perpetrating in supposing that we had become friends a few years earlier than in fact we had. For this would have meant that I had known the Mme de Guermantes of the name of Guermantes, whose essence it was to be unknowable, that I had been permitted to enter the name of the golden syllables, had been received into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, whereas in fact I had merely been to dine at the house of a lady who was already nothing more in my eyes than a very ordinary woman and who had occasionally invited me, not to descend into the submarine kingdom of the Nereids, but to spend an evening with her in her cousin’s box. “If you want to know anything more about Bréauté,” Mme de Guermantes continued, still speaking to Bloch, “though there is no earthly reason why you should, ask our friend here, who is a hundred times more interesting than Bréauté ever was. He must have dined at my house with him fifty times. It was at my house, was it not, that you got to know Bréauté? In any case, it was there that you met Swann.” And I was just as surprised that she should imagine that I might have met M. de Bréauté elsewhere than at her house (which could only have happened had I moved in that society before I became acquainted with her) as I was to see that she believed that it was through her that I had met Swann. Less untruthfully than Gilberte, who had been in the habit of saying of Bréauté: “He is an old country neighbour, I so enjoy talking to him about Tansonville,” whereas in fact in the past he had never visited the Swanns at Tansonville, I might have said of Swann: “He was a country neighbour who often used to come round and see us in the evening,” for indeed the memories which he recalled to my mind had nothing to do with the Guermantes. “I don’t know how to describe him,” she went on. “He was a man whose only subject of conversation was people with grand titles. He had a whole collection of curious anecdotes about my Guermantes relations and about my mother-in-law and about Mme de Varambon before she became a lady-in-waiting to the Princesse de Parme. But does anybody today know wh
o Mme de Varambon was? Our friend here, yes, he knew all those people. But it is all ancient history, they are not even names today, and in any case they don’t deserve to be remembered.” And again it struck me that, in spite of the apparent unity of that thing which we call “society,” in which, it is true, social relations reach their maximum of concentration (for all paths meet at the top) and in which there are no barriers to communication, there exist nevertheless within it, or at least there are created within it by Time, separate provinces which after a while change their names and are no longer comprehensible to those who arrive in society only when its pattern has been altered. “Mme de Varambon was a good lady who said things of an incredible stupidity,” continued the Duchess, who failed to appreciate that poetry of the incomprehensible which is an effect of Time and chose rather to extract from every situation its element of ironic humour, the element that could be transformed into literature of the type of Meilhac or into the Guermantes brand of wit. “At one moment she had a mania for swallowing a certain kind of lozenge which people used to take in those days for coughs and which was called” (and she laughed as she pronounced a name that was so special, so well known formerly and so unknown today to everyone around her) “a Géraudel lozenge. ‘Madame de Varambon,’ my mother-in-law used to say to her, ‘if you don’t stop swallowing a Géraudel lozenge every five minutes, you will injure your stomach.’ ‘But Madame la Duchesse,’ replied Mme de Varambon, ‘how can they possibly injure the stomach when they go into the bronchial tubes?’ And then it was she who made the remark: ‘The Duchess has a most beautiful cow, so beautiful that it is always taken for a bull!’” And Mme de Guermantes would gladly have gone on relating anecdotes of Mme de Varambon, of which she and I knew hundreds, but we realised that in the ignorant memory of Bloch this name evoked none of those images which rose up for us as soon as there was mention of her or of M. de Bréauté or of the Prince d’Agrigente, though perhaps for this very reason all these names were endowed in his eyes with a glamour which I knew to be exaggerated but which I found comprehensible—though not because I myself had at one time felt its influence, for it is rarely that our own errors and absurdities, even when we have penetrated to the truth behind them, make us more indulgent to those of others.
The past had been so transformed in the mind of the Duchess (or else the distinctions which existed in my mind had been always so absent from hers that what had been an event for me had gone unnoticed by her) that she was able to suppose that I had first met Swann in her house and M. de Bréauté elsewhere, thus conferring upon me a past as man about town of which she exaggerated the remoteness from the present. For the notion of time elapsed which I had just acquired was something that the Duchess had too, and, whereas my illusion had been to believe the gap between past and present shorter than in fact it was, she on the contrary actually overestimated it, she placed events further back than they really were, a notable consequence of this being her disregard of that supremely important line of demarcation between the epoch when she had been for me first a name and then the object of my love and the utterly different epoch when she had been for me merely a society woman like any other. It was of course only during this second period, when she had become for me a different person, that I had been to her house. But to her own eyes these differences were invisible and she would have seen nothing in the least odd in my going to her house two years earlier, for how was she to know that she had then been a different woman and even her doormat a different doormat, since her personality did not present to her that break in continuity which it presented to me?
“All this reminds me,” I said to her, “of that first evening when I went to the Princesse de Guermantes’s, when I wasn’t sure that I had been invited to her party and half expected to be shown the door, and when you wore a red dress and red shoes.” “Good heavens, how long ago all that was!” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, accentuating by her words my own impression of time elapsed. She seemed to be gazing into this remote past in a melancholy mood, and yet she laid a particular emphasis upon the red dress. I asked her to describe it to me, which she did most willingly. “One couldn’t possibly wear a thing like that now. It was the sort of dress that was worn in those days.” “But it was pretty, wasn’t it?” I said. She was always afraid of giving away a point in conversation, of saying something that might depreciate her in the eyes of others. “Personally, I found it a charming fashion. If nobody wears those dresses today, it is simply because it isn’t done. But they will come back, as fashions always do—in clothes, in music, in painting,” she added with vigour, for she supposed there to be a certain originality in this philosophic reflexion. Then the sad thought that she was growing old caused her to resume her languid manner, which a smile, however, momentarily contradicted: “Are you sure that they were red shoes that I wore? I thought they were gold.” I assured her that I had the most vivid recollection of the colour of her shoes, though I preferred not to describe the incident which made me so certain on this point. “How kind of you to remember that!” she said to me sweetly, for women call it kindness when you remember their beauty, just as painters do when you admire their work. And then, since the past, however remote it may be for a woman like the Duchess who has more head than heart, may nevertheless chance to have escaped oblivion, “Do you recall,” she said, as though to thank me for remembering her dress and her shoes, “that Basin and I brought you home in our carriage? You couldn’t come in with us because of some girl who was coming to see you after midnight. Basin thought it the funniest thing in the world that you should receive visits at such an hour.” Indeed that was the evening when Albertine had come to see me after the Princesse de Guermantes’s party and I recalled the fact just as clearly as the Duchess, I to whom Albertine was now as unimportant as she would have been to Mme de Guermantes had Mme de Guermantes known that the girl because of whom I had had to refuse their invitation was Albertine. (In fact, she was quite in the dark as to the identity of this girl, had never known it and only referred to the incident because of the circumstances and the singular lateness of the hour.) Yes, I recalled the fact, for, long after our poor dead friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past. And though we no longer love them, it may happen that in speaking of a room, or a walk in a public park, or a country road where they were present with us on a certain occasion, we are obliged, so that the place which they occupied may not be left empty, to make allusion to them, without, however, regretting them, without even naming them or permitting others to identify them. Such are the last, the scarcely desirable vestiges of survival after death.
If the opinions which the Duchess expressed about Rachel were in themselves commonplace, they interested me for the reason that they too marked a new hour upon the dial. For Mme de Guermantes had no more completely forgotten than Rachel the terrible evening which the latter had endured in her house, but in the Duchess’s mind too this memory had been transformed. “Of course,” she said to me, “it interests me all the more to hear her, and to hear her acclaimed, because it was I who discovered her, who saw her worth and praised her and got people to listen when she was quite unknown and everybody thought her ridiculous. Yes, my dear boy, this will surprise you, but the first house in which she recited in public was mine! Yes, while all the so-called avant-garde, like my new cousin,” she said, pointing ironically towards the Princesse de Guermantes, who for Oriane had remained Mme Verdurin, “would have allowed her to die of hunger rather than condescend to listen to her, I had made up my mind that she was interesting and I offered her a fee to come and act in my house in front of the most distinguished audience that I could muster. I may say, though the word is rather stupid and pretentious—for the truth is that talent needs nobody to help it—that I launched her. But I am not suggesting that she needed me.” I made a vague gesture of protest, and I saw that Mme de Guermantes was quite prepared to accept the contrary thesis. ?
??You don’t agree? You think that talent needs a support, needs someone to bring it into the light of day? Well, perhaps you are right. Curiously enough, that is exactly what Dumas used to say to me. In this case I am extremely flattered if I have done anything, however little, to promote not of course the talent but the reputation of so fine an artist.” Mme de Guermantes preferred to abandon her idea that talent, like an abscess, forces its way to the surface unaided, partly because the alternative hypothesis was more flattering for her, but also because for some time now, mixing with newcomers to the social scene and being herself fatigued, she had become almost humble, questioning others and asking them their opinion before she formed her own. “I don’t need to tell you,” she went on, “that that intelligent public which calls itself society understood absolutely nothing of her art. They booed and they tittered. It was no use my saying: ‘This is strange, interesting, something that has never been done before,’ nobody believed me, just as nobody has ever believed anything I have said. And it was exactly the same with the piece that she recited, which was a scene from Maeterlinck. Now, of course, it is very well known but in those days people merely thought it ridiculous—not I, however, I admired it. I must say I am surprised, when I think of it, that a mere peasant like myself, with no more education than all the other provincial girls around her, should from the very first moment have felt drawn to these things. Naturally I couldn’t have said why, but I liked them, I was moved—indeed, even Basin, who can hardly be called hypersensitive, was struck by the effect that they had on me. ‘I won’t have you listening to these absurdities,’ he said, ‘it makes you ill.’ And he was right, because although I’m supposed to be a woman without any feeling I’m really a bundle of nerves.”