In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3

I N S E A R C H O F L O S T T I M E , V O L U M E 3

The Guermantes Way

M A R C E L P R O U S T

Edited and Annotated by William C. Carter

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established
in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907,
Yale College.

Frontispiece: Corrected proofs for Le Côté de Guermantes.

Location: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
© BnF, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais. Used with permission.
The passage shown here corresponds to our pages 197–­98.
Photos on pages v (Proust, 1900) and ix (Proust, c. 1896)
used with permission of Adoc-­photos / Art Resource, NY.

Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. Translation by C. K.

Scott Moncrieff copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.,
copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced,
in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (be-
yond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity

for educational, business, or promotional use. For infor-
mation, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or
[email protected] (U.K. office).

Set in Adobe Garamond with Scala Sans and Didot types by

Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933623

ISBN 978-­0 -­300-­18619-­2 (paper : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-

­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii
Introductionix

The Guermantes Way

Part One 3
Part Two, Chapter 1 343
Part Two, Chapter 2 381

Synopsis659
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

I am pleased to acknowledge the large debt of gratitude that I owe

to all those who have made important contributions to this volume:
Evelyne Bloch-­Dano, Robert Bowden, Ronald Cohen, James Con-
nelly, Elyane Dezon-­Jones, Hollie Harder, Bryan Plank, and Fred
Renneker. They form a distinguished group of scholars, writers, and
readers whose knowledge and skills proved invaluable in revising and
annotating C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s translation of The Guermantes
Way. I am indeed fortunate to call many of them my good friends,
whose expertise, kindness, and encouragement mean more to me
than I can express. My sincere and everlasting thanks to all those at
Yale University Press, especially Sarah Miller and Dan Heaton, for
their dedication to this monumental project of creating a new edition
of Proust’s novel. Dan has been my editor on all my works on Proust
published by this press, and I cannot imagine working without him.
I am constantly informed and inspired by his knowledge of language
and style and cheered by his sense of humor. I also wish to express my
gratitude to my research assistant Nicolas Drogoul, my former stu-
dent and now for some time my research assistant, who has so often
helped me in the preparation of this volume. My gratitude goes above
all to my wife, Lynn, whose love of literature and her career as a maga-
zine editor are only two of the many ways that make her the perfect
companion for my life’s work, as she is for all my adventures, literary
and otherwise.

vii
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

Proust originally intended for The Guermantes Way to be the second

volume of In Search of Lost Time. However, in the six months fol-
lowing the publication of Swann’s Way in 1913, there were two tragic
events, one personal to Proust, the other global in its ramifications,
both of which would dramatically change the scope of Proust’s novel
and the dates of its publication. In May 1914, his private secretary,
Alfred Agostinelli, whom he “adored,” died in an airplane crash while
taking flying lessons, using funds provided by Proust. In late June,
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in
Sarajevo. Little more than a month later, World War I broke out, an
event that would delay the resumption of publication of In Search of
Lost Time until 1919. That year Proust published the volume that he
wrote during the war years, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. His
book won the Goncourt Prize.
While few now question the jury’s decision, at the time the award
was a controversial one. In the aftermath of the Great War, which
had proved so costly to France, especially in the large numbers of
young men killed and wounded, many felt that the prize should be
awarded to Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), a war novel, written
by a thirty-­three-­year-­old veteran named Roland Dorgelès. In fact,
the jury split the vote, with Proust receiving six votes out of ten. It is
thought that Léon Daudet, who headed the selection committee and
whose family had long been associated with the Goncourt brothers
and with Proust, used his influence to make certain that Proust won
the prize. The novelist acknowledged as much in a letter to Jacques
Rivière, telling him that he intended to dedicate The Guermantes Way
to Daudet by way of gratitude for his role in obtaining the Goncourt
Prize. The dedication, including a list of Daudet’s works, reads: “To
Léon Daudet,” the author of “so many masterpieces, to the incom-
parable friend, as a token of gratitude and admiration, M. P.”
The Guermantes Way was published in two separate volumes, the

ix
 first appearing in 1920 and the second in 1921. Proust’s great gift for
comedy and satire, a key aspect of his style throughout In Search of
Lost Time, is especially evident in The Guermantes Way, when the Nar-
rator is invited to the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duc and
Duchesse de Guermantes. This tome is, in many ways, the pendant
to Swann’s Way and its exploration of bourgeois society. Proust’s por-
trayal of the two “ways” offers many comic scenes, while his pene-
trating analyses of people and places open windows on French his-
tory and society, including that of the Belle Époque. Such scenes in
The Guermantes Way show that the Narrator is beginning to see high
society as a vain and sterile world. Proust also shows us characters re-
acting to the main political crisis that gripped France around the turn
of the century: the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal that resulted from the
anti-­Semitism that was widespread throughout society, the military,
and the government.
Proust devotes a separate chapter to a traumatic episode in the
Narrator’s life: the agony and death of his beloved grandmother, a
loss whose devastating impact will not be felt by him until later, when
it is described, in Sodom and Gomorrah, in a famous passage that bears
a separate title, The Intermittencies of the Heart. Proust believed that
this poignant interlude about death and memory and grieving was
so important thematically and structurally that he considered using
The Intermittencies of the Heart as the general title of the novel before
choosing In Search of Lost Time.
Léon Daudet’s younger brother, Lucien, who had read his advance
copy of The Guermantes Way twice, wrote Proust to express his won-
derment at his friend’s accomplishment. Proust’s “projection” of what
seemed to be every human thought and emotion “caused a special
happiness: one no longer had the impression of reading.” He con-
gratulated the author on his “incredible sense of dialogue,” citing ex-
amples and saying, “One could make of this third volume an entire
book of maxims,” the “most beautiful” ever written and a “psycho-
logical manual more complex than all the others, a totally new artistic
‘doctrine’ and the most amusing of all novels.” Lucien was awed.
“How is it that you possess all this too, in addition to all the rest?”

x Introduction
He continued in this vein, saying that Proust had created a compres-
sion of life, accomplishing even more than Balzac and Stendhal. One
of Proust’s most distinguished contemporaries, André Gide, saw the
challenge for other writers: “You are a monster, you exhaust every
subject. . . . How can you expect anyone else to write a novel?”
Critical reception of The Guermantes Way was, in general, highly
favorable. However, having described the Narrator’s entry into Paris’s
exclusive aristocratic salons, Proust found himself depicted once again
as a snob. He immediately launched a counteroffensive. In a letter to
the critic Jacques Boulenger, Proust observed that, having lived from
the age of fifteen in the midst of ladies like Madame de Guermantes,
he possessed the “strength to brave in the eyes of those who ignore
it the opinion that I am a snob, by depicting snobbery, not from the
outside and ironically as would a novelist who was a snob would do,
but from the inside by giving myself the soul of someone who would
like to know a Duchesse de Guermantes. . . . Would an author who
is a snob . . . say that he desired to know a Madame de Guermantes?”
While In Search of Lost Time is without question a work of fiction, this
letter is one of several in which Proust speaks of himself as though he
were the Narrator. He explained the distinction in a letter to André
Chaumeix, describing the Narrator as “the one who says I and is not
always me.” Proust also wrote to Louis Martin-­Chauffier, who was
to publish a review of the volume, to say that the novelist counted
on him to “make it very clear that The Guermantes Way is the exact
opposite of a snobbish book. . . . The truth is that by natural logic
after having confronted the poetry of the place named Balbec with
the triviality of the real Balbec, I had to proceed in the same manner
for the proper name Guermantes.” Proust then revealed to Martin-­
Chauffier how the Narrator’s lifelong quest will conclude: “The only
thing I don’t say about the Narrator is that at the end he is a writer,
because the entire book could be called a vocation . . . but which is
not discovered until the last volume.”

Like the thousands of readers who have known Proust only in the
translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, I remain in awe of his skills and

Introduction xi
 what he achieved. However, being human, he occasionally slipped or
missed the mark. I have tried to make corrections or alterations where
necessary, while striving to avoid introducing errors or infelicities of
my own. Since I described my method of editing and annotating in
the introduction to the first volume, Swann’s Way, I do not need to
repeat that here. I will limit myself to giving a few examples of the
kinds of changes that I continue to make. In addition, I have restored
French expressions such as crème de la crème, dernier cri, comme il
faut, and the like—words or phrases that are now in current usage
in English and that can be found in standard English dictionaries.
These borrowings from French may not have been used as currently
in English in Scott Moncrieff ’s time, or he may have chosen not to
use them for other reasons.
Here are some examples of corrections that I have made in this
volume. In the original, sauvoir, which is a basin for the cultivation of
fish, is translated by Scott Moncrieff as “secret chamber.” In another
passage, he mistranslated the sentence Je craignais qu’elle eût encore
mal au cœur, as “I was afraid that her heart might be troubling her
again.” The passage in question is the one where the grandmother be-
comes ill: mal au cœur means to feel sick or nauseated and, despite
the presence of the word cœur, does not indicate heart trouble. Scott
Moncrieff also translated literally Proust’s aigle, used to describe the
Duchesse de Guermantes, as “eagle,” whereas colloquially, and in the
context in which it is used, it means “genius.” In one passage, Proust
uses a colorful idiom, les alouettes me tombent toutes rôties, which Scott
Moncrieff translated nearly literally: “larks drop into my mouth al-
ready roasted.” I have chosen a less literal but more accurate meaning:
“things will just fall into my lap.”

In addition to consulting a number of standard reference works,

I have read and am greatly indebted to the annotated French edi-
tions of Proust, especially À la recherche du temps perdu, general
editor Jean-­Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 4 vols., 1987–89); Le Côté
de Guermantes, general editor Jean Milly, edited and annotated by
Elyane Dezon-­Jones (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2 vols., 1987); and Le

xii Introduction
Côté de Guermantes, edited and annotated by Bernard Brun (Paris:
Livre de Poche, 1992). I also made frequent use of specialized dic-
tionaries or works on Proust, such as Citations, références et allusions
de Marcel Proust, by Jacques Nathan (Paris: Nizet, 1969); A Proust
Dictionary, by Maxine Arnold Vogely (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1981);
Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time,
by Eric Karpeles (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008); Le Diction-
naire Marcel Proust (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004); the Correspon-
dance de Marcel Proust, edited and annotated by Philip Kolb (Paris:
Plon, 21 vols., 1970–93); Selected Letters in English, vol. 1, 1880–1903,
edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Ralph Manheim, introduction by
J. M. Cocking (New York: Doubleday, 1983); Selected Letters, vol. 2,
1904–1909, edited by Philip Kolb, translated with an introduction by
Terence Kilmartin (London: Collins, 1989); Selected Letters, vol. 3,
1910–1917, edited by Philip Kolb, translated with an introduction by
Terence Kilmartin (London: HarperCollins, 1992); Selected Letters,
vol. 4, 1918–1922, edited by Philip Kolb, translated with an intro-
duction by Joanna Kilmartin, foreword by Alain de Botton (London:
HarperCollins, 2000).
If not otherwise specified, all persons referred to in the notes are
of French nationality. Occasional idiosyncratic capitalizations of
common nouns, italic emphases, and quotation marks are Proust’s
own. All biblical references are to the King James Version. All page
references in the notes to Swann’s Way and to In the Shadow of Young
Girls in Flower are to the Yale University Press editions. In addition to
providing factual information in the notes, I try, when appropriate,
to provide pertinent biographical information, as well an indicator
of key scenes and thematic words that even the most attentive reader
may fail to appreciate fully on the first encounter.

Introduction xiii
This page intentionally left blank
à la recherche du temps perdu
in search of lost time

The Guermantes Way

À Léon Daudet
À l’auteur
Du Voyage de Shakespeare,
du Partage de l’enfant,
de L’Astre noir,
de Fantômes et vivants,
du Monde des images,
de tant de chefs-d’œuvre,
À l’incomparable ami,
en témoignage
de reconnaissance et d’admiration.
M. P.
This page intentionally left blank
 Part One

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to 1. Before entering the service of the
Françoise. Every word uttered by the “maids” upstairs made her Narrator’s family, Françoise was Aunt
Léonie’s servant at Combray. See
jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking her- Swann’s Way, 32–33.
self what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved.
Certainly the servants had made no less noise in the attics of our
old home; but she knew them, she had made of their comings and
goings familiar events. Now she faced even silence with a strained
attention. And as our new neighborhood appeared to be as quiet
as the boulevard onto which we had hitherto looked had been
noisy, the song (distinct at a distance, when it was still quite faint,
like an orchestral motif ) of a man passing by brought tears to the
eyes of Françoise in exile. And so if I had been tempted to laugh
at her in her misery at having to leave a house in which one was
“so well respected on all sides” and she had packed her trunks
while weeping, according to the rites of Combray,1 and declaring
superior to all possible houses the one that had been ours, on the
other hand I, who found it as hard to assimilate the new as I found
it easy to abandon the old, I felt myself drawn toward our old
servant when I saw that moving into a building where she had
not received from the concierge, who did not yet know us, the
marks of respect necessary to her mental well-­being, had brought
her positively to the verge of exhaustion. She alone could under-
stand what I was feeling; certainly her young footman was not the
person to do so; for him, who was as unlike the Combray type as
it was possible to conceive, packing up, moving, living in another
neighborhood, were all like taking a vacation in which the novelty
of one’s surroundings gave one the same sense of refreshment as
if one had actually traveled; he thought he was in the country;

3
 The Guermantes Way

2. When the grandmother first visited and a head cold afforded him, like a sudden “gust of wind” in a
the hotel, her friend Mme de Villepa- railway carriage whose window does not shut properly, the deli-
risis had urged her to rent an apart-
ment there. See Swann’s Way, 22. Origi- cious impression of having seen the world; with each sneeze he re-
nally, an hôtel was used for the city joiced that he had found so chic a position, having always longed
dwelling of a great lord or a particularly to be in the service of people who traveled a lot. And so, without
wealthy individual. It is the equivalent
of a mansion or town house. giving him a thought, I went straight to Françoise, who, in re-
turn for my having laughed at her tears over a departure that had
left me cold, now showed an icy indifference to my sorrow, be-
cause she shared it. The “sensitivity” claimed by neurotic people
increases their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others
of the sufferings to which they pay an ever-­increasing attention in
themselves. Françoise, who would not allow the least of her own
ailments to pass unnoticed would, if I were in pain, turn her head
from me so that I would not have the satisfaction of seeing my
sufferings pitied, or so much as observed. It was the same as soon
as I tried to speak to her about our new house. Moreover, having
been obliged, a day or two later, to return to the house we had just
left, to retrieve some clothes that had been overlooked when we
moved, while I, as a result of it, still had a “temperature,” and like
a boa constrictor that has just swallowed an ox, felt myself pain-
fully distended by the sight of a long sideboard that my eyes still
had to “digest,” Françoise, with true feminine inconstancy, came
back saying that she had really thought she would suffocate on our
old boulevard, that she had found it quite a day’s journey to get
there, that never had she seen such difficult stairs, that she would
not go back to live there “for a king’s ransom,” not if you were to
offer her millions—pure hypotheses—and that everything (every-
thing, that is to say, to do with the kitchen and the corridors) was
much better fitted up in our new home. Which, it is high time
now that the reader should be told—and told also that we had
moved into it because my grandmother, not having been at all
well (though we took care to keep this reason from her), was in
need of purer air—was an apartment forming part of the Hôtel
de Guermantes.2
At the age when Names, offering us an image of the unknow-

4 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

able that we have poured into their molds, while at the same mo- 3. The legend of Geneviève de Bra-
ment they designate for us also a real place, force us accordingly to bant is linked in the Narrator’s mind
to Mme de Guermantes. See Swann’s
identify one with the other to such a point that we set out to seek Way, 10, n. 9.
in a city for a soul that it cannot contain but that we no longer 4. Mélusine, the water sprite of the
have the power to expel from the sound of its name, it is not only fountain of Lusignan, is the most
famous fairy in the legends of Poitou.
to towns and rivers that names give an individuality, as do alle- She became the ancestress and tute-
gorical paintings, it is not only the physical universe that they lary spirit of the House of Lusignan
pattern with differences, people with marvels, but also the social when she married the first Comte Ray-
mond de Lusignan. On her wedding
universe; and so every château, every hotel or famous palace, has day, she made him vow never to visit
its lady or its fairy, as every forest has its genie, as every stream her on Saturdays, the day on which she
its deity. Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its name, the fairy is must assume a mermaidlike shape.
The count broke his promise, hiding
transformed to suit the life of our imagination by which she lives; one Saturday to see his wife’s transfor-
thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme de Guermantes mation. Mélusine was obliged to leave
existed in me, after having been for years no more than the re- him and wander about as a ghost until
doomsday. See In the Shadow of Young
flection cast by a magic-­lantern slide or a stained-­glass window,3 Girls in Flower, 153 and n. 297.
began to let its colors fade when quite other dreams impregnated
it with the bubbling coolness of swift mountain streams.
And yet the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the
real person to whom her name corresponds, for the name then be-
gins to reflect that person, and she has in her nothing of the fairy;
the fairy may revive if we distance ourselves from the person, but
if we remain in her presence the fairy dies for good and with her
the name, as happened to the family of Lusignan, which was fated
to become extinct on the day when the fairy Mélusine would dis-
appear.4 Then the Name, beneath our successive retouchings of
which we may end by finding the original of the beautiful portrait
of a woman whom we have never met, is nothing more than the
mere photograph, for identification, to which we refer in order
to decide whether we know, whether or not we ought to greet
a person who passes us in the street. But let a sensation from a
bygone year—like those recording instruments that preserve the
sound and the style of the various artists who have sung or played
into them—enable our memory to hear that name with the par-
ticular timbre with which it then sounded in our ears, then, while
the name itself has apparently not changed, we feel the distance

Part One 5
 The Guermantes Way

5. This is the distinction that Proust that separates the dreams that its same syllables have meant to us
makes between what he calls volun- at different times. For a moment, from the clear echo of its war-
tary and involuntary memory. The latter
alone is capable of restoring to the bling in some distant springtime, we can extract, as from the little
past its true and vivid colors. The best tubes we use in painting, the exact, forgotten, mysterious, fresh
example of this so far in the novel is tint of the days that we had believed ourselves to be recalling,
the madeleine scene. See Swann’s Way,
49–54. when, like a bad painter, we were giving to the whole of our past,
6. For the appearance of Mme de Guer- spread out on the same canvas, the tones, conventional and all
mantes at Mlle Percepied’s wedding at alike, of our voluntary memory.5 Whereas on the contrary, each
Combray, see Swann’s Way, 199–204.
of the moments that composed it employed, for an original cre-
ation, in a unique harmony, the color of those days that we no
longer know and which, for that matter, still suddenly enrapture
me if by some chance the name Guermantes, resuming for a mo-
ment, after all these years, the sound, so different from its sound
today, that it had for me on the day of Mlle Percepied’s marriage,6
brings back to me that mauve, so delicate, almost too bright, too
new, which gave a velvety softness to the billowing scarf of the
young duchess, and, like two periwinkle flowers, growing beyond
reach and blossoming now again, her eyes, sunlit with an azure
smile. And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of
those little balloons that have been filled with oxygen or another
gas; when I manage to puncture it, to make it release what it con-
tains, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year, of that day,
mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the wind
from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent
the sun packing, now let it spread itself over the red woolen carpet
of the sacristy and clothed it in a bright, almost geranium, pink,
with that, so to speak, Wagnerian sweetness in its gaiety that pre-
serves the nobility of festive occasions. But even apart from rare
moments such as these, in which suddenly we feel the original
entity quiver and resume its form, carve itself out of the syllables
now dead, if, in the vertiginous whirl of daily life, in which they
serve only the most practical purposes, names have lost all their
color, like a prismatic top that spins too quickly and seems only
gray, when, on the other hand, in reverie we reflect, we seek, so as
to return to the past, to slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion

6 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

by which we are borne along, gradually we see once more appear, 7. For these walks along the Vivonne,
side by side, but entirely distinct from one another, the tints that see Swann’s Way, 190–97.
8. For these clusters of flowers, see
in the course of our existence have been successively presented to Swann’s Way, 97.
us by a single name.
What form was assumed in my mind by this name Guermantes
when my first nurse—knowing no more, probably, than I know
today in whose honor it had been composed—sang me to sleep
with that old song, Gloire à la Marquise de Guermantes, or when,
some years later, the veteran Maréchal de Guermantes, making my
nursery-­maid’s bosom swell with pride, stopped in the Champs-­
Élysées to remark: “A fine looking child that!” and gave me a
chocolate drop from his pocket bonbonnière, I cannot, of course,
now say. Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part
of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them ex-
cept as we learn things that happened before we were born—from
the accounts given me by other people. But more recently I find
in the period of that name’s occupation of me seven or eight dif-
ferent shapes that it has successively assumed; the earliest were the
most beautiful; gradually, my dream, forced by reality to abandon
a position that was no longer tenable, established itself anew in
one slightly less advanced until it was obliged to retire still fur-
ther. And, with Mme de Guermantes, was transformed simulta-
neously her dwelling, itself also the offspring of that name, fertil-
ized from year to year by some word or other that came to my ears
and modified my reveries; that dwelling of hers reflected them in
its very stones, which had turned to mirrors, like the surface of a
cloud or of a lake. A donjon without mass, no more indeed than
a thin band of orange light from the summit of which the lord
and his lady dealt out life and death to their vassals, had given
place—right at the end of that “Guermantes way” along which,
on so many summer afternoons, I followed with my parents the
course of the Vivonne7—to that land of bubbling streams where
the duchess taught me to fish for trout and to know the names of
the flowers whose red and violet clusters8 adorned the walls of the
neighboring gardens; then it had been the ancient heritage, the

Part One 7
 The Guermantes Way

9. The construction of Notre-­Dame de poetic domain, from which the proud race of Guermantes, like a
Paris began in 1163; that of Notre-­Dame carved and mellow tower that traverses the ages, had already risen
de Chartres in 1194.
10. Laon is the capital of the départe- over France when the sky was still empty at those points where
ment of Aisne. Its Notre-­Dame de Laon later were to rise Notre-­Dame de Paris and Notre-­Dame de Char-
dates from the early twelfth century tres,9 when on the summit of the hill of Laon the nave of its cathe-
and is one of the first Gothic cathedrals
in France. When seen from afar, cathe- dral10 had not yet been poised, like the Ark of the Flood on the
drals often resemble ships, and indeed summit of Mount Ararat, crowded with Patriarchs and Judges11
the word nave (nef in French) comes anxiously leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of
from the Latin word for ship. The com-
parison to the Ark is also heightened God was yet appeased, carrying with it the types of the vegetation
by the fact that this cathedral features that were to multiply on the earth, brimming over with animals
unusual sculptures: sixteen colossal that have escaped even by the towers, where oxen grazing calmly
oxen on top of its high towers. Proust
visited the cathedral in 1905 and after- upon the roof look down over the plains of Champagne;12 when
ward wrote to a friend, “It’s there, the traveler who left Beauvais13 at the close of day did not yet see,
better than in the rich subsequent ef- following him and turning with his road, spread out against the
florescences, that one can see the first
burgeoning of the Gothic and how ‘the golden screen of the western sky, the black, ribbed wings of the
marvelous flower slowly emerges.’” cathedral. It was, this Guermantes, like the setting of a novel, an
Proust, Selected Letters 2: 167. imaginary landscape that I had difficulty picturing to myself and
11. The Patriarchs were the scriptural
fathers of the Hebrew people; the longed all the more to discover, set in the midst of real lands and
Judges were tribal heroes exercising roads that all of a sudden would become alive with heraldic de-
leadership among the Hebrews after tails, within a few miles of a railway station; I recalled the names
the death of Joshua.
12. From the mount on which the of the places around it as if they had been situated at the foot of
cathedral of Laon was built one can see Parnassus or of Helicon,14 and they seemed precious to me, as
to the south and west the territory of the physical conditions—in the realm of topographical science—
the ancient province of Champagne.
13. The Cathedral of Saint-­Pierre in required for the production of a mysterious phenomenon. I saw
Beauvais dates from 1247 and is the again the escutcheons blazoned beneath the windows of Combray
tallest Gothic structure in existence. church; their quarters filled, century after century, with all the
14. In Greek mythology, Parnassus
was the mountain where Apollo and seigneuries15 that, by marriage or conquest, this illustrious house
the Muses resided. Helicon is another had brought flying to it from all the corners of Germany, Italy,
mountain that was consecrated to the and France; vast territories in the North, powerful cities in the
Muses and whose name is often used
as a synonym of Parnassus. South, assembled there to group themselves in Guermantes, and,
15. A seigneury is the territory under losing their material quality, to inscribe allegorically their sinople
the government of a feudal lord. donjon, or château triple-­towered argent upon its azure field.16 I
16. In heraldry sinople indicates vert
or green. The real coat of arms of the had heard of the famous tapestries of Guermantes, I could see
Guermantes family bears gules (the them, medieval and blue, a trifle coarse, detach themselves like a
­heraldic color red) and a fleur-de-lis. floating cloud from the legendary, amaranthine name at the foot

8 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

of the ancient forest in which Childebert17 so often went hunting; 17. Childebert I (c. 495–558, king 511–
and this delicate, mysterious background of their lands, this vista 58) was the son of the Frankish King
Clovis I. Childebert ruled the territory
of the ages, it seemed to me that, as effectively as by traveling to between the Seine and the Loire Rivers.
see them, I might penetrate their secrets simply by coming in con- Two other Frankish kings bore this
tact for a moment in Paris with Mme de Guermantes, the suze- name.
18. She is the wife of the feudal lord.
rain18 of the place and lady of the lake,19 as if her face, her speech 19. According to the legends of the
must possess the local charm of forest groves and streams, and Knights of the Round Table, the Lady
the same secular peculiarities as the old customary20 recorded in of the Lake is Viviane, who after having
been Merlin’s lover, raised Lancelot. Ac-
her archives. But then I had met Saint-­L oup;21 he had told me cording to some of the myths, Viviane
that the château had borne the name of Guermantes only since is the mother of Mélusine. See À la
the seventeenth century, when his family had acquired it. They recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gal-
limard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 314,
had lived, until then, in the neighborhood, but their title was not n. 5. We see that Proust associates
taken from those parts. The village of Guermantes had received these myths with his own fictional
its name from the château around which it had been built, and so Guermantes family.
20. A customary or custumal is a book
that it should not destroy the view from the château, a servitude, containing laws and usages or cus-
still in force, traced the line of its streets and limited the height of toms.
its houses. As for the tapestries, they were by Boucher,22 bought 21. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower, 338.
in the nineteenth century by a Guermantes with a taste for the 22. The model here for the château de
arts, and hung, interspersed with a number of mediocre sporting Guermantes is the château de Bal-
pictures that he himself had painted, in a hideous drawing room leroy in Normandy. Proust visited the
château in August 1907 and viewed
upholstered in Adrianople red and plush. By these revelations the tapestries of François Boucher
Saint-­L oup had introduced into the château elements foreign to (1703–70), who also decorated the
the name of Guermantes, making it impossible for me to con- drawing rooms and boudoirs in mytho-
logical and pastoral scenes. See Proust,
tinue to extract solely from the resonance of the syllables the stone Correspondance 7: 264. From 1735 to
and mortar of its walls. And so, in the heart of the name, was ef- 1755, Boucher designed the tapestries
faced the château mirrored in its lake, and what now became ap- for Beauvais. In 1755, he became the
artistic director of the Gobelin facto-
parent to me, surrounding Mme de Guermantes as her dwelling, ries, a post he held until 1770.
had been her house in Paris, the Hôtel de Guermantes, limpid
like its name, for no material and opaque element intervened to
interrupt and blind its transparency. As the word “church” signi-
fies not only the temple but also the assembly of the faithful, this
Hôtel de Guermantes comprised all those who shared the life of
the duchess, but these intimates on whom I had never set eyes
were for me only famous and poetic names, and knowing exclu-
sively persons who themselves also were names only, did but en-

Part One 9
 The Guermantes Way

23. The porcelain manufacturer in hance and protect the mystery of the duchess by extending all
Meissen began producing in 1710 a around her a vast halo that at the most declined in brilliance as its
new type of china conceived by the
Saxon Walter von Tschirnhaus. The circumference increased.
figurines, statuettes, and bibelots of In the parties that she gave, since I could not imagine the guests
Saxe porcelain (known as Dresden else- as having any bodies, any moustaches, any boots, as making any
where) were very popular throughout
the eighteenth century. utterances that were commonplace, or even original in a human
24. The Louvre of Philippe Auguste, and rational way, this whirlpool of names, introducing less ma-
the construction of which began in terial substance than would a phantom banquet or a spectral ball,
1204, was originally a fortified château
with a donjon surrounded by walls. To around that statuette in Saxe23 china that was Madame de Guer-
the north of the fortress was a garden mantes, kept for her palace of glass the transparency of a show-
in which salad greens and a variety of case. Then, after Saint-­L oup had told me various anecdotes about
fruits and vegetables were grown. See
À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: his cousin’s chaplain, her gardeners, and the rest, the Hôtel de
Gallimard [Pléiade edition], 1988), Guermantes had become—as the Louvre24 might have been in
2: 315, n. 2. days gone by—a kind of château surrounded, in the very heart of
Paris, by its own domains, acquired by inheritance, by virtue of
an ancient right that had quaintly survived, over which she still
enjoyed feudal privileges. But this last dwelling itself vanished
when we had come to live beside Mme de Villeparisis in one of
the apartments adjoining that occupied by Mme de Guermantes
in a wing of her hotel. It was one of those old town houses, a few
of which are perhaps still to be found, in which the main court-
yard—whether they were alluvial deposits washed there by the
rising tide of democracy, or a legacy from a more primitive time
when the different trades were clustered around the overlord—is
often flanked by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for
instance, or a tailor’s, such as we see nestling between the but-
tresses of those cathedrals that the esthetic zeal of the restorer has
not swept clear of such accretions; a concierge who also did cob-
bling, kept chickens, grew flowers, and, at the far end, in the main
building, a “comtesse” who, when she drove out in her old car-
riage-and-pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums that seem
to have escaped from the little garden by the concierge’s lodge
(with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who got
down to leave cards at every aristocratic hotel in the neighbor-
hood), scattered vague little smiles and waved her hand in greeting

10 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

to the concierge’s children and to any bourgeois tenants who were 25. A contredanse or contra dance is a
passing at that moment, and whom she found indistinguishable folk dance in which couples face each
other in two lines or a square.
in her disdainful affability and leveling pride. 26. A calèche (calash) is a light small-­
In the house in which we had now come to live, the great lady wheeled four-­passenger carriage with a
at the end of the courtyard was a duchess, elegant and still young. folding top.

She was, in fact, Mme de Guermantes and, thanks to Françoise, I

soon came to know all about her household. For the Guermantes
(to whom Françoise regularly alluded as the people “below,” or
“downstairs”) were her constant preoccupation from the first
thing in the morning when, as she did Mamma’s hair, casting a
forbidden, irresistible, furtive glance down into the courtyard, she
would say: “Look at that, now; a pair of holy sisters; that’ll be for
downstairs, surely”; or, “Oh! Just look at the fine pheasants in the
kitchen window; no need to ask where they came from, the duke
will have been out ahunting!”—until the evening when, if her ear,
while she was putting out my night things, caught the sound of
a piano or a few notes of a ditty, she would conclude: “They’re
having company down below; merry doings, I’ll be bound”;
whereupon, in her symmetrical face, beneath her now snow-­white
hair, a smile from her young days, sprightly but proper, would for
a moment set each of her features in its place, arranging them in
an affected and delicate way, as though for a contredanse.25
But the moment in the life of the Guermantes that excited
the keenest interest in Françoise, gave her the most complete sat-
isfaction and at the same time the sharpest annoyance, was that
at which, the two halves of the porte cochère having been thrust
apart, the duchess stepped into her calèche.26 It was usually a
little while after our servants had finished celebrating that sort of
solemn Passover that no one might disturb, called their midday
dinner, during which they were so far “taboo” that my father him-
self would not have taken the liberty of ringing for them, knowing
moreover that none of them would have paid any more attention
to the fifth peal than to the first, and that he would have com-
mitted this impropriety to no avail, though not without damage
to himself. For Françoise (who, in her old age, lost no opportu-

Part One 11
 The Guermantes Way

27. The expression “faire une tête de nity to assume a suitable expression)27 would without fail have
circonstance” means to put on a look presented him, for the rest of the day, with a face covered with
or face suitable to the circumstances or
occasion. the tiny red cuneiform hieroglyphs by which she made visible—
28. In the Roman Catholic Church, a though by no means legible—to the outer world the long tale of
mass with no music and a minimum of her grievances and the profound reasons for her discontent. She
ceremony.
would enlarge upon them, too, in a running “aside,” but not so
that we could catch her words. She called this practice—which
she believed must be appalling for us—“mortifying,” as she put
it, “vexing,” saying “low masses”28 for us the whole blessed day.
The last rites accomplished, Françoise, who was at one and the
same time, as in the primitive church, the celebrant and one of the
faithful, helped herself to a final glass of wine, undid the napkin
from her throat, folded it after wiping from her lips a stain of
watered wine and coffee, slipped it into its ring, turned a doleful
eye to thank “her” young footman who, to show his zeal in her
service, was saying: “Come, Madame, have a few more grapes;
they’re exquisite,” and went straight to open the window on the
pretext that it was too hot in “this wretched kitchen.” Dexterously
casting, as she turned the latch and let in the fresh air, a glance of
studied indifference into the courtyard below, she furtively ascer-
tained that the duchess was not ready yet to start, brooded for a
moment with disdainful and impassioned eyes over the waiting
carriage, and, this instance of attention once paid to the things
of the earth, raised them toward the heavens, whose purity she
had already divined from the sweetness of the air and the warmth
of the sun; and let them rest on a corner of the roof, at the place
where, every spring, there came to build their nest, right over the
chimney of my bedroom, a pair of pigeons like those she used to
hear cooing from her kitchen at Combray.
“Ah! Combray, Combray,” she cried. (And the almost singing
tone in which she declaimed this invocation might, taken with the
Arlesian purity of her features, have made the onlooker suspect her
of a southern origin and that the lost homeland she was lamenting
was no more than a land of adoption. If so, he would have been
wrong, for it seems that there is no province that has not its own

12 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

“South”;29 do we not indeed constantly meet Savoyards and Bre- 29. Midi is used in French to designate
tons30 in whose speech we find all those pleasing transpositions the south of France.
30. Savoyards are inhabitants of Savoy,
of longs and shorts that are characteristic of the Southerner!) “Ah! a region in southeastern France on the
Combray, when will I see you again, poor land! When will I pass Italian frontier; Bretons are inhabitants
the blessed day under your hawthorn trees and our own poor lilac of Bretagne (Brittany), the ancient
province of the extreme northwest re-
trees, hearing the finches sing, and the Vivonne making a little gion of France.
noise like someone whispering, instead of that wretched bell from 31. See Swann’s Way, 22, where the tai-
our young master, who can never stay still for half an hour on end lor’s name is not given.

without having me run the length of that cursed corridor. And

even then he makes out I don’t come quick enough; you’d need
to hear the bell before he has rung it, and if you’re a minute late,
away he ‘flies’ into the most towering rage. Alas, poor Combray;
maybe I will see you only when I’m dead, when they drop me
like a stone into the hollow of the tomb. And so, nevermore will I
smell your lovely hawthorns, so white. But in the sleep of death I
daresay I will still hear those three peals of the bell that will have
driven me to damnation in this world.”
Her soliloquy was interrupted by the calls from the court-
yard of the waistcoat tailor,31 the same who had so pleased my
grandmother once, long ago, when she had gone to pay a call on
Mme de Villeparisis, and now occupied no less elevated a place
in Françoise’s affections. Having raised his head when he heard
our window open, he had already been trying for some time to
attract his neighbor’s attention in order to bid her good day. The
coquetry of the young girl that Françoise had once been softened
and refined for M. Jupien the querulous face of our old cook,
dulled by age, ill temper, and the heat of the kitchen stove, and
it was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity, and modesty
that she bestowed a gracious salutation on the waistcoat tailor,
but without making any audible response, for if she did infringe
Mamma’s orders by looking into the courtyard, she would never
have dared to go the length of talking from the window, which
had the knack, according to Françoise, of bringing down on her
“a whole chapter” from Madame. She pointed out the waiting ca-
lèche to him, as if to say: “A fine pair of horses, eh!” but what she

Part One 13
 The Guermantes Way

32. Pierre Corneille (1606–84) was, actually muttered was: “What an old rattle-­trap!” principally be-
next to Racine, the most famous cause she knew that he would be bound to answer her, putting his
seventeenth-­century tragic playwright.
Ennui, as used by Corneille and his con- hand to his lips so as to be audible without having to shout: “You
temporaries, had a much more forceful could have one too if you liked, as good as they have and better, I
meaning than it does today. Whereas daresay, only you don’t care for that sort of thing.”
the word now means a “problem” or
“difficulty” or merely “boredom,” in And Françoise, after a modest, evasive, signal of delight, the
Corneille’s time, ennui meant violent meaning of which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know;
despair or deep sorrow caused by the simplicity’s the rule in this house,” shut the window again in case
death or longing for an absent loved
one, or by lack of hope, or by the ad- Mamma should come in. These “you” who might have had more
vent of any serious misfortunes. horses than the Guermantes were ourselves, but Jupien was right
33. The verb s’ennuyer de means to miss in saying “you” since, except for a few purely personal gratifica-
someone terribly, to languish because
someone is absent or deceased. tions, such as, when she coughed all day long without ceasing
and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her cold, that
of pretending, with an irritating little titter, that she did not have
a cold, like those plants that an animal to which they are wholly
attached keeps alive with food that it catches, eats, and digests
for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily as-
similable residue, Françoise lived with us in symbiosis; it was we
who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take
on ourselves the task of concocting those little sops to her vanity
out of which was formed—with the addition of the recognized
right of freely practicing the cult of the midday dinner according
to the ancient custom, which included the little gulp of air at the
window when the meal was finished, a certain amount of loitering
in the street when she went out to do her marketing, and a Sunday
outing when she went to see her niece—the portion of content-
ment indispensable to her existence. And so it can be understood
why Françoise might well have languished in those first days of
our migration, a prey, in a house where my father’s claims to dis-
tinction were not yet known, to a malady that she herself called
“ennui,” ennui in the emphatic sense in which the word is em-
ployed by Corneille,32 or in the last letters of soldiers who end by
taking their own lives because they miss so terribly33 their fian-
cées or their native villages. Françoise’s ennui had soon been cured
by none other than Jupien, for he at once procured her a pleasure

14 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

just as keen and more refined than she would have felt if we had
decided to keep a carriage. “Very good class, those Juliens” (for
Françoise readily assimilated new names to those with which she
was already familiar), “very worthy people; you can see it written
on their faces.” Jupien was in fact able to understand, and to in-
form the world that if we did not keep a carriage it was because
we had no wish for one. This new friend of Françoise was seldom
at home, having obtained a post in one of the government offices.
A waistcoat tailor first of all, with the “chit of a girl” whom my
grandmother had taken for his daughter, he had lost all interest in
the exercise of that trade after the girl (who, when still little more
than a child, had shown great skill in darning a torn skirt, that
day when my grandmother had gone to call on Mme de Villepa-
risis) had turned to ladies’ fashions and become a skirtmaker. A
prentice hand, to begin with, in a dressmaker’s workroom, em-
ployed to stitch a seam, to fasten a flounce, to sew on a button
or a press stud, to fix a waistband with hooks and eyes, she had
quickly risen to be second and then chief assistant, and having
formed a clientele of her own among ladies of fashion now worked
at home, that is to say in our courtyard, usually with one or two
of her young girlfriends from the workroom, whom she had taken
on as apprentices. After this, Jupien’s presence in the place had
ceased to matter. No doubt the little girl (a big girl by this time)
still had often to cut out waistcoats. But with her friends to assist
her she needed no one besides. And so Jupien, her uncle, had
sought employment outside. He was free at first to return home
at noon, then, when he had definitely replaced the man he had
only been assisting, not before dinnertime. His appointment to
a “tenured position” did not occur, fortunately, until some weeks
after our arrival, so that Jupien’s kindness could be brought to
bear on Françoise long enough to help her get through the first
difficult phase without undue torment. At the same time, and
without underrating his value to Françoise as “transition medi-
cine,” I am bound to say that my first impression of Jupien had
been far from favorable. From a few feet away, entirely ruining the

Part One 15
 The Guermantes Way

effect that his plump cheeks and florid complexion would other-
wise have produced, his eyes, brimming with a compassionate,
mournful, dreamy gaze, led one to suppose that he was seriously
ill or had just suffered a great bereavement. Not only was there
nothing of the sort, but also as soon as he spoke (perfectly well,
by the way), he was rather cold and mocking. There resulted from
this discord between his eyes and his speech a certain falsity that
was not attractive and gave him the air of being made as uncom-
fortable as a guest who arrives in a jacket at a party where everyone
else is wearing formal attire or as someone who having to reply
to a royal personage does not know exactly how he ought to ad-
dress him and gets around the difficulty by reducing his remarks
to almost nothing. Jupien’s (here the comparison ends) were, on
the contrary, charming. Indeed, corresponding possibly to this in-
undation of his face by his eyes (which one ceased to notice when
one came to know him), I soon discerned in him a rare intelli-
gence and one of the most spontaneously literary that I have ever
come across, in the sense that, probably without education, he
possessed or had assimilated, with the help only of a few books
hastily skimmed, the most ingenious turns of speech. The most
gifted people whom I had known had died very young. And so I
was convinced that Jupien’s life would soon be cut short. He had
kindness and compassion, the most delicate and the most gen-
erous feelings. His role in Françoise’s life had soon ceased to be
indispensable. She had learned to stand in for him.
Even when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a
parcel or message, while seeming to pay no attention to him and
merely pointing vaguely to an empty chair, while she continued
her work, Françoise so skillfully put to the best advantage the
few moments that he spent in the kitchen while he waited for
Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that the stranger went
away without having ineradicably engraved in his mind the con-
viction that, if we “did not have” any particular thing, it was be-
cause we had “no wish” for it. If she made such a point of other
people’s knowing that we “had money” (for she knew nothing of

16 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

what Saint-­L oup used to call partitive articles, and said simply 34. In English, expressing the partitive
“have money,” “fetch water”),34 of their knowing that we were (some or any) is optional, but in French
it must always be expressed. We may
rich, it was not because riches with nothing else besides, riches say “I have some money,” or “I have
without virtue, were in her eyes the supreme good in life, but money.” Instead of avoir d’argent and
virtue without riches was not her ideal either. Riches were for her, apporter d’eau, Françoise should have
said: “avoir de l’argent” and “apporter
so to speak, a necessary condition of virtue, failing which virtue de l’eau.”
itself would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so little 35. The rue de la Chaise is in the
between them that she had come in time to invest each with the seventh arrondissement and runs from
the rue de Grenelle to the boulevard
other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to Raspail. It is near the old aristocratic
discover something edifying in riches. neighborhood known as the Faubourg
As soon as she had shut the window again, which she did rather Saint-­Germain. See Swann’s Way, 17.
36. This is a famous line in Georges
quickly—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on Feydeau’s comedy La Dame de chez
her “every imaginable insult”—Françoise began with many groans Maxim (1899): “Eh! Allez donc, c’est
and sighs to put straight the kitchen table. pas mon père.” The line is spoken by
la môme Crevette (act 2, scene 4) and
“There are some Guermantes who stay in the rue de la Chaise,”35 is repeated many times throughout the
began my father’s valet; “I had a friend who used to work there; play by the heroine, a young demimon-
he was their second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old daine. It has come to mean: “There’s
nothing wrong with that!” or “It’s not
pal, but his brother-­in-­law, who did his time in the army with my fault!” See In the Shadow of Young
one of the Baron de Guermantes’s grooms. ‘After all, he’s not my Girls in Flower, 381, n. 233.
father,’”36 added the valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to
hum the popular airs of the season, of peppering his conversation
with all the latest witticisms.
Françoise, with the tired eyes of an aging woman, eyes that
moreover saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, made
out not the witticism that underlay the words, but that there must
be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest
of his remarks and had been uttered with considerable emphasis
by one whom she knew to be a joker. She smiled at him, therefore,
with an air of benevolent bewilderment, as if to say: “Always the
same, that Victor!” And she was genuinely pleased, knowing that
listening to smart sayings of this sort was akin—if remotely—to
those reputable social pleasures for which, in every class of so-
ciety, people make haste to dress themselves in their best and run
the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed the valet to
be a friend after her own heart, for he never ceased to denounce

Part One 17
 The Guermantes Way

37. A 1905 law put an end to the gov- with fierce indignation the appalling measures that the Republic
ernment funding of religious groups. was about to enforce against the clergy.37 Françoise had not yet
This and other measures led to the
separation of church and state in learned that our cruelest adversaries are not those who contradict
France. and try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports
38. Françoise repeats an error here that that may make us unhappy, taking care not to give them any ap-
she made earlier at Combray. She con-
fuses the word parenthèse (parenthesis) pearance of justification that might diminish our pain and per-
with parenté (kinship). See Swann’s haps give us some slight regard for a party that they make a point
Way, 176. of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once ter-
39. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a
physicist, mathematician, philoso- rible and triumphant.
pher, and distinguished writer. His “The duchess must be allianced with all that bunch,” said
most famous literary work is the unfin- Françoise, bringing the conversation back to the Guermantes of
ished Pensées sur la religion chrétienne
(1670). Despite his accomplishments the rue de la Chaise, as one begins a piece over again from the an-
as a scientist, Pascal came to accept dante. “I can’t recall who told me that one of them had married a
the authority of the Gospels. He retired cousin of the duke. It’s the same geological relation,38 anyway. Ay,
to Port-­Royal, where he espoused the
asceticism of Jansenist doctrines. they’re a great family, the Guermantes!” she added, in a tone of re-
40. Françoise pronounces eux (them) spect founding the greatness of the family at once on the number
as eusse, not unlike the pronunciation of its branches and the brilliance of its connections, as Pascal39
of “youse” for “you.”
41. Angers is a city in western France, founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on the authority of
located in the département of Maine-­ the Scriptures. For since there was but the single word “great” to
et-­Loire, about 190 miles southwest of express both meanings, it seemed to Françoise that they formed a
Paris. It is the former capital of Anjou.
42. The French distinguish between single idea—her vocabulary, like certain cut stones, showing thus
langage, one’s manner of speaking or on certain of its facets a flaw that projected a ray of darkness into
one’s speech, and langue, the language the recesses of her mind.
itself.
43. Toponymy is the lexicological or ety- “I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them40 that have their château
mological study of the place names of at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they
a region or language. As we have seen must be kin to their cousin at Algiers, too.” My mother and I had
since the beginning of this novel, the
Narrator is fascinated by this topic. long wondered who this cousin in Algiers could be until finally we
discovered that Françoise meant by the name Algiers the town of
Angers.41 What is far away may be more familiar to us than what
is quite near. Françoise, who knew the name Algiers from some
particularly awful dates that used to be given us at the New Year,
had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language
itself,42 and especially its toponymy,43 was strewn with errors. “I
meant to talk to their butler about it. What is it again they call
him?” she interrupted herself as though asking herself a question

18 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

regarding protocol; which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of 44. The Marquise de Sévigné, née
course, it’s Antoine they call him!” as though Antoine had been a Marie de Rabutin-­Chantal (1626–96),
is famous for her Letters. In a number
title. “He’s the one who could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, of these, she uses the expression faire
he is a great pedant, you’d say they’d cut his tongue out, or that réponse.
he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no response when you 45. See Swann’s Way, 100.
46. For an explanation of why Françoise
talk to him,” went on Françoise, who used “make response” in the and other domestics use employés in-
same sense as Mme de Sévigné.44 “But,” she added, quite untruth- stead of “servants” or “staff,” see In the
fully, “so long as I know what’s boiling in my pot, I don’t bother Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 413.
47. Chanoine and chanoinesse (literally,
my head about what’s in other people’s. In any case, it’s not very canon and canoness) are used to show
orthodox. Besides, he’s not a courageous man.” (This criticism that Françoise’s malformation of An-
might have led one to suppose that Françoise had changed her toine(sse) is legitimate even if her word
does not exist in usage.
mind about physical bravery that, according to her, in Combray 48. The rue Chanoinesse, on the Île de
days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts.45 But it was not so. la Cité in the fourth arrondissement,
“Courageous” meant simply hardworking.) “They say, too, that connects the rue d’Arcole and the rue
du Cloître-­Notre-­Dame and derives its
he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all the gossip ancient name from the many canons at
one hears. The employees46 never stay long there because of the the Cloître-­Notre-­Dame.
lodge; the concierges are jealous and set the duchess against them.
But it’s safe to say that he’s a real lazybones, that Antoine, and his
Antoinesse is no better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing
the name “Antoine” with a feminine ending that would designate
the butler’s wife, was inspired, no doubt, in her act of word for-
mation by an unconscious memory of the words chanoine and cha-
noinesse.47 If so, she was not far wrong. There is still a street near
Notre-­Dame called rue Chanoinesse,48 a name that must have
been given to it (since it was never inhabited by any but male
canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise
was in reality the contemporary. She proceeded, moreover, at once
to furnish another example of this way of forming feminine end-
ings, for she added: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the
duchess that has the château de Guermantes. And it’s she that is
Madame the Mayoress down in those parts. That’s something.”
“I can well believe that it is something,” came with conviction
from the footman, who had not detected the irony.
“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why,
for folk like them to be mayor and mayoress, it’s just thank you

Part One 19
 The Guermantes Way

49. Angelus, the time of which is an- for nothing. Ah, if it was mine, that château de Guermantes, you
nounced by a bell, is a devotion of wouldn’t see me setting foot in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a
the Western church that commemo-
rates the Incarnation and is said in the family who has got something to go on with, like Monsieur and
morning, at noon, and in the evening. Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on in this wretched
50. The church bells ring “to bless the town rather than get away down to Combray the moment they’re
fruits of the earth,” on Rogation Days;
these days of prayers and processions free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off re-
usually take place in the spring three tiring? They’ve got everything they want. Why wait till they’re
days before Ascension Day in order to dead? Ah, if I had only a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to
bring heaven’s blessings on the harvest.
keep me warm in winter, a fine time I’d have of it at home in my
brother’s poor old house at Combray. Down there you do feel
you’re alive; you haven’t all these houses stuck up in front of you,
there is so little noise at nighttime, you can hear the frogs singing
five miles off and more.”
“That must indeed be fine!” exclaimed the young footman with
enthusiasm, as though this last attraction had been as peculiar to
Combray as the gondola is to Venice.
A more recent arrival in the household than my father’s valet,
he used to talk to Françoise about things that might interest not
himself so much as her. And Françoise, whose face wrinkled up
in disgust when she was treated as a mere cook, had for the young
footman, who referred to her always as the “housekeeper,” the
peculiar tenderness that princes not of the blood royal feel toward
the well-­meaning young men who dignify them with a “High-
ness.”
“At any rate one knows what one’s about, there, and what time
of year it is. It isn’t like here where you won’t find one wretched
buttercup flowering at holy Easter any more than you would at
Christmas, and I can’t hear so much as the tiniest angelus49 ring
when I lift my old bones out of bed in the morning. Down there,
you can hear every hour; there’s only the one poor bell, but you
say to yourself: ‘My brother will be coming in from the field now,’
and you watch the daylight fade, and the bell rings to bless the
fruits of the earth,50 and you have time to take a turn before you
light the lamp. But here it’s daytime and it’s nighttime, and you

20 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

go to bed, and you can’t say any more than the dumb beasts what 51. The valet makes a mistake in usage
you’ve been about all day.” here by employing the word souvent
as an adjective (souventes fois), which
“I gather Méséglise is a fine place, too, Madame,” broke in the would be the equivalent, if correct in
young footman, who found that the conversation was becoming French, of the English word oftentimes.
a little too abstract for his liking, and happened to remember
having heard us, at the table, mention Méséglise.
“Oh! Méséglise,” said Françoise, with the broad smile that one
could always bring to her lips by uttering any of those names—
Méséglise, Combray, Tansonville. They were so intimate a part of
her life that she felt, on meeting them outside it, on hearing them
used in conversation, a gaiety more or less akin to that which a
teacher excites in his class by making an allusion to some con-
temporary personage whose name the pupils had never supposed
could possibly greet their ears from the height of the lectern. Her
pleasure arose also from the feeling that these places were some-
thing to her, which they were not for the rest of the world, old
companions with whom one has shared many outings; and she
smiled at them as if she found in them something witty, because
she did find in them a great part of herself.
“Yes, you may well say so, my son, it’s a pretty enough place
is Méséglise”; she went on laughing softly, “but how did you ever
come to hear tell of Méséglise?”
“How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-­known place;
people have told me about it—yes, much times,”51 he assured her
with that criminal inexactitude of the informer who, whenever we
attempt to make an impartial estimate of the importance that a
thing that matters to us may have for other people, makes it im-
possible for us to succeed.
“Ah, I can tell you, it’s better down there under the cherry trees
than standing here in front of the stove all day.”
She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since
Eulalie’s death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had
loved her as little in her lifetime as she loved anyone whose cup-
board was bare, who was dying of hunger, and after that came,

Part One 21
 The Guermantes Way

52. For Françoise’s jealousy and sus- like a good-­for-­nothing, thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put
picions of Eulalie, see Swann’s Way, on airs.” It no longer pained her that Eulalie had so skillfully man-
121–23.
53. Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) is the aged, Sunday after Sunday, to secure her “tip” from my aunt.52 As
author of Les Caractères (1688), a work for the latter, Françoise never ceased to sing her praises.
that presents the portraits of a number “But it was at Combray itself that you used to be, with a cousin
of characters or types. The verb plaindre
now means “to pity.” In Françoise’s of Madame?” asked the young footman.
usage, it means that Aunt Léonie did “Yes, with Mme Octave—oh, a very saintly woman, my poor
not regret the expenditure. friends, and a house where there was always enough and to spare,
and all of the very best, a good woman, you may well say, who
had no pity on the partridges, or the pheasants, or anything; you
might turn up five to dinner or six, it was never the meat that was
lacking, and of the best quality too, and white wine, and red wine,
and everything you could wish.” (Françoise used the word “pity”
in the meaning given it by La Bruyère.)53 “It was she that paid the
damages, always, even if the family stayed for months and years.”
(This reflection was not really a slur on us, for Françoise belonged
to a time when the word “damages” was not restricted to a legal
use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell you, people didn’t
go away hungry from that house. Monsieur le Curé told us many’s
the time, if there ever was a woman who could count on going
straight before the Throne of God, it was she. Poor Madame, I
can hear her saying now in that little voice of hers: ‘You know,
Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just
as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the vict-
uals, you may be quite sure. If you’d only seen her, she weighed
no more than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She
would never listen to a word I said; she would never see the doctor.
Ah, it wasn’t in that house that you’d have to gobble down your
dinner. She liked her servants to be well nourished. Here, it’s been
just the same again today; we haven’t had time for so much as to
break a crust of bread; everything must be done in a rush.”
What exasperated her more than anything were the crisp slices
of toast that my father used to eat. She was convinced that he had
them simply to give himself airs and to keep her “dancing.” “I can
tell you frankly,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw

22 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

the like.” He said it as if he had seen everything, and as if in him

the range of a millennial experience extended over all countries
and their customs, among which was not anywhere to be found
a custom of eating slices of toast. “Yes, yes,” the butler muttered,
“but that may all be changed; the workers are going on strike in
Canada, and the minister told Monsieur the other evening that
he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was
no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself en-
tirely honest, but since he regarded all politicians as shady, the
crime of embezzlement seemed to him less serious than the pet-
tiest larceny. He did not even stop to ask himself whether he had
heard this historical utterance aright, and was not struck by the
improbability that such a thing would have been admitted by the
guilty party himself to my father without my father’s immedi-
ately turning him out of the house. But the philosophy of Com-
bray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that the strikes in
Canada could have any repercussion on the consumption of toast.
“So long as the world goes round, look, there’ll be masters to keep
us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of
this theory of perpetual trotting, for the last quarter of an hour my
mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time
as Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had
been saying: “What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at
least two hours at the table.” And she rang timidly three or four
times. Françoise, “her” footman, and the butler heard the bell
ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no thought of an-
swering it, but rather like the first sounds of the instruments being
tuned when a concert is about to begin, and one knows that there
will be only a few minutes more of intermission. And so, when the
peals were repeated and became more urgent, our servants began
to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much time left
and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal somewhat
louder than the rest, gave a collective sigh and went their several
ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette out-
side the door, Françoise, after a string of reflections on ourselves,

Part One 23
 The Guermantes Way

54. In the original, sauvoir, which is a such as: “They’ve got the jumps today, surely,” going up to the top
basin for the cultivation of fish. floor to tidy her things, while the butler, having supplied himself
55. A cairn is a heap of stones piled up
as a memorial or as a landmark. first with notepaper from my bedroom, polished off the arrears of
56. Whistler (1843–1903) painted a his private correspondence.
series of landscapes that bear the title In spite of the haughty air of their butler, Françoise had been
Harmony. In 1905, Proust went to the
Whistler exhibition at the Palais de in a position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes
l’École des Beaux-­Arts, where he saw occupied their hotel by virtue not of an immemorial right but of
Harmony in Blue and Silver, Crépuscule a quite recent tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked
in Opal: Trouville; The Blue Wave: Biar-
ritz; and Nocturne in Blue and Silver. on the side that I did not know was rather small and just like
57. The Faubourg Saint-­Germain is a all the neighboring gardens; and I realized at last that there were
historic district of Paris, an elegant resi- not to be seen feudal gallows or fortified mill, fish pond,54 pil-
dential section on the Left Bank that
includes parts of the fifth, sixth, and lared dovecot, communal bakehouse, tithe-­barn, fortress, draw-
seventh arrondissements; it is named bridge or fixed bridge or even flying bridges, any more than toll
for the church of Saint-­Germain-­des-­ bridges, spires, charters, or cairns.55 But just as Elstir, when the
Prés. In Proust’s day, it was inhabited
mostly by the descendants of pre-­ bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a
Revolutionary France. portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of
58. Proust placed “salon” in quotation salt water on the globe, had suddenly restored to it a personality
marks because in French it can mean
the drawing room or those who as- of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal, painted by
semble there. Whistler in his Harmony in Blue and Silver,56 so the name Guer-
mantes had seen perish under Françoise’s blows the last of the
dwellings that had issued from its syllables when one day an old
friend of my father said to us, speaking of the duchess: “She has
the most important position in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain; hers
is the leading salon in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain.”57 No doubt
the most exclusive salon, the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-­
Germain was little or nothing after all those other dwellings of
which in turn I had dreamed. And yet this one too (and it was to
be the last of the series), had something, however humble, above
and beyond its material components, a secret differentiation.
And it became all the more essential that I should be able to ex-
plore in Mme de Guermantes’s “salon,”58 among her friends, the
mystery of her name, since I did not find it in her person when
I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the after-
noon in her carriage. Once before, indeed, in the church at Com-
bray, she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a metamor-

24 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

phosis, with cheeks irreducible to, impenetrable by the color of the 59. In Greek mythology, the Hesperides
name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, were the nymphs of evening who were
charged with guarding the golden
taking the place of my shattered dream, like a swan or willow apples. When these were stolen from
that has been changed into a god or nymph,59 and which hence- them, the nymphs were transformed
forward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be into trees: an elm, a poplar, and a
weeping willow. Zeus took the form of
shaken by the wind. And yet scarcely had I lost sight of this van- a swan to seduce Leda. In Wagner’s
ished radiance before it formed itself again, like the green and rosy Lohengrin, Gottfried is metamorphosed
afterglow of sunset after the sweep of the oar has broken it, and in into a swan.

the solitude of my thoughts the name had quickly appropriated to

itself my impression of the face. But now, frequently, I saw her at
her window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least
if I did not succeed in integrating in her the name Guermantes,
in thinking that she was Mme de Guermantes, I cast the blame on
the impotence of my mind to accomplish completely the act that
I demanded of it; but she herself, our neighbor, seemed to commit
the same error; and what is more, to make it without discomfi-
ture, without any of my scruples, without even suspecting that
it was an error. Thus Mme de Guermantes showed in her dresses
the same anxiety to follow the fashion as if, believing herself to
have become simply a woman like all the rest, she had aspired to
that elegance in her attire in which other ordinary women might
equal and perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in the street gaze
admiringly at a well-­dressed actress; and in the morning, before
she set out on foot, as if the opinion of the passersby, whose vul-
garity she accentuated by parading familiarly through their midst
her inaccessible life, could be a tribunal competent to judge her,
I would see her in front of the mirror playing, with a conviction
free from all pretense or irony, with passion, with ill-­humor, with
conceit, like a queen who has consented to appear as a servant
girl in theatricals at court, this role, so unworthy of her, of a fash-
ionable woman; and in this mythological oblivion of her natural
grandeur, she looked to see whether her veil was hanging properly,
smoothed her cuffs, straightened her cloak, as the divine swan per-
forms all the movements natural to his animal species, keeps his
eyes painted on either side of his beak without putting into them

Part One 25
 The Guermantes Way

60. Proust often uses synesthesia, the any glint of life, and darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella,
stimulation of one sense by another as a swan would, without remembering that he is a god. But as
sense, to describe the auditory effect
the name Guermantes has on the Nar- the traveler, disappointed by the first appearance of a strange
rator. See Swann’s Way, 10 and 196. town, tells himself that he will doubtless succeed in penetrating
61. Proust is speaking generically here: its charm by visiting its museums, becoming acquainted with its
this salon, typical of the old aristocratic
ones located in the Faubourg Saint-­ inhabitants, working in its libraries, so I assured myself that, had
Germain, happens to be on the Right I been given the right of entry into Mme de Guermantes’s house,
Bank. were I one of her friends, were I to penetrate into her life, I would
then know what, within its brilliant orange-­colored envelope,60
her name did really, objectively enclose for other people, since,
after all, my father’s friend had said that the Guermantes set was
something exceptional in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain.
The life that I supposed them to lead there flowed from a source
so different from anything in my experience, and must, I felt, be
so extraordinary, that I could not have imagined the presence, at
the duchess’s soirées, of people in whose company I myself had
already been, of people who really existed. For, not being able sud-
denly to change their nature, they would have carried on conver-
sations there of the sort that I knew; their partners would perhaps
have stooped to reply to them in the same human speech; and,
in the course of an evening spent in the leading salon of the Fau-
bourg Saint-­Germain, there would have been moments identical
with moments that I had already lived: which was impossible. It
is true that my mind was perplexed by certain difficulties, and the
presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no
more obscure a mystery than this leading salon in the Faubourg,
situated here, on the Right Bank61 and so near that from my bed-
room in the morning, 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 sensed clearly that it was already part of the Faubourg,
when I saw the Guermantes doormat, spread out on the other
side of this Equator, of which my mother had made bold to say,
having like myself caught a glimpse of it one day when their door
stood open, that it was in a shocking state. For the rest, how could

26 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

their dining room, their dim gallery with its furniture upholstered 62. Solomon garnished the temple with
in red plush, into which I could see sometimes from our kitchen gold and other precious metals. See
2 Chronicles 2: 4–17.
window, have failed to possess in my eyes the mysterious charm 63. The Sainte-­Chapelle is on the Île
of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, to form part of it in an essen- de la Cité, next to the Palais de Jus-
tial fashion, to be geographically situated within it, since to have tice, which was once a royal residence,
constructed by King Louis IX, known as
been entertained at dinner in that room was to have gone into the Saint Louis. The chapel’s magnificent
Faubourg Saint-­Germain, to have breathed its atmosphere, since stained-­glass windows are flanked by
the people who, before going to the table, sat down by the side of statues of the apostles standing against
the pillars on either side. The apostles’
Mme de Guermantes on the leather sofa in that gallery were all hair, beards, and robes are made of gilt
of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain? No doubt elsewhere than in the wood.
Faubourg, at certain soirées, one might see now and then, majes- 64. The oasis of Figuig is the largest
and richest of the groups of oases in
tically enthroned amid the vulgar herd of fashionable people, one the Moroccan Sahara Desert.
of those men who are mere names and varyingly assume, when
one tries to form a picture of them, 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, there was no one but them.
They were wrought of precious materials, the columns that up-
held the temple.62 Even for intimate gatherings it was from among
them only that Mme de Guermantes could choose her guests, and
in the dinners for twelve, assembled around the dazzling napery
and plate, they were like the golden statues of the Apostles in the
Sainte-­Chapelle, symbolic and sanctifying pillars before the Holy
Table.63 As for the tiny strip of garden that stretched between high
walls at the back of the hotel, where on summer evenings Mme de
Guermantes had liqueurs and orangeade brought out after dinner,
how could I not have felt that to sit there of an evening, between
nine and eleven, on its iron chairs—endowed with a magic as
potent as the leather sofa—without inhaling the breezes peculiar
to the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, was as impossible as to take a
siesta in the oasis of Figuig64 without thereby being necessarily in
Africa? Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest
certain objects, certain people, and create an atmosphere. Alas,
those picturesque sites, those natural features, those local curiosi-
ties, those works of art of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, no doubt I
would never be permitted to set my feet among them. And I must

Part One 27
 The Guermantes Way

content myself with a shiver of excitement as I sighted from the

high sea (and without the least hope of ever landing there) like a
distant minaret, like the first palm tree, like the first signs of some
exotic industry or vegetation, the well-­worn doormat of its shore.
But if the Hôtel de Guermantes began for me at the door of
its vestibule, its dependencies must be regarded as extending a
long way farther, according to the duke, who, looking on all the
other tenants as farmers, peasants, purchasers of national assets,
whose opinion was of no account, shaved himself every morning
in his nightshirt at the window, came down into the courtyard,
according to the warmth or coldness of the day, in his shirtsleeves,
in pajamas, in a plaid coat of startling colors, with a shaggy nap,
in a little light-­colored topcoat shorter than his jacket, and made
one of his grooms lead past him at a trot some horse that he had
just bought. More than once, indeed, the horse broke the window
of Jupien’s shop, whereupon Jupien, to the duke’s indignation,
demanded compensation. “If it were only in consideration of all
the good that Madame la Duchesse does in the house here and
in the parish,” said M. de Guermantes, “it is an outrage on this
fellow’s part to claim a sou from us.” But Jupien had stuck to
his guns, apparently not having the faintest idea what “good” the
duchess had ever done. And yet she did do good, but—since one
cannot do good to everybody at once—the memory of the bene-
fits that we have heaped on one person is a valid reason for our ab-
staining from helping another, whose discontent we thereby make
all the stronger. From other points of view than that of charity the
neighborhood appeared to the duke—and this over a considerable
area—to be only an extension of his courtyard, a longer track for
his horses. After seeing how a new horse trotted by itself, he would
have it harnessed and taken through all the neighboring streets,
the groom running beside the carriage holding the reins, making
it pass to and fro before the duke, who stood on the pavement,
erect, gigantic, enormous in his light-­colored clothes, a cigar be-
tween his teeth, his head in the air, his monocle scrutinizing, until
the moment when he sprang on the box, drove the horse up and

28 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

down for a little to try it, then set off with his new turnout to meet 65. The Schola Cantorum was devoted
his mistress in the Champs-­Élysées. Before leaving the courtyard, to the restoration of ancient musical
forms, Gregorian and Palestrinian. It
M. de Guermantes would bid good day to two couples who be- was founded in 1894 by Charles Bordes
longed more or less to his world; the first, some cousins of his and others; in 1896, under the direction
who, like working-­class parents, were never at home to look after of Vincent d’Indy, it became a pres-
tigious conservatory specializing in
their children, since every morning the wife went off to the Schola sacred music and liturgical chants.
Cantorum65 to study counterpoint and fugue, and the husband 66. The chair attendants were women,
to his studio to carve wood and tool leather; and then the Baron usually war widows, who were in charge
of renting chairs in public gardens and
and Baronne de Norpois, always dressed in black, she like a chair- churches.
keeper66 and he like an undertaker, who emerged several times
daily on their way to church. They were the nephew and niece
of the former ambassador whom we knew, and whom my father
had, in fact, met at the foot of the staircase without realizing
whence he came; for my father supposed that so considerable a
personage, one who had come in contact with the most eminent
men in Europe and was probably quite indifferent to the empty
distinctions of aristocratic rank, was hardly likely to frequent the
society of these obscure, clerical, and narrow-­minded nobles. They
had not been inhabiting the place for long; Jupien, who had come
out into the courtyard to say a word to the husband just as he was
greeting M. de Guermantes, called him “M. Norpois,” not being
certain of his name.
“Monsieur Norpois, indeed! Oh, that really is good! Just wait a
little! This individual will be calling you Comrade Norpois next!”
exclaimed M. de Guermantes, turning to the baron. He was at last
able to vent his spleen against Jupien who addressed him as “Mon-
sieur,” instead of “Monsieur le Duc.”
One day when M. de Guermantes required some information
about a matter of which my father had professional knowledge,
he had introduced himself to him 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 with
his work and eager to avoid any interruption, the duke, leaving
his stableboys, would come up to him in the courtyard, straighten
the collar of his overcoat, with the serviceable deftness inherited

Part One 29
 The Guermantes Way

67. The ombres chinoises is a show in from a line of royal body servants in days gone by, take him by
which the characters are silhouetted the hand, and, holding it in his own, patting it even to prove to
on a screen. In 1895, it was revived in
Paris as a form of entertainment at the my father, with a courtesan’s shamelessness, that he, the Duc de
cabaret Chat Noir and the Olympia Guermantes, made no bargain about my father’s right to the privi-
music hall. lege of contact with the precious ducal flesh, lead him, so to speak,
68. Chantilly is a town in the départe-
ment of Oise where there is a forest by on a leash, extremely annoyed and thinking only how he might es-
the same name and a magnificent châ- cape, through the porte cochère out into the street. He had given
teau that dates from the Middle Ages. us a sweeping bow one day when we had come in just as he was
69. Henri d’Orléans, Duc d’Aumale
(1822–97), fourth son of Louis-­ going out in the carriage with his wife; he was bound to have told
Philippe, was a general and histo- her my name; but what likelihood was there of her remembering
rian who inherited the vast fortune it, or my face either? And besides, what a feeble recommendation
of the Prince de Condé. He became
the owner of the château de Chantilly. to be pointed out simply as being one of her tenants! Another,
Around 1890, the duke began giving more valuable, would have been my meeting the duchess at the
lavish parties at the château to which house of Mme de Villeparisis, who, as it happened, had sent word
he invited celebrities, aristocrats, mili-
tary leaders, academicians, artists, and by my grandmother that I was to go and see her, and, remem-
political figures. bering that I had been intending to pursue a literary career, had
added that I would meet several authors there. But my father felt
that I was still a little young to go into society, and since the state
of my health continued to worry him, he was not eager to give me
needless opportunities for new outings.
As one of Mme de Guermantes’s footmen was in the habit of
chatting with Françoise, I picked up the names of several of the
houses that she frequented, but formed no impression of any of
them; from the moment in which they were a part of her life, of
the life that I saw only through the veil of her name, were they not
inconceivable?
“Tonight there’s a big party with a Chinese shadow-­puppet67
show at the Princesse de Parme’s,” said the footman, “but we won’t
be going, because at five o’clock Madame is taking the train to
Chantilly68 to spend a few days with the Duc d’Aumale;69 but it’ll
be the lady’s maid and valet who are going with her. I’m to stay
here. She won’t be at all pleased, the Princesse de Parme won’t.
That’s four times already she’s written to Madame la Duchesse.”
“Then you won’t be going down to the château de Guermantes
this year?”

30 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

“It’s the first time we won’t be going there: it’s because of the 70. Cannes is a resort city on the
duke’s rheumatics, the doctor says he’s not to go there till the Riviera in the département of Alpes-­
Maritimes.
radiators are in, but we’ve been there every year till now, right on 71. Princesse Isabelle d’Orléans (1878–
to January. If the radiators aren’t ready, perhaps Madame will go 1961) in 1899 married her first cousin
for a few days to Cannes70 to the Duchesse de Guise’s,71 but noth- Jean-­Pierre Clément Marie d’Orléans,
Duc de Guise (1874–1940), who was,
ing’s settled yet.” for Orléanist supporters, the titular
“And to the theater, do you go, sometimes?” King of France.
“We go now and then to the Opéra,72 usually on the eve- 72. The Théâtre National de l’Opéra,
located in the ninth arrondissement,
nings to which the Princesse de Parme has subscribed, that’s once avenue de l’Opéra, was inaugurated in
a week; it seems it’s a fine show they give there, plays, operas, 1875. It is also known as the Palais Gar-
everything. Madame refused to subscribe to it herself, but we go nier, after its architect, Charles Garnier
(1825–98).
all the same to the boxes Madame’s friends take, one one night, 73. A baignoire (or baignoir) is a large
another another, often in the baignoire73 with the Princesse de box located on the ground floor or
Guermantes, the wife of Monsieur le Duc’s cousin. She’s sister to lowest tier of a theater.
74. Glèbe is a feudal term that desig-
the Duke of Bavaria. . . . And so you’ve got to run upstairs again nates the land to which the serfs were
now, have you?” went on the footman, who, although identified attached and that they were obliged to
with the Guermantes, had of masters in general a political notion, cultivate.
75. Guglielmo Marconi sent the first
a view that allowed him to treat Françoise with as much respect wireless transmissions on December
as if she too were in service to a duchess. “You enjoy good health, 12, 1901.
Madame.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t for these cursed legs of mine! On the plain I
can still get along” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in
the streets, where Françoise had no objection to walking, in other
words “on a plane surface”), “but it’s these blasted stairs that do
me in. Good day to you, Monsieur, we’ll see you again, perhaps,
this evening.”
She was all the more eager to continue her conversations with
the footman after he had informed her that the sons of dukes
often bore the title of prince until the death of their fathers. Evi-
dently the cult of the nobility, blended with and accommodating
itself to a certain spirit of revolt against it, must, springing he-
reditarily from the glèbes74 of France, be very strongly implanted
still in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of
the genius of Napoléon or of wireless telegraphy75 without suc-
ceeding in attracting her attention and without her slackening for

Part One 31
 The Guermantes Way

76. Scott Moncrieff added “of nomen- an instant the movements with which she was scraping the ashes
clature.” from the grate or laying the table, if she were simply to be told
77. Piqué is a tightly woven fabric with
various patterns of wales. these idiosyncrasies of nomenclature,76 and that the younger son
78. A pas is a dance step or combina- of the Duc de Guermantes was generally called Prince d’Oléron,
tion of steps. would at once exclaim: “That’s lovely, that is!” and stand there
dazed, as though in front of a stained-­glass window.
Françoise learned also from the Prince d’Agrigente’s valet, who
had become friends with her by coming around often with letters
for the duchess, that he had been hearing a great deal of talk in
society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-­L oup to Mlle
d’Ambresac, and that it was practically settled.
That villa, that opera box, into which Mme de Guermantes
transfused the current of her life, must, it seemed to me, be places
no less magical than her home. The names of Guise, of Parme,
of Guermantes-­Bavière, differentiated from all possible others the
vacation resorts to which the duchess went, the daily festivities that
the track of her carriage wheels linked to her hotel. If they told me
that the life of Mme de Guermantes consisted in a succession of
those vacation spots, of those festivities, they brought no further
light to bear on it. Each of them gave to the life of the duchess a
different determination, but succeeded only in changing the mys-
tery of it, without allowing any of its own mystery to escape, pro-
tected by a covering, enclosed in a vase, amid the waves of all
the other lives. The duchess might take her lunch on the shore of
the Mediterranean at Carnival time, but in the villa of Mme de
Guise, where the queen of Parisian society was nothing more, in
her white piqué77 dress, among numerous princesses, than a guest
like any other, and on that account more moving still to me, more
herself by being thus made new, like a star of the ballet who in the
fantastic course of a pas78 takes the place of each of her ballerina
sisters in succession; she might look at Chinese shadow shows, but
at a soirée given by the Princesse de Parme, listen to a tragedy or
an opera, but from the baignoire of the Princesse de Guermantes.
Since we localize in the body of a person all the potentialities
of that person’s life, the memory of the people he or she knows

32 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

and has just left or is on the way to meet, if, having learned from 79. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Françoise that Mme de Guermantes was going on foot to lunch Flower, 22.
80. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
at the Princesse de Parme’s, I saw her, about midday, emerge from Flower, 450.
her house in a gown of flesh-­colored satin above which her face
was of the same shade, like a cloud at sunset, it was all the plea-
sures of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain that I saw before me, con-
tained in that small compass, as though in a shell, between its
valves glazed with roseate nacre.
My father had a friend at the ministry, one A. J. Moreau, who,
to distinguish himself from the other Moreaus, took care always
to prefix both initials to his name, with the result that people
called him, for short, “A. J.” Now, somehow or other, this A. J.
found himself in possession of an orchestra seat for a gala evening
at the Opéra; he sent the ticket to my father, and as Berma, whom
I had not seen perform again since my first disappointment,79 was
to perform in an act of Phèdre, my grandmother persuaded my
father to give me the ticket.
To tell the truth, I attached no importance to this possibility
of hearing Berma, which, a few years earlier, had plunged me in
such a state of agitation. And it was not without a sense of melan-
choly that I noticed my indifference to what at one time I had put
before health, before peace of mind. It was not that I was less im-
passioned in my desire for an opportunity to contemplate close
at hand the precious particles of reality glimpsed by my imagi-
nation. But my imagination no longer placed these in the diction
of a great actress; since my visits to Elstir,80 it was on certain tap-
estries, certain modern paintings that I had transferred the inner
faith I had once had in acting, in this tragic art of Berma; my
faith, my desire, no longer coming forward to pay incessant wor-
ship to the diction, the attitudes of Berma, the counterpart that I
possessed of them in my heart had gradually perished, like those
other counterparts of the dead in ancient Egypt who had to be
fed continually in order to maintain their originals in eternal life.
This art had become meager and menial. No deep-­lying soul in-
habited it anymore.

Part One 33
 The Guermantes Way

That evening, as, armed with the ticket that my father had re-
ceived from his friend, I was climbing the grand staircase of the
Opéra, I saw in front of me a man whom I took at first for M. de
Charlus, whose bearing he had; when he turned his head to ask
one of the staff a question, I saw that I had been mistaken, but
nevertheless I had no hesitation in placing the stranger in the same
class of society, from the way not only in which he was dressed
but in which he spoke to the man who took the tickets and to the
usherettes who were keeping him waiting. For, apart from indi-
vidual characteristics, there was still at this period between any
dandified and wealthy man of that part of the nobility and any
dandified and wealthy man of the world of finance or big business
a strongly marked difference. Where one of the latter would have
thought he was giving proof of his being chic by adopting a cut-
ting, haughty tone in speaking to an inferior, the great nobleman,
affable, smiling, appeared to be considering, practicing an affec-
tation of humility and patience, a pretense of being just an ordi-
nary member of the audience, as a privilege of his good breeding.
It is likely that on seeing him thus dissemble behind a smile over-
flowing with bonhomie the barred threshold of the special little
universe that he carried in his person, more than one wealthy
banker’s son, entering the theater at that moment, would have
taken this great nobleman for a person of little importance if he
had not remarked in him an astonishing resemblance to the por-
trait that had recently appeared in the newspapers of a nephew of
the Austrian emperor, the Prince of Saxony, who happened to be
in Paris at the time. I knew him to be a great friend of the Guer-
mantes. As I myself reached the ticket taker, I heard the Prince of
Saxony (or his double) say with a smile: “I don’t know the number
of the box; it was her cousin who told me I had only to ask for
her box.”
He may well have been the Prince of Saxony; it was perhaps the
Duchesse de Guermantes (whom, in that event, I would be able
to watch in the process of living one of those moments of her un-
imaginable life in her cousin’s baignoire) that he saw in his mind’s

34 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

eye when he said “her cousin who told me I had only to ask for her 81. We remember that the princess has
box,” so much so that this smiling and particular gaze and those so a ground-­floor box (baignoire). Since
the same word is used in French for
simple words caressed my heart (far more than would any abstract bath or bathtub, Proust is about to
reverie) with the alternative antennae of a possible happiness and make the most metaphorically of the
an uncertain prestige. Whatever he was, in uttering this sentence liquid associations latent in the word’s
literal meaning.
to the ticket taker he grafted onto a commonplace evening in my 82. In Homer as in Virgil, Athena
everyday life a potential passage into a new world; the corridor to (Minerva) is the protector of Achaeans.
which he was directed after mentioning the word “baignoire”81 83. This is the verse line known as the
alexandrine, used in the French clas-
and along which he now proceeded was moist and cracked and sical theater and by many poets. Each
seemed to lead to subaqueous grottoes, to the mythical kingdom line contains twelve syllables consisting
of the water nymphs. I had before me a gentleman in evening regularly of six iambs with a caesura
after the third iamb.
dress who was walking away from me, but I kept playing upon
and around him, as with the light from an unstable projector, and
without succeeding in making it actually coincide with him, the
idea that he was the Prince of Saxony and was on his way to join
the Duchesse de Guermantes. And, although he was alone, that
idea external to himself, impalpable, immense, as unsteady as a
projection from a magic lantern, seemed to precede and guide
him like that Divinity, invisible to the rest of mankind, who
stands beside the Greek warrior in the hour of battle.82
I took my seat, while trying to recapture a line from Phèdre that
I could not quite remember. In the form in which I repeated it to
myself it did not have the right number of feet, but as I made no
attempt to count them, between its imbalance and a classical line
of poetry it seemed as though no common measure could exist. It
would not have surprised me to learn that I must subtract at least
six syllables from that monstrous phrase to reduce it to a line of
twelve feet.83 But suddenly I remembered it, and the irremedi-
able asperities of an inhuman world vanished as if by magic; the
syllables of the line at once filled up the requisite measure of an
alexandrine, what there was in excess floated off with the ease and
the dexterity of a bubble of air that rises to burst on the surface of
the water. And, after all, this monstrosity with which I had been
struggling consisted of only a single foot.
A certain number of orchestra seats had been offered for sale

Part One 35
 The Guermantes Way

84. In a French theatrical tradition that at the box office and bought, out of snobbishness or curiosity, by
dates from the Middle Ages, three those who wished to study the appearance of people whom they
knocks (les trois coups) made by the
stage manager’s staff, called the briga- might not have another opportunity of seeing at close quarters.
dier, are heard from behind the stage to And it was indeed a fragment of their true social life, ordinarily
signal to the audience that the curtain hidden from view, that one could examine here in public, for, the
is about to rise for the performance to
begin. Princesse de Parme having herself distributed among her friends
85. A bavaroise is a Bavarian cream or the seats in the boxes, balconies, and baignoires, the auditorium
mousse. was like a drawing room in which everyone changed his place,
went to sit here or there, next to a woman he knew.
Next to me were some vulgar people who, not knowing the
regular subscribers, were eager to show that they were capable of
identifying them and named them aloud. They went on to remark
that these subscribers behaved there as though they were in their
own drawing rooms, meaning that they paid no attention to what
was being performed. But that was the exact opposite of what did
take place. A brilliant student who had taken an orchestra seat in
order to hear Berma thinks only of not soiling his gloves, of not
disturbing, of making friends with the neighbor whom chance
has put beside him, of pursuing with an intermittent smile the
fleeting glance, avoiding with apparent want of politeness the
intercepted glance of a person of his acquaintance whom he has
discovered in the audience and to whom, after a thousand inde-
cisions, he makes up his mind to go and talk just as the three
knocks84 from the stage, sounding before he has had time to reach
his friend, force him to take flight, like the Hebrews in the Red
Sea, through a heaving tide of spectators and spectatresses whom
he has obliged to rise and whose dresses he tears or whose boots
he crushes as he passes. On the other hand, it was because the
society people sat in their boxes (behind the general terrace of the
balcony), as in so many little suspended drawing rooms, the outer
wall of which had been removed, or in so many little cafés, to
which one might go for a bavaroise85 without being intimidated
by the mirrors in gilt frames or the red plush seats, in the Nea-
politan style of the establishment; it was because they rested an
indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the columns that upheld

36 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

this temple of the lyric art, it was because they remained unmoved 86. Henri IV (1553–1610) was King of
by the extravagant honors that seemed to be being paid them by a Navarre from 1562 to 1610 and King of
France from 1589 to 1610, the first king
pair of carved figures that held out toward the boxes branches of of the Bourbon dynasty. His features
palm and laurel, that they and they alone would have had minds are preserved on medals by Guillaume
free to listen to the play, if only they had had minds. Dupré and Philippe Danfrie.
87. Monseigneur is a French title of
At first there was nothing visible but vague shadows, in which honor used for dignitaries such as prel-
one suddenly encountered—like the gleam of a precious stone ates or princes of the royal family.
that one cannot see—the phosphorescence of a pair of famous
eyes, or, like a medallion of Henri IV86 on a dark background,
the bent profile of the Duc d’Aumale, to whom an invisible lady
was exclaiming “Monseigneur87 must allow me to take his coat,”
to which the prince replied, “Oh, come, come! Really, Madame
d’Ambresac.” She took it, in spite of this vague prohibition, and
was envied by all the rest for being thus honored.
But in the other baignoires, almost everywhere, the white deities
who inhabited those somber abodes had taken refuge against their
shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the
performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached them-
selves slowly, one by one, from the depths of the night that they
patterned, and, raising themselves toward the light, allowed their
seminude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the ver-
tical limit of their course, at the chiaroscuro surface where their
gleaming faces appeared behind the gaily breaking foam of the
feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their pearl-­
adorned hyacinthine locks, which seemed to have been curled by
the undulation of the flowing tide; next came the orchestra seats,
abode of mortals forever separated from the somber and trans-
parent realm to which, at points here and there, on its brimming,
liquid surface, the limpid, reflecting eyes of the water goddesses
served as a frontier. For the folding seats on its shore, the forms
of the monsters in the orchestra seats were reflected in those eyes
in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their
angle of incidence, as happens with those two parts of external
reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, how-
ever rudimentary, analogous to our own, we would think ourselves

Part One 37
 The Guermantes Way

88. A Nereid is any of the Mediterra- mad if we addressed a smile or a glance of recognition: minerals
nean Sea nymphs, fathered by Nereus, and people to whom we have not been introduced. Beyond this
who personify the play of the waves.
89. Halcyon is a name originally de- boundary, however, within the limits of their domain, the radiant
rived from Alcyone of Greek mythology, daughters of the sea kept turning at every moment to smile up at
daughter of Aeolus, King of the Winds. the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff,
Having lost her husband, Ceyx, in a
shipwreck, the distraught Alcyone or toward some aquatic demigod, whose pate was a polished stone
threw herself into the sea. One of the to which the tides had borne a smooth covering of seaweed, and
gods changes her and her husband into his gaze a disc of rock crystal. They leaned toward these creatures,
seabirds. Every year, during the seven
days on end when “the sea lies still and offering them bonbons; sometimes the flood parted to admit a
calm . . . Alcyone broods over her nest fresh Nereid88 who, belated, smiling, apologetic, had just floated
floating on the sea.” Edith Hamilton, into blossom out of the shadowy depths; then, the act ended,
Mythology (New York: Little, Brown,
1998), 145. Throughout The Guermantes having no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of earth
Way, Proust associates the Duchesse that had drawn them to the surface, plunging back all at once, the
de Guermantes with various sea, lake, divine sisters vanished into the night. But of all these retreats to
and river myths.
the thresholds of which their frivolous desire to behold the works
of man brought the curious goddesses who let none approach
them, the most famous was the cube of semidarkness known to
the world as the baignoire of the Princesse de Guermantes.
Like a mighty goddess who presides from afar over the games
of lesser deities, the princess had deliberately remained a little way
in the background on a sofa placed sideways in the box, red as a
reef of coral, beside a large vitreous reflection that was probably
a mirror and made one think of the section cut by a ray of sun-
light, perpendicular, opaque, and liquid, in the dazzling crystal of
the sea. At once plume and corolla, like certain marine plants, a
great white flower, downy as the wing of a bird, hung down from
the princess’s forehead along one of her cheeks, the curve of which
it followed with a coquettish suppleness, amorous and alive, and
seemed almost to enfold it like a rosy egg in the softness of a hal-
cyon’s nest.89 Over the princess’s hair, reaching in front to her eye-
brows and caught back lower down at the level of her throat, was
spread a net made of those little white shells that are fished up in
certain southern seas and that were intermingled with pearls, a
marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and at moments
plunged back again into a darkness in the depths of which even

38 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

then a human presence was revealed by the sparkling motility of 90. Whistler signed some of his can-
the princess’s eyes. The beauty that set her far above all the other vases with a butterfly. See In the
Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 419.
fabulous daughters of the twilight was not altogether materially 91. Proust here uses loge, which can
and comprehensively inscribed in the nape of her neck, her shoul- refer to any sort of box.
ders, her arms, her figure. But the exquisite, unfinished line of the
last was the exact starting point, the inevitable focus of invisible
lines into which the eye could not help prolonging them, mar-
velous lines, springing into life around the woman like the specter
of an ideal form projected upon the screen of darkness.
“That’s the Princesse de Guermantes,” said my neighbor to the
gentleman beside her, taking care to begin the word “princesse”
with a string of p’s, to show that a title like that was ridiculous.
“She hasn’t been sparing with her pearls. I’m sure, if I had as many
as that, I wouldn’t make such a display of them; I don’t find that
at all comme il faut.”
And yet when they caught sight of the princess, all those who
were looking around to see who was in the audience felt springing
up for her in their hearts the rightful throne of beauty. Indeed,
with the Duchesse de Luxembourg, with Mme de Morienval,
with Mme de Saint-­Euverte, and any number of others, what en-
abled one to identify their faces would be the juxtaposition of a
big red nose and a harelip, or of a pair of wrinkled cheeks and
a faint moustache. These features were nevertheless sufficient in
themselves to charm the eye, since having merely the conventional
value of a sample of handwriting, they gave one to read a famous
and impressive name; but they also gave one, ultimately, the idea
that ugliness had about it something aristocratic, and that it was a
matter of indifference whether the face of a great lady, provided it
was distinguished, should be beautiful as well. But like certain art-
ists who, instead of the letters of their names, put at the bottom of
their canvas a form that is beautiful in itself, a butterfly,90 a lizard,
a flower, so it was the form of a delicious body and face that the
princess had placed in the corner of her box,91 thereby showing
that beauty can be the noblest of signatures; for the presence there
of Mme de Guermantes-­Bavière, who brought to the theater only

Part One 39
 The Guermantes Way

92. A barrel organ is an instrument such persons as at other times formed part of her intimate circle,
used especially by street musicians. It was in the eyes of connoisseurs of the aristocracy the best possible
produces music by the action of a re-
volving cylinder studded with pegs on certificate of the authenticity of the tableau that her baignoire pre-
a series of valves that admit air from a sented, a sort of evocation of a scene from the intimate and sin-
bellows to a set of pipes. gular life of the princess in her palaces in Munich and in Paris.
93. Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), writer
and archaeologist, is well known for his Our imagination being like a broken barrel organ92 that always
stories and novellas, among them Co- plays some other tune than the one shown on its card, every time
lomba (1840) and Carmen (1844). that I had heard any mention of the Princesse de Guermantes-­
94. Henri Meilhac (1831–97), play-
wright and author. He wrote Le Mari Bavière, the recollection of certain sixteenth-­century works had
de la débutante as well as the librettos begun singing in my head. I was obliged to rid myself of this as-
for Jacques Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène sociation now that I saw her offering crystallized fruit to a stout
and Georges Bizet’s Carmen with Lu-
dovic Halévy (1834–1908), with whom gentleman in tails. Certainly I was very far from concluding, be-
he is often associated. cause of this, that she and her guests were mere human beings like
95. Le Mari de la débutante is a comedy the rest of the audience. I understood that what they were doing
in four acts by Henri Meilhac and Lu-
dovic Halévy that premiered at the there was only a game, and that as a prelude to the acts of their real
Théâtre du Palais-­Royal on February 5, life (of which, presumably, this was not where they lived the im-
1879. portant part) they had arranged, in obedience to a ritual unknown
to me, to pretend to offer and decline bonbons, a gesture robbed
of its ordinary significance and decided in advance like the step
of a dancer who alternately raises herself on her toes and circles
around a scarf. Who knows? Perhaps at the moment of offering
him her bonbons the goddess was saying, with that note of irony
in her voice (for I saw her smile): “Would you like some bon-
bons?” What did it matter to me? I would have found a delicious
refinement in the deliberate dryness, in the style of Mérimée93 or
Meilhac,94 of these words addressed by a goddess to a demigod
who knew what sublime thoughts they both had in their minds,
in reserve, doubtless, until the moment when they would begin
again to live their true life, and who, joining in the game, an-
swered with the same mysterious mischievousness: “Thank you.
I would like a cherry bonbon.” And I would have listened to this
dialogue with the same avidity as to a scene from Le Mari de la dé-
butante,95 where the absence of poetry, of lofty thoughts, things
so familiar to me which, I suppose, Meilhac could easily, had he
chosen, have put into it a thousand times over, seemed to me in

40 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

itself a refinement, a conventional refinement and therefore all the 96. See Swann’s Way, 372–73. The
more mysterious and instructive. model here is probably Comte Louis de
Turenne (1843?–­1907). See his photo-
“That fat fellow is the Marquis de Ganançay,” came in a graph by Paul Nadar in Anne-­Marie
knowing tone from the man next to me, who had not quite caught Bernard’s The World of Proust as Seen
the name whispered in the row behind. by Paul Nadar (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002), 84.
The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downward at the end 97. Compare the analogy of the
of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his aquarium in In the Shadow of Young
monocle,96 was moving slowly through the transparent shade and Girls in Flower, 282–83.
98. These are characters from Zaïre, a
appeared no more to see the public in the orchestra section than tragedy in five acts and in verse written
a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the crowd of curious gazers, by Voltaire, performed in 1732. Oros-
behind the glass wall of an aquarium.97 Now and again he paused, mane is the sultan of Jerusalem who
falls in love with his Christian prisoner
venerable, wheezing and mossy, and the audience could not have Zaïre. Their religions separate them.
told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, Seized with jealousy, Orosmane kills
or simply breathing. No one else aroused in me so much envy as Zaïre, then himself. Sarah Bernhardt
played the part of Zaïre in 1873.
he, on account of his apparent familiarity with this baignoire and 99. “Bird of paradise” designates any
the indifference with which he allowed the princess to hold out to of numerous brilliantly colored plumed
him her box of bonbons; throwing him, at the same time, a glance oscine birds (family Paradisaeidae),
chiefly of New Guinea and neighboring
from her beautiful eyes cut from a diamond, which at such mo- islands.
ments intelligence and friendliness seemed to liquefy, whereas,
when they were at rest, reduced to their purely material beauty,
to their mineral brilliance alone, if the least reflection disturbed
them ever so slightly, they set the depths of the parterre ablaze
with their inhuman, horizontal, and resplendent fires. But now,
because the act of Phèdre in which Berma was playing was due
to start, the princess came to the front of the baignoire; where-
upon, as if she herself were a theatrical apparition, in the different
zone of light that she traversed, I saw not only the color but the
material of her adornments change. And in the baignoire, dry
now, emerging, a part no longer of the watery realm, the prin-
cess, ceasing to be a Nereid, appeared turbaned in white and blue
like some marvelous tragic actress dressed for the part of Zaïre, or
perhaps of Orosmane;98 then, when she had taken her seat in the
front row, I saw that the soft halcyon’s nest that tenderly shielded
the rosy nacre of her cheeks was—downy, dazzling, velvety, an im-
mense bird of paradise.99

Part One 41
 The Guermantes Way

100. The use of daguerreotype for But now my gaze was diverted from the Princesse de Guer-
astronomical observation dates from mantes’s baignoire by a little woman who came in, ill-­dressed,
1855.
101. The part of the main floor of a plain, her eyes ablaze with indignation, followed by two young
theater that is behind the orchestra, men, and sat down a few seats away from me. Then the curtain
especially the parquet circle, or the part rose. I could not help being saddened by the thought that there
of the main floor of a theater that is be-
neath the galleries. remained now no trace of my old dispositions, at the period when,
102. These lines are from Racine’s play in order to miss nothing of the extraordinary phenomenon that I
Phèdre, act 2, scene 5, and are said would have gone to the ends of the earth to see, I kept my mind
by Phèdre to Hippolyte: “They say a
prompt departure is to take you away prepared like the sensitive plates100 that astronomers take out to
from us, my lord.” This is the begin- Africa, to the West Indies, to make and record an exact observa-
ning of the famous scene in which tion of a comet or an eclipse; when I trembled for fear that some
Phèdre declares her incestuous love for
her stepson Hippolyte, whose father is cloud (a fit of ill-humor on the artist’s part or an incident in the
Thésée. audience) might prevent the spectacle from presenting itself with
the maximum of intensity; when I would not have believed that I
was watching it in the best conditions had I not gone to the very
theater that was consecrated to her like an altar, in which I then
felt to be still a part of it, though an accessory part only, of her
appearance from behind the little red curtain, the ticket takers
with their white carnations appointed by her, the vaulted bal-
cony above a parterre101 filled with a shabbily dressed crowd, the
women selling programs containing her photograph, the chestnut
trees in the square outside, all those companions, those confidants
of my impressions of those days that seemed to me to be insepa-
rable from them. Phèdre, the “Declaration Scene,”102 Berma, had
then for me a sort of absolute existence. Standing aloof from the
world of current experience they existed by themselves, I must go
to meet them, I would penetrate what I could of them, and if I
opened my eyes and soul to their fullest extent I would still absorb
but very little of them. But how pleasant life seemed to me: the
insignificance of the form of it that I myself was leading mattered
not at all, no more than the time we spend on dressing, on getting
ready to go out, since transcending it there existed in an abso-
lute form, good and difficult to approach, impossible to possess
in their entirety, those more solid realities, Phèdre and the “way in
which Berma spoke her lines.” Steeped in these dreams of perfec-

42 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

tion in the dramatic art (a strong dose of which anyone who had
at that time subjected my mind to analysis at any moment of the
day or even the night would have been able to extract from it), I
was like a battery that accumulates and stores up electricity. And
a time had come when, ill as I was, even if I had believed that I
would die from it, I would still have been compelled to go and
hear Berma. But now, like a hill that from a distance seems a patch
of azure sky, but, as we draw nearer, returns to its place in our
ordinary vision of things, all this had left the world of the absolute
and was no more than a thing like other things, of which I took
cognizance because I was there, the actors were people of the same
substance as the people I knew, trying to speak in the best possible
way these lines of Phèdre, which themselves no longer formed a
sublime and individual essence, distinct from everything else, but
were simply more or less effective lines ready to slip back into the
vast corpus of French poetry, of which they were merely a part. I
felt a discouragement that was all the more profound in that, if
the object of my headstrong and active desire no longer existed,
on the other hand, the same tendency to indulge in an obses-
sional reverie, which varied from year to year, but led me always
to sudden impulses, regardless of danger, still persisted. The day
on which I rose from my sickbed and set out to see, in some châ-
teau or other, a painting by Elstir or a medieval tapestry, was so
like the day on which I ought to have started for Venice, or that on
which I had gone to hear Berma, or left for Balbec, that I felt be-
fore going that the immediate object of my sacrifice would, after a
little while, leave me cold, that then I might pass close by the place
without stopping even to look at that painting, those tapestries
for which I would at this moment risk so many sleepless nights,
so many hours of pain. I discerned in the instability of its object
the vanity of my effort, and at the same time its vastness, which I
had not before noticed, like those neurasthenics whose exhaustion
we double by pointing out to them that they are exhausted. In the
meantime my musings gave a certain prestige to everything that
had any connection with them. And even in my most carnal de-

Part One 43
 The Guermantes Way

103. See Swann’s Way, 94–99. sires, oriented always in a certain direction, concentrated around
104. Aricie is a princess of royal Athe- a single dream, I might have recognized as their primary motive
nian blood and daughter of a family
hostile to Thésée, in whose court she is an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the
being held captive. Thésée’s son, Hip- innermost core of which, as in my reveries while I sat reading all
polyte, is in love with her. Ismène is her afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the idea of perfection.103
confidante.
105. A peplos is a garment worn like a I no longer felt the same indulgence as on the former occasion
shawl by women of ancient Greece. toward the deliberate expressions of tenderness or anger that I had
then noticed in the delivery and gestures of Aricie, Ismène, and
Hippolyte.104 It was not that the actors—they were the same—
did not still seek, with the same intelligent application, to im-
part now a caressing inflection, or a calculated ambiguity to their
voices, now a tragic amplitude, or a suppliant gentleness to their
gestures. Their intonations bade the voice: “Be gentle, sing like a
nightingale, caress and woo”; or on the contrary, “now make your-
self furious,” and then hurled themselves upon the voice, trying
to carry it along with them in their frenzy. But it, mutinous, inde-
pendent of their diction, remained unalterably their natural voice
with its material defects or charms, its everyday vulgarity or affec-
tation, and thus presented an ensemble of acoustic or social phe-
nomena that the sentiment contained in the lines they were re-
citing was powerless to alter.
Similarly, the gestures of the actors said to their arms, to their
peplos:105 “Be majestic.” But each of these unsubmissive limbs
allowed a biceps that knew nothing of the role to flaunt itself be-
tween shoulder and elbow; they continued to express the triviality
of everyday life and to bring to light, instead of Racinian nuances,
mere muscular attachments; and the peplos that they held up fell
back again along vertical lines in which the natural law that gov-
erns falling bodies was challenged only by an insipid textile pli-
ancy. At this point the little woman who was sitting near me ex-
claimed: “No applause! And did you ever see such a getup? She’s
too old; she can’t do it anymore; she ought to give it up.”
Amid the “shhh!” from their neighbors the two young men
with her succeeded in making her keep quiet, and her fury raged
now only in her eyes. This fury could, moreover, be prompted

44 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

only by the thought of success, of fame, for Berma, who had 106. Cleopatra (69–30 b.c.) was the
earned so much money, was overwhelmed with debts. Since she Queen of Egypt from 51 to 30. Her
beauty attracted Julius Caesar and Mark
was always making business or social appointments that she was Antony.
prevented from keeping, she had messengers flying with cancel- 107. In the original, voitures de l’Ur-
lations down every street, and to hotel suites reserved in advance baine. The Urbaine was a Paris com-
pany that rented a variety of carriages.
that she would never occupy, oceans of perfume to bathe her dogs, In the early 1900s, its main office was
penalties for breaches of contract with all her managers. Failing located at 55, Chaussée-­d’Antin, in the
any more serious expenses and being not so voluptuous as Cleo- ninth arrondissement.

patra,106 she would have found the means of squandering prov-

inces and kingdoms on telegrams and hired carriages.107 But the
little woman was an actress who had never tasted success and had
vowed a deadly hatred against Berma. The latter had just come
onto the stage. And then—oh, the miracle—like those lessons
that we labored in vain to learn overnight, and find intact, known
by heart, on waking up next morning, like, too, those faces of
dead friends that the impassioned efforts of our memory pursue
without recapturing them, and which, when we are no longer
thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as they were in
life—the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought
so greedily to seize its essence, now, after these years of oblivion,
in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the force of
a self-­evident truth, on my admiration. Formerly, in my attempts
to isolate this talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard,
the role itself, a role common to all the actresses who appeared as
Phèdre, which I had myself studied beforehand so that I might be
capable of subtracting it, of receiving as a residue only the talent
of Mme Berma. But this talent that I sought to discover outside
the role itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great mu-
sician (it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he
played the piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one
no longer knows whether the performer is a pianist at all, because
(not interposing all that mechanism of muscular effort, crowned
here and there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower
of notes in which at least the listener, who does not quite know
where he is, thinks that he can discern talent in its material, tan-

Part One 45
 The Guermantes Way

108. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in gible reality) his playing has become so transparent, so filled with
Flower, 16, n. 41. what he is interpreting, one no longer sees the performer himself
and he is nothing now but a window opening upon a great work
of art. The intentions that surrounded, like a majestic or delicate
border, the voice and mime of Aricie, Ismène, and Hippolyte I
had been able to distinguish, but Phèdre had interiorized hers,
and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction
and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly simplicity of their
unbroken surfaces, those treasures, those effects of which no sign
emerged, so completely had they been absorbed into it. Berma’s
voice, in which there subsisted not one atom of lifeless matter re-
fractory to the mind, betrayed no discernible sign of that overflow
around it of tears that one could feel, because they had not been
able to absorb it in themselves, trickling over the marble voice
of Aricie or Ismène, but had been brought to an exquisite per-
fection in each of its tiniest cells like the instrument of a master
violinist, in whom one means, when one says that he has a beau-
tiful sound, to praise not a physical peculiarity but a superiority of
soul; and, as in the classical landscape where in the place of a van-
ished nymph there is an inanimate spring, a clear and conscious
intention had been transformed into a certain quality of timbre,
strangely, appropriately, coldly limpid. Berma’s arms, which the
lines of verse themselves, by the same dynamic force that made
the words issue from her lips, seemed to raise onto her bosom
like leaves disturbed by a gush of water; her attitude, on the stage,
which she had gradually built up, which she was to modify yet
further, and which was based on reasonings of a different pro-
fundity from those of which traces could be seen in the gestures
of her fellow actors, but of reasonings that had lost their original
deliberation and had melted into a sort of radiance in which they
sent throbbing, around the character of Phèdre, elements rich and
complex, but which the fascinated spectator took not as an artistic
triumph but as a natural gift; those white veils themselves, which,
tenuous and clinging, seemed to be of a living substance and to
have been woven by the suffering, half-­pagan, half-­Jansenist,108

46 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

around which they drew close like a frail, shrinking chrysalis; all 109. We have seen this dynamic at
these, voice, attitude, gestures, veils, around this embodiment of work in the first two volumes not only
with Berma but also in the Narrator’s
an idea that is a line of poetry (an embodiment that, unlike our anticipation of meeting Bergotte and
human bodies, covers the soul not with an opaque screen that later of seeing for the first time the
prevents us from seeing it but with a purified, a quickened gar- church in the Persian style at Balbec.
This is part of Proust’s narrative
ment through which the soul is diffused and wherein we discover strategy: the Narrator’s great antici-
it), were nothing more than additional envelopes that instead of pation is followed by disappointment
concealing showed up in greater splendor the soul that had as- until he reaches the ultimate revelation
and understanding of the true meaning
similated them to itself and had spread itself through them, like or nature of his experience.
layers of different substances, grown translucent, the superposi-
tion of which only causes a richer refraction of the imprisoned,
central ray that pierces through them, and makes more extensive,
more precious, and more beautiful the matter permeated by fire
in which it is enshrined. So Berma’s interpretation was, around
Racine’s work, a second work, quickened also by the breath of
genius.
My own impression, to tell the truth, though more pleasant
than on the earlier occasion, was not really different. Only I no
longer confronted it with a preexistent, abstract, and false idea of
dramatic genius, and I understood now that dramatic genius was
precisely this. It had just occurred to me that if I had not experi-
enced any pleasure the first time I had heard Berma, it was be-
cause, as earlier still when I used to meet Gilberte in the Champs-­
Élysées, I had come to her with too strong a desire.109 Between
my two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resem-
blance but another more profound. The impression given us by a
person or a work (or an interpretation) of marked individuality
is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the
ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos,” and so forth, which
we might, failing anything better, have had the illusion of dis-
covering in the commonplace show of a “correct” face or talent,
but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a
form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it
must detect and isolate the unknown element. It hears a piercing
sound, an oddly interrogative intonation. It asks itself: “Is this

Part One 47
 The Guermantes Way

beautiful? Is what I am feeling just now admiration? Is this rich-

ness of coloring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is
a piercing sound, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic im-
pression caused by a person whom one does not know, wholly
material, in which there is no room left for “breadth of interpreta-
tion.” And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we
listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, be-
cause in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that corresponds
to an individual impression.
This was precisely what Berma’s acting showed me. This was
what was meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction. Now I
could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpre-
tation; or rather it was to this that those epithets were convention-
ally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn
to stars that have nothing mythological about them. We feel in
one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between
the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge
the interval. It was to some extent this interval, this fault that I
had had to cross when, that afternoon when I first went to hear
Berma, having strained my ears to catch every word, I had found
some difficulty in correlating my ideas of “nobility of interpreta-
tion,” of “originality,” and had broken out in applause only after
a moment of unconsciousness and as if my applause sprang not
from my actual impression but was connected in some way with
my preconceived ideas, with the pleasure that I found in saying to
myself: “At last I am listening to Berma.” And the difference that
there is between a person or a work of art that is markedly indi-
vidual and the idea of beauty exists just as much between what
they make us feel and the idea of love or of admiration. Wherefore
we fail to recognize them. I had found no pleasure in listening to
Berma (any more than, earlier still, in seeing Gilberte). I had said
to myself: “Well, I don’t admire her.” But then I was thinking only
of mastering the secret of Berma’s acting, I was preoccupied with
that alone, I was trying to open my mind as wide as possible to re-

48 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

ceive all that her acting contained: I understood now that all this 110. A pièce de circonstance is a play
amounted to nothing more nor less than admiration. written for a special occasion.
111. On December 9, 1896, Sarah Bern-
This genius, of which Berma’s interpretation was solely the hardt gave a matinée performance
revelation, was it indeed solely the genius of Racine? of act 2 of Phèdre at the Théâtre de
I thought so at first. I was soon to be undeceived once the la Renaissance. She then performed
act 4 of Rome vaincue, by Alexandre
act from Phèdre ended, after enthusiastic curtain calls from the Parodi (1842–1901). This play was not
audience, through which the old actress, beside herself with rage, a novelty but a reprise of a role that
drawing her little body up to its full height, turning sideways in she had created in 1876, and one that
the critic Jules Renard considered “an
her seat, stiffened the muscles of her face and folded her arms over ignoble thing.” It was a performance of
her bosom to show that she was not joining the others in their ap- this type that the Narrator is describing
plause and to make more noticeable a protest that to her appeared here. À la recherche du temps perdu
(Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade edition],
sensational though it passed unperceived. The play that followed 1988), 2: 350, n. 1.
was one of those novelties which at one time I had expected, since
they were not famous, to be inevitably trivial and of no general
application, devoid as they were of any existence outside the per-
formance that was being given of them at the moment. But I did
not have with them as with a classic play the disappointment of
seeing the eternity of a masterpiece occupy no more space or time
than the width of the footlights and the length of a performance
that would finish it as effectively as an occasional play.110 Then at
each passage that I felt the audience liked and that would one day
be famous, in place of the fame that it had not been able to win in
the past, I added the fame that it would enjoy in the future, by a
mental process the converse of the one that consists in imagining
masterpieces on the day of their first thin performance, when it
seemed inconceivable that a title no one had ever heard before
could one day be set, bathed in the same mellow light, beside
those of the author’s other works. And this role would be placed
one day in the list of her finest interpretations, next to that of
Phèdre. Not that in itself the role was devoid of all literary merit;
but Berma was as sublime in it as she was in Phèdre.111 I realized
then that the work of the playwright was for the actress no more
than the material, the nature of which was comparatively unim-
portant, for the creation of her masterpiece of interpretation, just

Part One 49
 The Guermantes Way

112. Until the modern era, French as the great painter whom I had met at Balbec, Elstir, had found
dramas were written in verse, usually the inspiration for two pictures of equal merit in a school building
alexandrines.
without any character and a cathedral that is in itself a work of
art. And as the painter dissolves houses, carts, people, in some
broad effect of light that makes them all homogeneous, so Berma
spread out great sheets of terror or tenderness over words that
were all equally blended, all planed down or raised to one level,
which a lesser artist would have carefully detached from one an-
other. No doubt each of them had an inflection of its own, and
Berma’s diction did not prevent one from catching the rhythm of
the verse. Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of
beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something that is
at once similar to and different from the preceding rhyme, which
is prompted by it, but introduces the variation of a new idea, one
is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellec-
tual, the other metrical? But Berma at the same time made the
words, the lines, even the soliloquies, flow into an ensemble vaster
than themselves, at the margins of which it was a joy to see them
obliged to stop, to break off; thus it is that a poet takes pleasure in
making hesitate for a moment at the rhyming point the word that
is about to spring forth, and a composer in merging the various
words of the libretto in a single rhythm that runs counter to them
and carries them along. Thus into the prose of the modern play-
wright as into the verses of Racine,112 Berma knew how to intro-
duce those vast images of grief, nobility, passion that were her
own masterpieces, and in which she could be recognized, as in the
portraits he has made of different sitters, we recognize a painter.
I no longer had any desire, as on the former occasion, to be
able to immobilize Berma’s poses, the beautiful effect of color that
she gave for a moment only in a beam of limelight, which at once
faded never to reappear, nor to make her repeat a single line a hun-
dred times over. I realized that my original desire had been more
exacting than the intentions of the poet, the actress, the great
decorative artist who directed the production, and that the charm
that floated over a line as it was spoken, those unstable poses per-

50 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

petually transformed into others, those successive tableaux were 113. Mousseline is a fine sheer fabric
the transient result, the momentary object, the mobile master- that resembles muslin.
114. Founded on November 11, 1833, to
piece that the art of the theater undertook to create and that encourage the improvement of horse
would be destroyed if an attempt were made to fix it for all time breeding in France, the Jockey Club
by a too much enraptured listener. I did not even make a resolu- was one of Paris’s most elegant and
exclusive clubs. In Proust’s day, it was
tion to come back another day and hear Berma again. I was satis- located at 1 bis, rue Scribe.
fied with her; it was when I admired too keenly not to be disap-
pointed by the object of my admiration, whether that object was
Gilberte or Berma, that I demanded in advance, of the impression
to be received tomorrow, the pleasure that yesterday’s impression
had denied me. Without seeking to analyze the joy that I had just
felt, and might perhaps have put to some more profitable use, I
said to myself, as did in the old days some of my schoolfellows:
“Certainly, I put Berma first!” not without a confused feeling that
Berma’s genius was not, perhaps, very accurately represented by
this affirmation of my preference and by this award to her of a
“first” place, whatever the peace of mind that they might inciden-
tally restore to me.
Just as the curtain was rising on this second play, I looked up
at Mme de Guermantes’s baignoire. This princess had just—by a
movement that created an exquisite line that my mind pursued
into the void—turned her head toward the back of the baignoire;
her guests were all standing, and also turned toward the back, and
between the double hedge that they thus formed, with all the as-
surance and the grandeur of the goddess that she was, but with a
strange meekness due to her feigned and smiling embarrassment at
arriving so late and making everyone get up in the middle of the
performance, the Duchesse de Guermantes, enveloped in white
mousseline,113 entered. She went straight up to her cousin, made a
deep curtsy to a young man with blond hair who was seated in the
front row, and turning again toward the sacred marine monsters
who were floating in the recesses of the cavern, gave to these demi-
gods of the Jockey Club114—who at that moment, and particularly
M. de Palancy, were the men whom I would most have liked to
be—the familiar “good evening” of an old and intimate friend, an

Part One 51
 The Guermantes Way

115. Proust uses the word dentition, allusion to the day-­to-­day relations with them during the past fif-
which means one’s set of teeth. The teen years. I sensed the mystery, but could not solve the riddle of
meaning of the same word in English is
similar: the character of a set of teeth the smiling gaze that she addressed to her friends, in the azure bril-
especially with regard to their number, liance with which it glowed while she surrendered her hand to one
kind, and arrangement. and then to another, a gaze that, could I have broken up its prism,
116. An aigrette is a spray of feathers
(as of the egret) for the head. analyzed its crystallization, might perhaps have revealed to me the
117. The profile of a bird is suggested essential quality of the unknown life that became apparent in it at
by that of the Comtesse Laure de Che- that moment. The Duc de Guermantes followed his wife, the flash
vigné, with whom young Proust be-
came infatuated. He mentions his of his monocle, the smiling gleam of his dentition,115 the white-
behavior, similar to the Narrator’s, in ness of his carnation or of his pleated shirtfront scattering, to make
a letter to Reynaldo Hahn, written in room for their light, the darkness of his eyebrows, lips, and tailcoat;
1895: “I went to the avenue Marigny
every morning to see Mme de Che- with a wave of his outstretched hand, which he let drop onto their
vigné pass.” For more about her profile, shoulders, vertically, without moving his head, he commanded the
see William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: inferior monsters, who were making way for him, to resume their
A Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2013), 129–30. seats, and made a deep bow to the blond young man. One would
118. In May 1912, Proust met Mme have said that the duchess had guessed that her cousin, of whom,
Henry Standish, with whom Mme Élisa- it was rumored, she was inclined to make fun for what she called
beth Greffulhe (1860–1952) invited him
to the theater. He considered these two “exaggerations” (a noun that, from her own point of view, so wittily
women to be especially well dressed, French and restrained, was naturally applicable to Germanic poetry
though in different styles. He wrote and enthusiasm), would be wearing this evening one of those cos-
to a friend: “I made the acquaintance
. . . of a beauty of the Septennat, Mme tumes in which the duchess thought of her as “dressed up,” and
Standish, with whom Madame Gref- that she had decided to give her cousin a lesson in good taste. In-
fulhe took me to the theatre and whom stead of the wonderful downy plumage that descended from the
I found (making all the necessary
allowances for age, etc.) splendid in crown of the princess’s head to her neck, instead of her net of shells
her marinated elegance, her artful sim- and pearls, the duchess wore in her hair only a simple aigrette,116
plicity.” Proust, Selected Letters 3: 74. To which, rising above her arched nose and level eyes,117 reminded one
Geneviève Straus, Proust wrote about
meeting her friend Mme Standish: of the crest on the head of a bird. Her neck and shoulders emerged
“I didn’t have time to talk to her about from a drift of snow-­white mousseline, against which fluttered a
you, but I should have greatly enjoyed swan’s-­down fan, but below this her gown, the bodice of which
talking to you about her. You could
have given me some invaluable infor- had for its sole ornament innumerable spangles (either little sticks
mation for my book about her style of and beads of metal, or brilliants), molded her figure with a preci-
dressing.” Proust, Selected Letters 3: 76. sion that was positively British. But different as their two costumes
were, after the princess had given her cousin the chair in which she
herself had previously been sitting, they could be seen turning to
gaze at one another in mutual admiration.118

52 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

Perhaps Mme de Guermantes would smile the next day when

she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, that the
princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that the latter
had been, all the same, ravishing and marvelously arranged; and
the princess, whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little
austere, a little “tailor-­made” in her cousin’s way of dressing, would
discover in this strict sobriety an exquisite refinement. Moreover,
the harmony that existed between them, the universal and pre-
established gravitation exercised by their upbringing, neutralized
the contrasts not only in their apparel but also in their attitude. By
those invisible and magnetic lines that the elegance of their man-
ners traced between them, the expansive nature of the princess
was stopped short, while toward those lines the formal correctness
of the duchess allowed itself to be attracted and relaxed, turning
to sweetness and charm. As, in the play that was now being per-
formed, to realize how much personal poetry Berma extracted
from it one had only to entrust the role she was playing, which she
alone could play, to any other actress, so the spectator who raised
his eyes to the balcony would have seen there in two smaller boxes
how an “arrangement” supposed to suggest that of the Princesse
de Guermantes simply made the Baronne de Morienval appear
eccentric, pretentious, and ill-­bred, while an effort, as painstaking
as it must have been costly, to imitate the clothes and style of the
Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme de Cambremer look
like some provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, erect, desic-
cated, angular, with a plume of raven’s feathers stuck vertically in
her hair. Perhaps the proper place for this lady was not a theater
in which it was only with the brightest stars of the season that the
boxes (even those in the highest tier, which from below seemed
like great hampers brimming with human flowers and attached
to the vaulted ceiling of the auditorium by the red cords of their
plush-­covered partitions) composed an ephemeral panorama that
deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which
this evening was held motionless by attention, heat, giddiness,
dust, elegance, and boredom, in that sort of eternal, tragic instant

Part One 53
 The Guermantes Way

of unconscious waiting and calm torpor that, in retrospect, seems

always to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker
of a fire.
The explanation of Mme de Cambremer’s presence on this
occasion was that the Princesse de Parme, devoid of snobbish-
ness as are most truly royal personages and, on the other hand,
devoured by a pride in and passion for charity that held an equal
place in her heart with her taste for what she believed to be the
Arts, had bestowed a few boxes here and there on women like
Mme de Cambremer who were not numbered among the highest
aristocratic society but with whom she was connected in various
charitable undertakings. Mme de Cambremer never took her eyes
off the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which was all the
simpler for her since, not being actually acquainted with either,
she could not be suspected of angling for a sign of recognition.
Inclusion in the visiting lists of these two great ladies was never-
theless the goal that she had been pursuing for the past ten years
with untiring patience. She had calculated that she might reach
it, possibly, in five years more. But having been smitten by a fatal
malady, the inexorable character of which—for she prided herself
on her medical knowledge—she thought she knew, she was afraid
that she might not live so long. This evening she was happy at
least in the thought that all these women whom she barely knew
would see in her company a man who was one of their own set,
the young Marquis de Beausergent, Mme d’Argencourt’s brother,
who moved impartially in both worlds and in whose presence the
women of the second were delighted to be seen by those of the
first. He was seated behind Mme de Cambremer on a chair placed
at an angle so that he might observe the other boxes with his
glasses. He knew everyone in them and to greet his friends, with
the irresistible elegance of his beautifully curved figure, his fine
features and blond hair, he half rose from his seat, a smile bright-
ening his blue eyes, with a blend of deference and detachment, a
picture delicately engraved in the rectangle of the oblique plane
in which he was placed, like one of those old prints that portray a

54 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

great, haughty nobleman in his courtly pride. He often accepted 119. In Roman mythology, Diana is the
these invitations to go to the theater with Mme de Cambremer; goddess of the hunt and the wood-
lands.
in the auditorium, and on the way out, in the lobby, he stood gal-
lantly by her side amid the throng of more brilliant friends whom
he saw about him, and to whom he refrained from speaking, to
avoid any awkwardness, just as though he had been in doubtful
company. If at such moments there swept by him the Princesse de
Guermantes, as beautiful and light-­footed as Diana,119 letting trail
behind her the folds of an incomparable cloak, turning after her
every head and followed by every eye (and, most of all, by Mme
de Cambremer’s), M. de Beausergent would become absorbed in
conversation with his companion, acknowledging the friendly and
dazzling smile of the princess only with constraint, under compul-
sion, and with the well-­bred reserve and the considerate coldness
of a person whose friendliness might have been at the moment
inconvenient.
Had not Mme de Cambremer known already that the bai-
gnoire belonged to the princess, she could still have told that the
Duchesse de Guermantes was the guest from the air of greater
interest with which she was surveying the spectacle of stage and
auditorium, out of politeness to her hostess. But simultaneously
with this centrifugal force, an equal and opposite force generated
by the same desire to be sociable drew the duchess’s attention back
to her own attire, her plume, her necklace, her bodice and also to
that of the princess herself, whose subject, whose slave her cousin
seemed thus to proclaim herself, come here solely to see her, ready
to follow her elsewhere should it have taken the fancy of the titular
occupant of the box to rise and leave, and regarding the rest of the
house as composed merely of strangers, worth looking at simply
as curiosities, though she numbered among them many friends to
whose boxes she regularly repaired on other evenings and with re-
gard to whom she never failed on those occasions to demonstrate a
similar loyalism, exclusive, relativistic, and hebdomadal. Mme de
Cambremer was surprised to see her there that evening. She knew
that the duchess stayed on very late at Guermantes and had sup-

Part One 55
 The Guermantes Way

posed her to be there still. But she had been told that sometimes,
when there was some special function in Paris that she considered
worth her while to attend, Mme de Guermantes would order one
of her carriages to be brought around as soon as she had taken tea
with the hunters, and, as the sun was setting, start out at a fast
trot through the gathering darkness of the forest, then along the
road, to take the train at Combray and so be in Paris the same
evening. “Perhaps she has come up from Guermantes especially
to see Berma,” thought Mme de Cambremer, and marveled at
the thought. And she remembered having heard Swann say in the
ambiguous jargon that he used in common with M. de Charlus:
“The duchess is one of the noblest souls in Paris, the cream of
the most refined, the choicest society.” For myself, who derived
from the names Guermantes, Bavière, and Condé what I imag-
ined to be the lives, the thoughts of the two cousins (I could no
longer do so from their faces, having seen them), I would rather
have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in
the world. For in his I would have found merely intelligence, an
intelligence superior to my own but similar in kind. But what the
Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion
that would have furnished me with an invaluable clue to the na-
ture of these two poetic creatures, I imagined with the aid of their
names, I endowed with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst
and the longing of a fever-­stricken wretch, what I demanded that
their opinion of Phèdre should yield to me was the charm of the
summer afternoons that I had spent in wandering along the Guer-
mantes way.
Mme de Cambremer was trying to make out how exactly the
cousins were dressed. For my own part, I never doubted that their
toilettes were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in
which the livery with red collar or blue facings had belonged once
exclusively to the Houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather
as is peculiar to a bird the plumage that, as well as being a height-
ening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The toilettes of
these two ladies seemed to me like the materialization, snow-­

56 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

white or patterned with color, of their inner activity, and, like the 120. In mythology, Juno (or Hera) was
gestures that I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make, with a goddess whose favorite bird was the
peacock.
no doubt in my own mind that they corresponded to some idea 121. Minerva (Athena) was the god-
latent in her, the plumes that swept downward from her brow, and dess of wisdom and commerce and the
her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed each to have a favorite child of Jupiter. He trusted her
to carry his shield, the Aegis, on which
special meaning, to be to one or the other woman an attribute was fixed a Gorgon, one of three snake-­
that was hers and hers alone, the significance of which I would haired sisters in Greek mythology
eagerly have learned; the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from whose appearance turns the beholder
to stone.
its wearer as her peacock is from Juno,120 and I did not believe that 122. The ceiling of the Opéra was deco-
any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more rated with paintings by Jules Lenepveu
than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva.121 And when I and represented the hours of the day
and night. The sun, moon, dawn, and
turned my eyes to their baignoire, far more than on the ceiling of dusk were represented by personages
the theater, painted with cold and lifeless allegories,122 it was as playing the trumpet and flute, and
though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the clouds that holding laurel wreaths and dancing
while surrounded by clouds and cher-
ordinarily veiled it, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contem- ubs. These allegorical figures were
plating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a painted over in 1964 by Marc Chagall.
clear lighted space, between two pillars of heaven. I gazed on this 123. A madrepore is any of various
stony reef-­building corals (order Madre-
momentary apotheosis with an anxiety that was partly soothed poraria) of tropical seas that assume
by the feeling that I myself was unknown to the Immortals; the a variety of branching, encrusting, or
duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could massive forms.

surely have kept no memory of that, and it did not distress me

that she found herself, owing to the place that she occupied in the
baignoire, gazing down at the nameless, collective madrepores123
of the audience in the orchestra section, for I had the happy sense
that my own being had been dissolved in their midst, when, at the
moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, there must,
I suppose, have come to paint itself on the impassive current of
those two blue eyes the blurred form of the protozoon devoid
of any individual existence, which was myself, I saw a ray illu-
mine them: the duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing
in that moment a thousand times more lovely, raised toward me
the white-­gloved hand that had been resting on the balustrade of
the box, waved it at me in token of friendship; my gaze was met
by the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the prin-
cess, who had unconsciously set them ablaze merely by turning

Part One 57
 The Guermantes Way

her head to see who it might be that her cousin was thus greeting,
while the duchess, who had recognized me, showered upon me
the sparkling and celestial torrent of her smile.

Now every morning, long before the hour at which she left her
house, I went by a devious route to post myself at the corner of
the street along which she generally came, and, when the moment
of her arrival seemed imminent, strolled homeward with an air
of being absorbed in something else, looking the other way and
raising my eyes to her face as I drew level with her, but as though
I had not in the least expected to see her. Indeed, for the first few
mornings, so as to be sure of not missing her, I waited opposite
the house. And every time that the porte cochère opened (letting
out one after another so many people who were not the one for
whom I was waiting), its grinding rattle continued in my heart in
a series of oscillations that took a long time to subside. For never
was devotee of a famous actress whom he did not know, posting
himself and patrolling the pavement outside the stage door, never
was angry or idolatrous crowd, gathered to insult or to carry in
triumph through the streets the condemned assassin or the na-
tional hero whom it believes to be on the point of coming when-
ever a sound is heard from the inside of the prison or the palace,
never were these so stirred by their emotion as I was, awaiting the
emergence of this great lady who in her simple attire was able, by
the grace of her movements (quite different from her allure when
she entered a drawing room or a box), to make of her morning
walk—and for me there was no one in the world but herself out
walking—a whole poem of elegant refinement and the finest orna-
ment, the rarest flower of the season. But after the third day, so
that the concierge would not discover my stratagem, I went much
farther afield, to some point on the duchess’s usual route. Often
before that evening at the theater I had made similar little ex-
cursions before lunch when the weather was fine; if it had been
raining, at the first gleam of sunshine I would hasten downstairs
to take a stroll, and if, suddenly, coming toward me, on the still

58 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

wet pavement changed by the sun into a golden lacquer, in the

transformation scene of a crossroads powdered with mist that the
sun tanned and gilded, I caught sight of a schoolgirl followed by
her teacher or of a dairymaid with her white sleeves, I stood mo-
tionless, my hand pressed to my heart, which was already leaping
toward an unexplored life; I tried to remember the street, the time,
the number of the door through which the girl (whom I followed
sometimes) had vanished and failed to reappear. Fortunately, the
fleeting nature of these cherished images, which I promised my-
self that I would make an effort to see again, prevented them from
fixing themselves with any vividness in my memory. No matter,
I was less sad now at the thought of my own ill-health, of my
never having summoned up the energy to set to work, to begin a
book, the world appeared to me now a pleasanter place to live in,
life a more interesting experience to go through now that I had
learned that the streets of Paris, like the roads around Balbec, were
aflower with those unknown beauties whom I had so often sought
to evoke from the woods of Méséglise, each one of whom aroused
a voluptuous desire that she alone appeared capable of assuaging.
On coming home from the Opéra, I had added for the fol-
lowing morning, to those whom for some days past I had been
hoping to meet again, the image of Mme de Guermantes, tall,
with her high-­piled crown of silky, blond hair; with the affection
promised me in the smile that she had directed at me from her
cousin’s baignoire. I would follow the route Françoise had told
me that the duchess generally took, and I would try at the same
time, in the hope of meeting two girls whom I had seen a few days
earlier, not to miss their leaving a class or catechism. But mean-
while, from time to time, the scintillating smile of Mme de Guer-
mantes, the pleasant sensation it had given me, returned. And
without exactly knowing what I was doing, I tried to find a place
for them (as a woman studies the possible effect on her dress of
some set of jeweled buttons that have just been given her) beside
the romantic ideas that I had long held and that Albertine’s cold-
ness, Gisèle’s premature departure, and before them my deliberate

Part One 59
 The Guermantes Way

and my too-­long-­sustained separation from Gilberte, had set free

(the idea, for instance of being loved by a woman, of having a
life in common with her); next, it was the image of one or other
of the two girls seen in the street that I linked to those ideas, to
which immediately afterward I was trying to adapt my memory of
the duchess. Compared with those ideas my memory of Mme de
Guermantes at the Opéra was a very little thing, a tiny star twin-
kling beside the long tail of a blazing comet; moreover, I had been
quite familiar with the ideas long before I came to know Mme de
Guermantes; my memory of her, on the contrary, I possessed but
imperfectly; at moments it escaped me; it was during the hours
when, from floating vaguely in my mind in the same way as the
images of various other pretty women, it passed gradually into a
unique and definite association—exclusive of every other femi-
nine form—with my romantic ideas of so much longer standing
than itself, it was during those few hours in which I remembered
it most clearly that I ought to have taken steps to find out exactly
what it was; but I did not then know the importance that it was
to assume for me; it was pleasant merely as a first private meeting
with Mme de Guermantes inside myself, it was the first, the only
accurate sketch, the only one taken from life, the only one that
was really Mme de Guermantes; during the few hours in which
I was fortunate enough to retain it without having the sense to
pay it any attention, it must all the same have been charming,
that memory, since it was always to it, freely still at that moment,
without haste, without strain, without the slightest compulsion
or anxiety, that my ideas of love returned; then, as gradually those
ideas fixed it more definitely, it acquired from them a greater
strength but itself became more vague; presently I could no longer
recapture it; and in my reveries I no doubt distorted it completely,
for whenever I saw Mme de Guermantes I realized the disparity—
always, as it happened, different—between what I had imagined
and what I saw. And now every morning, certainly, at the mo-
ment when Mme de Guermantes emerged from her gateway at
the top of the street I saw again her tall figure, her face with its

60 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

bright eyes and crown of silken hair—all the things for which I
was there waiting; but, on the other hand, a minute or two later,
when, having first turned my eyes away so as to appear not to be
expecting this encounter that I had come to seek, I raised them to
look at the duchess at the moment in which we converged, what
I saw then were red patches (which I did not know whether they
were due to the fresh air or to a blotchy complexion) on a sullen
face, which with the curtest of nods and a long way removed from
the affability of the Phèdre evening, acknowledged the greeting
that I addressed to her daily with an air of surprise, and that did
not seem to please her. And yet, after a few days, during which the
memory of the two girls fought against heavy odds for the mas-
tery of my amorous feelings with the memory of Mme de Guer-
mantes, it was in the end the latter that, as though of its own ac-
cord, generally prevailed while its competitors withdrew; it was to
it that I finally found myself, on the whole voluntarily still and as
though from choice and with pleasure, to have transferred all my
thoughts of love. I had ceased to dream of the little girls coming
from their catechism, or of a certain dairymaid; and yet I had also
lost all hope of encountering in the street what I had come there
to seek, either the affection promised to me, at the theater, in a
smile, or the profile, the bright face beneath its pile of blond hair
that were so only when seen from afar. Now I would not even have
been able to say what Mme de Guermantes was like, what I recog-
nized her by, because every day, in the picture that she presented
as a whole, the face was different, as were the dress and the hat.
Why did I one morning, when I saw coming toward me be-
neath a mauve hood a sweet, smooth face whose charms were
symmetrically arranged around a pair of blue eyes, a face in which
the curve of the nose seemed to have been absorbed, gauge from a
joyous commotion within me that I was not going to return home
without having caught a glimpse of Mme de Guermantes; and on
the next, did I feel the same agitation, affect the same indifference,
turn away my eyes in the same distracted manner as on the day
before, at the apparition, seen in profile as she crossed from a side

Part One 61
 The Guermantes Way

124. Petit-suisse is a small, unripened street and beneath a navy blue toque, of a beaklike nose alongside
cheese originally from the Normandy a red cheek marked with a piercing eye, like some Egyptian deity?
region.
Once it was not merely a woman with a bird’s beak that I saw but
almost the bird itself; the outer garments and even the toque of
Mme de Guermantes were of fur, and since she thus left no cloth
visible, she seemed naturally furred, like certain vultures whose
thick, smooth, tawny, soft plumage suggests rather the coat of
an animal. From the midst of this natural plumage, the tiny head
arched out its beak and the two eyes on its surface were piercing
and blue.
One day I had been pacing up and down the street for hours
on end without a glimpse of Mme de Guermantes when suddenly,
inside a dairy shop tucked in between two of the hotels of this
aristocratic and plebeian quarter, there appeared, took shape the
vague and unfamiliar face of a fashionably dressed woman who
was asking to see some “petits-suisses”124 and, before I had had
time to make her out, I was struck, as by a flash of light that
reached me sooner than the rest of the image, by the glance of
the duchess; another time, having failed to meet her and hearing
midday strike, I realized that it was not worth my while to wait for
her any longer; I was sadly making my way home; and, absorbed
in my disappointment and looking absentmindedly at a passing
carriage, I realized suddenly that the movement of her head a lady
had made from the carriage window was meant for me, and that
this lady, whose features, relaxed and pale, or it might equally be
tense and vivid, composed, beneath a round hat nestled at the
foot of a towering aigrette, the face of a stranger whom I had sup-
posed that I did not know, was Mme de Guermantes, by whom
I had let myself be greeted without my even acknowledging her.
And sometimes I came upon her as I entered the porte cochère,
standing outside the lodge where the detestable concierge whose
inquisitive eyes I loathed was in the act of making her a profound
obeisance and also, no doubt, his daily “report.” For the entire
staff of the Guermantes household, hidden behind the window
curtains, were trembling as they watched a conversation that they

62 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

were unable to overhear, but which meant, as they very well knew,
that one or other of them would certainly have his day out stopped
by the duchess to whom this gossip was betraying him. In view of
the whole series of different faces that Mme de Guermantes dis-
played thus one after the other, faces that occupied a relative and
varying expanse, contracted one day, vast the next, in her person
and attire as a whole, my love was not attached to any one or an-
other of those changing elements of flesh and fabric that replaced
one another as day followed day, and that she could modify and
renew almost entirely without altering my agitation because be-
neath them, beneath the new collar and the strange cheek, I felt
that it was still Mme de Guermantes. What I loved was the in-
visible person who set all this outward show in motion, whose
hostility so distressed me, whose approach set me trembling,
whose life I would have liked to make my own and chase away her
friends. She might flaunt a blue feather or show a fiery complexion
without her actions losing any of their importance for me.
I would not myself have felt that Mme de Guermantes was
irritated at meeting me day after day, had I not learned it indi-
rectly by reading it on the face, stiff with coldness, disapproval,
and pity that Françoise showed when she was helping me to get
ready for these morning walks. The moment I asked her for my
outdoor things I felt a contrary wind arise in her worn and bat-
tered features. I made no attempt to win her confidence, for I
knew that I would not succeed. She had, for at once discovering
any unpleasant thing that might have happened to my parents
or myself, a power the nature of which I have never been able to
fathom. Perhaps it was not supernatural and could be explained
by sources of information that were open to her alone: as it may
happen that the news that often reaches a savage tribe several days
before the mail has brought it to the European colony has really
been transmitted to them not by telepathy but from hilltop to
hilltop by a chain of beacon fires. Thus, in the particular instance
of my morning walks, possibly Mme de Guermantes’s servants
had heard their mistress say how tired she was of running into

Part One 63
 The Guermantes Way

me every day without fail wherever she went, and had repeated
her remarks to Françoise. My parents might, it is true, have at-
tached some servant other than Françoise to my person; still I
would have been no better off. Françoise was in a sense less a ser-
vant than the others. In her way of feeling things, of being kind
and pitiful, hard and distant, superior and narrow, of combining
a white skin with red hands, she was still the village girl whose
parents had had “a place of their own” but having fallen on hard
times had been obliged to put her into service. Her presence in
our household was the country air, the social life of a farm of fifty
years ago transported to us by a sort of journey in reverse whereby
it is the place in the country that comes to visit the traveler. As
the glass cases in a regional museum are filled with specimens of
the curious handiwork that the peasants still carve or embroider
in certain provinces, so our apartment in Paris was decorated with
the words of Françoise, inspired by a traditional local sentiment
and governed by extremely ancient laws. And she could in Paris
find her way back as though by clues of colored thread to the
cherry trees and songbirds of her childhood, to the bed in which
her mother died, and that she still vividly saw. But in spite of all
this wealth of background, once she had come to Paris and had
entered our service she had acquired—as, obviously, anyone else
would have done in her place—the ideas, the system of interpre-
tation used by the servants on the other floors, compensating for
the respect that she was obliged to show to us by repeating the
rude words that the cook on the fourth floor had used to her mis-
tress, with a servile gratification so intense that, for the first time
in our lives, feeling a sort of solidarity between ourselves and the
detestable occupant of the fourth floor apartment, we said to our-
selves that possibly, after all, we too were masters. This alteration
in Françoise’s character was perhaps inevitable. Certain forms of
existence are so abnormal that they are bound to produce certain
characteristic faults; such was the life led by the king at Versailles
among his courtiers, a life as strange as that of a pharaoh or a
doge—and, far more even than the king’s, the life of his courtiers.

64 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

The life led by servants is probably of an even more monstrous ab- 125. A salient is an outwardly projecting
normality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing. part of a fortification, trench system, or
line of defense.
But it was actually in details more intimate still that I would have
been obliged, if I had dismissed Françoise, to keep the same ser-
vant. For various others were to enter my service in years to come;
already furnished with the defects common to all servants, they
underwent nevertheless a rapid transformation with me. As the
laws of attack govern those of riposte, in order not to be hurt by
the asperities of my character, all of them effected in their own
an identical resilience, always at the same point, and to make up
for this took advantage of the gaps in my line to install advanced
posts. Of these gaps I knew nothing, any more than of the sa-
lients125 to which they gave rise, precisely because they were gaps.
But my servants, by gradually becoming spoiled, made me aware
of them. It was from the defects that they invariably acquired that
I learned what were my own natural and invariable shortcomings;
their character offered me a sort of negative of my own. We had
always laughed, my mother and I, at Mme Sazerat, who used,
in speaking of her servants, expressions like “that race,” “that
species.” But I must admit that what made it useless to think of
replacing Françoise with anyone else was that her successor would
inevitably have belonged just as much to the race of servants in
general and to the class of my servants in particular.
To return to Françoise, I never in my life experienced any hu-
miliation without having seen beforehand on her face a store of
condolences prepared and waiting, and when in my anger at the
thought of being pitied by her I tried to pretend that on the con-
trary I had scored a distinct success, my lies broke feebly against
the wall of her respectful but obvious unbelief and the conscious-
ness that she enjoyed of her own infallibility. For she knew the
truth. She refrained from uttering it, and made only a slight move-
ment with her lips as if she still had her mouth full and was fin-
ishing a tasty morsel. She refrained from uttering it? Or so at least I
long believed, for at that time I still supposed that it was by means
of words that one communicated the truth to others. Indeed the

Part One 65
 The Guermantes Way

126. Scott Moncrieff supplied the words that people said to me recorded their meaning so unalter-
image of the “sensitive plate.” Proust ably on the sensitive plate126 of my mind that I could no more
wrote “deposited . . . their meaning in
my sensitive mind.” believe it to be possible that anyone who had professed to love
127. This anticipates the Narrator’s love me did not love me, any more than Françoise herself could have
for Albertine in the volumes The Captive doubted when she had read it in a newspaper that some priest or
and The Fugitive.
gentleman was prepared, on receipt of a stamped envelope, to fur-
nish us free of charge with an infallible remedy for every known
complaint or with the means of multiplying our income a hun-
dredfold. (If, on the other hand, our doctor were to prescribe for
her the simplest ointment to cure a head cold, she, so stubborn to
endure the keenest suffering, would complain bitterly of what she
had been made to sniff, insisting that it tickled her nose and that
life was not worth living.) But Françoise was the first person to
prove to me by her example (which I was not to understand until
long afterward, when it was given me afresh and more painfully,
as will be found in the later volumes of this work, by a person who
was dearer to me than Françoise)127 that the truth has no need
to be uttered to be made apparent, and that one may perhaps
gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words, without
even taking them into account, from a thousand outward signs,
even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere
of human character to what in nature are atmospheric changes. I
might perhaps have suspected this, since to myself, at that time, it
frequently occurred that I said things in which there was no ves-
tige of truth, while I made the real truth plain by all manner of
involuntary confidences expressed by my body and in my actions
(which were all too accurately interpreted by Françoise); I ought
perhaps to have suspected it, but to do so I would first have had
to be conscious that I myself was occasionally untruthful and dis-
honest. Now untruthfulness and dishonesty were with me, as with
most people, called into being in so immediate, so contingent a
fashion, and to defend some particular interest, that my mind,
fixed on some lofty ideal, allowed my character, in the darkness
below, to set about those urgent, sordid tasks, and did not look
down to observe them. When Françoise, in the evening, was nice

66 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

to me and asked my permission before sitting down in my room,

it seemed to me as though her face became transparent and I could
see the goodness and honesty that lay beneath. But Jupien, who
had lapses into indiscretion of which I learned only later, revealed
afterward that she had told him that I was not worth the price of
a rope to hang me, and that I had tried to insult her in every pos-
sible way. These words of Jupien set up at once before my eyes, in
new and strange colors, a print of the picture of my relations with
Françoise so different from the one on which I often took pleasure
in letting my eyes rest, and in which, without the least possibility
of doubt, Françoise adored me and lost no opportunity of singing
my praises, that I realized that it is not only the physical world
that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is
perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be di-
rectly perceiving and that we compose with the aid of ideas that
do not reveal themselves but are nevertheless effective; that the
trees, the sun, and the sky would not be the same as what we see
if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently con-
stituted from ours, or, better still, endowed for that purpose with
organs other than eyes that would furnish trees and sky and sun
with equivalents, though not visual ones. However that might be,
this sudden view that Jupien had opened up for me of the real
world appalled me. So far it concerned only Françoise, and of her
I barely thought. Was it the same with all one’s social relations?
And into what depths of despair might this not someday plunge
me, if it were the same with love? That was the future’s secret.
For the present only Françoise was concerned. Did she sincerely
believe what she had said to Jupien? Had she said it to embroil
Jupien with me, possibly so that we would not appoint Jupien’s
niece as her successor? At any rate I realized the impossibility of
obtaining any direct and certain knowledge of whether Françoise
loved or loathed me. And thus it was she who first gave me the
idea that a person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless
and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his
intentions with regard to ourselves exposed on his surface (like a

Part One 67
 The Guermantes Way

garden at which, with all its borders spread out before us, we gaze
through a railing), but is a shadow that we can never succeed in
penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowl-
edge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based on
his words and sometimes on his actions, though neither words
nor actions can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves
contradictory information—a shadow behind which we can alter-
nately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame
of hatred and of love.
I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest
happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that
He should cast down on her every imaginable calamity, and that
ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her
from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who
would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for
refuge. I imagined her doing so. And indeed on those evenings
when some change in the atmosphere or in my own state of health
brought to the surface of my consciousness some forgotten scroll
on which were recorded impressions of bygone days, instead of
profiting from the forces of renewal that had been generated in
me, instead of employing them to decipher in my own mind
thoughts that as a rule escaped me, instead of setting myself at
last to work, I preferred to relate aloud, to conceive in a lively,
external manner, with a flow of invention as useless as was my
declamation of it, a whole novel crammed with adventure, sterile
and false, in which the duchess, fallen upon misfortune, came
to implore assistance from me—me who had become, by a con-
verse change of circumstances, rich and powerful. And when I had
thus spent hours on end imagining the circumstances, rehearsing
the sentences with which I would welcome the duchess beneath
my roof, the situation remained unaltered; I had, alas, in reality,
chosen to love the very woman who, in her own person, combined
perhaps the greatest possible number of different advantages; in
whose eyes, accordingly, I could not hope, myself, ever to have
any sort of prestige; for she was as rich as the richest commoner—

68 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

and noble also; without reckoning that personal charm that set 128. Proust uses the colloquial word
her at the pinnacle of fashion, made her among all the others a dingo, which dates from the end of the
eighteenth century and is borrowed
sort of queen. from the indigenous Australian word
I felt that I was annoying her by crossing her path every for a wild dog.
morning; but even if I had had the heart to refrain from doing so 129. This word balancer, in the sense
of hesitating, is commonly used by
for two or three days consecutively, Mme de Guermantes might seventeenth-­century French writers,
not have noticed that abstention, which would have represented such as Mme de Sévigné and La Bru-
so great a sacrifice on my part, or might have set it down to some yère. À la recherche du temps perdu
(Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade edition],
obstacle beyond my control. And indeed I could not have made 1988), 2: 368, n. 2.
myself cease following her route except by arranging that it should
be impossible for me to do so, for my constant need to meet her, to
be for a moment the object of her attention, the person to whom
her greeting was addressed, was stronger than my fear of arousing
her displeasure. I would have had to go away for some time; and
for that I had not the heart. I did think of it more than once.
I would then tell Françoise to pack my suitcases, and immedi-
ately afterward to unpack them. And as the spirit of imitation, the
desire not to appear behind the times, alters the most natural and
most positive form of oneself, Françoise, borrowing the expres-
sion from her daughter’s vocabulary, used to remark that I was
“dippy.”128 She did not approve of this; she said that I was always
“balancing,” for she used, when she was not aspiring to rival the
moderns, the language of Saint-­Simon.129 It is true that she liked
it still less when I spoke to her as master to servant. She knew that
this was not natural to me and did not suit me, a condition that
she rendered in words as “where there isn’t a will.” I would never
have had the heart to leave Paris except in a direction that would
bring me closer to Mme de Guermantes. This was by no means an
impossibility. Would I not indeed find myself nearer to her than I
was in the morning, in the street, solitary, humiliated, feeling that
not a single one of the thoughts that I would have liked to convey
to her ever reached her, in that weary patrolling up and down of
walks that might last indefinitely, without my getting anywhere,
if I were to go miles away from Mme de Guermantes, but go to
someone of her acquaintance, someone whom she knew to be par-

Part One 69
 The Guermantes Way

130. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in ticular in the choice of his friends and who appreciated me, would
Flower, 486–87. be able to speak to her about me, and if not to obtain it from
her at least to make her know what I wanted, someone thanks
to whom, in any event, simply because I would discuss with him
whether or not it would be possible for him to convey this or that
message to her, I would give to my solitary and silent meditations
a new form, spoken, active, that would seem to me an advance,
almost a realization? What she did during the mysterious daily life
of the “Guermantes” that she was—this was the constant object
of my reverie; and to break through the mystery, even by indirect
means, as with a lever, by employing the services of a person to
whom were not forbidden the hotel of the duchess, her soirées,
unrestricted conversation with her, would not that be a contact
more distant but at the same time more effective than my contem-
plation of her every morning in the street?
The friendship, the admiration that Saint-­L oup felt for me
seemed to me undeserved and had hitherto left me indifferent. All
at once I attached a great value to them; I would have liked him to
disclose them to Mme de Guermantes, and I was quite prepared
even to ask him to do so. For when we are in love, all the little, un-
known privileges that we enjoy we would like to be able to divulge
to the woman we love, as the underprivileged and the bores do in
everyday life. We are distressed by her ignorance of them; we seek
consolation in the thought that just because they are never visible
she has perhaps added to the opinion that she already had of us
this possibility of further advantages that remain unknown.
Saint-­L oup had not for a long time been able to come to Paris,
either, as he himself explained, because of his military duties, or,
as was more likely, because of the trouble that he was having with
his mistress, with whom he had twice now been on the point of
breaking off relations. He had often told me what a pleasure it
would be to him if I came to visit him at that garrison town,
the name of which, a couple of days after his leaving Balbec, had
caused me so much joy when I had read it on the envelope of the
first letter I received from my friend.130 It was (not so far from

70 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

Balbec as its wholly inland surroundings might have led one to 131. A fiacre is a small hackney coach.
think) one of those little fortified towns, aristocratic and military,
set in a broad expanse of country over which on fine days there
floats so often in the distance a sort of intermittent haze of sound
that—as a screen of poplars by its sinuosity outlines the course of
a river that one cannot see—indicates the movements of a regi-
ment on maneuver, so that the very atmosphere of its streets, ave-
nues, and squares has been gradually tuned to a sort of perpetual
vibration, musical and martial, while the most ordinary noise of
wagon or streetcar is prolonged in vague trumpet calls, indefi-
nitely repeated, to the hallucinating ear, by the silence. It was not
too far away from Paris for me to be able, if I took the express, to
return, join my mother and grandmother, and sleep in my own
bed. As soon as I realized this, troubled by a painful longing, I
had too little willpower to decide not to return to Paris but rather
to stay in this town; but also too little to prevent a porter from
carrying my luggage to a fiacre131 and not to adopt, as I walked
behind him, the destitute soul of a traveler who is looking after his
belongings and for whom no grandmother is waiting, not to get
into the carriage with the complete detachment of a person who,
having ceased to think of what it is that he wants, has the air of
knowing what he wants, and not to give the driver the address of
the cavalry barracks. I thought that Saint-­L oup might come and
sleep that night at the hotel where I would be staying, in order
to make less painful for me the first shock of contact with this
strange town. One of the guards went to find him, and I waited at
the barracks gate, before that huge ship of stone, booming with
the November wind, out of which, every moment, for it was now
six o’clock, men were emerging in pairs into the street, staggering
as if they were coming ashore in some exotic port where they
found themselves temporarily anchored.
Saint-­L oup arrived, moving like a whirlwind, his monocle spin-
ning in the air before him; I had not given my name; I was eager
to enjoy his surprise and delight. “Oh! What a nuisance!” he ex-
claimed, suddenly catching sight of me, and blushing to the tips

Part One 71
 The Guermantes Way

132. Saint-­Loup’s phrase is “Ça fait of his ears. “I’ve just had a week’s leave, and I won’t be off duty
assez,” which contains a conjugated again for another week.”
form of the verb faire (to make).
133. Proust uses simply “élégances” And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this
placed in quotation marks to indicate first night alone, for he knew better than anyone my bedtime anxi-
his irony or disapproval or satirical in- eties, which he had often noticed and soothed at Balbec, he broke
tent.
off his lamentation to turn and look at me, coax me with little
smiles, with tender though unsymmetrical glances, half of them
coming directly from his eye, the other half through his monocle,
but both sorts alike were an allusion to the emotion that he felt
on seeing me again, an allusion also to the important matter that
I still did not understand but that concerned me now vitally, our
friendship.
“Mon Dieu! And where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t
recommend the hotel where we mess; it is next to the Exhibition
ground, where there’s a show just starting; you’ll find it far too
crowded. No, you’d better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it is a little
eighteenth-­century palace with old tapestries. It ‘makes’ quite the
‘old historical dwelling.’”
Saint-­L oup employed in every connection the word “makes”
for “has the air of,”132 because the spoken language, like the
written, feels from time to time the need of these alterations in
the meanings of words, these refinements of expression. And just
as journalists often have not the least idea from what school of lit-
erature come the “well-­turned phrases”133 that they borrow, so the
vocabulary, the very diction of Saint-­L oup were formed in imita-
tion of three different esthetes, none of whom he knew personally
but whose modes of speech had been indirectly instilled into him.
“Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted
to your auditory hyperesthesia. You will have no neighbors. I quite
see that it is a slender advantage, and as, after all, another guest
may arrive tomorrow, it would not be worth your while to choose
that particular hotel with so precarious an object in view. No, it’s
because of its appearance that I recommend it. The rooms are
quite attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there is
something reassuring about that.” But to me, less of an artist than

72 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

Saint-­L oup, the pleasure that an attractive house could give was 134. For the Narrator’s anguish at Com-
superficial, almost nonexistent, and could not calm my growing bray, see Swann’s Way, 14–15; for that of
Balbec, see In the Shadow of Young Girls
anguish, as painful as the one that I used to feel long ago at Com- in Flower, 261–67.
bray when my mother did not come upstairs to say goodnight,
or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the
room with the unnaturally high ceiling that smelled of vetiver.134
Saint-­L oup read all this in my fixed gaze.
“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor
fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking
to you about tapestries that you won’t have the heart to look at,
even. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally, I find it very
cheerful, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same
effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t
understand; I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in
your place.”
At that moment a sergeant who was exercising a horse in the
stable yard, entirely absorbed in making the animal jump, dis-
regarding the salutes of passing soldiers, but hurling volleys of
insults at those who got in his way, turned with a smile to Saint-­
Loup and, seeing that he had a friend with him, saluted us. But
his horse at once reared up, frothing. Saint-­L oup flung himself at
its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in calming it down and
returned to my side.
“Yes,” he resumed, “I assure you that I do understand; I feel
for you as keenly as you do yourself. I am wretched,” he went
on, laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder, “when I think
that if I could have stayed with you tonight, I might have been
able, if we chatted until morning, to relieve you of a little of your
unhappiness. I could easily lend you some books, but you won’t
want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I won’t be able to get
anyone else to take my place here; I’ve been off now twice in a row
because my girl came down to see me.”
And he knitted his brows partly with vexation and also in the
effort to decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply
to my disease.

Part One 73
 The Guermantes Way

135. Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) “Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a sol-
was a libertarian socialist and anar- dier who passed us. “Hurry up; get a move on!”
chist, who, in 1840 published his best-­
known work, Qu’est-­ce que la propriété? After which he turned once more to me, and his monocle and
(What is property?). At Balbec, the his peering, myopic gaze hinted an allusion to our great friend-
grandmother, wishing to thank Saint-­ ship.
Loup for his kindness to the Narrator,
gave him a large collection of Proud- “No! To see you here, in these barracks where I have spent so
hon’s letters. Saint-­Loup’s socialist much time thinking about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes.
leanings and admiration of Proudhon I must be dreaming. On the whole, how’s your health? Some-
are among the many signs of his class
betrayal. See In the Shadow of Young what better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself presently.
Girls in Flower, 339–40, 484. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang around too long in
136. A képi is a military cap with a the courtyard, there’s the devil of a wind; I don’t feel it now my-
round flat top with a visor and usually
sloping toward the front. self, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching
cold. And what about your work; have you started yet? No? You
are an odd fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I would be writing
morning, noon, and night. It amuses you more to do nothing?
What a pity it is that it’s the mediocre ones like me who are always
ready to work, and the ones who could, don’t want to! There,
and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her
Proudhon135 never parts from me.”
An officer, tall, handsome, majestic, emerged with slow and
solemn steps from the foot of a staircase. Saint-­L oup saluted him
and immobilized the perpetual instability of his body long enough
to hold his hand against the peak of his képi.136 But he had flung
himself into the action with so much force, straightening himself
with so sharp a movement, and, the salute ended, let his hand fall
with so abrupt a release, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg,
and monocle, that this moment was one not so much of immo-
bility as of a vibrating tension in which were neutralized the exces-
sive movements that he had just made and those he was about to
begin. Meanwhile the officer, without coming any nearer, calm,
benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing, in short, the direct
opposite of Saint-­L oup, also raised, but without haste, his hand
to his képi.
“I must just say a word to the captain,” whispered Saint-­L oup.
“Be a good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the

74 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

second on the right, on the third floor; I’ll be with you in a 137. The First Empire, under Napoléon,
minute.” dates from 1804 to 1814/1815.
138. Liberty and Company was named
And setting off at the double, preceded by his monocle, which for its creator the Englishman Arthur
fluttered in every direction, he made straight for the slow and Lasenby Liberty (1843–1917). The com-
stately captain whose horse had just been brought around and pany’s printed and dyed fabrics, espe-
cially its silks and satins, were famous
who, before preparing to mount, was giving orders with a studied for their subtle and artistic colors
nobility of gesture as in some historical painting, and as though and were highly prized as material for
he were setting forth to take part in some battle of the First Em- dresses from about 1890 to 1920.

pire,137 whereas he was simply going to ride home, to the house

that he had taken for the period of his service at Doncières, and
which stood in a square named, as though in an ironical antici-
pation of the arrival of this Napoleonid, place de la République.
I started to climb the staircase, nearly slipping on each of its nail-­
studded steps, catching glimpses of barrack rooms with bare walls
and a double row of beds and kits. I was shown Saint-­L oup’s
room. I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I could
hear someone moving about; he moved something, he dropped
something else; I sensed that the room was not empty, that some-
body was there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning
to burn. It could not keep quiet; it kept shifting its logs about, and
very clumsily. I entered the room; one log rolled into the fender
and set another smoking. And even when it was not moving, like
an ill-­bred person it made noises all the time, which, from the
moment I saw the flames rising, revealed themselves to me as
noises made by a fire, although if I had been on the other side of
a wall I would have thought that they came from someone who
was blowing his nose and walking about. Finally, I sat down in
the room and waited. Liberty138 hangings and old German fab-
rics of the eighteenth century preserved it from the smell that
was exhaled by the rest of the building, a coarse, insipid, moldy
smell like that of whole wheat bread. It was here, in this charming
room, that I could have dined and slept with a calm and happy
mind. Saint-­L oup seemed almost to be present in it by reason of
the textbooks that littered his table, next to photographs, among
which I recognized my own and that of Mme de Guermantes,

Part One 75
 The Guermantes Way

thanks to the light of the fire that had at last grown accustomed
to the grate, and, like an animal crouching in an ardent, noiseless,
faithful watchfulness, let fall only now and then a smoldering log
that crumbled into sparks, or licked with a tongue of flame the
sides of the chimney. I heard the ticktock of Saint-­L oup’s watch,
which could not be far away. This ticktock changed its place every
moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to come from
behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left, some-
times to die away as though it were far away. Suddenly I caught
sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the ticktock in a fixed
place from which it did not move again. That is to say, I thought
I heard it at this place; I did not hear it there; I saw it there, for
sounds have no position in space. At least we associate them with
movements, and in that way they serve the purpose of warning us
of those movements, of appearing to make them necessary and
natural. Certainly it sometimes happens that a sick man whose
ears have been plugged with cotton wool ceases to hear the noise
of a fire such as was crackling at that moment in Saint-­L oup’s fire-
place, laboring at the formation of embers and cinders, which it
then drops into the fender, nor would he hear the passage of the
streetcars whose music took its flight, at regular intervals, over
the main square of Doncières. Let the sick man then read a book,
and the pages will turn silently before him, as though they were
being leafed by the fingers of a god. The heavy rumbling of a bath
that is being filled becomes thin, faint, and distant like a celes-
tial twittering. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, take from
it all its aggressive power to hurt us; driven mad a moment ago
by hammer blows that seemed to be shattering the ceiling above
our head, we now enjoy receiving them, light, caressing, distant,
like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing
breeze. We play games of solitaire with cards that we do not hear,
until we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are
moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play
with them, have begun to play with us. And in this connection
we may ask ourselves whether, in the case of Love (indeed we

76 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

may add to Love the love of life and the love of fame, since there 139. Proust, like the Narrator, was
are, it appears, persons who are acquainted with these latter senti- hypersensitive to noise, and used
Quiès wax balls as ear plugs. See
ments), we ought not to act like those who, when a noise disturbs Carter, Marcel Proust, 700.
them, instead of praying that it may cease, stop their ears; and,
with them as our pattern, bring our attention, our defenses to bear
on ourselves, give them as an objective to subdue not the other
person with whom we are in love but our capacity for suffering at
that person’s hands.
To return to the problem of sound, we have only to thicken
the wads that plug the aural passages,139 and they confine to a
pianissimo the girl who has just been playing a boisterous tune
overhead; if we go further, and steep one of the wads in grease, at
once the whole household must obey its despotic rule; its laws ex-
tend even beyond our portals. Pianissimo is not enough; the wad
instantly closes the keyboard, and the music lesson is abruptly
ended; the gentleman who was walking up and down in the room
above breaks off in the middle of his beat; the movement of car-
riages and streetcars is interrupted as though a head of state were
expected to pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds some-
times disturbs our sleep instead of protecting it. Only yesterday
the incessant noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous
narrative all that was happening in the street and in the house,
succeeded at length in making us sleep, like a boring book; today,
on the surface of silence that is spread over our sleep a shock,
louder than the rest, manages to make itself heard, gentle as a
sigh, unrelated to any other sound, mysterious; and the call for
an explanation that it emits is sufficient to awaken us. Take away
for a moment from the sick man the cotton wool that has been
plugging his ears and in a flash the daylight, the full sunlight of
sound dawns afresh, dazzling him, is born again in the universe;
in all haste returns the multitude of exiled sounds; we are present,
as though it were the chanting of choirs of angels, at the resurrec-
tion of the voices. The empty streets are filled for a moment with
the whir of the swift and successive wings of the singing streetcars.
In the bedroom itself, the sick man has created, not, like Prome-

Part One 77
 The Guermantes Way

140. Strictly speaking, Prometheus did theus, fire, but the sound of fire.140 And when we increase or re-
not create fire but stole it from the duce the wads of cotton wool, it is as though we were pressing
forge of Hephaestus and gave it to
humans. Zeus was not fond of humans alternately one and the other of the two pedals that we have added
and wanted them to be deprived of fire. to the sonority of the outer world.
Only there are also suppressions of sound that are not tem-
porary. The man who has become completely deaf cannot even
heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye
to watch, on the tilted lid, for the white, hyperborean reflection,
like that of a coming snowstorm, which is the premonitory sign
that it is wise to obey by cutting off (as the Lord bade the waves
be still) the electric current; for already the rising, spasmodic egg
of the boiling milk is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong up-
heavals, puffs out and sets bellying several drooping sails that had
been wrinkled by the cream, sends into the tempest a nacreous
sail, which the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is
hushed in time, will make them all swirl around upon themselves
and set them adrift, changed now into magnolia petals. But if
the sick man should not be quick enough in taking the necessary
precautions, presently, when his drowned books and watch are
seen barely emerging from the milky tidal wave, he will be obliged
to call his elderly maid, who, though he be himself an eminent
statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no more
sense than a child of five. At other times in the magic chamber, in
front of the closed door, a person who was not there a moment ago
makes his appearance; it is a visitor whom we did not hear coming
in, and who merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of those little
puppet theaters, so restful for those who have taken a dislike to
the spoken language. And for this totally deaf man, since the loss
of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is
with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth become almost an
Eden, in which sound has not yet been created. The highest water-
falls unfold for his eyes alone their sheets of crystal, calmer than
the glassy sea, pure as the cascades of Paradise. As sound was for
him before his deafness the perceptible form in which the cause
of a movement was draped, objects moved without sound seemed

78 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

to be being moved also without cause; deprived of all resonant

sonority, they show a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive; they
move, halt, light up of their own accord. Of their own accord they
vanish in the air like the winged monsters of prehistoric days. In
the solitary and neighborless house of the deaf man the service,
which, before his infirmity was complete, was already showing
more reserve, was being done silently, is now assured him with a
sort of surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-­
tale king. And, as on the stage, the building that the deaf man sees
from his window—be it barracks, church, or city hall—is only so
much scenery. If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit
a cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less substantial even
than a palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity,
it will subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its
heavy blocks of stone tarnish, with anything so vulgar as noise, the
chastity of the prevailing silence.
The silence, all the more relative, that reigned in the little bar-
rack room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened
and Saint-­L oup, dropping his monocle, dashed in.
“Ah, Robert, how comfortable you must be here,” I said to him;
“how good it would be if one were allowed to dine and sleep here.”
And indeed, had it not been against the regulations, what re-
pose untinged by sadness I could have tasted there, protected
by that atmosphere of tranquility, vigilance, and gaiety that was
maintained by a thousand wills controlled and free from care,
a thousand lighthearted spirits, in that great community called
a barracks where, time having taken the form of action, the sad
bell that tolled the hours outside was replaced by the same joyous
clarion of those martial calls, the ringing memory of which was
kept perpetually alive in the paved streets of the town, like the
dust that floats in a sunbeam—a voice sure of being heard, and
musical because it was the command not only of authority to obe-
dience but of wisdom to happiness.
“So you’d rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than
go to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-­L oup asked me, smiling.

Part One 79
 The Guermantes Way

“Oh, Robert, it is cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I

pleaded; “you know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched
I will be over there.”
“Well, you flatter me!” he replied. “It occurred to me just now
that you would rather stay here tonight. And that is precisely what
I went to ask the captain.”
“And he has given his permission?” I cried.
“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”
“Oh! I adore him!”
“No; that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold
of my orderly and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on,
while I turned away in order to hide my tears.
We were several times interrupted by one or other of Saint-­
Loup’s friends coming in. He drove them all out again.
“Get out of here. Buzz off!”
I begged him to let them stay.
“No, really; they would bore you stiff; they are absolutely un-
cultured; all they can talk about is racing or grooming horses. Be-
sides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these pre-
cious moments I’ve been looking forward to. But you mustn’t
think, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, that every-
thing military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have
a major here who is an admirable man. He’s given us a course
in which military history is treated like a demonstration, like a
problem in algebra. Even from the esthetic point of view there
is about it a curious beauty, alternately inductive and deductive,
that you couldn’t fail to appreciate.”
“That’s not the captain who’s given me permission to stay here
tonight?”
“No; thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a ser-
vice is the biggest fool who ever walked the face of the earth. He’s
perfect for looking after the mess hall and uniform inspections; he
spends hours with the sergeant major and the master tailor. There
you have his mentality. What’s more, he has a vast contempt, like
everyone here, for the admirable major I was telling you about. No

80 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

one will speak to the latter because he’s a Freemason and doesn’t
go to confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have a petit
bourgeois like that in his house. Which is pretty brassy, when all’s
said and done, from a man whose great-­grandfather was a small
farmer, and who would probably be a small farmer himself if it
hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars. Not that he hasn’t a lurking
sense of his own rather ambiguous position in society, where he’s
neither fish nor fowl. He hardly ever shows his face at the Jockey, it
makes him feel extremely awkward, this so-­called prince,” added
Robert, who, having been led by the same spirit of imitation to
adopt the social theories of his teachers and the worldly preju-
dices of his relatives, unconsciously wedded the democratic love
of humanity to a contempt for the nobility of the Empire.
I was looking at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought
that, since Saint-­L oup had this photograph in his possession, he
might perhaps give it to me, made me feel all the fonder of him
and want to render him a thousand services, which seemed to
me a very small exchange for it. For this photograph was like one
more encounter, added to all those that I had already had, with
Mme de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if,
by some sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped
beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time
to gaze at my leisure at that plump cheek, that arched neck, that
tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her
passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection
of memory); and the contemplation of them, as well as of the
bare throat and arms of a woman whom I had never seen save
in a high-­necked and long-­sleeved dress, was to me a voluptuous
discovery, a priceless favor. Those lines, which had seemed to me
almost a forbidden spectacle, I could study there, as in a textbook
of the only geometry that had any value for me. Later on, when I
looked at Robert, I noticed that he too was a little like the photo-
graph of his aunt, and by a mysterious process that I found al-
most as moving, since, if his face had not been directly created by
hers, the two had nevertheless a common origin. The features of

Part One 81
 The Guermantes Way

the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to my vision of

Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes, seemed
to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in another
copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of Robert’s
face, which might almost be superimposed on his aunt’s. I saw
in him, with a keen longing, those features characteristic of the
Guermantes, of that race that had remained so individual in the
midst of a world with which it was not confounded, in which it
remained isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seemed
to have been the issue, in the age of mythology, of the union of a
goddess with a bird.
Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by
my evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense
of well-­being inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the
champagne that bedewed at the same time my brow with beads
of sweat and my eyes with tears; it washed down the partridges;
I ate them with the astonishment of a layman, of any sort, who
finds in a certain way of life with which he is not familiar what
he has supposed it to exclude—the astonishment, for instance,
of an atheist who sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a
presbytery. And the next morning, when I awoke, I rose and went
to cast from Saint-­L oup’s window, which being at a great height
overlooked the whole countryside, a curious scrutiny to make the
acquaintance of my new neighbor, the landscape that I had not
been able to distinguish the day before, having arrived too late, at
an hour when it was already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak
of night. And yet, early as it had awoken from its sleep, I could see
it, when I opened the window and looked out, only as one sees it
from the window of a château overlooking a pond, shrouded still
in its soft white morning gown of mist, which scarcely allowed me
to make out anything at all. But I knew that, before the soldiers
who were busy with their horses in the courtyard had finished
grooming them, it would have cast its gown aside. In the mean-
time, I could see only a barren hill, raising close up against the
side of the barracks a back already swept clear of darkness, rough

82 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

and wrinkled. Through the transparent curtain of frost I could

not take my eyes from this stranger who, too, was looking at me
for the first time. But when I had formed the habit of coming
to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more
real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at
Balbec, than our house in Paris, which I thought of as absent—or
dead—friends, that is, no longer having any strong belief in their
existence, caused, even without my realizing it, its reflected shape
to be always outlined on the slightest impressions that I formed
at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning,
on the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of hot
chocolate prepared by Saint-­L oup’s orderly in this comfortable
room, which seemed like a sort of optical center from which to
look out at the hill—the idea of there being anything else to do
but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered
impossible by this same mist. Imbibing the shape of the hill, asso-
ciated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole web of
my thoughts at that particular time, this mist, without my having
thought about it at all, succeeded in coloring all my thoughts of
that time, just as a massive and unmelting lump of gold had re-
mained allied to my impressions of Balbec, or as the proximity of
the outside stairs of blackish sandstone gave a grayish background
to my impressions of Combray. It did not, however, persist late
into the day; the sun began by hurling at it, in vain, a few darts
that sprinkled it with brilliants before they finally overcame it. The
hill might expose its grizzled rump to the sun’s rays, which, an
hour later, when I went down to the town, gave to the russet tints
of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the election posters
pasted on the walls, an exaltation that raised my spirits also and
made me stamp, singing as I went, on the pavements from which
I could hardly keep myself from jumping in the air for joy.
But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew
beforehand that I was doomed to find sadness there. It was like
an unbreathable aroma that all my life long had been exhaled for
me by every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom: in the

Part One 83
 The Guermantes Way

one that I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained

elsewhere, and in its place sent only Habit. But I could not em-
ploy this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look after things for
me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I arrived alone,
where I must bring into contact with its environment that “self ”
that I rediscovered only at yearlong intervals, but always the same,
having not grown at all since Combray, since my first arrival at
Balbec, weeping, without any possibility of consolation, on the
corner of an unpacked trunk.
As it happened, I was mistaken. I had no time to be sad, for I
was not alone for an instant. The fact of the matter was that there
remained of the old palace a superfluous refinement of structure
and decoration, out of place in a modern hotel, and which, re-
leased from any practical purpose, had in its long spell of leisure
acquired a sort of life: passages winding about in all directions,
which one was continually crossing in their aimless wanderings,
lobbies as long as corridors and as ornate as drawing rooms, which
had the air rather of being dwellers there themselves than of
forming part of a dwelling, which could not be induced to enter
and settle down in any of the rooms but wandered about outside
mine and came up at once to offer me their company—neighbors
of a sort, idle but never noisy, menial ghosts of the past who had
been granted the privilege of staying, provided they kept quiet
by the doors of the rooms rented to visitors, and who, every time
that I came across them, greeted me with a silent deference. In
short, the idea of a lodging, simply a container case for our present
existence, simply shielding us only from the cold and from the
sight of others, was absolutely inapplicable to this dwelling, an as-
sembly of rooms as real as a colony of people, living, it was true,
in silence, but things that one was obliged to meet, to avoid, to
greet, when one returned. One tried not to disturb them, and one
could not look without respect at the great drawing room that had
formed, far back in the eighteenth century, the habit of stretching
itself at its ease among its hangings of old gold beneath the clouds
of its painted ceiling. And one was seized with a more personal

84 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

curiosity as to the smaller rooms that, without any regard for sym- 141. The Directory (Directoire) was the
metry, ran all around it, innumerable, startled, fleeing in disorder French Revolutionary government
established by the Constitution of the
as far as the garden, to which they could descend so easily down Year III (on the Revolutionary calendar),
three broken steps. which lasted from November 1795 to
If I wished to go out or to come in without taking the elevator November 1799.

or being seen on the main staircase, a smaller private staircase,

no longer in use, offered me its steps so skillfully arranged, one
close above another, that there seemed to exist in their gradation
a perfect proportion of the same kind as those which, in colors,
scents, savors, often arouse in us a particular sensual pleasure. But
the pleasure to be found in going up and down stairs I had had to
come here to learn, as once before to an Alpine resort to find that
the act—as a rule not noticed—of breathing can be a perpetual
delight. I received that dispensation from effort that is granted to
us only by the things to which long use has accustomed us, when
I set my feet for the first time on those steps, familiar before I even
knew them, as if they possessed, deposited on them, perhaps, in-
corporated in them by the masters of long ago whom they used
to welcome every day, the prospective charm of habits that I had
not yet contracted and that indeed could only grow weaker once
they had become my own. I went into a room; the double doors
closed behind me, the drapes let in a silence in which I felt my-
self invested with a sort of exhilarating royalty; a marble mantel-
piece with ornaments of wrought brass, of which one would have
been wrong to think that its sole idea was to represent the art of
the Directory,141 offered me a fire, and a little armchair on short
legs helped me to warm myself as comfortably as if I had been
sitting on the hearthrug. The walls held the room in a close em-
brace, separating it from the rest of the world and, to let in, to
enclose what made it complete, parted to make way for the book-
case, reserved a place for the bed, on either side of which col-
umns airily upheld the raised ceiling of the alcove. And the room
was prolonged in depth by two closets as wide as itself, the latter
of which had hanging from its wall, to scent the contemplation
that one came here to find, a voluptuous rosary of orrisroots; the

Part One 85
 The Guermantes Way

doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost

retreat, were not content with tripling its dimensions without its
ceasing to be well proportioned, and not only allowed my eyes to
enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but
added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still
inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty. This closet
overlooked a courtyard, a fair, solitary stranger whom I was glad
to have for a neighbor when next morning my eyes fell on her, a
captive between her high walls in which no other window opened,
with nothing but two yellowing trees that were enough to give a
mauve softness to the pure sky above.
Before going to bed I decided to leave my room in order to ex-
plore the whole of my enchanting domain. I walked down a long
gallery that paid homage to me successively with all that it had
to offer me if I could not sleep, an armchair placed waiting in a
corner, a spinet, on a table against the wall a blue porcelain vase
filled with cineraria, and, in an old frame, the phantom of a lady
of long ago whose powdered hair was starred with blue flowers,
holding in her hand a bouquet of carnations. When I came to the
end, the bare wall in which no door opened said to me simply,
“Now you must turn and go back, but you see, you are at home
here,” while the soft carpet, not to be left out, added that if I did
not sleep that night I could easily come back barefoot, and the un-
shuttered windows, looking out over the countryside, assured me
that they would hold a sleepless vigil and that, at whatever hour I
chose to come, I need not be afraid of disturbing anyone. And be-
hind a hanging curtain I came upon a little closet that, stopped by
the wall and unable to escape, had hidden itself there abashed and
gave me a frightened stare from its little round window, glowing
blue in the moonlight. I went to bed, but the presence of the
eiderdown quilt, of the small columns, of the little fireplace, by
straining my attention to a pitch beyond that of Paris, prevented
me from abandoning myself to the habitual routine of my mus-
ings. And since it is this particular state of attention that enfolds
our sleep, acts upon it, modifies it, brings it into line with this

86 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

or that series of our past impressions, the images that filled my

dreams that first night were borrowed from a memory entirely
distinct from that on which my sleep usually drew. If I had been
tempted while asleep to let myself be swept back upon my usual
currents of memory, the bed to which I was not accustomed, the
coddling attention that I was obliged to pay to the position of my
limbs when I turned over, were sufficient to rectify or to maintain
the new thread of my dreams. It is the same with sleep as with our
perception of the external world. It needs only a modification in
our habits to make it poetic; it is enough that while undressing we
should have dozed off involuntarily on our bed for the dimensions
of our dreamworld to be altered and its beauty felt. We awake,
look at our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock in
the morning, but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so
vividly does this nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to
have come down to us from the skies, by virtue of some divine
right, enormous and solid like an emperor’s orb of gold. In the
morning, worried by the thought that my grandfather was ready
and they were waiting for me to start on our walk along the Mé-
séglise way, I was awakened by the blare of a regimental band that
passed every day beneath my windows. But two or three times—
and I say this because one cannot properly describe human life
unless one bathes it in the sleep into which it plunges night after
night and that sweeps around it as a promontory is encircled by
the sea—the intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear
the shock of the music and I heard nothing. On other mornings
it gave way for a moment; but, still velvety from having slept,
my consciousness (like those organs by which, after a preliminary
anesthetic, a cauterization, not perceived at first, is felt only at
the very end and then as a faint burning sensation) was touched
only gently by the shrill points of the fifes, which caressed it with
a vague, cool, matutinal warbling; and after this brief interrup-
tion in which the silence had turned to music, it relapsed into my
slumber before even the dragoons had finished passing, depriving
me of the last blossoming sprays of the surging bouquet of sound.

Part One 87
 The Guermantes Way

142. This is an allusion to the three And the zone of my consciousness that its springing stems had
witches in Macbeth, act 4, scene 1. brushed was so narrow, so circumscribed with sleep that later on,
when Saint-­L oup asked me whether I had heard the band, I was
not certain that the sound of its brasses had not been as imagi-
nary as the one that I heard during the day echo, after the slightest
noise, from the paved streets of the town. Perhaps I had heard
it only in a dream, prompted by my fear of being awakened, or
else of not being awakened and so not seeing the regiment march
past. For often, when I was still asleep at the moment when, on
the contrary, I had supposed that the noise would awaken me, for
the next hour I imagined that I was awake, while still dozing, and
I enacted to myself with tenuous shadow-­shapes on the screen
of my slumber the various scenes of which it deprived me but at
which I had the illusion of looking on.
What one has meant to do during the day, as it turns out, sleep
intervening, one accomplishes only in one’s dreams, that is to say
after its course has been diverted by drowsiness into following
another lane than one would have chosen when awake. The same
story branches off and has a different ending. When all is said,
the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that
people who have difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to es-
cape from the waking world. After having desperately, for hours
on end, with their eyes closed, revolved in their minds thoughts
similar to those that they would have had with their eyes open,
they take heart again if they notice that the preceding minute has
been weighed down by a line of reasoning in strict contradiction
to the laws of logic and the reality of the present, this brief “ab-
sence” signifying that the door is now open through which they
will perhaps presently be able to escape from the perception of
the real, to advance to a resting place more or less remote from it,
which will mean their having a more or less “good” night. But al-
ready a great stride has been made when we turn our backs on the
real, when we reach the outer caves where “autosuggestions” pre-
pare—like witches—the hell-­broth142 of imaginary maladies or of
the recurrence of nervous disorders, and watch for the hour at

88 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

which the storm that has been gathering during our unconscious 143. Any of a genus (Datura) of widely
sleep will break with sufficient force to make sleep cease. distributed strong-­scented herbs,
shrubs, or trees of the nightshade
Not far from there is the secret garden in which grow like family, including some used as sources
strange flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from another, of medicinal alkaloids (as stramonium)
the sleep induced by datura,143 by the multiple extracts of ether, the or in folk rites or illicitly for their poi-
sonous, narcotic, or hallucinogenic
sleep of belladonna, of opium, of valerian, flowers whose petals re- effects.
main closed until the day when the predestined stranger will come 144. The Legras powder that Proust
and, touching them, bid them open, and release for long hours burned for his asthma fumigations
contained belladonna and datura.
the aroma of their peculiar dreams into a marveling and bewil- Proust also suffered from insomnia
dered being.144 At the end of the garden stands the convent with and took barbiturates.
open windows through which we hear voices repeating the lessons 145. Siegfried, the hero of Wagner’s
The Ring of the Nibelung, breaks several
learned before we went to sleep and that we will know only at the swords on an anvil before forging one
moment of awakening; while, a presage of that moment, sounds that he will use to kill Fafner and to ob-
the resonant ticktock of that inner alarm clock that our preoccu- tain the magic ring of the Nibelung.

pation has so effectively regulated that when our housekeeper

comes in and tells us: “It is seven o’clock,” she will find us awake
and ready. On the dim walls of the room that opens upon our
dreams, within which toils, without ceasing, that oblivion of the
sorrows of love whose task, interrupted and brought to naught at
times by a nightmare filled with reminiscence, is quickly resumed,
hang, even after we are awake, the memories of our dreams, but
so enveloped in darkness that often we catch sight of them for the
first time only in the broad light of the afternoon when the ray
of a similar idea happens by chance to strike them; some of them
clear and harmonious while we slept, but already so distorted that,
having failed to recognize them, we can but hasten to lay them in
the earth like dead bodies too quickly decomposed or objects so
seriously damaged, so nearly crumbling into dust that the most
skillful restorer could not bring them back to their true form or
make anything of them.
Near the gate is the quarry to which our heavier slumbers repair
in search of substances that coat the brain with so unbreakable a
glaze that, to awaken the sleeper, his own will is obliged, even on
a golden morning, to smite him with mighty blows of the axe,
like a young Siegfried.145 Beyond this, again, are the nightmares

Part One 89
 The Guermantes Way

146. Perhaps Proust is thinking of Dio- of which the doctors foolishly assert that they tire us more than
nysus, another son of Zeus and also does insomnia, whereas on the contrary they enable the thinker
a victim of Hera’s jealousy. Or he may
have had in mind Hylas, the youth to escape from the strain of thought; those nightmares with their
who served as Hercules’ companion fantastic albums in which our relatives who are dead are shown
and lover, who was abducted by water meeting with a serious accident which at the same time does not
nymphs. There is a painting by Nicolas
Poussin (1594–1665) or by his school preclude their speedy recovery. Until then we keep them in a little
entitled Nymphs Feeding the Child rat cage, in which they are smaller than white mice and, covered
Jupiter (1650) in the National Gallery with big red spots, out of each of which a feather sprouts, they
in Washington, D.C.
engage us in Ciceronian dialogues. Next to this album is the re-
volving disc of awakening, by virtue of which we submit for a mo-
ment to the tedium of having to return presently to a house that
was torn down fifty years ago, the image of which is gradually
effaced as sleep grows more distant by a number of others, until
we arrive at the image that appears only when the disc has ceased
to revolve and that coincides with the one that we will see with
opened eyes.
Sometimes I had heard nothing, being in one of those slum-
bers into which we fall as into a pit from which we are heartily
glad to be drawn up a little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that
has been brought to us (as by the nymphs who fed the infant
Hercules)146 by those agile, vegetative powers whose activity is
doubled while we sleep.
That kind of sleep is called “sleeping like lead,” and it seems as
though one has become oneself, and remains for a few moments
after such a sleep has ended, a mere man of lead. One is no longer
a person. How then, searching for one’s mind, one’s personality, as
one searches for a thing that is lost, does one recover one’s own self
rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is
it not another personality than the previous one that becomes in-
carnate in one? One fails to see what dictates the choice and why,
among the millions of human beings any one of whom one might
be, it is on the being one was the day before that one unerringly
lays one’s hand? What is it that guides us, when there has been an
actual interruption—whether it be that our unconsciousness has
been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves?

90 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

There has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat
and rhythmical tractions of the tongue revive us. No doubt the
room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memo-
ries to which other, older memories cling; or were some memories
dormant in us, of which we now become conscious? The resur-
rection at our awakening—after the beneficial attack of mental
alienation that is sleep—must after all be similar to what occurs
when we recapture a name, a line of poetry, a refrain that we had
forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is
to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky, but
held back by the chill of those last autumn mornings, so luminous
and so cold, in which winter begins, in order to look at the trees
on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few strokes of
gold or of pink that seemed to have been left in the air, on an in-
visible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my
neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like
a chrysalis in the process of metamorphosis I was a dual creature
whose different parts were not adapted to the same environment;
for my eyes color was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on
the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for color. I arose
only after my fire had been lit and studied the picture, so delicate
and transparent, of the mauve and golden morning, to which I
had now added by artificial means the element of warmth that
it lacked, poking my fire, which burned and smoked like a good
pipe and gave me, as a pipe would have given me, a pleasure at
once coarse because it was based on a material comfort and deli-
cate because beyond it were the blurred outlines of a pure vision.
The walls of my dressing room were papered with a violent red on
which were strewn black and white flowers, to which it seemed
that I ought to have some difficulty in growing accustomed. But
they succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing me not
into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating my cheer-
fulness and my songs when I got up in the morning; they suc-
ceeded only in imprisoning me in the heart of a sort of poppy,

Part One 91
 The Guermantes Way

out of which to look at a world that I saw quite differently than

when in Paris, from the bright screen that was this new dwelling,
of a different aspect from the house of my parents, and into which
flowed a purer air. On certain days, I was agitated by the desire to
see my grandmother again, or by the fear that she might be ill, or
else by the memory of some business that I had left half-­finished
in Paris, and which seemed to have made no progress; sometimes
again it was some difficulty in which, even here, I had managed
to become involved. One or other of these anxieties had kept me
from sleeping, and I was without strength to face my sorrow,
which in a moment grew to fill the whole of my existence. Then
I sent someone from the hotel to the barracks, with a note for
Saint-­L oup: I told him that if it was physically possible—I knew
that it was extremely difficult for him—I would be most grateful
if he would look in for a minute. An hour later he arrived; and on
hearing his ring at the door I felt myself liberated from my obses-
sions. I knew that, if they were stronger than I, he was stronger
than they, and my attention was diverted from them and turned
toward him who would have to settle them. He had just come
into the room, and already he had enveloped me in the fresh air
in which since early morning he had been deploying so much ac-
tivity, a vital atmosphere very different from that of my room, to
which I at once adapted myself by appropriate reactions.
“I hope you weren’t angry with me for disturbing you; there is
something that’s worrying me, as you probably guessed.”
“Not at all; I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I
thought it very nice of you. I was delighted that you sent for me.
But what’s wrong? Things not going well? What can I do to help?”
He listened to my explanations, and gave careful answers; but
before he had uttered a word he had transformed me to his own
likeness; compared with the important occupations that kept him
so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries that, a moment ago, I had
been unable to endure for another instant seemed to me as to him
negligible; I was like a man who, not having been able to open his
eyes for some days, sends for a doctor, who neatly and gently raises

92 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

his eyelid, removes from beneath it and shows him a grain of sand;
the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my cares resolved them-
selves into a telegram that Saint-­L oup undertook to dispatch. Life
seemed to me so different, so delightful; I was flooded with such
a surfeit of strength that I longed for action.
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid; we’re going on a route march in
three-quarters of an hour, and I am needed there.”
“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”
“No, no bother at all, the captain was very good about it; he
told me that if it was for you I must go at once; but you under-
stand, I don’t like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”
“But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to
the place where you’ll be on maneuver, it would interest me im-
mensely, and I could perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to do that; you have been lying awake,
racking your brains over a thing that, I assure you, is not of the
slightest importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, you
should lay your head down on your pillow and go to sleep, which
you will find an excellent antidote to the demineralization of your
nerve cells; only you mustn’t go to sleep too soon, because our
band boys will be coming along beneath your windows; but as
soon as they’ve passed I think you’ll be left in peace, and we’ll see
each other again this evening, at dinner.”
But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment being
trained in field maneuvers, when I began to take an interest in the
military theories that Saint-­L oup’s friends used to expound over
the dinner table, and when it had become the chief desire of my
life to see at close quarters their various leaders, just as a person
who makes music his principal study and spends his life in concert
halls finds pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one mingles
with the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground
I used to have to take tremendously long walks. In the evening
after dinner the longing for sleep made my head drop every now
and then as in a spell of vertigo. The next morning I realized that I

Part One 93
 The Guermantes Way

147. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in had no more heard the band than, at Balbec, after the evenings on
Flower, 421–34. which Saint-­L oup had taken me to dinner at Rivebelle,147 I used to
hear the concert on the beach. And at the moment when I wanted
to get up I had a delicious feeling of incapacity; I felt myself fas-
tened to a deep, invisible ground by the articulations (of which my
tiredness made me conscious) of muscular and nourishing roots.
I felt myself full of strength; life seemed to extend more amply
before me; this was because I had reverted to the healthy tired-
ness of my childhood at Combray on the mornings following the
days when we had taken the Guermantes way. Poets claim that we
recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we
enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth.
But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in
disappointment as in success. The fixed places, contemporary with
different years, it is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find
them. This is where the advantage comes in, to a certain extent,
of great exhaustion followed by a good night’s rest. Good nights,
to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep,
where no reflection from overnight, no gleam of memory comes
to light up the interior monologue, if that does not cease also,
turn so effectively the soil and break through the surface stone of
our body that we discover there, where our muscles dive down and
throw out their twisted roots and breathe in new life, the garden
in which we used to play as a child. There is no need to travel in
order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it.
What once covered the earth is no longer on it but beneath; a mere
excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city, excavation
is necessary also. But we will see how certain impressions, fugitive
and fortuitous, carry us back even more effectively to the past,
with a more delicate precision, with a flight more light-­winged,
more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal
than these organic dislocations.
Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still; I had, without any
opportunity of going to bed, been following the maneuvers for
several days on end. How blessed then was my return to the hotel!

94 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

As I got into bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands 148. These “romances,” discovered by
of enchanters, sorcerers like those who people the “romances” be- the French in the seventeenth century,
were often epic poems written in Italy
loved of our forebears in the seventeenth century.148 My sleep that and Spain during the Middle Ages,
night and the lazy morning that followed it were no more than such as Amadis of Gaul by Garci Rodrí-
a charming fairy tale. Charming, beneficent perhaps also. I re- guez de Montalvo, Orlando Furioso by
Ludovico Ariosto, and Jerusalem Deliv-
minded myself that the worst sufferings have their place of sanc- ered by Torquato Tasso. A good indi-
tuary, that one can always, when all else fails, find repose. These cation of their being “beloved” is the
thoughts carried me far. number of quotations of these authors
and their French imitators in the letters
On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-­L oup had of Mme de Sévigné, which is where
to stay in the barracks, I often went to visit him there. It was a long Proust undoubtedly read most of them.
way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris:
Gallimard [Pléiade edition], 1987),
side of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost 2: 428, n. 2.
constantly over this high ground, filling all the buildings erected 149. The Café de la Paix opened around
on three sides of the barracks square, and howling incessantly like 1870 at 12, boulevard des Capucines,
near the Jockey Club, which was at
a cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged 1 bis, rue Scribe. It was a favorite place
on some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the for supper after the theater.
mess, talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced 150. This is most likely Jacques de
Crussol, the fourteenth Duc d’Uzès
me (and whom later on I came now and then to see, even when he (1868–93).
was not going to be there), looking down from the window three 151. Henri Philippe Marie, Prince d’Or-
hundred feet at the countryside below, bare now except where re- léans (1867–1901), was the son of the
Duc de Chartres (1840–1910) and the
cently sown fields, often still soaked with rain and glittering in the great-grandson of Louis-­Philippe.
sun, showed a few strips of green, of the brilliance and translucent
limpidity of enamel, I could hear him discussed by the others, and
I soon learned what a popular favorite he was. Among many of the
volunteers, belonging to other squadrons, sons of rich bourgeois
families who looked at the aristocratic high society only from out-
side and without penetrating its enclosure, the attraction that they
naturally felt toward what they knew of Saint-­L oup’s character
was reinforced by the prestige that attached in their eyes to the
young man whom, on Saturday evenings when they went on leave
to Paris, they had seen supping in the Café de la Paix149 with the
Duc d’Uzès150 and the Prince d’Orléans.151 And on that account,
into his handsome face, his casual way of walking and saluting,
the perpetual dance of his monocle, the affectation shown in the
cut of his service dress—the képis always too high, the pants of

Part One 95
 The Guermantes Way

152. The pants worn by cavalry officers too fine a cloth and too pink152 a shade—they had introduced
were often of varying shades of red. the idea of a “chic” that, they were positive, was lacking in the
153. Proust uses a slang term époilant:
literally so astounding that you laugh best turned-­out officers in the regiment, even the majestic captain
until your hair falls out. to whom I had been indebted for the privilege of sleeping in the
barracks, who seemed, in comparison, too pompous and almost
common.
One of them said that the captain had bought a new horse.
“He can buy as many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-­L oup on
Sunday morning in the allée des Acacias; now he rides with an
altogether different chic!” replied his companion, and knew what
he was talking about, for these young men belonged to a class
that, if it does not frequent the same houses and know the same
people, nevertheless, thanks to money and leisure, does not differ
from the nobility in its experience of all those refinements of life
that money can buy. At most their refinement had, in the matter
of clothes, for instance, something about it more studied, more
impeccable than the free and easy negligence that so delighted
my grandmother in Saint-­L oup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons
of big bankers or stockbrokers, as they sat eating oysters after the
theater, to see at a nearby table Sergeant Saint-­L oup. And what
a tale there was to tell in the barracks on Monday night, after a
weekend leave, by one of them who was in Robert’s squadron, and
to whom he had said good day “most politely,” while another, who
was not in the same squadron, was quite positive that in spite of
this Saint-­L oup had recognized him, for two or three times he had
put up his monocle and stared in the speaker’s direction.
“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had
been spending the day with his mistress; “my brother says his
dress coat was cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”
“What was his waistcoat like?”
“He wasn’t wearing a white waistcoat; it was mauve, with some
sort of palms on it; very stunning!”153
To the “old soldiers” (sons of the soil who had never heard of
the Jockey Club and simply put Saint-­L oup in the category of
ultrarich noncommissioned officers, in which they included all

96 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

those who, whether bankrupt or not, lived in a certain style, whose

income or debts reached a rather high figure, and who were gen-
erous toward their men), the gait, the monocle, the trousers, Saint-­
Loup’s képis, even if they saw in them nothing particularly aristo-
cratic, furnished nevertheless just as much interest and meaning.
They recognized in these peculiarities the character, the style that
they had assigned once and for all to this most popular of the
“stripes” in the regiment, manners like no one’s else, scornful in-
difference to what his superior officers might think, which seemed
to them the natural corollary of his kindness to his subordinates.
The morning cup of coffee in the barrack room, the afternoon rest
in the bunks, seemed pleasanter when some old soldier served up
to the greedy and idle squad some savory tidbit about a képi be-
longing to Saint-­L oup.
“It was the height of my pack.”
“Come on, old fellow, you don’t expect us to believe that;
you’re pulling our leg, it couldn’t have been the height of your
pack,” interrupted a young college graduate who hoped by using
these slang terms not to appear a greenhorn, and by venturing on
this contradiction to obtain confirmation of a fact the thought of
which enchanted him.
“Oh, so it wasn’t the height of my pack? You measured it, I
suppose! I’ll tell you this much, the C.O. glared at him as if he’d
have liked to put him in the clink. But you needn’t think the
great Saint-­L oup felt squashed; no, he came and he went, and he
lowered his head and raised his head, and always that stunt with
the monocle. We’ll see what the captain has to say when he hears.
Oh, very likely he’ll say nothing, but you may be sure he won’t be
pleased. But there’s nothing so wonderful about that képi. I hear
he’s got thirty of ’em and more at home in town.”
“Where did you hear that, old man? From our blasted cor-
poral?” asked the young graduate, pedantically displaying the
new forms of speech that he had only recently acquired and with
which he took pride in garnishing his conversation.
“Where did I hear it? From his orderly of course!”

Part One 97
 The Guermantes Way

154. Mercury was the son of Zeus and “Ah! Now you’re talking. That’s a fellow who knows when he’s
the messenger of the gods. “He was well off!”
graceful and swift of motion. On his
feet were winged sandals; wings were “I’ll say! He’s got more dough than I have, that’s for sure! And
on his low-­crowned hat, too, and on his besides Saint-­L oup gives him all his own things, and everything.
magic wand, the Caduceus.” Hamilton, He said he wasn’t getting enough grub in the canteen. Along
Mythology, 34.
comes de Saint-­L oup and gives cooky hell: ‘I want him to be
properly fed, d’you hear,’ he says, ‘and I don’t care what it costs.’”
The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted
by the emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker,
which had an immense success.
On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill
up the time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with
Saint-­L oup at the hotel in which he and his friends had estab-
lished their mess, I made for my own room, as soon as the sun
had set, so as to have a couple of hours in which to rest and read.
In the square, the evening light bedecked the pepper-­pot turrets
of the château with little pink clouds that matched the color of
the bricks and completed the harmony by softening the tone of
the latter with a twilight gleam. So strong a current of vitality
coursed through my nerves that no amount of movement on my
part could exhaust it; each step I took, after touching a paving
stone of the square, rebounded off it. I seemed to have growing on
my heels the wings of Mercury.154 One of the fountains was filled
with a ruddy glow, while in the other the moonlight had already
begun to turn the water opalescent. Between them were children
at play, uttering shrill cries, wheeling in circles, obeying some ne-
cessity of the hour, like swifts or bats. Next door to the hotel, the
old national courts and the Louis XVI orangery, in which were
now installed the savings bank and the Army Corps headquar-
ters, were lighted from within by the palely gilded globes of their
gas jets, which, already burning, in the still clear daylight outside,
suited those vast, tall, eighteenth-­century windows from which
the last rays of the setting sun had not yet departed, as would have
suited a complexion heightened with rouge a headdress of yellow
tortoiseshell, and persuaded me to return to my fireside and my

98 Part One
 The Guermantes Way

lamp, which, alone in the façade of my hotel, was striving to resist

the gathering darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors
with pleasure, before it was completely dark, as to an appetizing
meal. I kept, when I was in my room, the same fullness of sen-
sation that I had felt outside. It gave such an apparent convexity
of surface to things that as a rule seem flat and empty—to the
yellow flame of the fire, the coarse blue paper of the sky, on which
the setting sun had scribbled corkscrews and whirligigs, like a
schoolboy with a piece of red chalk, the curiously patterned cloth
on the round table, on which a ream of essay paper and an inkpot
lay in readiness for me, together with one of Bergotte’s novels—
that ever since these things have continued to seem to me to be
enriched with a particular form of existence that I feel I should be
able to extract from them if it were granted me to set eyes on them
again. I thought with joy of the barracks that I had just left and of
their weather vane turning with every wind that blew. Like a diver
breathing through a pipe that rises above the surface of the water,
I felt that I was in a sense linked to a healthy, open-­air life by
keeping as a mooring those barracks, that towering observatory,
dominating a countryside furrowed with canals of green enamel,
into whose various buildings I esteemed as a priceless privilege,
which I hoped would last, my freedom to go whenever I chose,
always certain of a welcome.
At seven o’clock I dressed and went out again to dine with
Saint-­L oup at the hotel where he took his meals. I liked to go
there on foot. It was by now pitch dark, and after the third day
of my visit there began to blow, as soon as night had fallen, an
icy wind that seemed a harbinger of snow. As I walked, I ought
not, strictly speaking, to have ceased for a moment to think of
Mme de Guermantes; it was only in the attempt to draw nearer
to her that I had come to visit Robert’s garrison. But a memory,
a grief, are fleeting things. There are days when they withdraw
so far that we are barely conscious of them; we think that they
have gone forever. Then we pay attention to other things. And
the streets of this town had not yet become for me what streets

Part One 99
 The Guermantes Way

155. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) are in the place where one is accustomed to live, simply a means
was a Dutch painter and engraver. Kar- of going from one place to another. The life led by the inhabi-
peles suggests Rembrandt’s painting
The Money-Changer (1627), now found tants of this unknown world must, it seemed to me, be a mar-
in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Mu- velous thing, and often the lighted windows of some dwelling
seum, Berlin. Eric Karpeles, Paintings in kept me standing for a long time motionless in the darkness by
Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search
of Lost Time (London: Thames and laying before my eyes the actual and mysterious scenes of an exis-
Hudson, 2008), 148. tence into which I might not penetrate. Here the fire genie dis-
156. See Swann’s Way, 179. played to me in a crimson tableau the booth of a chestnut seller
in which two noncommissioned officers, their belts slung over the
backs of chairs, were playing cards, never dreaming that a magi-
cian’s wand was making them emerge from the night, like an ap-
parition on the stage, and presenting them as they actually were
at that very moment to the eyes of a transfixed passerby whom
they could not see. In a little curiosity shop a candle, burned al-
most to its socket, projecting its warm glow over an engraving,
reprinted it in sanguine, while, battling against the darkness, the
light of the big lamp tanned a scrap of leather, inlaid a dagger with
fiery spangles, spread a priceless film of gold, like the patina of
time or the varnish used by an old master, on paintings that were
only bad copies, made in fact of the whole hovel, in which there
was nothing but worthless imitations and bad paintings, a mar-
velous composition by Rembrandt.155 Sometimes I lifted my gaze
to some huge old dwelling whose shutters had not been closed
and in which amphibious men and women, adapting themselves
anew each evening to live in an element different from that of
day, floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that, after night-
fall, rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms
to the very brink of the outer walls of stone and glass, the move-
ment of their bodies sending through it unctuous golden ripples.
I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that ran past
the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Méséglise,156 the force
of my desire caught and held me; it seemed to me that a woman
must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness,
I felt suddenly brush past me a skirt, the very intensity of the plea-
sure that I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the

100 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a ter- 157. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1528–
rified stranger. This Gothic alley meant for me something so real 69) painted village scenes that were
both realistic and fantastical. Pieter
that if I had been successful in picking up and enjoying a woman Brueghel the Younger (c. 1564–1625)
there, it would have been impossible for me not to believe that it is known especially for his paintings
was the ancient charm of the place that was bringing us together, of flowers, fruits, and landscapes. It
is probably the paintings of the elder
and even though she were no more than a common streetwalker, Brueghel that Proust has in mind.
stationed there every evening, still the wintry night, the strange
place, the darkness, the medieval atmosphere would have lent her
their mysterious glamour. I thought of what might be in store for
me; to try to forget Mme de Guermantes seemed to me a dreadful
thing, but reasonable, and for the first time possible, easy perhaps.
In the absolute quiet of this neighborhood I could hear ahead of
me shouted words and laughter that must have come from tipsy
revelers staggering home. I waited to see them; I stood peering in
the direction from which I had heard the noise. But I was obliged
to wait for some time, for the surrounding silence was so intense
that it had allowed to travel with the utmost clarity and force
noises that were still distant. Finally the revelers did appear, not,
as I had supposed, in front of me, but very far behind. Whether
the intersection of side streets, the interposition of houses had, by
reverberation, brought about this acoustic error, or because it is
very difficult to locate a sound whose position is not known to us,
I had been as mistaken about distance as about direction.
The wind grew stronger. It was bristling and grainy with coming
snow. I returned to the main street and jumped on board the little
streetcar on which, from its platform, an officer, without seeming
to see them, was acknowledging the salutes of the loutish soldiers
who trudged past along the pavement, their faces daubed crimson
by the cold, reminding me—in this little town that the sudden
leap from autumn into early winter seemed to have transported
farther north—of the rubicund faces that Brueghel157 gives to his
joyful, feasting, frostbitten peasants.
And sure enough at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-­L oup
and his friends and to which the festivities now beginning had at-
tracted a number of people from near and far, I found, as I hurried

Part One 101

 The Guermantes Way

158. Around 1908, Proust dined at the straight across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens
Hostellerie de Guillaume le Conqué- in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, lob-
rant, at Dives, near Cabourg, and was
astounded to find on the menu the sters being flung, alive, into what the landlord called the “ever-
“Demoiselles de Cherbourg au feu lasting fire,”158 an influx (worthy of some Census at Bethlehem159
éternel.” Marcel Plantevignes, Avec such as the old Flemish masters used to paint) of new arrivals who
Marcel Proust (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1966),
335–36. assembled in groups in the courtyard, asking the landlord or one
159. This picture is one that Pieter of his staff (who, if he did not like the look of them, would rec-
Brueghel the Elder painted in 1566. It ommend lodgings elsewhere in the town) whether they could have
is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-­
Arts at Brussels. The painting depicts dinner and beds, while a scullion hurried past holding a struggling
not the biblical Bethlehem but a snow-­ fowl by the neck. And similarly, in the big dining room that I
covered Flemish village. A number of crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room where my
copies were made by Pieter Brueghel
the Younger as well as by other Flemish friend was waiting for me, it was of some repast in the Gospels
painters. portrayed with a medieval naïveté and an exaggeration typically
Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets,
grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and
piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to
gain speed and set them down on the huge sideboard where they
were carved at once but where—for most of the people had nearly
finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as
though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them
in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to
respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but
naïvely illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and
to an esthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye
the splendor of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the
assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought by a
sideboard at the far end of the room; and to find out from him,
who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me,
in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward
among the chafing dishes that had been lighted here and there to
keep the latecomers’ plates from growing cold (which did not,
however, prevent the dessert, in the center of the room, from being
piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannequin, sometimes
supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really
of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-­cook,

102 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being

knocked down by his colleagues—toward this server, in whom I
felt that I recognized a character who is traditionally present in all
these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy
the snub-­nosed features, naïve and ill-­drawn, the daydreaming ex-
pression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence
that the others have not yet begun to suspect. I should add that,
in view probably of the coming festivities, this cast of secondary
roles was strengthened by a celestial contingent, recruited entirely
from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musi-
cian, whose blond hair framed a fourteen-­year-­old face, was not,
it was true, playing an instrument, but stood daydreaming be-
fore a gong or a pile of plates, while other less infantile angels flew
swiftly across the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air
with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins that fell along the lines
of their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed
ends. Fleeing those ill-­defined regions, screened by a hedge of
palms through which the angelic servers looked, from a distance,
as though they had floated down out of the empyrean, I pushed
my way through to the smaller room in which Saint-­L oup’s table
was laid. I found there several of his friends who dined with him
regularly, nobles except for one or two commoners in whom the
young nobles had, in their schooldays, detected likely friends,
and with whom they readily associated, proving thereby that they
were not in principle hostile to the middle class, even though it
was republican, provided it had clean hands and went to mass. On
the first of these evenings, before we sat down to dinner, I drew
Saint-­L oup into a corner and, in front of all the rest but so that
they could not hear me, said to him:
“Robert, this is hardly the time or the place for what I am going
to say, but I won’t be a second. I keep on forgetting to ask you
when I’m in the barracks; isn’t that Mme de Guermantes’s photo-
graph that you have on your table?”
“Why, yes; my dear aunt.”
“Of course she is; what a fool I am; I knew that, but I’d never

Part One 103

 The Guermantes Way

really thought about it. Good Lord, your friends will be getting
impatient; we must be quick, they’re looking at us; another time
will do; it isn’t at all important.”
“That’s all right; go on as long as you like. They can wait.”
“No, no; I do want to be polite to them; they’re so nice; be-
sides, it doesn’t really matter in the least, I assure you.”
“Do you know that worthy Oriane, then?”
This “worthy Oriane,” as he might have said, “that good
Oriane,” did not imply that Saint-­L oup regarded Mme de Guer-
mantes as especially good. In this instance the words “good,” “ex-
cellent,” “worthy” are mere reinforcements of the demonstrative
“that,” indicating a person who is known to both parties and of
whom the speaker does not quite know what to say to someone
outside the family circle. The word “good” does duty as a stopgap
and keeps the conversation going for a moment until the speaker
has hit upon “Do you see much of her?” or “I haven’t set eyes on
her for months,” or “I’ll be seeing her on Tuesday,” or “She must
be getting on, now, you know.”
“I can’t tell you how funny it is that it should be her photo-
graph, because we’re living in her house now, and I’ve been hearing
the most astounding things” (I would have been hard put to say
what) “about her, which have made me immensely interested in
her, only from a literary point of view, you understand, from a—
how should I put it—from a Balzacian point of view; but you’re so
clever you can see what I mean; I don’t need to explain things to
you; but we must hurry up; what on earth will your friends think
of my manners?”
“They will think absolutely nothing; I have told them that
you’re sublime, and they are a great deal more alarmed than you
are.”
“You are too kind. But listen, what I want to say is this: I sup-
pose Mme de Guermantes hasn’t any idea that I know you, has
she?”
“I can’t say; I haven’t seen her since the summer, because I
haven’t had any leave since she’s been in town.”

104 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“What I was going to say is this: I’ve been told that she looks 160. Scott Moncrieff translated Proust’s
on me as an absolute idiot.” “aigle” literally as “eagle,” whereas col-
loquially it means “genius.”
“That I do not believe; Oriane is not exactly a genius,160 but all
the same she’s by no means stupid.”
“You know that, as a rule, I don’t care at all about your adver-
tising the good opinion you’re kind enough to hold of me; I’m not
conceited. That’s why I’m sorry you’ve said flattering things about
me to your friends here (we will go back to them in two seconds).
But Mme de Guermantes is different; if you could let her know—
if you would even exaggerate a trifle—what you think of me, you
would give me great pleasure.”
“Why, of course I will, if that’s all you want me to do; it’s
not very difficult; but what difference can it possibly make to you
what she thinks of you? I suppose you think her no end of a joke,
really; anyhow, if that’s all you want we can discuss it in front of
the others or when we’re by ourselves; I’m afraid of your tiring
yourself if you stand talking, and it’s so inconvenient too, when
we have heaps of opportunities of being alone together.”
It was precisely this inconvenience that had given me courage
to approach Robert; the presence of the others was for me a pre-
text that justified my giving my remarks a brief and disjointed
form, under cover of which I could more easily dissemble the
falsehood of my saying to my friend that I had forgotten his con-
nection with the duchess, and also not give him time to frame—
with regard to my reasons for wanting Mme de Guermantes to
know that I was his friend, was clever, and so forth—questions
that would have been all the more disturbing in that I would not
have been able to answer them.
“Robert, I’m surprised that a man of your intelligence would
fail to understand that one doesn’t discuss the things that will give
one’s friends pleasure; one does them. Now I, if you were to ask
me no matter what, and indeed I only wish you would ask me to
do something for you, I can assure you I wouldn’t want any ex-
planations. I’ve asked you for more than I really want; I have no
desire to know Mme de Guermantes, but just to test you I ought

Part One 105

 The Guermantes Way

161. Tu is the singular, familiar form of to have said that I was eager to dine with Mme de Guermantes; I
“you” in French and is normally used am sure you would never have done it.”
when speaking directly to someone
who is a family member or a close ac- “Not only would I have done it, I will do it.”
quaintance. “When?”
162. This is an approximate quotation “Next time I’m in Paris, three weeks from now, I expect.”
of Blaise Pascal from his Mémorial, a
piece of parchment that was found on “We will see; I daresay she won’t want to see me, though. I
his body following his death. It con- can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
tained scribblings meant to commemo- “Not at all; it’s nothing.”
rate the night of November 23, 1654,
when he found salvation. The exact “Don’t say that; it’s tremendous, because now I can see what
wording is “Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de sort of friend you are; whether what I ask you to do is important
joie.” “Félicité inconnue” is not in Pas- or not, disagreeable or not, whether I am really keen about it or
cal’s text.
ask you only as a test, matters little; you say you will do it, and
there you show the fineness of your mind and heart. A stupid
friend would have started a discussion.”
Which was exactly what he had just been doing; but perhaps
I wanted to flatter his self-­esteem; perhaps also I was sincere, the
sole touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the extent to which
a friend could be useful regarding the one thing that seemed to
me to have any importance, namely my love. Then I went on, per-
haps out of duplicity, perhaps from a genuine increase of affection
inspired by gratitude, by self-­interest, and by the copy of Mme
de Guermantes’s very features that nature had reproduced in her
nephew Robert.
“But now we really must join the others, and I’ve mentioned
only one of the two things I wanted to ask you, the less important;
the other is more important to me, but I’m afraid you will never
consent. Would it annoy you if we were to call each other tu?”161
“Annoy me? My dear fellow! Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-­of
happiness! ”162
“Thank you—tu I mean—so very much. You begin first! This
pleases me so much that you needn’t do anything about Mme
de Guermantes if you’d rather not; calling each other tu is quite
enough for me.”
“I can do both.”
“Oh, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later while

106 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

we were at dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd the way our con-
versation is always being interrupted, I can’t think why—you re-
member the lady I was speaking to you about just now.”
“Yes.”
“You’re quite sure you know who I mean?”
“Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”
“You wouldn’t care to give me her photograph, I suppose?”
I had meant to ask him only for the loan of it. But when the
time came to speak I suddenly felt shy, realizing that my request
was indiscreet, and in order to hide my confusion I put the ques-
tion more bluntly, and increased my demand, as if it had been
quite natural.
“No; I would have to ask her permission first,” was his answer.
He blushed as he spoke. I could see that he had a reservation
in his mind, that he also attributed one to me, that he would give
only a partial service to my love, under the restraint of certain
moral principles, and for this I hated him.
At the same time I was touched to see how differently Saint-­
Loup behaved toward me now that I was no longer alone with him,
and that his friends formed an audience. His increased affability
would have left me cold had I thought that it was deliberately as-
sumed; but I could feel that it was spontaneous and consisted only
of all that he usually said about me in my absence and refrained as
a rule from saying when I was alone with him. In our private con-
versations, certainly, I might suspect the pleasure that he found in
talking to me, but that pleasure he almost always left unexpressed.
Now, at the same remarks from me, which, as a rule, he enjoyed
without showing it, he watched from the corner of his eye to see
whether they produced on his friends the effect on which he had
counted, an effect corresponding to what he had promised them
beforehand. The mother of a debutante could have been no more
unrelaxing in her attention to her daughter’s repartee and to the
attitude of the public. If I had made some remark at which, alone
in my company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid that
the others might not have seen the point, and put in a “What?

Part One 107

 The Guermantes Way

What?” to make me repeat what I had said, to attract their atten-

tion, and turning at once to his friends and making himself auto-
matically, by facing them with a hearty laugh, the conductor of
their laughter, he revealed to me for the first time the opinion that
he actually held of me and must often have expressed to them. So
that I caught sight of myself suddenly from without, like a person
who reads his name in a newspaper or sees himself in a mirror.
It occurred to me on one of these evenings to tell a mildly
amusing story about Mme Blandais, but I stopped at once, re-
membering that Saint-­L oup knew it already, and that when I had
begun to tell it to him the day following my arrival he had inter-
rupted me with: “You told me that before, at Balbec.” I was sur-
prised, therefore, to find him begging me to go on and assuring
me that he did not know the story and that it would amuse him
immensely. “You’ve forgotten it for the moment,” I said to him,
“but you’ll remember as I go on.” “No, really; I swear to you,
you’re mistaken. You’ve never told it to me. Do go on.” And
throughout the story he fixed a feverish and enraptured gaze alter-
nately on myself and on his friends. I realized only after I had fin-
ished, amid general laughter, that it had struck him that this story
would give his friends a good idea of my wit, and that it was for
this reason that he had pretended not to know it. Such is the stuff
of friendship.
On the third evening, one of his friends, to whom I had not
had an opportunity before of speaking, conversed with me at great
length; and I overheard him telling Saint-­L oup how much he was
enjoying himself. And indeed we sat talking together almost all
evening, leaving our glasses of Sauternes untouched on the table
before us, isolated, sheltered from the others by the sumptuous
veils of one of those intuitive sympathies between men, which,
when they are not based on any physical attraction, are the only
kind that is altogether mysterious. Of such an enigmatic nature
had seemed to me, at Balbec, the feeling that Saint-­L oup had for
me, a feeling not to be confused with the interest of our conver-
sations, free from any material association, invisible, intangible,

108 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

and yet a thing of whose presence in himself, like a sort of com- 163. In the original, phlogistique, which
bustible gas,163 he had been aware enough to refer to it with a was a flammable liquid, the theory of
which was developed by Georg Stahl
smile. And perhaps there was something more surprising still in (1660–1734), a German doctor and
this sympathy born here in a single evening, like a flower that chemist who considered fire a material
had budded and opened in a few minutes in the warmth of this substance.
164. The Dreyfus Affair was the biggest
little room. I could not help asking Robert when he spoke to me scandal of the Third Republic and for
about Balbec whether it was really settled that he was to marry many years split apart French society,
Mlle d’Ambresac. He assured me that not only was it not settled, including Proust’s own family. Alfred
Dreyfus (1859–1935) was a Jewish army
but that there had never been any question of such a match, that captain who was falsely accused in
he had never seen her, that he did not know who she was. If at 1894 of sending secret documents on
that moment I had happened to see any of the social gossips who artillery design to the German mili-
tary attaché. Dreyfus was convicted of
had told me of this coming event, they would promptly have an- treason and imprisoned (1895) in soli-
nounced the engagement of Mlle d’Ambresac to someone who was tary confinement on Devil’s Island, off
not Saint-­L oup and that of Saint-­L oup to someone who was not the coast of French Guyana. The evi-
dence against Dreyfus was later discov-
Mlle d’Ambresac. I would have surprised them greatly had I re- ered to be forged. On May 28, 1899,
minded them of their incompatible and still so recent predictions. the combined chambers of the Court of
In order that this little game may continue and multiply false re- Appeal began to hear Dreyfus’s appeal
for a new court-­martial.
ports by attaching the greatest possible number to every name in 165. Général Raoul François Charles Le
turn, nature has furnished those who play it with a memory as Mouton de Boisdeffre (1839–1919), gen-
short as their credulity is long. eral and chief of staff of the army from
1893 to 1898. An anti-­Dreyfusard, he
Saint-­L oup had spoken to me of another of his comrades who was forced to resign when the evidence
was present also, one with whom he was on particularly good allegedly proving Dreyfus’s guilt was
terms, since in this environment they were the only two advocates discovered to have been forged.
166. Général Félix Gustave Saus-
of the reopening of the Dreyfus case.164 sier (1828–1905), military governor of
“That fellow? Oh, he’s not like Saint-­L oup, he’s a zealot,” my Paris from 1884 to January 1898. He
new friend informed me; “he’s not even sincere. At first, he used had advised the minister of war not to
prosecute Dreyfus, but was forced on
to say: ‘Just wait a little, there’s a man I know well, a clever, kind-­ December 3, 1894, to give the order
hearted fellow, Général de Boisdeffre;165 you need have no hesita- that an investigation be opened.
tion in accepting his opinion.’ But as soon as he heard that Bois-
deffre had pronounced Dreyfus guilty, Boisdeffre ceased to count:
clericalism, the prejudices of the General Staff, prevented him
from forming a candid opinion, although there is, or rather was,
before this Dreyfus business, no one half so clerical as our friend.
Next he told us that now we were sure to get the truth because the
case was being put in the hands of Saussier,166 and he, a soldier of

Part One 109

 The Guermantes Way

167. In March 1896, Colonel Georges the Republic (our friend coming from an ultramonarchist family,
Picquart (1854–1914), chief of the intel- if you please), was a man of steel, with a stern unyielding con-
ligence bureau of the army since 1895,
discovered that the real German spy science. But when Saussier pronounced Esterhazy167 innocent, he
was probably Colonel Marie Charles found fresh reasons to account for the decision, reasons damaging
Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (1847– not to Dreyfus but to Général Saussier. It was the militarist spirit
1923), an infantry officer of Hungarian
origin. In January 1898, Esterhazy was that blinded Saussier (and I must explain to you that our friend
tried and acquitted by court-­martial. is just as much militarist as clerical, or at least he was; I no longer
He was arrested again in July 1898 and know what to think of him). His family is devastated at seeing
later dismissed from the army for “ha-
bitual misconduct.” him possessed by such ideas.”
168. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is “Don’t you think,” I suggested, half turning toward Saint-­L oup
one of the literary giants of nineteenth-­ so as not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, as well as
century world literature. He is famous
for his novels that form the vast collec- toward his friend, and so that we might all three join in the con-
tion whose general title is La Comédie versation, “that the influence we ascribe to environment is particu-
humaine. He is considered one of the larly true of an intellectual environment. One is the man of one’s
founders of realism for his studies
of Parisian and provincial life in mid-­ ideas. There are far fewer ideas than men; therefore all men with
nineteenth-­century France. similar ideas are alike. As there is nothing material in an idea, so
169. Stendhal is the pseudonym of the people who are only materially neighbors of the man with an
Henri Beyle (1783–1842), critic and
writer, whose novels Le Rouge et le noir idea can do nothing to modify it.”
(1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme At this point I was interrupted by Saint-­L oup, because another
(1839) are considered by many to be of the young soldiers had leaned across to him with a smile and,
among the best ever written.
pointing to me, exclaimed: “Duroc! Duroc all over!” I had no idea
what this might mean, but I felt the expression on the shy young
face to be more than friendly. Saint-­L oup was not satisfied with
this comparison. In an ecstasy of joy, no doubt increased by the
joy that he felt in making me shine before his friends, with ex-
treme volubility, stroking me as though he were rubbing down a
horse that had just come first past the post, he reiterated: “You’re
the cleverest man I know, do you hear?” He corrected himself, and
added: “You and Elstir. You don’t mind my bracketing him with
you, do you? You understand—I’m just being scrupulous. For ex-
ample: I say to you as one might have said to Balzac:168 ‘You are the
greatest novelist of the century—you and Stendhal.’169 I’m being
excessively scrupulous, you see, and at heart with an immense ad-
miration. No? You don’t go along with Stendhal?” he added, with
a naïve confidence in my judgment, which found expression in a

110 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

charming, smiling, almost childish glance of interrogation from 170. La Chartreuse de Parme was based
his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side; Bloch can’t on the chronicles of the Farnese family,
sovereigns of Parma in the sixteenth
stand Stendhal. I think it’s idiotic of him. The Chartreuse170 is century.
after all a tremendous work, don’t you think? I’m so glad you 171. Mosca, prime minister to the
agree with me. What is it you like best in the Chartreuse? Tell me,” Prince de Parme, and Fabrice del
Dongo are major characters in La Char-
he said to me with a boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his treuse de Parme. The hero, Fabrice, is
physical strength made the question almost terrifying. “Mosca? the nephew of the Duchess of Sanse-
Fabrice?”171 I answered timidly that Mosca reminded me a little verina, mistress of Count Mosca, chief
minister at the court of Parma. Balzac
of M. de Norpois. Whereupon peals of laughter from the young wrote a laudatory article about the
Siegfried-­Saint-­L oup. And no sooner had I added: “But Mosca novel, and it was included in the 1846
is far more intelligent, not so pedantic,” than I heard Robert cry: edition.
172. Proust gives to this major the
“Bravo!” actually clapping his hands, and, helpless with laughter, name of a prominent general, Gérard-­
gasp: “Oh, perfect! Admirable! You really are astounding.” While Christophe de Michel du Roc, called
I was speaking, even the approbation of the others seemed super- Duroc (1772–1813), Duc de Frioul, who
fought in the battles of Austerlitz, As-
fluous to Saint-­L oup; he insisted on silence. And just as a con- pern, and Wagram. He was killed at
ductor stops his orchestra with a rap from his baton because Bautzen.
someone in the audience has made a noise, so he rebuked the
author of this disturbance: “Gibergue, you must be quiet when
someone else is speaking. You can tell us about it afterward.” And
to me: “Please go on.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, for I had been afraid that he was
going to make me begin all over again.
“And since an idea,” I went on, “is a thing that cannot partici-
pate in human interests and would be incapable of deriving any
benefit from them, the men who are governed by an idea are not
influenced by self-­interest.”
When I had finished, “That’s one in the eye for you, my boys,”
exclaimed Saint-­L oup, who had been watching me with the same
anxious solicitude as if I had been walking a tightrope. “What
were you trying to say, Gibergue?”
“I was saying that your friend reminded me a lot of Major
Duroc.172 I seemed to hear him speaking.”
“Why, I’ve often thought so myself,” replied Saint-­L oup; “they
have several points in common, but you’ll find there are a thou-
sand things in this fellow that Duroc hasn’t got.”

Part One 111

 The Guermantes Way

173. That is, a partisan of Dreyfus. Just as a brother of this friend of Saint-­L oup, who had been
174. Later in this volume, Proust com- trained at the Schola Cantorum, thought about every new musical
ments on this word, which dates from
1877 and means mental state or atti- work not at all what his father, his mother, his cousins, or his
tude. friends at the club thought, but exactly what the other students
175. The Oriental princess is Comtesse at the Schola thought, so this noncommissioned nobleman (of
Anna de Noailles (1876–1933), a friend
of Proust’s, and the author of several whom Bloch formed an extraordinary opinion when I told him
volumes of poetry. about him, because, touched to hear that he belonged to the same
176. Victor Hugo (1802–85) excelled in party173 as himself, he nevertheless imagined him on account of
all the major literary genres, including
drama. A prolific writer of poems, he is his aristocratic birth, religious upbringing, and military training
best known in translation for his novels to be as different as possible, endowed with the same exotic charm
The Hunchback of Notre-­Dame and Les as a native of a distant country) had a “mentality,”174 as people
Misérables. Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863)
was a poet, novelist, and playwright. were now beginning to say, analogous to that of the whole body
He wrote several collections of poems: of Dreyfusards in general and of Bloch in particular, on which the
Poèmes (1822); Poèmes antiques et mo­ traditions of his family and the interests of his career could re-
dernes (1826); Les Destinées (1864).
177. That is, his new friend or neighbor tain no hold whatever. Similarly one of Saint-­L oup’s cousins had
during this conversation. married a young Eastern princess175 who was said to write poetry
quite as fine as Victor Hugo’s or Alfred de Vigny’s,176 and in spite
of this was supposed to have a different type of mind from what
one would naturally expect, the mind of an Eastern princess im-
mured in an Arabian Nights palace. For the writers who had the
privilege of meeting her was reserved the disappointment or rather
the joy of listening to conversation that gave the impression not
of Scheherazade but of a person of genius of the type of Alfred de
Vigny or Victor Hugo.
I took a particular pleasure in talking to this young man,177
as for that matter to all Robert’s friends and to Robert himself,
about the barracks, the officers of the garrison, and the army in
general. Thanks to the immensely enlarged scale on which we see
the things, however petty they may be, in the midst of which we
eat, we talk, we lead our real life, thanks to that formidable en-
largement that they undergo, and the effect of which is that the
rest of the world, not being present, cannot compete with them,
and assumes in comparison the insubstantiality of a dream, I had
begun to take an interest in the various personalities of the bar-
racks, in the officers whom I saw in the courtyard when I went to

112 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

visit Saint-­L oup, or, if I was awake then, when the regiment passed 178. Once Picquart’s actions had pre-
beneath my windows. I would have liked to know more about the pared the way for Dreyfus’s vindication,
Picquart became the object of hatred
major whom Saint-­L oup so greatly admired, and about the course and suspicion on the part of his fellow
in military history that would have appealed to me “even from officers. He was reassigned to southern
an esthetic point of view.” I knew that with Robert a certain ver- Tunisia, then recalled in November
1897, and called up for court-­martial
balism was too often a trifle hollow, but at other times implied in January 1898. He was imprisoned in
the assimilation of profound ideas that he was fully capable of Cherche-­Midi until November 25, 1898,
grasping. Unfortunately, from the military point of view Robert when he was tried and dismissed from
the army. In 1906, he was reinstated
was above all preoccupied at this time with the Dreyfus Affair. He and appointed minister of war.
spoke little about it, since at his table he alone was a Dreyfusard; 179. The first wave of pogroms took
the others were violently opposed to the idea of a new trial, ex- place between 1880 and 1882.

cept my neighbor at table, my new friend, and his opinions ap-

peared to be somewhat vague. A firm admirer of the colonel, who
was regarded as an exceptionally competent officer and had de-
nounced the current agitation against the army in several of his
regimental orders, which won him the reputation of being an anti-­
Dreyfusard, my neighbor had heard that his commanding officer
had let fall certain remarks that had led to the supposition that he
had his doubts as to the guilt of Dreyfus and retained his admi-
ration for Picquart.178 On this last point at any rate, the rumor of
Dreyfusism as applied to the colonel was ill-­founded, as are all the
rumors, springing from no one knows where, that float around
any great scandal. For, shortly afterward, this colonel, having been
detailed to interrogate the former chief of the Intelligence Branch,
had treated him with a brutality and contempt the like of which
had never been known before. However this might be (and natu-
rally he had not taken the liberty of going directly to the colonel
for his information), my neighbor had paid Saint-­L oup the cour-
tesy of telling him—in the tone in which a Catholic lady might
tell a Jewish lady that her parish priest denounced the massacre of
the Jews in Russia179 and openly admires the generosity of certain
Jews—that their colonel was not, with regard to Dreyfusism—
to a certain kind of Dreyfusism, at least—the fanatical, narrow
opponent that he had been made out to be.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” was Saint-­L oup’s comment, “for

Part One 113

 The Guermantes Way

180. This passage on military theories he’s a sensible man. But in spite of everything he is blinded by the
is an addition that Proust made in 1917, prejudices of his caste, and above all by his clericalism. Now,” he
when World War I was in its third year.
Proust’s objective is in part to estab- turned to me, “Major Duroc, the lecturer on military history I was
lish a parallel between the theories ex- telling you about; there’s a man who is wholeheartedly in support
pounded by Saint-­Loup and the reality of our views, or so I’m told. And I would have been surprised to
of a conflict on a global scale. He thus
prepares the pages that will be devoted hear that he wasn’t, for he’s not only a brilliantly clever man, but
to the war in Time Regained, especially a Radical-­Socialist and a Freemason.”
in the conversations about the war with Partly out of courtesy to his friends, to whom Saint-­L oup’s pro-
Saint-­Loup and Gilberte. Proust fol-
lowed the events of the war by reading fessions of Dreyfusard faith were painful, and also because the
seven daily newspapers. Many of his subject was of more interest to me, I asked my neighbor if it were
ideas about military strategy and the true that this major gave a demonstration of military history180
course of the war come from articles
by Henry Bidou published in Le Journal that had a genuine esthetic beauty.
des débats and by Colonel Feyler in Le “It’s absolutely true.”
Journal de la Guerre. “But what do you mean by that?”
“Well, all that you read, let us say, in the narrative of a military
historian, the smallest facts, the most trivial happenings, are only
the outward signs of an idea that has to be analyzed and that often
conceals other ideas, like a palimpsest. So that you have a field for
study as intellectual as any science you care to name, or any art,
and one that is satisfying to the mind.”
“Give me an example or two, if you don’t mind.”
“It is not very easy to explain,” Saint-­L oup broke in. “You read,
let us say, that this or that corps has tried . . . but before we go any
further, the serial number of the corps, its order of battle are not
without their significance. If it isn’t the first time that the opera-
tion has been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a
different corps being brought up, it is perhaps a sign that the pre-
vious corps have been wiped out or have suffered heavy casualties
in the said operation; that they’re no longer in a fit state to carry it
through successfully. Next, we must ask ourselves what was this
corps that is now out of action; if it was made up of shock troops,
held in reserve for big attacks, a fresh corps of inferior quality will
have little chance of succeeding where the first has failed. Further-
more, if we are not at the start of a campaign, this fresh corps may
itself be made up of odds and ends drawn from other corps, which

114 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

throws a light on the strength of the forces the belligerent still has
at its disposal and the proximity of the moment when its forces
will definitely be inferior to the enemy’s, which gives to the opera-
tion on which this corps is about to engage a different meaning,
because, if it is no longer in a condition to make good its losses, its
very successes can only bring it nearer, as simple arithmetic will
show, to its ultimate destruction. Moreover, the serial number of
the opposing corps is of no less significance. If, for instance, it is a
much weaker unit, which has already consumed several important
units of the attacking force, the whole nature of the operation is
changed, since, even if it should end in the loss of the position
that the defending force has been holding, simply to have held it
for any length of time may be a great success if a very small de-
fending force has been sufficient to destroy considerable forces on
the other side. You can understand that if, in the analysis of the
corps engaged on both sides, one finds such points of importance,
then the study of the position itself, of the roads, of the railways
that it commands, of the lines of supply that it protects, is of even
greater consequence. One must study what I may call the whole
geographical context,” he added with a laugh. (And indeed he was
so delighted with this expression that, every time he employed it,
even months afterward, it was always accompanied by the same
laugh.) “While the operation is being prepared by one of the bel-
ligerents, if you read that one of his patrols has been wiped out in
the neighborhood of the position by the other belligerent, one of
the conclusions that you are entitled to draw is that one side was
attempting to reconnoiter the defensive works with which the
other intended to repulse the attack. An exceptional burst of ac-
tivity at a given point may indicate the desire to capture that
point, but equally well the desire to hold the enemy in check
there, not to retaliate at the point where he has attacked you; or it
may indeed be only a feint, intended to cover by a sharp increase
of activity the withdrawal of troops in that sector. (This was a
classic feint in Napoléon’s wars.) On the other hand, to appreciate
the significance of any movement, its probable object, and, as a

Part One 115

 The Guermantes Way

corollary, the other movements by which it will be accompanied

or followed, it is not immaterial to consult, not so much the an-
nouncements issued by Headquarters, which may be intended to
deceive the enemy, to mask a possible setback, as the manual of
field operations in use in the country in question. We are always
entitled to assume that the maneuver that an army has attempted
to carry out is the one prescribed by the rules that are applicable
to analogous circumstances. If, for instance, the rule lays down
that a frontal attack should be accompanied by a flank attack, and
if, after the flank attack has failed, Headquarters claims that it had
no connection with the main attack and was merely a diversion,
there is a strong likelihood that the truth will be found by con-
sulting the rules and not the reports issued from Headquarters.
And there are not only the regulations governing each army to be
considered, but also their traditions, their habits, their doctrines.
The study of diplomatic activities, with their perpetual action or
reaction on military activity, must not be neglected either. Inci-
dents apparently insignificant, misunderstood at the time, will ex-
plain to you how the enemy, counting on the support that these
incidents show to have been withheld, was able to carry out only
a part of his strategic plan. So that, if you know how to read mili-
tary history, what is a confused jumble for the ordinary reader be-
comes a chain of reasoning as rational as a painting is for the art
lover who knows how to look at what the person portrayed is
wearing and has in his hands, whereas the visitor hurrying through
a museum is bewildered by a blur of color that gives him a head-
ache. But just as with certain paintings, in which it is not enough
to observe that the figure is holding a chalice, but one must know
why the painter chose to place a chalice in his hands, what it is in-
tended to symbolize, so these military operations, apart from their
immediate objective, are quite regularly traced, in the mind of the
general directing the campaign, from the plans of earlier battles,
which we may call the past experience, the literature, the learning,
the etymology, the aristocracy of the battles of today. Mind you, I
am not speaking for the moment of the local, the (what should I

116 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

call it?) spatial identity of battles. That exists also. A battlefield has 181. Ulm is a city in Baden-­Württemberg,
never been, and never will be throughout the centuries, simply the where on October 20, 1805, the Aus-
trian general Karl Mack, surrounded
ground upon which a particular battle has been fought. If it has by Napoléon’s troops, surrendered.
been a battlefield, that was because it combined certain conditions At Lodi, in Italy, on May 10, 1796, the
of geographical position, of geological formation, drawbacks even, French Revolutionary forces, led by
Napoléon, won a victory over the Aus-
of a kind that would obstruct the enemy (a river, for instance, cut- trians. He forced the rear guard of
ting it in two), which made it a good battlefield. And so what it the Austrians to cross the Adda River
has been it will continue to be. A painter doesn’t make a studio while sweeping the bridge with volleys
of bullets. Leipzig, in Saxony, is where
out of any old room; so you don’t make a battlefield out of any old the French met with defeat while trying
piece of ground. There are predestined sites. But, once again, to ward off the convergence of four
that’s not what I was talking about; it was the type of battle that enemy armies. At Cannae, Hannibal
(247–183 b.c.) of Carthage was victo-
one imitates in a sort of strategic tracing, a tactical pastiche, if you rious against the Roman army during
like. Battles like Ulm, Lodi, Leipzig, Cannae.181 I can’t say whether the second Punic War in 216 b.c. This
there will ever be another war, or which nations will fight in it, defeat was one of the greatest disasters
suffered by the Romans and is the
but, if a war does come, you may be sure that it will include (and model of a flank attack. These battles
deliberately, on the commander’s part) a Cannae, an Austerlitz, a have in common the strategy of envel-
Rossbach, a Waterloo,182 to mention only a few. Some of our opment, frontal or surrounding.
182. On December 2, 1805, at Auster-
people say quite openly that Marshal von Schlieffen183 and Gen- litz, Napoléon scored one of his
eral Falkenhausen184 have prepared in advance a Battle of Cannae greatest victories against the combined
against France, in the Hannibal style, pinning their enemy down Austrian and Russian forces. Ross-
bach is a German village in Saxony
along his whole front, and advancing on both flanks, especially on where on November 5, 1757, during the
the right through Belgium, while Bernhardi185 prefers the oblique Seven Years’ War, Frederick II inflicted
advance186 of Frederick the Great,187 Leuthen rather than a humiliating defeat on the French
forces under the command of Prince
Cannae.188 Others expound their views less crudely, but I can tell de ­Soubise. His cavalry cut off the
you one thing, my boy, that Beauconseil, the squadron com- French cavalry, and the French infantry
mander I introduced you to the other day, who is an officer with had no time to form their battalions.
183. Marshal von Schlieffen (Count
a very great future before him, has boned up to execute a little Alfred von Schlieffen, 1833–1913), chief
Pratzen189 attack of his own, knows it inside out and is keeping it of the German General Staff from 1891
up his sleeve, and if he ever has an opportunity to put it into prac- to 1906, began in 1905 to develop a war
plan of indirect attack that bears his
tice he will make a clean job of it and let us have it on a grand name and was designed to guarantee
scale. The breakthrough in the center at Rivoli, too;190 that’s a the Germans a rapid victory in the
thing that will crop up if there’s ever another war. It’s no more event of war.
184. Frederick Ludwig, Baron de Falken-
obsolete than The Iliad. I must add that we are practically con- hausen (1869–1936), commanded the
demned to make frontal attacks, because we can’t afford to repeat forces in Alsace during World War I.
the mistake we made in ’70;191 we must assume the offensive, and He is the author of several books on

Part One 117

 The Guermantes Way

warfare; his ideas developed those of nothing but the offensive. The only thing that troubles me is that
Schlieffen. if I see only the slower, more antiquated minds among us op-
185. Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–
1930), German general, military theore- posing this splendid doctrine, still, one of the youngest of my
tician of pan-­Germanism, and author of masters, who is a genius, I mean Mangin,192 would like us to leave
War Today. He considered war a “duty” room, provisionally of course, for the defensive. It is not very easy
and an indispensable factor of culture.
In Germany and the Next War, he took to answer him when he cites the example of Austerlitz, where the
as his model the Prussian king Fred- defense was merely a prelude to attack and victory.”
erick II the Great, whom he dubbed The enunciation of these theories by Saint-­L oup made me
“Frederick the Unique.” As a disciple of
Schlieffen, he became the military theo- happy. They gave me to hope that perhaps I was not being led
retician of World War I and based his astray, in my life at Doncières, with regard to these officers whom
German strategy during the war on the I heard being discussed while I sat sipping a Sauternes, which
ideas of Schlieffen and Frederick II.
186. In French, l’ordre oblique is de- bathed them in its charming golden glint, by the same magni-
fined as the order of battle in which fying power that had swollen to such enormous proportions in my
one presents the enemy one flank while eyes while I was at Balbec, the king and queen of a desert island in
protecting the other end.
187. Frederick the Great (1712–86), Oceania, the little group of the four gourmets, the young gambler,
King of Prussia, using a surprise offen- Legrandin’s brother-­in-­law, now so shrunken in my view as to
sive, won a brilliant victory over the appear nonexistent. What pleased me today would not, perhaps,
Austrians at Leuthen, in Silesia, on
December 5, 1757, a month after his leave me indifferent tomorrow, as had always happened hitherto;
victory over the French. the being that I still was at this moment was not perhaps doomed
188. This sentence was added after to imminent destruction, since to the ardent and fugitive passion
April 1, 1920, the date on which Général
Mangin published an article, “Com- that I had felt on these few evenings for everything that concerned
ment finit la guerre” (How the war military life, Saint-­L oup, by what he had just been saying to me
will end) in La Revue des Deux Mondes, touching the art of war, added an intellectual foundation, of a per-
April 1, 1920, 483. Proust copies out
several phrases, the ones about Han- manent character, capable of attaching me to itself so strongly that
nibal’s tactics and the oblique advance I might, without any attempt to deceive myself, feel assured that
of Frederick the Great. À la recherche du after I had left Doncières I would continue to take an interest in
temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade
edition], 1988), 2: 411, n. 4. the work of my friends there, and would not be long in coming to
189. Pratzen was a plateau that formed pay them another visit. At the same time, in order to be quite sure
a strategic spot in the battle of Auster- that this art of war was indeed an art in the true sense of the word:
litz. Napoléon deployed seventy-­four
thousand troops to face the ninety “You interest me—I beg your pardon, tu193 interest me enor-
thousand Austro-­Russian troops and mously,” I said to Saint-­L oup, “but tell me, there is one point that
tempted the enemy to divide its forces. puzzles me. I feel that I could become passionately interested in
The enemy took the bait, and Napoléon
was victorious. the art of war, but if so I must first be sure that it is not so very
190. Rivoli, a city in Italy, was the site of different from the other arts, that knowing the rules is not every-
Napoléon Bonaparte’s victory over the thing. You tell me that battle plans are copied. I do find some-

118 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

thing esthetic, just as you said, in seeing beneath a modern battle Austrians on January 14, 1794. Seeing
the plan of an older one; I can’t tell you how attractive it sounds. that the enemy armies were converging
on the plain of Rivoli, Napoléon con-
But then, does the genius of the commander count for nothing? centrated the divisions led by Joubert
Does he really do no more than apply the rules? Or rather, given and Masséna, and they crushed the
equal knowledge, are there great generals as there are great sur- Austrians as they approached. Proust is
here using a February 1, 1917, lecture by
geons, who, when the symptoms exhibited by two states of ill- Henry Bidou on the battle of the Marne
ness are identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel, for some that was published in Le Journal des
­infinitesimal reason, founded perhaps on their experience, but in- débats the following day.
191. This is a reference to the Franco-­
terpreted afresh, that in one case they ought to do one thing, in Prussian War in which France suffered
another case another; that in one case it is better to operate, in an- a rapid and humiliating defeat.
other to wait?” 192. Charles-­Marie-­Emmanuel Mangin
(1866–1925) was a general who played
“Well, of course! You will find Napoléon not attacking when an important role in a number of World
all the rules ordered him to attack, but some obscure divination War I battles as head of the First,
warned him not to. For instance, look at Austerlitz, or in 1806 take then the Sixth, and finally the Tenth
Armies. Proust had read his articles on
his instructions to Lannes.194 But you will find certain generals the war in La Revue des Deux Mondes
slavishly imitating one of Napoléon’s maneuvers and arriving at a that ran in the issues from April 1 to
diametrically opposite result. There are a dozen examples of that July 1, 1918, in six installments. Proust’s
brother Robert, who served with dis-
in 1870. But even for the interpretation of what the enemy may tinction as an army doctor, was a friend
do, what he actually does is only a symptom that may mean any of Mangin’s.
number of different things. Each of them has an equal chance of 193. The Narrator has momentarily for-
gotten that he and Saint-­Loup agreed
being the right thing, if one looks only to reasoning and science, to address each other as tu.
just as in certain difficult cases all the medical science in the world 194. Jean Lannes (1769–1809) accompa-
will be powerless to decide whether the invisible tumor is malig- nied Napoléon to Egypt and served with
distinction at Montebello, Marengo, and
nant or not, whether or not the operation ought to be performed. Saragossa; he participated in the battle
It is his flair, his divination, like that of Mme de Thèbes195 (do at Austerlitz in 1805 and in Napoléon’s
you follow me?) that decides, in the great general as in the great campaigns of 1806 and 1807.
195. Mme de Thèbes (1865–1916) was a
doctor. Thus I’ve been telling you, to take one example, what famous palmist who lived at 29, avenue
might be meant by a reconnaissance on the eve of a battle. But it de Wagram. Proust consulted her in
may mean a dozen other things also, such as making the enemy 1894. See Carter, Marcel Proust, 182.

think you are going to attack him at one point whereas you in-
tend to attack him at another, putting out a screen that will pre-
vent him from seeing the preparations for your real operation, to
force him to bring up fresh troops, to hold them, to immobilize
them in a different place from where they are needed, to form an
estimate of the forces at his disposal, to feel him out, to force him

Part One 119

 The Guermantes Way

196. This book has been identified as to show his hand. Sometimes, indeed, the fact that you employ
Monadology (1714) by Wilhelm Got- an immense number of troops in an operation is by no means a
tfried Leibniz (1646–1716), a German
philosopher and mathematician. A proof that that is your true objective; for you may be justified in
monad is a self-­contained system of carrying it out, even if it is only a feint, so that the feint may have
perceptions that mirrors the whole uni- a better chance of deceiving the enemy. If I had time now to go
verse within itself, each monad tending
toward the clarification and distinction through the Napoleonic wars from this point of view, I assure you
of presentations. Ideas, according to that these simple classic movements that we study here, and that
Leibniz, are not acquired, since they are you’ll come and see us practicing in the field, just for the plea-
innate, but the explicit consciousness
of them is acquired. sure of a walk, you young rascal—no, I know you’re not well, I
apologize!—well, in a war, when you feel behind you the vigi-
lance, the judgment, the profound study of the High Command,
you’re as moved by them as by the simple lanterns of a lighthouse,
only a material illumination but also an emanation of the mind,
sweeping through space to warn ships of danger. I may be wrong,
perhaps, in speaking to you only of the literature of war. In reality,
as the constitution of the soil, the direction of wind and light tell
us which way a tree will grow, so the conditions in which a cam-
paign is fought, the features of the country through which you
maneuver, prescribe, to a certain extent, and limit the number of
the plans among which the general has to choose. Which means
that along a mountain range, through a system of valleys, over
certain plains, it is almost with the inevitability and the grandiose
beauty of an avalanche that you can predict the line of an army
on the march.”
“Now you deny me that freedom of choice in the commander,
that power of divination in the enemy who is trying to discover his
plans, which you allowed me a moment ago.”
“Not at all! You remember that book of philosophy we read
together at Balbec, the richness of the world of possibilities com-
pared with the real world.196 Very well! It’s exactly the same with
the art of war. In a given situation there will be four applicable
plans, one of which the general has to choose, as a disease may
pass through various phases that the doctor has to anticipate. And
here again human weakness and human greatness are fresh causes
of uncertainty. For of these four plans let us assume that contin-

120 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

gent reasons (such as the attainment of minor objectives, or time, 197. Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) was
which may be pressing, or the smallness of his effective strength one of the most important mathemati-
cians of his time. He was elected to the
and shortage of rations) lead the general to prefer the first plan, Académie Française in 1908 and was
which is less perfect, but less costly to carry out, more rapid, and also a member of the Académie des
has for its terrain a richer country for feeding his troops. He may, Sciences. His works include La Science
et l’hypothèse (1902), La Valeur de la sci-
after having begun with this plan, which the enemy, uncertain at ence (1906), and Science et la méthode
first, will soon detect, find that success lies beyond his grasp, the (1909). In 1906, he published a paper
difficulties being too great (that is what I call the unpredictable that advanced a theory of relativity.
198. The Field Service of 1895 was
element of human weakness), abandon it and try the second or issued by the Ministry of War on May
third or fourth plan. But he may have tried the first plan (and this 28, 1895. Although it was modified sev-
is what I call human greatness) merely as a feint to pin down the eral times, until 1913 the various edi-
tions were still known as that of May
enemy in order to surprise him later at a point where he has not 28, 1895. Gareth H. Steel, Chronology
been expecting an attack. Thus at Ulm, Mack, who expected the and Time in À la recherche du temps
enemy to advance from the west, was surrounded from the north, perdu (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979),
153.
where he thought he was perfectly safe. My example is not a very
good one, as a matter of fact. And Ulm is a better type of envel-
oping battle, which the future will see reproduced, because it is
not only a classic example from which generals will seek inspira-
tion, but a form that is to some extent necessary (one of several
necessities, which leaves room for choice, for variety) like a type
of crystallization. But it doesn’t much matter, really, because these
conditions are after all artificial. To go back to our philosophy
book; it is like the rules of logic or scientific laws, reality does con-
form to it more or less, but bear in mind that the great mathema-
tician Poincaré197 is by no means certain that the laws of mathe-
matics are strictly accurate. As to the rules themselves, which I
mentioned to you, they’re of secondary importance really, and
besides they are altered from time to time. We cavalrymen, for in-
stance, live by the Field Service of 1895,198 which, one may say, is
out of date since it is based on the old and obsolete doctrine that
maintains that cavalry warfare has little more than a psychological
effect, in the panic that the charge creates in the enemy. Whereas
the more intelligent of our teachers, all the best brains in the cav-
alry, and particularly the major I was telling you about, anticipate
on the contrary that the decisive victory will be obtained by a real

Part One 121

 The Guermantes Way

hand-­to-­hand encounter in which our weapons will be saber and

lance and the side that can hold out longer will win, not simply
psychologically and by creating panic, but physically.”
“Saint-­L oup is quite right, and it’s likely that the next Field Ser-
vice will show signs of this evolution,” put in my other neighbor.
“I am not ungrateful for your support, since your opinions
seem to impress my friend more than mine,” said Saint-­L oup with
a smile, whether because the growing friendship between his com-
rade and myself annoyed him slightly or because he thought it
graceful to solemnize it with this official confirmation. “Perhaps
I may have underestimated the importance of the rules. They do
change, that must be admitted. But in the meantime they control
the military situation, the plans of campaign and the concentra-
tion of troops. If they reflect a false conception of strategy, they
may be the principal cause of defeat. All this is a little too tech-
nical for you,” he remarked to me. “Basically, you should know
that what does most to accelerate the evolution of the art of war
is wars themselves. In the course of a campaign, if it is at all long,
you will see one belligerent profiting by the lessons given him by
the enemy’s successes and mistakes, perfecting the methods of the
latter, who will improve on them in turn. But all that is a thing
of the past. With the terrible advance of artillery, the wars of the
future, if there are to be any more wars, will be so short that, be-
fore we have had time to think of putting our lessons into practice,
peace will have been signed.”
“Don’t be so touchy,” I told Saint-­L oup, reverting to the first
words of this speech. “I was listening to you quite avidly.”
“If you will kindly not fly off the handle, and will allow me to
speak,” his friend went on, “I will add to what you have just been
saying that if battles copy and coincide with one another it isn’t
merely due to the mind of the commander. It may happen that
a mistake on his part (for example, his failure to appreciate the
strength of the enemy) will lead him to call on his men for extrava-
gant sacrifices, sacrifices that certain units will make with an abne-
gation so sublime that their part in the battle will be analogous

122 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

to that played by some other unit in some other battle, and they 199. On August 8, 1870, at Saint-­Privat-­
will be quoted in history as interchangeable examples: to stick to la-­Montagne, in Moselle, the first and
second Prussian armies of 200,000
1870, we have the Prussian Guard at Saint-­Privat, and the Turcos men surprised and defeated the French
at Frœschwiller and Wissembourg.”199 army of 80,000 men under the com-
“Ah! Interchangeable, exactly! Excellent! You’re very sharp,” mand of Maréchal Bazaine. The Turcos
were Algerian infantrymen, three divi-
was Saint-­L oup’s comment. sions of whom took part in the war
I was not unmoved by these last examples, as always when, be- of 1870. On August 4, 1870, Wissem-
neath the particular instance, I was afforded a glimpse of the gen- bourg, a town in Bas-­Rhin near the
German border, became the site of the
eral law. Still, the genius of the commander, that was what inter- first battle of the Franco-­Prussian War.
ested me, I was eager to discover in what it consisted, what steps, Frœschwiller is a community in the
in given circumstances, when the commander who lacked genius Bas-­Rhin where Prussians and French
fought on August 5, 1870.
could not withstand the enemy, the inspired leader would take to
reestablish his jeopardized position, which, according to Saint-­
Loup, was quite possible and had been done by Napoléon more
than once. And to understand what military distinction meant
I asked for comparisons between the various generals whom I
knew by name, which of them had most markedly the character
of a leader, the gifts of a tactician, at the risk of boring my new
friends, who however showed no signs of boredom, but continued
to answer me with an inexhaustible good nature.
I felt myself isolated, not only from the great, freezing night
that extended far around us and in which we heard from time to
time the whistle of a train that only rendered more keen the plea-
sure of being where we were, or the chimes of an hour that, hap-
pily, was still a long way short of the moment when these young
men would have to buckle on their sabers and go, but also from all
my external preoccupations, almost from the memory of Mme de
Guermantes, by the kindness of Saint-­L oup, to which his friends’
own, reinforcing it, gave, so to speak, a greater solidity; by the
warmth also of this little dining room, by the savor of the exqui-
site dishes that were set before us. They gave as much pleasure to
my imagination as to my gourmandise; sometimes the little piece
of nature from which they had been taken, the rugged holy water
stoup of the oyster in which lingered a few drops of salt water, or
the gnarled stem, the yellowed branches of a bunch of grapes still

Part One 123

 The Guermantes Way

200. Bernard Palissy (1510–89) was a enveloped them, inedible, poetic, and distant as a landscape, and
potter, craftsman, and hydraulics engi- producing, at different points in the course of the dinner, the suc-
neer. He made many ceramic plates
and greatly improved the technique. cessive images of a siesta in the shade of a vine and of an excursion
His work is known for its depiction of out to sea; on other evenings it was the cook alone who threw into
raised figures of little animals, fruits, relief these original properties of our food, which he presented in
and plants.
its natural setting, like a work of art; and a fish cooked in wine was
brought in on a long earthenware platter, on which, as it stood out
in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, infrangible but still contorted
from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded
by a circle of shellfish, of satellite animalcules, crabs, shrimps, and
mussels, it had the appearance of a ceramic dish by Bernard Pa-
lissy.200
“I am jealous. I am furious,” Saint-­L oup said to me, half
laughing, half in earnest, alluding to the interminable conversa-
tions aside that I had been having with his friend. “Is it because you
find him more intelligent than me? Do you like him better than
me? Well, I suppose he’s everything now?” (Men who are enor-
mously in love with a woman, who live in the society of woman-­
lovers, allow themselves pleasantries on which others, who would
see less innocence in them, would never dare to venture.)
When the conversation became general, they avoided any refer-
ence to Dreyfus for fear of offending Saint-­L oup. The following
week, however, two of his friends remarked how curious it was
that, living in so military an environment, he was so keen a Drey-
fusard, almost an antimilitarist. “The reason is,” I suggested, not
wishing to enter into details, “that the influence of environment
is not so important as people think . . .” I intended of course to
stop at this point, and not to reiterate the observations that I had
made to Saint-­L oup a few days earlier. Since, however, I had re-
peated these words almost textually, I was about to excuse my-
self by adding: “As, in fact, I was saying the other day . . .” But I
had reckoned without the reverse side of Robert’s kind admiration
of myself and certain other persons. That admiration reached its
fulfillment in so entire an assimilation of their ideas that, in the
course of a day or two, he would have completely forgotten that

124 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

those ideas were not his own. And so, in the matter of my modest
thesis, Saint-­L oup, for all the world as though it had always dwelt
in his own brain, and as though I were merely poaching on his
land, felt it incumbent upon him to greet my discovery with warm
approval.
“Why, yes; environment is of no importance.”
And with as much vehemence as if he were afraid that I might
interrupt him or fail to understand him:
“The real influence is that of one’s intellectual environment!
One is the man of one’s idea!”
He stopped for a moment, with the satisfied smile of one who
has digested his dinner, dropped his monocle and, fixing me with
a gimletlike stare:
“All men with similar ideas are alike,” he informed me, with a
challenging air. No doubt he had completely forgotten that I my-
self had said to him only a few days earlier what on the other hand
he had remembered so well.
I did not arrive at Saint-­L oup’s restaurant every evening in the
same state of mind. If a memory, a sorrow that weigh on us are
able to leave us so effectively that we are no longer aware of them,
they can also return and sometimes remain with us for a long
time. There were evenings when, as I passed through the town
on my way to the restaurant, I felt so keen a longing for Mme de
Guermantes that I could scarcely breathe; you might have said
that part of my chest had been cut open by a skilled anatomist,
taken out, and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering,
by an equivalent part of longing and love. And however neatly the
wound may have been stitched together, there is not much com-
fort in life when longing for another person is substituted for one’s
entrails, it seems to be occupying more room than they do, one
feels it perpetually, and besides, what a contradiction in terms to
be obliged to think a part of one’s body! Only it seems that we are
worth more, somehow. At the whisper of a breeze we sigh, from
oppression, but from languor also. I would look up at the sky. If
it was clear, I would say to myself: “Perhaps she is in the country;

Part One 125

 The Guermantes Way

201. See Swann’s Way, 166–67. she is looking at the same stars; and, for all I know, when I ar-
rive at the restaurant Robert may say to me: “Good news! I have
just heard from my aunt; she wants to meet you, she is coming
down here.” It was not in the firmament alone that I placed the
thought of Mme de Guermantes. A passing breath of air, more
fragrant than the rest, seemed to bring me a message from her, as,
long ago, from Gilberte in the wheat fields of Méséglise.201 We do
not change, we introduce into the feeling with which we regard
a person many slumbering elements that the feeling awakens but
that are foreign to it. Besides, with these feelings for particular
people, there is always something in us that is trying to bring
them nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more
general feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which
individuals and the suffering that they cause us are merely a means
to enable us to communicate: what mixed a certain pleasure with
my pain was that I knew it to be a tiny fragment of universal love.
Simply because I thought that I recognized sorrows that I had felt
on Gilberte’s account, or else when in the evenings at Combray,
Mamma would not stay in my room, and also the memory of cer-
tain pages of Bergotte, in the agony I now felt, to which Mme de
Guermantes, her coldness, her absence, were not clearly linked as
cause is to effect in the mind of a savant, I did not conclude that
Mme de Guermantes was not the cause of that agony. Is there not
such a thing as a diffused bodily pain, extending, radiating out
into other parts, which, however, it leaves, to vanish altogether, if
the practitioner lays his finger on the precise spot from which it
springs? And yet, until that moment, its extension gave it for us
so vague, so fatal a semblance that, powerless to explain or even
to locate it, we imagined that there was no possibility of its being
healed. As I made my way to the restaurant I said to myself: “It’s
already been two weeks since I last saw Mme de Guermantes.”
Two weeks that did not appear so enormous an interval except
to me, who, when Mme de Guermantes was concerned, counted
time by minutes. For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze
merely, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolo-

126 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

rous and poetic aspect. Each day now was like the loose crest of a
crumbling mountain, down one side of which I felt that I could
descend into oblivion, but down the other was borne away by the
need to see the duchess again. And I was continually inclining one
way or the other, having no stable equilibrium. One day I said to
myself: “Perhaps there will be a letter tonight”; and on entering
the dining room I found courage to ask Saint-­L oup:
“You don’t happen to have had any news from Paris?”
“Yes,” he replied gloomily; “bad news.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that it was only he
who was unhappy, and that the news came from his mistress.
But I soon saw that one of its consequences would be to prevent
Robert for a long time from taking me to see his aunt.
I learned that a quarrel had broken out between him and his
mistress, through the mail presumably, unless she had come down
to pay him a brief visit between trains. And the quarrels, even
when relatively slight, which they had previously had, had always
seemed as though they must prove insoluble. For she was a girl
of violent temper, who would stamp her foot and burst into tears
for reasons as incomprehensible as those that make children shut
themselves into dark closets, not come out for dinner, refuse to give
any explanation, and only redouble their sobs when, our patience
exhausted, we give them a slap. To say that Saint-­L oup suffered
terribly from this estrangement would be an understatement and
would give a false impression of his grief. When he found himself
alone, able to think only of his mistress parting from him with
the respect that she had felt for him at the sight of his energy, the
anxieties that he had had at first gave way before the irreparable,
and the cessation of an anxiety is so pleasant a thing that the rup-
ture, once it was certain, assumed for him something of the same
kind of charm as a reconciliation. What he began to suffer from, a
little later, was a secondary and accidental grief, the tide of which
flowed incessantly from his own heart, at the idea that perhaps she
would be glad to make it up, that it was not inconceivable that she
was waiting for a word from him, that in the meantime, to take re-

Part One 127

 The Guermantes Way

202. Scott Moncrieff omitted this sen- venge, she would perhaps on a certain evening, in a certain place,
tence and the next. do a certain thing, and that he had only to telegraph to her that he
203. For clarity, Scott Moncrieff added
“despite its emptiness.” was coming for it not to happen, that others perhaps were taking
advantage of the time that he was letting slip, and that in a few
days it would be too late to get her back, for she would already be
taken. Among all these possibilities he was certain of nothing; his
mistress preserved a silence that drove him to such a frenzy of grief
that he began to ask himself whether she might not be in hiding at
Doncières or have sailed for the Indies.
It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely dif-
ferent sense it is a terrible force in the hands of those who are loved.
It increases the anxiety of the lover who has to wait. Nothing so
tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart;
and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said
also that silence is a form of torture, capable of goading to mad-
ness anyone who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what
torture—greater than that of having to keep silence—to have to
endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert asked himself:
“What can she be doing, never to send me a single word, like
this? Most likely she is being unfaithful to me with others?”202
He asked himself again: “What can I have done to cause her never
to send me a single word? She hates me perhaps, and will go on
hating me forever.” And he reproached himself. Thus her silence
did indeed drive him mad with jealousy and remorse. Besides,
more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in
itself a prison. An immaterial enclosure, no doubt, but impene-
trable, this interposed slice of empty atmosphere, but through
which, despite its emptiness,203 the visual rays of the abandoned
lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible illumination than that
of silence that shows us not one absent love but a thousand, and
shows us each of them in the act of indulging in some fresh be-
trayal? Sometimes, in a sudden relaxation of his anguish, Robert
would imagine that this period of silence was about to end, that
the long-­awaited letter was on its way. He saw it, it had arrived, he
started at every sound, his thirst was already quenched, he mur-

128 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

mured: “The letter! The letter!” After this glimpse of an imaginary 204. Laws were passed in “1889 and
oasis of affection, he found himself once more toiling across the 1890 enabling the setting up of inter-
urban lines.” Steel, Chronology and
real desert of a silence without end. Time, 122.
He suffered in anticipation, without a single omission, all the 205. Rachel’s menagerie was no doubt
griefs and pains of a rupture that at other moments he believed inspired by Sarah Bernhardt’s.

he might somehow contrive to avoid, like people who put all their
affairs in order with a view to an expatriation that never takes
place, whose minds, no longer certain where they will find them-
selves living next day, flutter momentarily, detached from them,
like a heart that is taken out of a dying man and continues to beat,
separated from the rest of his body. In any case, this hope that his
mistress would return gave him courage to persevere in the rup-
ture, as the belief that one may return alive from the battle helps
one to face death. And inasmuch as habit is, of all the plants of
human growth, the one that has least need of nutritious soil in
order to live, and is the first to appear on what is apparently the
most barren rock, perhaps had he begun by effecting their rupture
as a feint he would in the end have grown genuinely accustomed
to it. But his uncertainty kept him in a state that, linked with the
memory of the woman herself, was akin to love. He forced him-
self, nevertheless, not to write to her, thinking perhaps that it was
a less cruel torment to live without his mistress than with her in
certain conditions, or else that, after the way in which they had
parted, it was necessary to wait for apologies from her, if she was
to keep what he believed her to feel for him in the way, if not
of love, at any rate of esteem and respect. He contented himself
with going to the telephone, which had recently been installed at
Doncières,204 and asking for news from, or giving instructions to
a lady’s maid whom he had placed in the service of his mistress.
These communications were, moreover, complicated and took up
much of his time, since, influenced by what her literary friends
preached to her about the ugliness of the capital, but principally
for the sake of her animals, her dogs, her monkey, her canaries,
and her parrot,205 whose incessant din her Paris landlord had
ceased to tolerate, Robert’s mistress had now taken a little house

Part One 129

 The Guermantes Way

206. Vicieux is in the original, meaning in the neighborhood of Versailles. Meanwhile he, at Doncières, no
depraved or licentious. longer slept a wink all night. Once, in my room, overcome by ex-
haustion, he dozed off for a little while. But suddenly he began to
talk, tried to get up and run, to stop something from happening,
and said: “I hear her; you won’t . . . you won’t . . .” He awoke. He
told me he had been dreaming that he was in the country at the
sergeant major’s. The latter had tried to keep him away from a
certain part of the house. Saint-­L oup had discovered that the ser-
geant major had staying with him a lieutenant, extremely rich and
extremely vicious,206 whom he knew to have a violent passion for
his mistress. And suddenly in his dream he had distinctly heard
the intermittent, regular cries that his mistress was in the habit of
uttering at the moment of gratification. He had tried to force the
sergeant major to take him to the room where she was. And the
other had held him back, to keep him from going there, with an
air of annoyance at such a lack of discretion in a guest that, Robert
said, he would never be able to forget.
“It was an idiotic dream,” he concluded, still quite breathless.
All the same I could see that, during the hour that followed,
he was more than once on the point of telephoning his mistress
to ask for a reconciliation. My father had now had the telephone
for a short time, but I doubt whether that would have been of
much use to Saint-­L oup. Besides, it hardly seemed to me quite
proper to make my parents, or even a mechanical instrument in-
stalled in their house, play the role of mediator between Saint-­
Loup and his mistress, no matter how ladylike and high-­minded
the latter might be. Saint-­L oup’s nightmare began to fade from
his memory. With a fixed and absent stare, he came to see me on
each of those cruel days, which traced in my mind as they fol-
lowed one after the other the splendid sweep of a staircase forged
in hard metal on which Robert stood asking himself what decision
his mistress was going to make.
At length she wrote to ask whether he would consent to for-
give her. As soon as he realized that a definite rupture had been
avoided, he saw all the disadvantages of a reconciliation. Besides,

130 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

he had already begun to suffer less acutely, and had almost ac- 207. All Souls’ Day is the second day
cepted a grief the sharp tooth of which he would have, in a few in November, which Catholics devote
to prayers for the dead. Bruges is the
months perhaps, to feel again if their liaison were to be resumed. capital of West Flanders in northwest
He did not hesitate for long. And perhaps he hesitated only be- Belgium.
cause he was now certain of being able to reclaim his mistress,
of being able to do it and therefore of doing it. Only she asked
him, so that she might have time to recover her equanimity, not
to come to Paris at the New Year. Now he did not have the heart
to go to Paris without seeing her. On the other hand, she had
declared her willingness to go abroad with him, but for that he
would need to make a formal application for leave, which Captain
de Borodino refused to grant him.
“I’m sorry about it, because of our visit to my aunt, which will
have to be postponed. I will certainly be in Paris at Easter.”
“We won’t be able to call on Mme de Guermantes then, be-
cause I’ll have gone to Balbec. But, really, it doesn’t matter in the
least, I assure you.”
“To Balbec? But you didn’t go there until August.”
“I know, but next year they’re sending me there earlier, for my
health.”
His only fear was that I might form a bad impression of his
mistress, after what he had told me. “She is violent simply because
she is too frank, too thorough in her feelings. But she is a sublime
creature. You can’t imagine what exquisite poetry there is in her.
She goes every year to spend All Souls’ Day at Bruges.207 ‘Nice’
of her, don’t you think? If you ever do meet her you’ll see what I
mean; she has a greatness about her . . .” And, as he was infected
with certain mannerisms of speech used in the literary circles in
which the woman moved: “There is something sidereal about her,
in fact something vatic; you know what I mean, the poet merging
into the priest.”
I searched all through dinner for a pretext that would enable
Saint-­L oup to ask his aunt to see me without my having to wait
until he came to Paris. Now such a pretext was furnished me by
the desire that I had to see some more paintings by Elstir, the great

Part One 131

 The Guermantes Way

208. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in painter whom Saint-­L oup and I had met at Balbec. A pretext be-
Flower, 450. hind which there was, moreover, an element of truth, for if, on my
209. Les Andelys is a town in the dé-
partement of Eure, at the confluence of visits to Elstir, I had asked of his painting that it should lead me
the Seine and Gambon rivers. to the comprehension and love of things better than itself, a real
thaw, an authentic square in a provincial town, live women on a
beach (at most I would have commissioned from him portraits of
the realities that I had not been able to fathom, such as a lane of
hawthorn blossoms, not so much that it might perpetuate their
beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now,
on the contrary, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of
those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above
anything else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.
It seemed to me, also, that the least of his paintings were
something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater
painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, whose
frontiers were not to be passed, matchless in substance. Eagerly
collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and
his work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that
he had begun to paint landscapes and still lifes, and that he had
started with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two
of these in his studio), and had then been for long under the influ-
ence of Japanese art.208
Several of the works most characteristic of his various manners
were scattered about the provinces. A certain house at Les An-
delys,209 in which there was one of his finest landscapes, seemed
to me as precious, gave me as keen a desire to go there and see it as
did a village in the département of Chartres, among whose mill-
stone walls was enshrined a glorious stained-­glass window; and
toward the possessor of this treasure, toward the man who, inside
his crude house, on the main street, closeted like an astrologer,
sat questioning one of those mirrors of the world that Elstir’s pic-
tures were, and who had perhaps bought it for many thousands of
francs, I felt myself borne by that instinctive sympathy that joins
the very hearts, the inmost natures of those who think alike on a
vital subject. Now three important works by my favorite painter

132 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

were described in one of these articles as belonging to Mme de

Guermantes. Thus it was, after all, quite sincerely that, on the eve-
ning on which Saint-­L oup told me of his mistress’s projected visit
to Bruges, I was able, during dinner, in front of his friends, to let
fall, as though on the spur of the moment:
“Listen, if you don’t mind. Just one last word on the subject of
the lady we were speaking about. You remember Elstir, the painter
I met at Balbec?”
“Why, of course I do.”
“You remember how much I admired his work?”
“I do, very well; and the letter we sent him.”
“Well, one of the reasons—not one of the chief reasons, an
incidental reason—why I would like to meet the said lady—you
do know who I mean. . .”
“Of course I do. How you digress!”
“. . . is that she has in her house one very fine painting, at least,
by Elstir.”
“You don’t say. I never knew that.”
“Elstir will probably be at Balbec at Easter; you know he now
spends nearly the entire year on that coast. I would very much
like to have seen this painting before I leave Paris. I don’t know
whether you’re on sufficiently intimate terms with your aunt: but
couldn’t you manage, somehow, by giving her so good an impres-
sion of me that she won’t refuse, to ask her if she’ll let me come
and see the painting without you, since you won’t be there?”
“Why, of course. I’ll answer for her, I’ll see to it.”
“Oh, Robert, I do like you!”
“It’s very nice of you to like me, but it would be equally nice if
you were to call me tu, as you promised, and as you began to do.”
“I hope it’s not your departure that you two are plotting
together,” one of Robert’s friends said to me. “You know, if Saint-­
Loup does go on leave, it needn’t make any difference, we’ll still
be here. It will be less amusing for you, perhaps, but we’ll do all
we can to make you forget his absence!”
As a matter of fact, just when we thought that Robert’s mistress

Part One 133

 The Guermantes Way

210. Eau du Portugal is an eau de toi- would have to go to Bruges alone, the news came that Captain de
lette, scented with bergamot and used Borodino, obdurate hitherto in his refusal, had granted Sergeant
for washing hair.
211. Eau des Souverains is an eau Saint-­L oup a long leave to Bruges. What had happened was this.
de toilette that was produced by the The prince, extremely proud of his luxuriant head of hair, was an
Legrand firm, which was located at 121, assiduous customer of the principal coiffeur in the town, who had
rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honoré.
started life as an apprentice to Napoléon III’s coiffeur. Captain
de Borodino was on the best of terms with the coiffeur, being,
in spite of his air of majesty, quite simple in his dealings with his
inferiors. But the coiffeur, through whose books the prince’s ac-
count had been running without payment for at least five years,
swollen no less by bottles of “Portugal”210 and “Eau des Souve-
rains,”211 curling irons, razors, and strops, than by the ordinary
charges for shampooing, haircutting, and the like, had a greater
respect for Saint-­L oup, who always paid cash on the barrel and
kept several carriages and saddle horses. Having learned of Saint-­
Loup’s vexation at not being able to go with his mistress, he had
spoken heartily about it to the prince at a moment when he was
trussed up in a white surplice with his head held firmly over the
back of the chair and his throat menaced by a razor. This story of
a young man’s amorous adventures won from the princely cap-
tain a smile of Bonapartist indulgence. It is hardly probable that
he thought of his unpaid bill, but the coiffeur’s recommendation
tended to put him in as good a humor as one from a duke would
have put him in a bad. While his chin was still smothered in soap,
the leave was promised and the form was signed that very eve-
ning. As for the coiffeur, who was in the habit of boasting end-
lessly and, in order to do so, claimed for himself, with an extraor-
dinary faculty for lying, distinctions that were pure fabrications,
having for once rendered a signal service to Saint-­L oup, not only
did he refrain from publicly taking credit for it, but, as if vanity
were obliged to lie, and when there was no reason to do so, gives
place to modesty, he never mentioned the matter to Robert again.
All Robert’s friends assured me that, as long as I stayed at Don-
cières, or if I should come there again at any time, even though he
were away, their horses, their quarters, their free time would be at

134 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

my disposal, and I felt that it was with the greatest cordiality that 212. The Théâtre-­Français is another
these young men put their comfort and youth and strength at the name for the Comédie-­Française.
213. Général Gaston Auguste, Marquis
service of my weakness. de Galliffet (1830–1909), was min-
“Why on earth,” they went on, after insisting that I should stay, ister of war in the Waldeck-­Rousseau
“don’t you come down here every year? You see how our modest cabinet from 1899 to 1900, and thus at
the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Before
life appeals to you! Besides you’re so interested in everything that that he was known especially for the
goes on in the regiment; quite the old soldier.” savagery with which he repressed the
For I continued my eager demands for them to classify the dif- Commune de Paris in 1871. He is one
of the men portrayed in James Tissot’s
ferent officers whose names I knew according to the degree of painting Le Cercle de la rue Royale. See
admiration that they thought them to deserve, just as, in my In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,
schooldays, I used to make the other boys classify the actors of the 383, n. 240.
214. Général François Oscar de Négrier
Théâtre-­Français.212 If, in the place of one of the generals whom I (1839–1913) participated in the war of
had always heard mentioned at the head of the list, such as Gal- 1870 before serving with distinction in
liffet213 or Négrier,214 one of Saint-­L oup’s friends said: “But Né- Algeria and later at Tonkin, where he
was wounded in 1885.
grier is one of the feeblest of our general officers,” and tossed out 215. Général Paul Marie César Gérald
the new, intact, appetizing name of Pau215 or Geslin de Bour- Pau (1848–1932) lost his right hand
gogne,216 I felt the same joyful surprise as long ago when the at Frœschwiller during the Franco-­
Prussian War. He was made com-
outworn name of Thiron217 or Febvre218 was sent flying by the mander of the Army of Alsace when
sudden explosion of the unfamiliar name of Amaury.219 “Better war broke out in 1914. The appetizing
even than Négrier? But in what respect; give me an example?” I aspect may be an allusion to pau-
piette, which is a cut of meat rolled and
would have liked there to exist profound differences even among stuffed.
the junior officers of the regiment, and I hoped in the reason for 216. Général Yves-­Marie Geslin de
these differences to seize the essential quality of what constituted Bourgogne (1847–1910) commanded
the cavalry brigades (1898) and infantry
military superiority. The one whom I would have been most inter- (1900) of the army’s second corps. He
ested to hear discussed, because he was the one whom I had most is the author of several books on mili-
often seen, was the Prince de Borodino. But neither Saint-­L oup tary strategy.
217. Charles-­Joseph-­Jean Thiron (1830–
nor his friends, if they did justice to the fine officer who kept 91) was an actor who specialized in
his squadron up to an incomparable pitch of efficiency, liked the playing financiers and elderly men.
man. Without speaking of him, naturally, in the same tone as of 218. Alexandre-­Frédéric Febvre (1835–
1916) was an actor who performed at
certain other officers, rankers and Freemasons, who did not asso- the Comédie-­Française between 1863
ciate much with the rest and had, in comparison, an uncouth, and 1894.
barrack-­room manner, they seemed not to include M. de Boro- 219. Amaury was the stage name of
Ernest-­Félix Socquet (1849–1910), who
dino among the officers of noble birth, from whom, it must be ad- was a member of the troupe of actors
mitted, he differed considerably in his attitude even toward Saint-­ at the Théâtre de l’Odéon between
Loup. The others, taking advantage of the fact that Robert was 1880 and 1900.

Part One 135

 The Guermantes Way

220. The coup d’état of December 2, only an N.C.O., and that therefore his influential relatives might
1851, perpetrated by Louis Napoléon be grateful were he invited to the houses of superior officers on
Bonaparte led to the restoration of the
Empire a year later. whom otherwise they would have looked down, lost no oppor-
221. Hohenzollern refers to the Royal tunity of having him to dine when any bigwig was expected who
House of Prussia, which reigned until might be of use to a young cavalry sergeant. Captain de Boro-
1918. This is another fictitious gene-
alogical reference to the Guermantes dino alone confined himself to his official relations (which, for
family. that matter, were always excellent) with Robert. The fact was that
222. A préfecture is an administrative the prince, whose grandfather had been made a maréchal and
post.
223. The Island of Elba, in the Medi- a prince-­duke by the emperor, with whose family he had sub-
terranean Sea east of Corsica, is where sequently allied himself by marriage, while his father had mar-
Napoléon was exiled in 1814 after his ried a cousin of Napoléon III and had twice been a minister after
abdication.
224. After his defeat at Sedan (Sep- the coup d’état,220 felt that in spite of all this he did not count
tember 2, 1870), Napoléon III was for much with Saint-­L oup and the Guermantes connection, who
taken prisoner and held at the château in turn, since he did not look at things from the same point of
Wilhelmshöhe, near Kassel, a city in Ar-
dennes on the Meuse. This marked the view as they, counted for very little with him. He suspected that,
end of the Second Empire. for Saint-­L oup, he himself was—he, a kinsman of the Hohen-
225. Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) was zollern221—not a true noble but the grandson of a farmer, but at
a Prussian statesman known as the
Iron Chancellor. His determination to the same time he regarded Saint-­L oup as the son of a man whose
unite all the German states under Prus- countship had been confirmed by the emperor—one of what were
sian control led him to provoke war known in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain as “touched-­up” counts—
with Napoléon III as part of the plan to
achieve his goal. and who had petitioned him first for a préfecture,222 then for some
other post a long way down the list of subordinates to His High-
ness the Prince de Borodino, minister of state, who was styled on
his letters “Monseigneur” and was a nephew of the sovereign.
Something more than a nephew, possibly. The first Princesse de
Borodino was reputed to have bestowed her favors on Napoléon I,
whom she followed to the Island of Elba,223 and the second, hers
on Napoléon III. And if, in the captain’s placid countenance, one
caught a trace of Napoléon I—if not in his natural features, at
least in the studied majesty of the mask—the officer had, particu-
larly in his melancholy and kindly gaze, in his drooping mous-
tache, something that reminded one also of Napoléon III; and
this in so striking a fashion that, having asked leave, after Sedan,
to join the emperor in captivity,224 and having been turned away
by Bismarck,225 before whom he had been brought, the latter,

136 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

happening to look up at the young man who was preparing to 226. For the Duchesse de Guer-
leave the room, was at once struck by the likeness and, reconsid- mantes’s (then the Princesse des
Laumes) humorous put-­down on the
ering his decision, called him back and gave him the authorization Napoleonic nobility, see Swann’s Way,
that he, in common with everyone else, had just been refused. 385–86.
If the Prince de Borodino was not prepared to make overtures to
Saint-­L oup or to the other members of Faubourg Saint-­Germain
society who were in the regiment (while he frequently invited
two lieutenants of plebeian origin who were pleasant compan-
ions), it was because, looking down on them all from the height
of his imperial grandeur, he drew between these two classes of in-
feriors the distinction that one set consisted of inferiors who knew
themselves to be such and with whom he was delighted to spend
his time, being beneath his outward majesty of a simple, jovial
humor, and the other of inferiors who thought themselves his su-
periors, a claim that he could not allow. And so, while all the other
officers of the regiment made much of Saint-­L oup, the Prince de
Borodino, to whose care the young man had been recommended
by Maréchal de X, confined himself to being obliging with regard
to the military duties that Saint-­L oup performed, moreover, in
the most exemplary fashion, but never had him to his house ex-
cept on one special occasion when he found himself practically
compelled to invite him, and since this occurred during my stay
at Doncières, he asked him to bring me to dinner also. I had no
difficulty that evening, as I watched Saint-­L oup sitting at his cap-
tain’s table, in distinguishing, in their respective manners and re-
finements, the difference that existed between the two aristocra-
cies: the old nobility and that of the Empire.226 The offspring of
a caste whose faults, even if he repudiated them with all the force
of his intellect, had been absorbed into his blood, a caste that,
having ceased to exert any real authority for at least a century, saw
nothing more now in the protective affability that formed part
of its regular course of education, than an exercise, like horse-
manship or fencing, cultivated without any serious purpose, as
a sport, Saint-­L oup, on meeting representatives of that middle
class that the old nobility so far despised as to believe that they

Part One 137

 The Guermantes Way

227. Eugène Rouher (1814–84) was a were flattered by its intimacy and would be honored by its infor-
political figure who held several posts mality, would take the hand of any bourgeois who might be intro-
under Napoléon III. He was vice presi-
dent of the Council of State (1852–55) duced to him, though he had failed perhaps to catch the stranger’s
and minister of agriculture, commerce, name, in a friendly grip, and as he talked to him (crossing and un-
and public works (1855–63). crossing his legs all the time, flinging himself back in his chair in
228. Achille Fould (1800–1867) was
a banker who was elected député in an attitude of absolute unconstraint, one foot in the palm of his
1842. In 1849, Louis Napoléon Bona- hand) call him “my dear fellow.” Belonging on the other hand to
parte (future Napoléon III) appointed a nobility whose titles still preserved their original meaning, still
him minister of finance, a post that he
held twice. in full possession of the splendid emoluments given in reward for
glorious services and bringing to mind the record of high offices
in which one is in command of many men and must know how to
deal with men, the Prince de Borodino—if not distinctly or with
any personal and clear awareness, but at any rate in his body that
revealed it by its attitudes and manners—regarded his own rank as
a prerogative that was still effective; those same commoners whom
Saint-­L oup would have slapped on the shoulder and taken by the
arm he addressed with a majestic affability, in which a reserve in-
stinct with grandeur tempered the smiling good-­fellowship that
came naturally to him, in a tone marked at once by a genuine
kindliness and a hauteur deliberately assumed. This was due, no
doubt, to his being not so far removed from the great embassies,
and the court itself, where his father had held the highest posts,
and where the manners of Saint-­L oup, his elbow on the table, his
foot in his hand, would not have been well received; but princi-
pally it was due to the fact that he despised the middle class less
because it was the great reservoir from which the first emperor had
chosen his maréchals and his nobles and in which the second had
found a Rouher227 and a Fould.228
Son, doubtless, or grandson of an emperor, who had nothing
more important to do than to command a squadron, his putative
father’s and grandfather’s preoccupations could not, for want of
an object on which to fasten themselves, survive in any real sense
in the mind of M. de Borodino. But as the spirit of an artist con-
tinues to model, for many years after he is dead, the statue that
he carved, so those preoccupations had taken shape in him, were

138 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

materialized, incarnate in him, it was they that his face reflected. 229. Louis Alexander Berthier (1753–
It was with, in his voice, the vivacity of the first emperor that he 1815) and André Masséna (1756–1817)
were both maréchals under Napoléon I
worded a reprimand to a corporal, with the dreamy melancholy and his closest military collaborators.
of the second that he exhaled the puff of cigarette smoke. When 230. Charles Maurice, Duc de
he passed in civilian clothes through the streets of Doncières, a Talleyrand-­Périgord (1754–1838), who
became a distinguished diplomat, was
certain sparkle in his eyes escaping from under the brim of the the Bishop of Autun until the Revolu-
bowler hat sent radiating around this captain a sovereign incog- tion. In 1797, he supported Napoléon
nito; people trembled when he strode into the sergeant-­major’s and served as minister of foreign affairs
until 1807. His Mémoires were pub-
office, followed by the adjutant and the quartermaster, as though lished in 1891.
by Berthier and Masséna.229 When he chose the cloth for his 231. Alexander I (1777–1825), Emperor
squadron’s trousers, he fastened on the master tailor a gaze capable of Russia from 1801 until his death,
spent much of his reign fighting Napo-
of baffling Talleyrand230 and deceiving Alexander;231 and at times, léon.
in the middle of an inspection, he would stop, let his handsome 232. Napoléon III played a determining
blue eyes cloud with dreams, twist his moustache, with the air role in the creation of the modern
states of Germany and Italy.
of one building a new Prussia and a new Italy.232 But a moment 233. Sèvres refers to porcelain manu-
later, reverting from Napoléon III to Napoléon I, he would point factured from 1756 in the town of
out that the equipment was not properly polished and would in- Sèvres in the département of Seine-­
et-­Oise. The factory was patronized by
sist on tasting the men’s rations. And at home, in his private life, Mme de Pompadour.
it was for the wives of middle-­class officers (provided that their
husbands were not Freemasons) that he would bring out not only
a dinner service of royal blue Sèvres,233 fit for an ambassador (this
had been given to his father by Napoléon, and appeared even
more priceless in the modest house in which he was living on the
avenue, like those rare porcelains that tourists admire with a spe-
cial delight in the rustic china closet of some old manor that has
been converted into a comfortable and prosperous farmhouse),
but other gifts of the emperor also: those noble and charming
manners, which too would have worked wonders in some diplo-
matic post abroad, if, for some men, it did not mean a lifelong
condemnation to the most unjust form of ostracism, merely for
having been “well born”; his easy gestures, his kindness, his grace,
and, enclosing glorious images beneath an enamel that was also
royal blue, the mysterious, illuminated, living reliquary of his
gaze. And regarding the social relations with the middle classes
that the prince had at Doncières, it may be appropriate to add

Part One 139

 The Guermantes Way

234. Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès, these few words. The lieutenant colonel played the piano beau-
née Mélanie de Bussière (c. 1832– tifully; the senior medical officer’s wife sang like a Conservatoire
1914), was lady-­in-­waiting to Empress
Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III. first-­place medalist. This latter couple, as well as the lieutenant
235. Joseph Joachim Napoléon (1834– colonel and his wife, used to dine every week with M. de Boro-
1901), grandson of the King of Naples, dino. They were flattered, unquestionably, knowing that when the
bore the title of Prince Murat. He mar-
ried the Princesse de Wagram in 1851. prince went to Paris on leave he dined with Mme de Pourtalès,234
236. Beauvais is the capital of the Oise and the Murats,235 and people like that. “But,” they said to them-
département in northern France. selves, “he’s just a captain, after all; he’s only too glad to get us to
237. By 1889, there were seven thou-
sand subscribers to the telephone in come. Still, he’s a real friend to us.” But when M. de Borodino,
Paris and its outskirts. who had long been pulling every possible string to secure an ap-
pointment for himself nearer Paris, was posted to Beauvais,236 he
packed up and went, and forgot as completely the two musical
couples as he forgot the Doncières theater and the little restau-
rant to which he used often to send out for his lunch, and, to their
great indignation, neither the lieutenant colonel nor the senior
medical officer, who had so often sat at his table, ever had so much
as a single word from him for the rest of their lives.
One morning, Saint-­L oup confessed to me that he had written
to my grandmother to give her news of me and to suggest that,
since there was a telephone237 service functioning between Paris
and Doncières, she might make use of it to speak to me. In short,
that very day she was to give me a call, and he advised me to be at
the post office at about a quarter to four. The telephone was not
yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today. And yet habit
requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces
with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at
once, the only thought in my mind was that it was very long, very
inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like
all of us nowadays I found not rapid enough for my liking in its
abrupt changes the admirable sorcery for which a few moments
are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person
to whom we wished to speak, and who, while still sitting at his
table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother’s case,
Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not neces-
sarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and preoccupations

140 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

of which we know nothing and of which he is going to inform 238. In Roman mythology, these vir-
us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and gins were consecrated to the goddess
Vesta and to the service of watching
all the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach the sacred fire perpetually kept burning
of our ear, at the precise moment that our fancy has ordained. on her altar.
And we are like the person in the fairy tale to whom a sorceress, 239. In Greek mythology, the Danaïds
were the fifty daughters of Danaüs.
on his uttering the wish, makes appear in a supernatural light his They were to marry the fifty sons of
grandmother or his fiancée in the act of leafing through a book, his twin brother Aegyptus. All but one
of shedding tears, of gathering flowers, very close to the spectator of them killed their husbands on their
wedding night. Forty-­nine of them were
and yet ever so remote, in the place in which she actually is at the condemned to spend eternity carrying
moment. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, water from the river in leaking urns.
apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke—occasionally for They represent the futility of a repeti-
tive task that can never be completed.
rather longer than seems to us necessary, I admit—the Vigi- 240. In Greek mythology, the mission
lant Virgins238 to whose voices we listen every day without ever of the Furies was to punish the crimes
coming to know their faces, and who are our Guardian Angels in of humans.

the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously guard;

the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our
side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Da-
naïds239 of the unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit
to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies240 who, just as
we were murmuring a confidence to a friend, in the hope that no
one was listening, cry out brutally: “I hear you!,” the ever infuri-
ated servants of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the
Invisible, the Demoiselles of the Telephone.
And, the moment our call has rung out, in the darkness filled
with apparitions to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny
sound, an abstract sound—the sound of distance overcome—and
the voice of the dear one speaks to us.
It is she, it is her voice that is speaking to us, that is there. But
how remote it is! How often have I been unable to listen without
anguish, as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, ex-
cept after long hours of travel, her whose voice has been so close
to my ear, I felt more clearly the sham and illusion of meetings ap-
parently most pleasant, and at what a distance we may be from the
persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only
to stretch out our hand to seize and hold them. A real presence in-

Part One 141

 The Guermantes Way

241. In a letter to Antoine Bibesco deed that voice so near—in actual separation! But a premonition
on December 4, 1902, long before also of an eternal separation! Over and again, as I listened in this
he began his novel, Proust wrote this
about hearing his mother’s voice for way, without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, it has
the first time on the telephone: “I went seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from depths out of
to Fontainebleau and spoke to her which one does not rise again, and I have known the anxiety that
on the phone. And suddenly, over the
phone, I heard her poor broken, tor- was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return
tured voice, changed forever from the (alone, and attached no longer to a body that I was nevermore to
voice I had always known, now full see), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued
of cracks and fissures; and it was on
hearing those bleeding, broken frag- from lips forever turned to dust.241
ments in the receiver that I had my first This afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur.
terrible inkling of what had broken for- When I reached the post office, my grandmother’s call had already
ever within her.” Proust, Selected Let-
ters 1: 277. been received; I stepped into the booth; the line was busy; someone
242. Punchinello is a character in Nea- was talking who probably did not realize that there was nobody to
politan farces who represents a jovial, answer him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless
quarreling, drinking common man. In
France, he became a stock marionette piece of wood began squeaking like Punchinello;242 I silenced it,
character in the Grand Guignol shows as one silences a puppet, by putting it back on its hook, but, like
in Paris. He usually wore a big hat, was Punchinello, as soon as I took it again in my hand, it resumed its
hunchbacked, and had a long beaked
nose; his voice was hoarse, nasal, and jabbering. At length, giving up in despair, by hanging up the re-
piercing. ceiver once and for all, I stifled the convulsions of this vociferous
stump, which kept up its chatter until the last moment, and went
in search of the operator, who told me to wait a little; then I spoke,
and, after a few seconds of silence, suddenly I heard the voice that
I supposed myself, mistakenly, to know so well; for always until
then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had
been accustomed to follow what she was saying on the open score
of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but I was hearing
her voice itself this afternoon for the first time. And because that
voice appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the
moment that it was a whole, and reached me in this way alone and
without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered
for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps, too, it had
never been so sweet, for my grandmother, knowing me to be far
away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an out-
pouring of tenderness, which, on her “principles” of upbringing,
she usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how

142 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

sad it was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness

drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever
have been—of every element of hardness, of all selfishness; fragile
by reason of its delicacy it seemed at every moment ready to break,
to expire in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone beside
me, seen, without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first time
the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.
Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone,
gave me this new impression that tore my heart? Not at all; it
was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an
evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my
grandmother, separated, for the first time in my life, from me.
The commands or prohibitions that she addressed to me at every
moment in the ordinary course of my life, the tedium of obedi-
ence or the fire of rebellion, which neutralized the affection that I
felt for her, were at this moment eliminated, and indeed might be
eliminated forever (since my grandmother no longer insisted on
having me with her under her control, was in the act of expressing
her hope that I would stay at Doncières altogether, or would at
any rate prolong my visit for as long as possible, seeing that both
my health and my work seemed likely to benefit by the change);
also, what I held compressed in this little bell that was ringing
next to my ear was, freed from the conflicting pressures that had,
every day hitherto, given it a counterpoise, and from this moment
irresistible, uplifting me entirely, our mutual affection. My grand-
mother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an anxious, an insen-
sate longing to return. This freedom that she allowed me hence-
forth and to which I had never dreamed that she would consent,
appeared to me suddenly as sad as might be my freedom after her
death (when I would still love her and she would forever have aban-
doned me). “Grandmother!” I cried to her, “Grandmother!” and
longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only that voice, a phantom,
as impalpable as the one that would come perhaps to visit me
when my grandmother was dead. “Speak to me!” but then it hap-
pened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound of

Part One 143

 The Guermantes Way

243. In Greek mythology, Orpheus her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no
is a poet and musician endowed by longer in communication with me, we had ceased to be in each
the gods. He fell in love with Eury-
dice, whom he married only to lose other’s presence, to be audible to one another, I continued to call
her shortly afterward to the sting of a her, groping the empty darkness in which I felt that her appeals
viper. Then he lost her for the second also must be straying. I was shaken by the same anguish that, in
time when he went to Hades and so
charmed Pluto that Eurydice was re- the distant past, I had felt once before, one day when, a little child,
leased on the condition that Orpheus in a crowd, I had lost her, an anguish due less to my not finding
would not look back until they reached her than to the thought that she must be searching for me, must
the earth. As soon as he emerged into
the daylight, he turned to see her, but be saying to herself that I was searching for her; an anguish com-
she was still in the cavern and vanished parable to the one that I would feel on the day when we speak to
the moment that he set eyes on her. those who can no longer reply and whom we would so love to have
244. Gutenberg and Wagram are the
codes for the two most important tele- hear at least all the things that we have not told them, and our as-
phone exchanges in Paris. Wagram surance that we are not unhappy. It seemed to me as though it was
began service in 1892 and served already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the
three thousand subscribers; a year
later Gutenberg began service with a ghostly world, and, standing alone before the apparatus, I went on
capacity of six thousand. These two vainly repeating: “Grandmother, Grandmother!” as Orpheus, left
names are those of real people before alone, repeats the name of his dead wife.243 I decided to leave the
they became utilitarian. Johannes Gens-
fleisch, called Gutenberg (c. 1400– post office, to go and find Robert at his restaurant in order to tell
1468), was a German printer who in- him that, as I was half expecting a telegram that would oblige me
vented the movable type printing press. to return to Paris, I wanted, just in case, to find out at what times
Louis Marie Philippe Alexandre Ber-
thier, last Prince de Wagram, was born the trains left. And yet, before reaching this decision, I felt I must
in 1883 and died in combat in October make one last attempt to invoke the Daughters of the Night, the
1918, one month before the armistice. Messengers of the Word, the deities without form or feature; but
the capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to open the
miraculous Portals, or more probably, had not been able; in vain
might they untiringly evoke, as was their custom, the venerable
inventor of printing and the young prince, collector of Impres-
sionist paintings and driver of automobiles (who was Captain de
Borodino’s nephew); Gutenberg and Wagram244 left their suppli-
cations unanswered, and I came away, feeling that the Invisible
would continue to turn a deaf ear.
When I came among Robert and his friends, I withheld the
confession that my heart was no longer with them, that my de-
parture was now irrevocably fixed. Saint-­L oup appeared to believe
me, but I learned afterward that he had from the first moment

144 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

realized that my uncertainty was feigned and that he would not 245. The word interurbain dates from
see me again the next day. And while, letting their plates grow 1885 and originally referred to the tele-
phone service between two or more
cold, his friends joined him in searching through the timetable cities before its meaning was expanded
for a train that would take me to Paris, and while we heard in the to mean any service or utility con-
cold, starry night the whistling of the locomotives on the line, I necting several cities.

certainly felt no longer the same peace of mind that on so many

evenings I had derived from the friendship of the former and the
latters’ distant passage. And yet they did not fail me this evening,
performing the same office in a different way. My departure op-
pressed me less when I was no longer obliged to think of it by
myself, when I felt that there was concentrated on what was to
be done the more normal, more wholesome activity of my ener-
getic friends, Robert’s brothers in arms, and of those other strong
creatures, the trains, whose going and coming, day and night, be-
tween Doncières and Paris, broke up in retrospect what had been
too compact and unbearable in my long isolation from my grand-
mother into daily possibilities of return.
“I don’t doubt the truth of what you’re saying, or that you
aren’t thinking of leaving us just yet,” said Saint-­L oup, smiling;
“but pretend you are going, and come and say goodbye to me
tomorrow morning early, otherwise there’s a risk of my not seeing
you; I’m going out to lunch, I’ve got leave from the captain; I will
have to be back in barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all
afternoon. I suppose the man to whose house I’m going, a couple
of miles out, will manage to get me back in time.”
Scarcely had he uttered these words than a messenger came for
me from my hotel; the telephone operator had sent to find me.
I ran to the post office, for it was nearly closing time. The word
“interurbain”245 recurred incessantly in the answers given me by
the clerks. I was in a fever of anxiety, for it was my grandmother
who had asked for me. The office was closing for the night. Finally
I got my connection. “Is that you, Grandmother?” A woman’s
voice, with a strong English accent, answered: “Yes, but I don’t
recognize your voice.” Neither did I recognize the voice that was
speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me tu, and not

Part One 145

 The Guermantes Way

246. A tilbury is a light two-­wheeled vous. And then all was explained. The young man for whom his
carriage. grandmother had called on the telephone had a name almost
identical to my own, and was staying in an annex of my hotel.
This call coming on the very day on which I had been telephoning
to my grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was
she who was asking for me. Whereas it was by pure coincidence
that the post office and the hotel had combined to make a two-
fold error.
The following morning I rose late, and failed to catch Saint-­
Loup, who had already started for the nearby château where he
was invited to lunch. About half past one, I had decided to go,
just in case, to the barracks in order to be there before he arrived,
when, as I was crossing one of the avenues on the way there, I
noticed, coming behind me in the same direction as myself, a til-
bury246 that, as it overtook me, obliged me to jump out of its way;
an N.C.O. was driving it, wearing a monocle; it was Saint-­L oup.
By his side was the friend whose guest he had been at lunch, and
whom I had met once before at the hotel where we dined. I did
not dare shout to Robert since he was not alone, but, in the hope
that he would stop and pick me up, I attracted his attention by a
sweeping wave of my hat, which might be regarded as due to the
presence of a stranger. I knew that Robert was nearsighted; still,
I would have supposed that, provided he saw me at all, he could
not fail to recognize me; he did indeed see my salute, and re-
turned it, but without stopping; driving on at full speed, without
a smile, without moving a muscle of his face, he confined himself
to keeping his hand raised for a minute to the peak of his képi,
as though he were acknowledging the salute of a soldier whom he
did not know personally. I ran to the barracks, but it was a long
way; when I arrived, the regiment was forming up in the court-
yard, where I was not allowed to remain, and I was heartbroken
at not having been able to say goodbye to Saint-­L oup; I went
up to his room, but he had gone; I was reduced to questioning a
group of sick soldiers, recruits who had been excused from route

146 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

marching, a young graduate, and one of the “old soldiers,” who 247. In the original, capiston, military
were watching the regiment form up. slang for captain.
248. Proust has given this soldier’s
“You haven’t seen Sergeant Saint-­ L oup, have you, by any place of origin a fictitious but Breton-
chance?” I asked. sounding name.
“He’s already gone down, Monsieur,” said the old soldier.
“I never saw him,” said the graduate.
“You never saw him,” exclaimed the old soldier, losing all
interest in me, “you never saw our famous Saint-­L oup, the figure
he’s cutting with his new trousers! When the capstan247 sees that,
officer’s cloth, my word!”
“Oh, that’s a good one; officer’s cloth,” replied the young
graduate, who, reported sick, was excused from marching and
tried, not without some misgivings, to be on easy terms with the
veterans. “This officer’s cloth you speak of is just a cloth like any
other.”
“Monsieur?” asked the old soldier angrily.
He was indignant that the young graduate had cast doubt on
the trousers’ being made of officer’s cloth, but, being a Breton,
coming from a village that went by the name of Penguern-­
Stereden,248 having learned French with as much difficulty as if
it had been English or German, whenever he felt himself over-
come by emotion he would go on saying “Monsieur” to give him-
self time to find words, then, after this preparation, let loose his
eloquence, confining himself to the repetition of certain words
that he knew better than others, but without haste, taking every
precaution to gloss over his unfamiliarity with the pronunciation.
“Ah! It’s cloth like any other?” he broke out, with a fury the
intensity of which increased as the speed of his utterance dimin-
ished. “Ah! It’s cloth like any other; when I tell you that it is offi-
cer’s cloth, when-­I-­tell-­you-­a-­thing, since-I-­tell-­you-­a-­thing, it’s
because I know, I would think. You should keep that stupid clap-
trap to yourself.”
“Very well then,” replied the young graduate, overcome by the
force of this argument.

Part One 147

 The Guermantes Way

249. A charger is a horse used for “There, look, there’s the capstan coming along. No, but just
battle or parade. look at Saint-­L oup; the way he throws his leg out; and his head.
Would you call that a noncom? And his monocle; oh, it’s flying
all around.”
I asked these soldiers, who did not seem at all troubled by
my presence, whether I too might look out of the window. They
neither objected to my doing so nor moved to make room for me.
I saw Captain de Borodino go majestically by, putting his horse
into a trot, and apparently under the illusion that he was taking
part in the battle of Austerlitz. A few passersby had stopped by
the gate to see the regiment file out. Erect on his charger,249 his
face inclined to plumpness, his cheeks of an imperial fullness, his
eye lucid, the prince must have been the victim of some hallucina-
tion, as I was myself whenever, after the streetcar had passed, the
silence that followed its rumble seemed to me to throb and echo
with a vaguely musical palpitation. I was wretched at not having
said goodbye to Saint-­L oup, but I left nevertheless, for my sole
concern was to return to my grandmother; always until then, in
this little country town, when I thought of what my grandmother
must be doing by herself, I had pictured her as she was when with
me, suppressing my own personality but without taking into
account the effects on her of such a suppression; now, I had to
free myself, at the first possible moment, in her arms, from the
phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by
her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned,
having, what I had never yet thought of her as having, a definite
age, who had just received a letter from me in the empty apart-
ment, as I had once before imagined Mamma in a house by her-
self, when I had left her to go to Balbec.
Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the
drawing room before my grandmother had been told of my re-
turn, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I
was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence,
and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work that she
will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to

148 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

thoughts that she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of my- 250. The Institut de France is made
self—thanks to the privilege that does not last but that one enjoys up of five academies: the Académie
Française, the Académie des Inscrip-
during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly tions et Belles-­Lettres, the Académie
the spectator of one’s own absence—there was present only the des Sciences, the Académie des Beaux-­
witness, the observer, with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger Arts, and the Académie des Sciences
Morales et Politiques. The academies
who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has meet regularly as separate bodies at the
called to take a photograph of places that one will never see again. Institut, located on the quai de Conti in
The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught the sixth arrondissement.
251. Proust may have borrowed the
sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see image of staggering academicians
the people who are dear to us except in the animated system, the from the novel L’Immortel, by Alphonse
perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before Daudet, an author whom he knew per-
sonally and about whom he wrote a
allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, catches tribute.
them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have
always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.
How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I
had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most per-
manent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is
an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past,
how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled
and changed, seeing that even in the most trivial spectacles of our
daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a clas-
sical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play
and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelli-
gible? But if, in place of our eyes, it should be a purely material
object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then
what we will see, in the courtyard of the Institut,250 for example,
will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an academician who
is trying to hail a fiacre, his staggering gait, his precautions to
avoid tumbling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he
were drunk or the ground covered with ice.251 So it is when some
cruel ruse of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection
from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they
ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they,
arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work
mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the loved one

Part One 149

 The Guermantes Way

who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has
always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a
hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a cherished
and mendacious likeness. And like a sick man who for a long time
has not looked at his own reflection, and constantly composes the
memory of the face that he never sees according to the ideal image
of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in
the mirror, in the middle of an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping
pink structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt,
I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never
seen her except in my own soul, always at the same place in the
past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous and overlap-
ping memories, suddenly in our drawing room that formed part
of a new world, that of Time, that in which dwell the strangers of
whom we say, “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time
and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting
on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-­faced, heavy, and common,
sick, daydreaming, following the lines of a book with eyes that
seemed hardly sane, a stricken old woman whom I did not know.
My request to be allowed to see the Elstirs in Mme de Guer-
mantes’s collection had been met by Saint-­L oup with: “I will
answer for her.” And indeed, unfortunately, it was he and he alone
who did answer. We answer readily enough for other people when,
setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent
them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy. No doubt even then
we take into account the difficulties due to another person’s nature
being different from our own, and we do not fail to have recourse
to some plan of action likely to influence that nature, an appeal
to his material interest, persuasion, emotion, which will neutralize
contrary tendencies on his part. But these differences from our
own nature, it is still our own nature that is imagining them; these
difficulties, it is we who are raising them; these compelling mo-
tives, it is we who are applying them. And when we wish to see the
other person perform the actions that in our mind’s eye we have
made him rehearse, and that make him act as we choose, the case

150 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

is altered, we come up against unseen resistances that may prove 252. See Swann’s Way, 439–40.
insuperable. One of the strongest is doubtless the one that may be
developed in a woman, who is not in love, by the disgust, fetid
and insurmountable, inspired in her by the man who is in love
with her; during the long weeks in which Saint-­L oup still did not
come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I had no doubt of his having
written begging her to do so, never once asked me to call at her
house to see the Elstirs.
I perceived signs of coldness on the part of another occupant
of the building. This was Jupien. Did he consider that I ought to
have gone in and said hello to him, on my return from Doncières,
before even going upstairs to our own apartment? My mother
said no, that there was nothing unusual about it. Françoise had
told her that he was like that, subject to sudden fits of ill-humor,
without any cause. These invariably passed off after a little time.
Meanwhile the winter was drawing to an end. One morning,
after several weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my
chimney—instead of the wind, formless, elastic, somber, which
convulsed me with a longing to go to the seashore—the cooing
of the pigeons that were nesting in the wall outside; shimmering,
unexpected, like a first hyacinth, gently tearing open its nour-
ishing heart that there might shoot forth, mauve and satin-­soft,
its flower of sound, letting enter like an opened window into my
bedroom still shuttered and dark the warmth, the dazzling bright-
ness, the fatigue of a first fine day. That morning, I was surprised
to find myself humming a music hall tune that had never entered
my head since the year in which I was supposed to go to Florence
and Venice.252 So profoundly does the atmosphere, as good days
and bad recur, act on our organism and draw from dim reserves
where we had forgotten them, the melodies written there that our
memory could not decipher. Presently a more conscious dreamer
accompanied this musician to whom I was listening inside myself,
without having recognized at first what he was playing.
I quite realized that it was not for any reason peculiar to Balbec
that on my arrival there I had failed to find in its church the charm

Part One 151

 The Guermantes Way

253. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in that it had had for me before I knew it;253 that in Florence or
Flower, 257–59. Parma or Venice my imagination could no more take the place of
my eyes when I looked at the sights there. I realized this. Similarly,
one New Year’s afternoon, as night fell, standing before a column
of playbills, I had discovered the illusion that lies in our thinking
that certain holidays differ essentially from the other days in the
calendar. And yet I could not prevent my memory of the time
during which I had looked forward to spending Holy Week in
Florence from continuing to make that week the atmosphere, so
to speak, of the City of Flowers, to give at once to Easter Day
something Florentine and to Florence something paschal. Easter
was still a long way off; but in the range of days that stretched out
before me the days of Holy Week stood out more clearly at the
end of those that merely came between. Touched by a ray of light,
like certain houses in a village that one sees from a distance when
the rest are in shadow, they had caught and kept all the sun.
The weather had now become milder. And my parents them-
selves, by urging me to take more exercise, gave me an excuse for
continuing my morning walks. I had wanted to give them up,
since they meant my meeting Mme de Guermantes. But it was for
this very reason that I kept thinking all the time of those walks,
which led to my finding, every moment, a new reason for taking
them, a reason that had no connection with Mme de Guermantes
and no difficulty in convincing me that, had she never existed,
I would still have taken a walk, without fail, at that hour every
morning.
Alas, if to me meeting any person other than herself would not
have mattered, I felt that to her meeting anyone in the world ex-
cept myself would have been endurable. It happened that, in the
course of her morning walks, she received the salutations of plenty
of fools whom she regarded as such. But the appearance of these
in her path seemed to her, if not to hold out any promise of plea-
sure, to be at any rate the result of mere chance. And she stopped
them at times, for there are moments in which one wants to es-
cape from oneself, to accept the hospitality offered by the soul of

152 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

another person, provided always that this soul, however modest 254. This is a light, soft, twilled silk.
and plain it may be, is a different soul, whereas in my heart she
was exasperated to feel that what she would have found was her-
self. And so, even when I had, for taking the same path as she,
another reason than my desire to see her, I trembled like a guilty
man as she came past; and sometimes, in order to neutralize any-
thing extravagant that there might seem to have been in my over-
tures, I would barely acknowledge her bow, or would fasten my
eyes on her face without raising my hat, and succeed only in irri-
tating her more than ever and making her begin to regard me as
insolent and ill-­bred besides.
She was now wearing lighter, or at any rate brighter, clothes,
and would come strolling down the street in which already, as
though it were spring, in front of the narrow shops that were
squeezed in between the huge fronts of the old aristocratic ho-
tels, over the booths of the butter woman and the fruit woman
and the vegetable woman, awnings were spread to protect them
from the sun. I said to myself that the woman whom I could
see from afar, walking, opening her sunshade, crossing the street,
was, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, the greatest
living exponent of the art of performing those movements and of
making out of them something exquisite. Meanwhile she was ad-
vancing toward me, unconscious of this widespread reputation,
her narrow, refractory body, which had absorbed none of it, was
bent stiffly forward under a scarf of violet surah;254 her clear, sullen
eyes looked absently in front of her, and had perhaps caught sight
of me; she was biting her lip; I saw her straighten her muff, give
alms to a beggar, buy a bunch of violets from a flower seller, with
the same curiosity that I would have felt in watching the strokes
of a great painter’s brush. And when, as she reached me, she gave
me a bow that was accompanied sometimes by a faint smile, it
was as though she had sketched in color for me, adding a personal
inscription to myself, a watercolor that was a masterpiece of art.
Each of her dresses seemed to me a natural, necessary ambiance,
like the projection around her of a particular aspect of her soul.

Part One 153

 The Guermantes Way

On one of these Lenten mornings, when she was on her way out
to lunch, I met her wearing a dress of bright red velvet, cut slightly
open at the neck. The face of Mme de Guermantes appeared to be
dreaming, beneath its pile of blond hair. I was less sad than usual
because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration
that the startling hue of her dress set between her and the rest of
the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this
comforted me. The dress struck me as being the materialization
around about her of the scarlet rays of a heart that I did not recog-
nize as hers and might have been able, perhaps, to console; shel-
tered in the mystical light of the garment with its gently flowing
folds, she made me think of some saint of the early ages of Chris-
tianity. After which I felt ashamed of inflicting the sight of myself
on this holy martyr. “But, after all, the streets belong to everyone.”
“The streets belong to everyone,” I repeated to myself, giving a
different meaning to the words, and marveling that indeed in the
crowded street, often soaked with rain, which made it beautiful
and precious as a street sometimes is in the old towns of Italy, the
Duchesse de Guermantes mingled with the public life of the world
moments of her own secret life, showing thus her mysterious self
to all and sundry, jostled by every passerby, with the splendid gra-
tuitousness of the greatest works of art. Since I went out in the
morning, after staying awake all night, in the afternoon my par-
ents would tell me to lie down for a little and try to sleep. There is
no need, when one is trying to find sleep, to give much thought
to the quest, but habit is very useful, and even the absence of
thought. But in these afternoon hours both were lacking. Before
going to sleep, I devoted so much time to thinking that I would
not be able to do so, that even after I was asleep a little of my
thought remained. It was no more than a glimmer in the almost
total darkness, but it was bright enough to cast a reflection in my
sleep, first of the idea that I could not sleep, and then, a reflection
of this reflection, that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea
that I was not asleep, then, by a further refraction, my awakening
. . . to a fresh doze in which I was trying to tell some friends who

154 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

had come into my room that, a moment earlier, when I was asleep, 255. The Narrator will travel to Venice in
I had imagined that I was not asleep. These shadows were barely The Fugitive.

distinguishable; it would have required a keen—and quite use-

less—delicacy of perception to seize them all. Similarly, in later
years, in Venice,255 long after the sun had set, when it seemed to
be quite dark, I have seen, thanks to the echo, itself imperceptible,
of a last note of light held indefinitely on the surface of the canals
as though some optical pedal were being pressed, the reflection of
the palaces unfurled, as though for all time, in a darker velvet, on
the crepuscular grayness of the water. One of my dreams was the
synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in
my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its medieval past.
In my sleep I saw a Gothic city rising from a sea whose waves
were stilled as in a stained-­glass window. An arm of the sea cut the
town in two; the green water stretched to my feet; it bathed on the
opposite shore the foundations of an Oriental church, and beyond
it houses that existed already in the fourteenth century, so that to
go across to them would have been to ascend the stream of time.
This dream in which nature had learned from art, in which the
sea had turned Gothic, this dream in which I longed to attain, in
which I believed that I was attaining to the impossible, it seemed
to me that I had often dreamed it before. But as it is the property
of what we imagine in our sleep to multiply itself in the past, and
to appear, even when new, familiar, I supposed that I was mis-
taken. I noticed, however, that I did often have this dream.
The diminutions, too, that characterize sleep were reflected in
mine, but in a symbolic manner; I could not in the darkness make
out the faces of the friends who were in the room, for we sleep
with our eyes shut; I, who could carry on endless verbal arguments
with myself while I dreamed, as soon as I tried to speak to these
friends felt the words stick in my throat, for we do not speak dis-
tinctly in our sleep; I wanted to go to them, and I could not move
my legs, for we do not walk when we are asleep either; and sud-
denly I was ashamed to be seen by them, for we sleep without our
clothes. So, my eyes blinded, my lips sealed, my legs fettered, my

Part One 155

 The Guermantes Way

256. See Swann’s Way, 91–92. body naked, the image of sleep that my sleep itself projected had
the appearance of those great allegorical figures in one of which
Giotto has portrayed Envy with a serpent in her mouth and of
which Swann had given me photographs.256
Saint-­L oup came to Paris for a few hours only. While assuring
me that he had had no opportunity of mentioning me to his aunt:
“She’s not being at all nice just now, Oriane isn’t,” he told me
with innocent self-­betrayal. “She’s not my old Oriane any longer,
they’ve gone and changed her. I assure you, it’s not worthwhile
bothering your head about her. You pay her far too great a com-
pliment. You wouldn’t care to meet my cousin Poictiers?” he went
on, without stopping to reflect that this could not possibly give
me any pleasure. “She’s quite an intelligent young woman; you’d
like her. She’s married to my cousin, the Duc de Poictiers, who
is a good fellow, but a bit slow for her. I’ve told her about you.
She said I was to bring you to see her. She’s much prettier than
Oriane, and younger, too. Really a nice person, you know, a really
fine person.” These were expressions recently—and all the more
ardently—adopted by Robert, which meant that the person in
question had a delicate nature. “I don’t go so far as to say she’s a
Dreyfusard, you must remember her background; still, she did say
to me: ‘If he is innocent, how horrible for him to be sent to Devil’s
Island.’ You see what I mean, don’t you? And then she’s the sort of
woman who does an awful lot for her old governesses; she’s given
orders that they’re never to be sent in by the servants’ staircase,
when they come to the house. She’s a very good person, I assure
you. Basically, Oriane doesn’t like her because she feels she’s more
intelligent.”
Although completely absorbed in the pity that she felt for one
of the Guermantes footmen—who had no chance of going to see
his fiancée, even when the duchess was out, for it would immedi-
ately have been reported to her from the lodge—Françoise was
heartbroken at not having been in the house at the moment of
Saint-­L oup’s visit, but this was because now she herself paid visits
also. She never failed to go out on the days when I most needed

156 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

her. It was always to see her brother, her niece, and, more particu- 257. See Swann’s Way, 172–73.
larly, her own daughter, who had recently come to live in Paris. 258. This is an abbreviation of L’Intran-
sigeant, a daily newspaper founded in
The family nature of these visits itself increased the irritation that 1880 by Henri Rochefort. During the
I felt at being deprived of her services, for I foresaw that she would Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper cam-
speak of them as being among those duties from which there was paigned against those who supported
Dreyfus.
no dispensation, according to the laws laid down at Saint-­André-­ 259. This is the only indication that we
des-­Champs.257 And so I never listened to her excuses without have of Françoise’s married name.
an ill-humor that was highly unjust to her, and was brought to a 260. This refers to a small blue postal
card (petit bleu) that could be sent
climax by the way Françoise had of saying not: “I’ve been to see throughout Paris by pneumatic mail.
my brother,” or “I’ve been to see my niece,” but “I’ve been to see
the brother,” “I just ‘ran’ in as I passed to say hello to the niece”
(or “to my niece the butcheress”). As for her daughter, Françoise
would have been glad to see her return to Combray. But this new
Parisian, making use, like a woman of fashion, of abbreviations,
though hers were of a vulgar kind, protested that the week she
was going shortly to spend at Combray would seem quite long
enough without so much as a sight of the Intran.258 She was still
less willing to go to Françoise’s sister, who lived in a mountainous
province, for “mountains,” said Françoise’s daughter, giving to the
adjective a new and terrible meaning, “aren’t really interesting.”
She could not make up her mind to go back to Méséglise, where
“the people are so stupid,” where in the market the gossips at their
stalls would claim cousinhood with her, and say “Why, aren’t you
poor dead Bazireau’s daughter?”259 She would sooner die than go
back and bury herself down there, now that she had “tasted the
life of Paris,” and Françoise, traditionalist as she was, smiled com-
placently nevertheless at the spirit of innovation that was incar-
nate in this new Parisian when she said: “Very well, mother, if you
don’t get your day off, you have only to send me a pneu.”260
The weather had turned chilly again. “Go out? What for? To
catch your death?” said Françoise, who preferred to remain in
the house during the week that her daughter and brother and
the butcher-­niece had gone to spend at Combray. Being, more-
over, the last adherent of the sect in whom survived obscurely my
Aunt Léonie’s doctrine regarding matters of natural philosophy,

Part One 157

 The Guermantes Way

261. Fiesole is an Italian village on the Françoise would add, speaking of this unseasonable weather:
hills across the Arno River, northeast of “It’s the remnant of the wrath of God!” But I responded to her
Florence.
262. Ponte Vecchio is Italian for “old complaints only with a languid smile, all the more indifferent to
bridge” and is the name of an ancient these predictions, in that whatever happened it would be fine for
bridge built across the Arno River in me; already I could see the morning sun shining on the slope of
1355 to replace an earlier one con-
structed in 1177. Fiesole,261 I warmed myself in its rays; their strength obliged me
to half open, half shut my eyelids, smiling the while, and my eye-
lids, like alabaster lamps, were filled with a rosy glow. It was not
only the bells that came from Italy, Italy had come with them. My
faithful hands would not lack flowers to honor the anniversary of
the voyage that I ought to have made long ago, for since, here in
Paris, the weather had turned cold again as in another year at the
time of our preparations for departure at the end of Lent, in the
liquid, freezing air that bathed the chestnut and plane trees on
the boulevards, the tree in the courtyard of our house, there were
already opening their petals, as in a bowl of pure water, the nar-
cissi, the jonquils, the anemones of the Ponte Vecchio.262
My father had informed us that he now knew through his
friend A.J. where M. de Norpois was going when he ran into him
in our building.
“It’s to see Mme de Villeparisis, they are great friends; I never
knew anything about it. It seems she’s a delightful person, a most
superior woman. You ought to go and call on her,” he told me.
“Another thing that surprised me very much. He spoke to me
of M. de Guermantes as quite a distinguished man; I had always
taken him for a boor. It seems he knows an enormous amount,
and has perfect taste, only he’s very proud of his name and his
connections. But for that matter, according to Norpois, he has
a tremendous position, not only here but also all over Europe. It
appears that the Austrian emperor and the tsar treat him just like
one of themselves. Old Norpois told me that Mme de Villeparisis
had taken quite a fancy to you, and that you would meet all sorts
of interesting people in her house. He praised you highly; you
will see him if you go there, and he may have some good advice
for you even if you are going to be a writer. For you’re not likely

158 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

to do anything else; I can see that. It might turn out to be quite

a good career; it’s not what I would have chosen for you, myself;
but you’ll be a man in no time now, we won’t always be here to
look after you, and we mustn’t prevent you from following your
vocation.”
If only I had been able to start writing! But whatever the con-
ditions in which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the under-
takings not to touch alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep
fit), whether it was with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure,
in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing my walk and keeping
it in reserve as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of good
health, utilizing the inactivity forced on me by a day of illness,
what always emerged in the end from all my efforts was a virgin
page, undefiled by any writing, ineluctable as that forced card that
in certain tricks one invariably is made to draw, however carefully
one may first have shuffled the pack. I was merely the instrument
of habits of not working, of not going to bed, of not sleeping,
which somehow must be done no matter what the cost; if I offered
them no resistance, if I contented myself with the pretext they
seized from the first opportunity that the day afforded them of
acting as they chose, I escaped without serious harm, I slept for a
few hours after all, toward morning, I read a little, I did not over-
exert myself; but if I attempted to thwart them, if I attempted
to go to bed early, to drink only water, to work, they grew res-
tive, they adopted strong measures, they made me really ill, I was
obliged to double my dose of alcohol, did not lie down in bed for
two days and nights on end, could not even read, and I vowed that
another time I would be more reasonable, that is to say less wise,
like the victim of an assault who allows himself to be robbed for
fear, should he offer resistance, of being murdered.
My father, in the meantime, had met M. de Guermantes once
or twice, and, now that M. de Norpois had told him that the duke
was a remarkable man, had begun to pay more attention to what
he said. As it happened, they met in the courtyard and discussed
Mme de Villeparisis. “He tells me she’s his aunt; ‘Viparisi,’ he pro-

Part One 159

 The Guermantes Way

263. “Bureau d’esprit,” perhaps used nounces it. He tells me, too, she’s an extraordinarily intelligent
ironically here, designates a salon woman. In fact he said she kept a School of Wit,”263 my father
where one takes pride in talking art,
literature, politics, and science. The added, impressed by the vagueness of this expression, which he
source of the expression is Boileau’s had indeed come across now and then in volumes of memoirs,
Satires, X, “Là du faux bel esprit se tien- but without attaching to it any definite meaning. My mother had
nent les bureaux”; À la recherche du
temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade so much respect for him that when she saw that he did not dis-
edition], 1988), 2: 448, n. 1. miss as of no importance the fact that Mme de Villeparisis kept
264. Anatole Leroy-­Beaulieu (1842– a School of Wit, decided that this must be of some consequence.
1912) and his brother Paul (1843–1916)
were both members of the Académie Although through my grandmother she had always known the
des Sciences Morales et Politiques. marquise’s intellectual worth, it was immediately enhanced in her
Anatole was Proust’s professor at the eyes. My grandmother, who was not very well just then, was not
École Libre des Sciences Politiques. But
Proust is most likely thinking of Paul in favor at first of the suggested visit, and afterward lost interest
here, who was an economist, author of in the matter. Since we had moved into our new apartment, Mme
many books, and founder of the review de Villeparisis had several times asked my grandmother to call on
L’Économiste français.
her. And invariably my grandmother had replied that she was not
going out just at present, in one of those letters which, by a new
habit of hers that we did not understand, she no longer sealed her-
self and left to Françoise the task of licking the envelopes. As for
myself, without any very clear picture in my mind of this “School
of Wit,” I would not have been greatly surprised to find the old
lady from Balbec installed behind a “desk,” as, for that matter, I
eventually did.
My father would have been glad to know, in addition, whether
the ambassador’s support would be worth many votes to him at
the Institut, for which he had thoughts of running as an inde-
pendent candidate. To tell the truth, while he did not venture
to doubt that he would have M. de Norpois’s support, he was
by no means certain of it. He had thought it merely malicious
gossip when they told him at the ministry that M. de Norpois,
wishing to be himself the only representative there of the Institut,
would put every possible obstacle in the way of my father’s can-
didature, which besides would be particularly awkward for him
at that moment, since he was supporting another candidate. And
yet, when M. Leroy-­Beaulieu264 had first advised him to run, and
had calculated his chances, my father had been struck by the fact

160 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

that, among the colleagues on whom he could count for support,

the eminent economist had not mentioned M. de Norpois. He
dared not ask the former ambassador point-­blank, but hoped
that I would return from my call on Mme de Villeparisis with
his election as good as secured. This call was now imminent. That
M. de Norpois would carry on propaganda calculated to assure
my father the votes of two-­thirds of the Académie seemed to him
all the more probable since the ambassador’s willingness to oblige
was proverbial, those who liked him least admitting that no one
else took such pleasure in being of service. And besides, at the
ministry, his protective influence was extended over my father far
more markedly than over any other official.
My father had also another encounter about this time, but
one at which his extreme surprise ended in equal indignation. In
the street one day he ran into Mme Sazerat, whose comparative
poverty reduced her life in Paris to occasional visits to a friend.
There was no one who bored my father quite so intensely as did
Mme Sazerat, so much so that Mamma was obliged, once a year,
to intercede with him in sweet and suppliant tones: “My dear, I
really must invite Mme Sazerat to the house, just once; she won’t
stay long”; and even: “Listen, dear, I am going to ask you to make
a great sacrifice; do go and call on Mme Sazerat. You know I hate
bothering you, but it would be so nice of you.” He would laugh,
raise various objections, and go to pay the call. And so, for all
that Mme Sazerat did not appeal to him, on catching sight of
her in the street he went toward her, doffing his hat; but to his
profound astonishment Mme Sazerat confined her greeting to the
frigid bow enforced by politeness toward a person who is guilty of
some disgraceful action or has been condemned to live henceforth
in another hemisphere. My father had come home speechless with
rage. Next day my mother met Mme Sazerat in someone’s drawing
room. She did not offer my mother her hand, but merely smiled
at her with a vague and melancholy air as one smiles at a person
with whom one used to play as a child, but with whom one has
since severed all relations because she has led a debauched life, has

Part One 161

 The Guermantes Way

265. Jules Méline (1838–1925) was a married a convict or (what is worse still) a divorced man. Now,
moderate republican who served as from time immemorial my parents had accorded to Mme Sazerat,
prime minister from 1896 to 1898. An
ardent anti-­Dreyfusard, on December 4, and inspired in her, the most profound respect. But (and of this
1897, he pronounced the famous sen- my mother was ignorant) Mme Sazerat, alone of her kind at Com-
tence: “Il n’y a pas d’affaire Dreyfus” bray, was a Dreyfusard. My father, a friend of M. Méline,265 was
(There is no Dreyfus Affair).
266. Proust and his father, who be- convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. He had flatly refused to listen
lieved that Dreyfus was guilty, often to some of his colleagues who had asked him to sign a petition
argued about the Dreyfus Affair. See for a new trial. He did not speak to me for a week, after learning
Carter, Marcel Proust, 251.
that I had chosen to take a different line.266 His opinions were
well known. He came near to being looked upon as a nationalist.
As for my grandmother, in whom alone of the family a generous
doubt was likely to be kindled, whenever anyone spoke to her of
the possible innocence of Dreyfus, she gave a shake of her head,
the meaning of which we did not at the time understand, but
which was like the gesture of a person who has been interrupted
while thinking of more serious things. My mother, torn between
her love for my father and her hope that I might turn out to have
brains, preserved an impartiality that she expressed by silence.
Finally my grandfather, who adored the army (even though his
duties with the National Guard had been the nightmare of his
mature years), could never, at Combray, see a regiment march
past the garden railings without baring his head as the colonel
and the colors passed. All this was quite enough to make Mme
Sazerat, who was completely aware of the disinterested and hon-
orable lives of my father and grandfather, regard them as pillars of
Injustice. We pardon the crimes of individuals, but not their par-
ticipation in a collective crime. As soon as she knew my father to
be an anti-­Dreyfusard, she set between him and herself continents
and centuries. Which explains why, across such an interval of time
and space, her greeting had been imperceptible to my father, and
why it had not occurred to her to hold out her hand, or to say a
few words, which would never have carried across the worlds that
lay between.
Saint-­L oup, who was due to come to Paris, had promised to
take me to Mme de Villeparisis’s, where I hoped, though I had

162 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

not said so to him, that we might meet Mme de Guermantes. He

invited me to lunch in a restaurant with his mistress, whom we
were afterward to accompany to a rehearsal. We were to go out in
the morning and call for her at her home on the outskirts of Paris.
I had asked Saint-­L oup that the restaurant to which we went
for lunch (in the lives of young noblemen with money to spend,
the restaurant plays as important a part as do bales of merchan-
dise in Arabian stories) might, if possible, be that to which Aimé
had told me that he would be going as headwaiter until the Balbec
season started. It was a great attraction to me who dreamed of so
many voyages and made so few to see again someone who formed
part not merely of my memories of Balbec but of Balbec itself,
who went there year after year, who when ill-health or my studies
compelled me to stay in Paris would be watching, just the same,
through the long July afternoons while he waited for the guests
to come in to dinner, the sun creep down the sky and set in the
sea, through the glass panels of the great dining room, behind
which, at the hour when the light died, the motionless wings of
vessels, smoky blue in the distance, looked like exotic and noc-
turnal butterflies in a showcase. Himself magnetized by his con-
tact with the powerful lodestone of Balbec, this headwaiter be-
came in turn a magnet attracting me. I hoped by talking to him to
be at once in communication with Balbec, to have realized here in
Paris something of the delights of travel.
I left the house early, with Françoise complaining bitterly be-
cause the footman who was engaged to be married had once again
been prevented, the evening before, from going to see his be-
trothed. Françoise had found him in tears; he had been itching
to go and strike the concierge, but had restrained himself, for he
valued his place.
Before reaching Saint-­L oup’s, where he was to be waiting for
me at the door, I ran into Legrandin, of whom we had lost sight
since our Combray days, and who, though now grown quite gray,
had preserved his air of youthful candor. Seeing me, he stopped:
“Ah! So it’s you,” he exclaimed, “a man of fashion, and in a

Part One 163

 The Guermantes Way

267. Legrandin is given the stereo- frock coat too! That is a livery in which my independent spirit
typical attitude of the Romantic poets would be ill at ease. It is true that you are a man of the world, I
mocked by Gustave Flaubert in his
Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary suppose, and go out paying calls! To go and dream, as I do, before
of received ideas): Ruines: font rêver, some half-­ruined tomb,267 my flowing tie and jacket are not out
et donnent de la poésie à un paysage. of place. You know how I admire the charming quality of your
(Ruins make you subject to dreaming
and lend poetical qualities to a land- soul; that is why I tell you how deeply I regret that you should
scape.) go forth and deny it among the Gentiles. By being capable of re-
268. The Terror is the name given to maining for a moment in the nauseating atmosphere—which I am
the dictatorial regime of the Revolu-
tion; it lasted from May 31, 1793, to July unable to breathe—of a drawing room, you pronounce on your
28, 1794, when Maximilien Robespierre own future the condemnation, the damnation of the Prophet. I
himself was guillotined. can see it all, you frequent the ‘light hearts,’ the social set of the
269. Proust’s model here may be
Georges de Porto-­Riche, whom he de- châteaux, that is the vice of today’s bourgeoisie. Ah! Those aris-
scribes in a letter as having uttered tocrats! The Terror268 was greatly to blame for not cutting the
the same revolutionary sentiments re- heads off every one of them.269 They are all sinister scoundrels,
garding nobles but who then “puts on
a jacket to go dine at Mme de Haus- when they are not simply dreary idiots. Still, my poor boy, if that
sonville’s.” Correspondance 2: 466. sort of thing amuses you! While you are on your way to your tea
270. The reference is to Jean de La Fon- party, your old friend will be more fortunate than you, for alone
taine’s fable, “Le Paysan du Danube,”
Fables, book XI, fable 7. The peasant in an outlying suburb he will be watching the pink moon rise in
condemns the greed, violence, and a violet sky. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this earth upon
corruption of the Romans. The name which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the law
has come to designate someone of
vulgar appearance and brutal frank- of gravity to hold me here, to keep me from escaping into another
ness, whose words nonetheless express sphere. I belong to a different planet. Goodbye; do not take amiss
the truth. the old-­time frankness of the peasant of the Vivonne, who has also
271. Luke 10:​28.
remained a peasant of the Danube.270 To prove to you that I am
your sincere well-­wisher, I am going to send you my last novel.
But you will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin
de siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest; what you want
is Bergotte, you have confessed it, gamy fare for the jaded palates
of sophisticated pleasure seekers. I suppose I am looked upon, in
your set, as an old campaigner; I make the mistake of putting my
heart into what I write, that is no longer done; besides, the life
of the people is not distinguished enough to interest your little
snobbicules. Go, get you gone, try to recall at times the words of
Christ: ‘This do, and thou shalt live.’271 Farewell, Friend.”
It was not with any particular resentment against Legrandin

164 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

that I parted from him. Certain memories are like friends in 272. These were pleasure gardens, cre-
common, they can bring about reconciliations; set down amid ated in the city or country, to gratify
a caprice or to provide a location for
fields starred with buttercups, upon which were piled the ruins romantic rendezvous.
of feudal greatness, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Le- 273. Great palaces on Crete were ex-
grandin and me, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne. cavated early in the twentieth century
by Sir Arthur John Evans and several
After coming out of a Paris in which, although spring had teams of British and Italian archaeolo-
begun, the trees on the boulevards had hardly put on their first gists. Minos, the quasi-­legendary King
leaves, it was a marvel to Saint-­ L oup and myself, when the of Crete, married Pasiphaë, daughter
of the Sun. It was Minos who is said
beltway train had set us down at the suburban village in which to have built the Palace of the Sun at
his mistress was living, to see every cottage garden bedecked with Knossos.
huge festal altars of fruit trees in blossom. It was like one of those
singular, poetical, ephemeral, local festivals that people travel long
distances to attend on certain fixed occasions, only this one was
held by nature. The flowers of the cherry tree are stuck so close
to its branches, like a white sheath, that from a distance, among
the other trees, which showed as yet scarcely a flower or leaf, one
might have taken it, on this day of sunshine that was still so cold,
for snow, melted everywhere else, still clung to the bushes. But the
tall pear trees enveloped each house, each modest courtyard in a
whiteness more vast, more uniform, more dazzling, as if all the
dwellings, all the enclosed spaces in the village were on their way
to make, on the same solemn date, their first communion.
These villages in the environs of Paris still have at their gates
seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century parks that were the “fol-
lies”272 of the stewards and mistresses of the great. A horticul-
turist had utilized one of these that was situated on low ground
beside the road for his fruit trees, or had simply, perhaps, pre-
served the plan of an immense orchard of former days. Laid out
in quincunxes, these pear trees, less crowded and less mature than
those that I had seen, formed great quadrilaterals—separated by
low walls—of white flowers, on each side of which the light fell
differently, so that all these airy roofless chambers seemed to be-
long to a Palace of the Sun, such as one might unearth in Crete273
or somewhere; and they made one think also of the different
ponds of a reservoir, or of those parts of the sea that man, for

Part One 165

 The Guermantes Way

274. An espalier is a plant, such as a some fishery or to plant oyster beds, has subdivided, when one
fruit tree, trained to grow flat against a saw, varying with the orientation, the light fall and play upon the
wall or some kind of support.
espaliers274 as upon springtime waters, and coax into unfolding
here and there, gleaming amid the openwork, azure-­paneled trellis
of the branches, the foaming whiteness of a creamy, sunlit flower.
It had been a country village, and had kept its old mayor’s office
sunburned and golden brown, in front of which, in the place of
maypoles and streamers, three tall pear trees were, as though for
some civic and local festival, gallantly bedecked with white satin.
Never had Robert spoken to me more tenderly of his mistress
than he did during this walk. She alone had taken root in his heart;
his future career in the army, his position in society, his family,
to these he was not, of course, indifferent, but they counted for
nothing beside the least thing that concerned his mistress. That
alone had any importance in his eyes, infinitely more importance
than the Guermantes and all the kings of the earth put together.
I do not know whether he had formulated to himself the doc-
trine that she was of an essence superior to anything else, but I do
know that he considered, took trouble only about what affected
her. Through her and for her he was capable of suffering, of being
happy, perhaps of killing. There was really nothing that interested,
that impassioned him except what his mistress wanted, was going
to do, what was going on, discernible at most in fleeting changes
of expression, in the narrow expanse of her face and behind her
privileged brow. So nice-­minded in all else, he looked forward to
the prospect of a brilliant marriage, solely in order to be able to
continue to maintain her, to keep her always. If one had asked
oneself what was the value that he set on her, I doubt whether
one could ever have imagined a figure high enough. If he did not
marry her, it was because a practical instinct warned him that as
soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would leave
him, or would at least live as she chose, and that he must retain
his hold on her by keeping her in suspense from day to day. For he
admitted the possibility that she did not love him. No doubt the
general affection called love must have forced him—as it forces all

166 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

men—to believe at times that she did. But in his heart of hearts he 275. Boucheron was a jewelry store
felt that the love she had for him did not preclude the possibility founded in 1858. At the end of the nine-
teenth century, it was located at 26,
of her remaining with him only on account of his money, and that place Vendôme.
on the day when she had nothing more to expect from him she 276. Pythian here refers to the
would make haste (the dupe of her friends and their literary theo- prophetess of Greek mythology who
pronounced oracles in the name of
ries, and still loving him, he imagined) to leave him. Apollo at Delphi.
“If she’s nice today,” he confided to me, “I am going to give her
a present that she’ll like. It’s a necklace she saw at Boucheron’s.275
It’s rather expensive for me just now—thirty thousand francs. But
this poor darling, she has so little pleasure in her life. She will be
extremely pleased with it, I know. She mentioned it to me and
told me she knew somebody who would perhaps give it to her. I
don’t believe that’s true, really, but just in case, I’ve arranged with
Boucheron, who is our family jeweler, to hold it for me. I’m glad
to think that you’re going to meet her; she’s nothing so very won-
derful to look at, you know.” (I could see that he thought just the
opposite and had said this only to make me, when I did see her,
admire her all the more.) “What she has above all is marvelous
judgment; she’ll perhaps be afraid to talk much before you, but I
rejoice in advance over what she’ll say to me about you afterward;
you know she says things one can go on thinking about for hours;
there’s really something about her that’s quite Pythian!”276
On our way to her house we passed by a row of little gardens,
and I was obliged to stop, for they were all aflower with cherry
and pear blossoms; as empty, no doubt, and lifeless only yesterday
as a house that no tenant has taken, they were suddenly peopled
and adorned by these newcomers, arrived during the night, whose
beautiful white garments we could see through the railings along
the garden paths.
“Listen; I can see you’d rather stop and look at all that and
be poetical,” said Robert, “so just wait for me here, will you; my
friend’s house is quite close, I will go and fetch her.”
While I waited I strolled up and down the road, past these
modest gardens. If I raised my head I could see, now and then,
girls sitting at the windows, but outside, in the open air, and at the

Part One 167

 The Guermantes Way

277. See Swann’s Way, 155. height of a half-­landing, here and there, light and pliant, in their
278. See Swann’s Way, 61, 166. fresh mauve gowns, hanging among the leaves, young clusters
279. The Tabernacle was a tent sanc-
tuary used by the Israelites for the Ark of lilacs were letting themselves be swung by the breeze without
of the Covenant during the Exodus. heeding the passerby who was turning his eyes toward their ver-
This may perhaps be a Eucharistic dant entresol. I recognized in them the platoons in violet uniform
metaphor: in the Roman Catholic prac-
tice, the tabernacle is the altar recep- posted at the entrance to M. Swann’s park, past the little white
tacle for the ciborium in which the fence,277 in the warm afternoons of spring, like an enchanting
consecrated host (the body of Christ) rustic tapestry. I took a path that led into a meadow. Along it
is stored.
280. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in blew a cold wind, bracing, as at Combray,278 but in the middle
Flower, 165–66. of the rich, moist, country soil, which might have been on the
bank of the Vivonne, there had nevertheless arisen, punctual at
the trysting place like all its band of brothers, a great white pear
tree, which waved smilingly in the sun’s face, like a curtain of light
materialized and made palpable, its flowers shaken by the breeze
but polished and glazed with silver by the sun’s rays.
Suddenly Saint-­L oup appeared, accompanied by his mistress,
and then, in this woman who was for him all the love, all the
sweet things in life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in
a body as in a Tabernacle,279 was the object that occupied inces-
santly my friend’s toiling imagination, whom he felt that he would
never really know, as to whom he was perpetually asking himself
what could be her secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh, in
this woman I recognized at once “Rachel when from the Lord,”280
she who, but a few years since—women change their position so
rapidly in that world, when they do change—used to say to the
procuress: “Tomorrow evening, then, if you need me for anyone,
you will send around for me, won’t you?”
And when they had “sent around” for her, and she found her-
self alone in the room with this “anyone,” she had known so well
what was required of her that after locking the door, as a prudent
woman’s precaution or a ritual gesture, she would begin to take off
all her things, as one does before the doctor who is going to sound
one’s chest, never stopping in the process unless the “someone,”
not caring for nudity, told her that she might keep on her chemise,
as specialists do sometimes who, having an extremely fine ear and

168 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

being afraid of their patient’s catching a chill, are satisfied with

listening to his breathing and the beating of his heart through his
shirt. On this woman whose whole life, all her thoughts, all her
past, all the men who at one time or another had had her were to
me so utterly unimportant that if she had told me about them I
would have listened to her only out of politeness and scarcely have
heard what she said, I felt that the anxiety, the torment, the love
of Saint-­L oup had been concentrated in such a way as to make—
out of what was for me nothing more than a mechanical toy—
the cause of endless suffering, the very object and reward of exis-
tence. Seeing these two elements separately (because I had known
“Rachel when from the Lord” in a house of ill repute), I realized
that many women for the sake of whom men live, suffer, take their
own lives, may be in themselves or for other people what Rachel
was for me. The idea that anyone could be tormented by curiosity
with regard to her life stupefied me. I could have told Robert of
any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me the most un-
interesting things in the world. And how they would have pained
him! And what had he not given to learn them, to no avail.
I realized then all that a human imagination can put behind a
little scrap of face, such as this woman’s face was, if it is the imagi-
nation that has known it first; and conversely into what wretched
elements, crudely material and utterly without value, might be
decomposed what had been the inspiration of countless dreams
if, on the contrary, it had been perceived in the opposite manner,
by the slightest trivial acquaintance. I saw that what had appeared
to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to
me for twenty francs in the house of ill repute, where it was then
for me simply a woman desirous of earning twenty francs, might
be worth more than a million, more than one’s family, more than
all the most coveted positions in life if one had begun by imag-
ining her to embody a mysterious creature, interesting to know,
difficult to seize and to hold. No doubt it was the same thin and
narrow face that we saw, Robert and I. But we had arrived at it
by two opposite ways, between which there was no communi-

Part One 169

 The Guermantes Way

281. Under Napoléon I, a louis was a cation, and we would never both see it from the same side. That
gold coin worth twenty francs. face, with its glances, its smiles, the movements of its lips, I had
known from the outside as being simply that of a woman of the
sort who for twenty francs would do anything that I asked. And so
her glances, her smiles, the movements of her lips had seemed to
me expressive merely as general actions with no individual quality,
and beneath them I would not have had the curiosity to look for
a person. But what to me had in a sense been offered at the start,
that consenting face, had been for Robert an ultimate goal toward
which he had made his way through endless hopes and doubts,
suspicions, dreams. He had given more than a million francs in
order to have for himself, in order that there might not be offered
to others, what had been offered to me, as to all and sundry, for
twenty. That he too had not had her at the lower price may have
been due to the chance of a moment, the instant in which she who
seemed ready to yield herself runs off, having perhaps an assigna-
tion elsewhere, some reason that makes her more difficult of ac-
cess that day. Should the man be a sentimentalist, then, even if she
has not observed it, but infinitely more if she has, the direst game
begins. Unable to swallow his disappointment, to make himself
forget about the woman, he starts afresh in pursuit, she flees him,
until a mere smile for which he no longer dared to hope is bought
at a thousand times what should have been the price of the most
intimate favors. It happens even at times in such a case, when one
has been led by a mixture of naïveté in one’s judgment and cow-
ardice in the face of suffering to commit the crowning folly of
making an inaccessible idol of a whore, that these ultimate favors,
or even the first kiss one will never obtain, one no longer even dares
to ask for it in order not to belie one’s assurances of Platonic love.
And it is then a bitter anguish to leave the world without having
ever known what were the embraces of the woman one has most
passionately loved. As for Rachel’s favors, however, Saint-­L oup
had fortunately succeeded in winning them all. Certainly if he
had now learned that they had been offered to all the world for a
louis,281 he would have suffered, of course, acutely, but would still

170 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

have given a million francs for the right to keep them, for nothing 282. Jesus appeared to Mary Magda-
that he might have learned could have made him emerge—since lene when she visited his tomb. John
20:​15.
that is beyond human control and can happen only in spite of it 283. This is an allusion to the angels of
by the action of some great natural law—from the path he had Sodom. Genesis 19:1.
taken, from which that face could appear to him only through
the web of the dreams that he had already spun. The immobility
of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the
colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be held in
balance by two infinities that led to her without meeting, for she
held them apart. And indeed, when we were both looking at her,
Robert and I did not see her from the same side of the mystery.
It was not “Rachel when from the Lord”—who seemed to me
of little importance—it was the power of the human imagination,
the illusion on which were based the pains of love, that I found so
great. Robert noticed that I appeared moved. I turned my eyes to
the pear and cherry trees of the garden opposite, so that he might
think that it was their beauty that had touched me. And it did
touch me in somewhat the same way; it also brought close to me
things of the kind that we not only see with our eyes but feel also
in our hearts. These trees that I had seen in the garden, likening
them in my mind to strange deities, had I not been mistaken like
Magdalene282 when, in another garden, on a day whose anniver-
sary was drawing near, she saw a human form and “thought it
was the gardener”? Treasurers of our memories of the golden age,
keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose, that
the splendor of poetry, the wonderful radiance of innocence may
shine in it and may be the recompense that we strive to earn, these
great white creatures, bowed in a marvelous fashion above the
shade propitious for rest, for angling, or for reading, were they not
rather angels? I exchanged a few words with Saint-­L oup’s mistress.
We cut across the village. Its houses were sordid. But by each of
the most wretched, of those that looked as though they had been
scorched and branded by a rain of brimstone, a mysterious trav-
eler, halting for a day in the accursed city, a resplendent angel283
stood erect, extending broadly over it the dazzling protection of

Part One 171

 The Guermantes Way

284. Roller-­skating became popular in the wings of innocence in flower: it was a pear tree. Saint-­L oup
France around 1875. drew me a little way in front to explain.
285. Calicot, in the original, is a deroga-
tory slang term for a salesman in a “I would have liked it if you and I could have remained alone
shop. together, in fact I would much rather have had lunch just with
you, and stayed with you until it was time to go to my aunt’s. But
this poor girl of mine here, it is such a pleasure to her, and she
is so nice to me, you know, that I hadn’t the heart to refuse her.
You’ll like her, however; she’s literary, a most sensitive nature, and
besides it’s such a pleasure to have lunch with her in a restaurant,
she is so charming, so simple, always delighted with everything.”
I believe nevertheless that, on this same morning, and probably
for the first and last time, Robert did detach himself for a moment
from the woman whom out of successive layers of affection he had
gradually created, and suddenly saw at some distance from him-
self another Rachel, the double of his but entirely different, who
was nothing more nor less than a simple little whore. We had left
the blossoming orchard and were making for the train that was
to take us to Paris when, at the station, Rachel, who was walking
by herself, was recognized and hailed by a pair of common little
“tarts” like herself, who first of all, thinking that she was alone,
called out: “Hello, Rachel, come along with us; Lucienne and
Germaine are in the train, and there’s room for one more. Come
on. We’ll all go together to the skating rink.”284 They were just
going to introduce to her two counter-­jumpers,285 their lovers,
who were accompanying them, when, noticing that she seemed a
little uneasy, they looked up and beyond her, caught sight of us,
and with apologies bade her a goodbye to which she responded in
a somewhat embarrassed, but still friendly tone. They were two
poor little “tarts” with collars of fake otterskin, looking more or
less as Rachel must have looked when Saint-­L oup first met her.
He did not know them, or their names even, and seeing that they
appeared to be very intimate with his mistress he could not help
wondering whether she too might not once have had, had not still
perhaps her place in a life of which he had never dreamed, utterly
different from the life she led with him, a life in which one had

172 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

women for a louis apiece, whereas he was giving more than a hun-
dred thousand francs a year to Rachel. He caught only a fleeting
glimpse of that life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel com-
pletely different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two
little tarts, a twenty-­franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the
moment duplicated herself in his eyes, he had seen, at some dis-
tance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel,
assuming that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It
may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he
was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage,
of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a
hundred thousand francs every year, he might easily perhaps have
escaped, and have enjoyed the favors of his mistress, as the two
counter-­jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing.
But how was it to be done? She had done nothing to prove herself
unworthy. Less generously rewarded she would be less nice to him,
would stop saying and writing the things that so deeply touched
him, things that he would quote, with a touch of ostentation, to
his comrades, taking care to point out how nice it was of her to say
them, but omitting to mention that he was maintaining her in the
most lavish fashion, or even that he ever gave her anything at all,
that these inscriptions on photographs, or greetings at the end of
telegrams were but the transmutation into the most exiguous, the
most precious of currencies of a hundred thousand francs. If he
took care not to admit that these rare kindnesses on Rachel’s part
were handsomely paid for by himself, it would be wrong to say—
and yet, by a simplistic reasoning, we do say it, absurdly, of every
lover who pays in cash for his pleasure, and of a great many hus-
bands—that this was from self-­esteem or vanity. Saint-­L oup was
intelligent enough to perceive that all the pleasures that appeal
to vanity he could have found easily and without cost to himself
in society, thanks to his historic name and handsome face, and
that his liaison with Rachel had, on the contrary, tended to iso-
late him somewhat from society, had led to his being less sought
after. No; this self-­esteem, which seeks to appear to be receiving

Part One 173

 The Guermantes Way

286. Place Pigalle is a square in Paris’s gratuitously the outward signs of the affection of her whom one
ninth arrondissement at the head of loves, is simply a consequence of love, the need to figure in one’s
rue Pigalle. It was a popular spot for
artists in the nineteenth century and own eyes and in other people’s as loved in return by the person
a major center of licentious nightlife whom one loves so much. Rachel rejoined us, leaving the two tarts
during Proust’s time. to get into their compartment; but no less than their fake otter-
287. The boulevard de Clichy, between
the ninth and eighteenth arrondisse- skins and the self-­conscious appearance of their young men, the
ments, runs from the place Clichy to names Lucienne and Germaine kept the new Rachel alive in front
the rue des Martyrs, passing by place of Robert for a moment longer. For a moment he imagined a place
Pigalle.
288. The Olympia was a popular music Pigalle286 existence with unknown associates, sordid love affairs,
hall during the 1890s. It was located at afternoons spent in simple amusements, excursions or pleasure-­
28, boulevard des Capucines. parties, in that Paris in which the sunny brightness of the streets
289. The rue Caumartin in the ninth ar-
rondissement runs from the boulevard from the boulevard de Clichy287 onward did not seem the same as
des Capucines to the rue Saint-­Lazare. the solar radiance in which he himself strolled with his mistress,
but must be something different, for love and suffering, which is
one with love, have, like intoxication, the power to differentiate
things for us. It was almost an unknown Paris in the heart of Paris
itself that he suspected; his liaison appeared to him like the ex-
ploration of a strange life, for if when with him Rachel was some-
what similar to himself, it was nevertheless a part of her real life
that she lived with him, indeed the most precious part in view of
his reckless expenditure on her, the part that made her so greatly
envied by her friends and would enable her one day to retire to the
country or to establish herself in the leading theaters, when she
had feathered her nest. Robert longed to ask her who Lucienne
and Germaine were, what they would have said to her if she had
joined them in their compartment, how they would all have spent
a day, which would have perhaps ended, as a supreme diversion,
after the pleasures of the skating rink, at the Olympia Tavern,288
if Robert and I had not been there. For a moment the purlieus of
the Olympia, which until then had seemed to him merely deadly
dull, aroused curiosity in him and pain, and the sunshine of this
spring day beating upon the rue Caumartin,289 where, possibly,
if she had not known Robert, Rachel might have gone that after-
noon and have earned a louis, filled him with a vague longing.
But what use was it to ply Rachel with questions when he already

174 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

knew that her answer would be merely silence, or a lie, or some- 290. Place Pigalle was painted by
thing extremely painful for him to hear, which would yet explain Auguste Renoir in 1880 and can be
seen in London’s National Gallery.
nothing. The porters were shutting the doors; we jumped into a 291. Art nouveau was a decorative style
first-­class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent pearls reminded Robert that was popular, beginning with the
that she was a woman of great price, he caressed her, restored her Paris Exposition of 1900, until about
1925. It features stylized flowers, sculp-
to her place in his heart where he could contemplate her, interi- tured effects in bronze, and themes
orized, as he had always done hitherto—except during this brief from nature.
instant in which he had seen her in the place Pigalle290 of an Im- 292. Tolstoyism takes its name from
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the
pressionist painter—and the train began to move. Russian novelist and moralist who in
It was, by the way, true that she was “literary.” She never stopped 1905–6 sent letters to Tsar Nicholas II
talking to me about books, art nouveau,291 and Tolstoyism292 ex- to advocate educational reforms.
293. The actress and demimondaine
cept to rebuke Saint-­L oup for drinking too much wine: Louisa de Mornand is Proust’s model
“Ah! If you could live with me for a year, we’d see a fine change. here. On February 18, 1905, at the
I would keep you on water and you’d be much better for it.” Théâtre du Vaudeville, Louisa played
the role of Zézette in Le Bon Numéro,
“Right you are. Let’s go away.” a play by André Barde.
“But you know very well that I have a lot of work to do” (for
she took her dramatic art very seriously). “Besides, what would
your family say?”
And she began to abuse his family to me in terms that seemed
to me, moreover, highly justified, and with which Saint-­L oup,
while disobeying her orders in the matter of champagne, entirely
concurred. I, who was so much afraid of the effect of wine on him,
and felt the good influence of his mistress, was quite prepared to
advise him to let his family go hang. Tears sprang to the young
woman’s eyes because I had been rash enough to refer to Dreyfus.
“The poor martyr!” she almost sobbed; “it will be the death of
him in that dreadful place.”
“Don’t upset yourself, Zézette,293 he will come back, he will be
acquitted all right; they will admit they’ve made a mistake.”
“But long before then he’ll be dead! Oh, well at any rate his
children will bear a stainless name. But just think of the agony he
must be going through; that’s what kills me! And would you be-
lieve that Robert’s mother, a pious woman, says that he ought to
be left on the Devil’s Island, even if he is innocent. Isn’t that ap-
palling?”

Part One 175

 The Guermantes Way

“Yes, it’s absolutely true, she does say that,” Robert assured me.
“She’s my mother, I’ve no objection to make, but it’s quite clear
she hasn’t got a sensitive nature like Zézette.”
In reality, these lunches that were said to be “such a pleasure”
always ended in trouble. For as soon as Saint-­L oup found him-
self in a public place with his mistress, he would imagine that
she was looking at every other man in the room, and his brow
would darken; she would notice his ill-­humor, which she may
have thought it amusing to encourage, but which more likely, out
of foolish pride, feeling wounded by his tone, she did not wish to
appear to be seeking to disarm; she would pretend to be unable
to take her eyes off some man or other, and indeed this was not
always purely a game. In fact, the gentleman who, in a theater
or a café, happened to sit next to them, or, to go no further, the
driver of the fiacre they had engaged, need only have something
attractive about him, and Robert, his perception quickened by
jealousy, would have noticed it before his mistress; he would see
in him immediately one of those foul creatures whom he had de-
nounced to me at Balbec, who corrupted and dishonored women
for their own amusement, would beg his mistress to take her eyes
off the man, thereby drawing her attention to him. And some-
times she found that Robert had shown such good taste in his
suspicions that after a little she even stopped teasing him in order
that he might calm down and consent to go off by himself on
some errand, which would give her time to enter into conversa-
tion with the stranger, often to make an assignation, sometimes
even to bring matters quickly to a head. I could see as soon as we
entered the restaurant that Robert was looking troubled. For he
had at once observed, what had escaped our notice at Balbec, that
standing among his coarser colleagues, Aimé, with a modest éclat,
emitted, quite unconsciously of course, that air of romance that
emanates for a certain number of years from fine hair and a Grecian
nose, features thanks to which he stood out among the crowd of
other waiters. The others, almost all of them well on in years, pre-
sented a series of types, extraordinarily ugly and pronounced, of

176 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

hypocritical priests, sanctimonious confessors, more numerously 294. An augur was an official diviner in
of comic actors of the old school, whose sugarloaf foreheads are ancient Rome.
295. There is in Illiers-­Combray’s
scarcely to be seen nowadays outside the collections of portraits Maison de Tante Léonie–­Musée Marcel
that hang in the humbly historic greenrooms of little outdated Proust an engraving titled Prince
theaters, where they are represented playing the roles of servants Eugène au tombeau de sa mère (Prince
Eugène at his mother’s tomb). Eugène
or great pontiffs, though this restaurant seemed, thanks to a selec- de Beauharnais (1781–1824) was the
tive recruiting and perhaps to some system of hereditary nomi- son of Alexandre de Beauharnais and
nation, to have preserved their solemn type in a sort of College Joséphine, the first Empress of France.

of Augurs.294 As ill luck would have it, Aimé having recognized

us, it was he who came to take our order, while the procession of
operatic high priests swept past us to other tables. Aimé inquired
after my grandmother’s health; I asked for news of his wife and
children. He gave it to me with emotion, for he was a family man.
He had an intelligent, vigorous, but respectful air. Robert’s mis-
tress began to gaze at him with a strange attentiveness. But Aimé’s
sunken eyes, in which a slight shortsightedness gave one the im-
pression of a veiled depth, betrayed no sign of awareness in his still
face. In the provincial hotel in which he had served for many years
before coming to Balbec, the charming sketch, now a trifle dis-
colored and faded, that was his face, and that, for all those years,
like some engraved portrait of Prince Eugène,295 had been visible
always at the same place, at the far end of a dining room that
was almost always empty, could not have attracted many curious
looks. He had thus for long remained, doubtless for lack of sym-
pathetic admirers, in ignorance of the artistic value of his face, and
but little inclined for that matter to draw attention to it, for he was
temperamentally cold. At most, some passing Parisian woman,
stopping for some reason in the town, had raised her eyes to his,
had asked him perhaps to serve her in her room before she took
the train again, and in the pellucid, monotonous, deep void of this
existence of a good husband and provincial servant had buried the
secret of a caprice without sequel that no one would ever bring to
light. And yet Aimé must have been conscious of the insistence
with which the eyes of the young actress were fastened upon him
now. In any case, it did not escape Robert beneath whose skin I

Part One 177

 The Guermantes Way

saw gathering a flush, not vivid like the one that burned his cheeks
when he felt any sudden emotion, but faint, diffused.
“Anything especially interesting about that waiter, Zézette?” he
inquired, after sharply dismissing Aimé. “One would think you
were making a study of him.”
“There you go again; I knew it was coming!”
“You knew what was coming, my dear girl? If I was mistaken,
I’m quite willing to take it back. But I have at least the right to
warn you against that flunky, seeing that I knew him at Balbec
(otherwise I wouldn’t give a damn), and who is one of the biggest
scoundrels who ever walked the face of the earth.”
She seemed eager to pacify Robert and began to engage me in
a literary conversation, in which he joined. I did not find it boring
to talk to her, for she had a thorough knowledge of the works that
I admired, and her opinion of them agreed more or less with my
own; but as I had heard Mme de Villeparisis declare that she had
no talent, I attached but little importance to this evidence of cul-
ture. She discoursed wittily on all manner of topics, and would
have been genuinely entertaining had she not affected to an irri-
tating extent the jargon of the literary coteries and studios. She
applied this, moreover, to everything under the sun; for example,
having acquired the habit of saying of a picture, if it were Impres-
sionist, or an opera, if Wagnerian, “Ah! That is good! ” one day
when a young man had kissed her on the ear, and, touched by her
pretense of being thrilled, had affected modesty, she said: “Yes,
really, as a sensation I call it distinctly good.” But above all what
surprised me was that the expressions peculiar to Robert (which,
moreover, had come to him, perhaps, from literary men whom
she knew) were used by her to him and by him to her as though
they had been a necessary form of speech, and without any con-
ception of the pointlessness of an originality that is universal.
She was, when eating, so clumsy with her hands that one as-
sumed that she must appear extremely awkward upon the stage.
She recovered her dexterity only when making love, with that
touching prescience of women who love the male body so in-

178 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

tensely that they immediately guess what will give most pleasure
to that body, which is yet so different from their own.
I ceased to take part in the conversation when it turned to the
theater, for on that topic Rachel was too malicious for my liking.
She did, it was true, take up in a tone of commiseration—against
Saint-­L oup, which proved that he was accustomed to hearing
Rachel attack her—the defense of Berma, saying: “Oh, no, she’s a
remarkable woman, really. Of course, the things she does no longer
appeal to us, they don’t correspond quite to what we are looking
for, but one must think of her at the time when she arrived on
the scene; we owe her a great deal. She has done good work, you
know. And besides she’s such a fine woman, she has such a good
heart; naturally she doesn’t care about the things that interest us,
but she has had in her time, with a rather moving face, a charming
quality of mind.” (Our fingers, by the way, do not play the same
accompaniment to all our esthetic judgments. If it is a picture
that is under discussion, to show that it is a fine piece of work,
with a rich palette, it is enough to stick out one’s thumb. But the
“charming quality of mind” is more exacting. It requires two fin-
gers, or rather two fingernails, as though one were trying to flick
off a particle of dust.) But with this single exception, Saint-­L oup’s
mistress spoke of the best-­known actresses in a tone of ironical
superiority that annoyed me because I believed—­mistakenly, as
it happened—that it was she who was inferior to them. She was
clearly aware that I must regard her as a mediocre actress, and on
the other hand have a great regard for those she despised. But she
showed no resentment, because there is in all great talent while
it is still, as hers was then, unrecognized, however sure it may be
of itself, a vein of humility, and because we make the consider-
ation that we expect from others proportionate not to our latent
powers but to the position to which we have attained. (I was, an
hour or so later, at the theater, to see Saint-­L oup’s mistress show
great deference toward those very artists whom she now judged so
harshly.) And so, in however little doubt my silence may have left
her, she insisted nevertheless on our dining together that evening,

Part One 179

 The Guermantes Way

296. There are several botanists in the assuring me that never had anyone’s conversation delighted her
Jussieu family, the most famous of so much as mine. If we were not yet in the theater, to which we
whom is Bernard de Jussieu (1699–
1777), who, in 1734, brought back were to go after lunch, we had the sense of being in a greenroom
from England, in his hat, the cedar of hung with portraits of old members of the company, so markedly
Lebanon tree, now a giant, that grows were the waiters’ faces those which, one thought, had perished
in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He
thus introduced this species in France. with a whole generation of unrivaled actors of the Palais-­Royal;
they had a look, also, of academicians: one of them, standing in
front of a side table, was examining a dish of pears with the ex-
pression of detached curiosity that M. de Jussieu296 might have
worn. Others, on either side of him, were casting about the room
that gaze filled with curiosity and coldness that members of the
Institut, who have arrived early, cast at the public, while they ex-
change a few murmured words that one fails to catch. They were
faces well known to all the regular customers. One of them, how-
ever, was being pointed out, a newcomer with a wrinkled nose
and sanctimonious lips, who had the air of a clergyman who was
taking up his duties there for the first time, and everyone gazed
with interest at this newly elected candidate. But presently, per-
haps to drive Robert away so that she might be alone with Aimé,
Rachel began to make eyes at a young student, who was having
lunch with a friend at a neighboring table.
“Zézette, let me beg you not to look at that young man like
that,” said Saint-­L oup, on whose face the hesitating flush of a mo-
ment ago had gathered now into a scarlet cloud that dilated and
darkened his swollen features; “if you must make a spectacle of us
here, I prefer to finish eating by myself and join you afterward at
the theater.”
At this point a messenger came up to tell Aimé that a gentleman
wanted him to come and speak to him at the door of his carriage.
Saint-­L oup, ever uneasy, and afraid now that it might be some
message of an amorous nature that was to be conveyed to his mis-
tress, looked out of the window and saw there, sitting in the back
of a brougham, his hands tightly buttoned in white gloves with
black seams, a flower in his buttonhole, M. de Charlus.
“There; you see,” he said to me in a low voice, “my family hunts

180 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

me down even here. Will you, please—I can’t very well do it my-
self, but you can, as you know the headwaiter so well and he’s
certain to give us away—ask him not to go to the carriage. He
can always send some other waiter who doesn’t know me. I know
my uncle; if they tell him that I’m not known here, he’ll never
come inside to look for me, he loathes this sort of place. Really,
it’s pretty disgusting that an old womanizer like him, who is still
at it, too, should be perpetually lecturing me and coming to spy
on me!”
Aimé, on receiving my instructions, sent one of his underlings
to explain that he was busy and could not come out at the mo-
ment, and (should the gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-­
Loup) that they did not know any such person. Presently the car-
riage left. But Saint-­L oup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our
whispered conversation and thought that it was still about the
young man whom Robert had been reproaching her for making
eyes at, broke out in a torrent of rage.
“Oh, indeed! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it?
Thank you for telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of
thing with one’s meals! Don’t pay any attention to what he says,
please; he’s rather piqued today, and, mostly,” she added, turning
to me, “he just says such things because he thinks it’s smart, that
it’s the grand seigneur thing to appear to be jealous.”
And she began to fidget with her hands and feet in nervous
irritation.
“But, Zézette, I’m the one for whom it’s unpleasant. You are
making us all ridiculous in the eyes of that gentleman, who will
begin to imagine you’re making advances to him, and who ap-
pears to be an impossible cad.”
“Oh, no, I think he’s charming; for one thing, he’s got the most
adorable eyes, and a way of looking at women—you can feel he
must love them.”
“You can at least keep quiet until I’ve left the room, if you have
lost your senses,” cried Robert. “Waiter, my things.”
I did not know whether I was expected to follow him.

Part One 181

 The Guermantes Way

“No, I need to be alone,” he told me in the same tone in which

he had just been addressing his mistress, and as if he were just as
furious with me. His anger was like a single musical phrase in an
opera to which several lines are sung, each entirely different from
one another in the libretto in meaning and character, but which
the music brings together in a common sentiment. When Robert
had gone, his mistress called Aimé and asked him various ques-
tions. She then wanted to know what I thought of him.
“He has an amusing expression, doesn’t he? You see, what
would amuse me would be to know what he really thinks about
things, to have him wait on me often, to take him traveling. But
that would be all. If we were expected to love all the people who
attract us, life would be pretty awful. It’s silly of Robert to get ideas
like that. All that sort of thing, it’s only just what comes into my
head, that’s all; Robert has nothing to worry about.” (She was still
gazing at Aimé.) “Do look what dark eyes he has. I would love to
know what’s behind them.”
Presently came a message that Robert was waiting for her in a
private room, to which he had gone by another door to finish his
lunch without having to pass through the restaurant again. I thus
remained alone, until I too was summoned by Robert. I found
his mistress stretched out on a sofa laughing under the kisses and
caresses that he was showering on her. They were drinking cham-
pagne. “Bonjour, you!” she cried to him, having recently picked
up this expression that seemed to her the last word in affection
and wit. I had not had much lunch, I was extremely uncomfort-
able, and although Legrandin’s words had had no effect on me,
I was sorry to think that I was beginning in a back room of a
restaurant and would be finishing in the wings of a theater this
first afternoon of spring. Looking first at the time to see that she
was not making herself late, she offered me a glass of champagne,
handed me one of her Turkish cigarettes, and unpinned a rose for
me from her bodice. Whereupon I said to myself: “I have nothing
much to regret about my day, after all; these hours spent in this
young woman’s company are not wasted, since I have had from

182 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

her charming gifts that could not be bought too dear: a rose, a 297. From 1881 to 1896, the Jardin
scented cigarette, and a glass of champagne.” I told myself this be- de Paris, located between the Palais
de l’Industrie and the Seine, was a
cause I felt that it endowed with an esthetic character and thereby café-­concert and dancing spot in the
justified, saved these hours of boredom. Perhaps I ought to have summer. In 1896, it was relocated to
reflected that the very need that I felt for a reason that might con- the Champs-­Élysées, facing the place
de la Concorde.
sole me for my boredom was sufficient to prove that I was ex-
periencing no esthetic sensation. As for Robert and his mistress,
they appeared to have no recollection of the quarrel they had had
a few minutes earlier, or of my having been a witness to it. They
made no allusion to it, sought no excuse for it, any more than for
the contrast with it made by their present conduct. By dint of
drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the in-
toxication that used to come over me at Rivebelle, though prob-
ably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from
that which the sun or traveling gives us to the one that we get from
exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each
should have a different “figure,” like the numbers of fathoms on
a chart—lays bare in us exactly at the depth it reaches a different
kind of man. The room that Saint-­L oup had taken was small, but
the single mirror decorating it was of such a kind that it seemed
to reflect about thirty others in an endless vista; and the electric
bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when the light
was on, followed by the procession of some thirty flashes similar
to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the
surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his
sensations heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by him-
self in this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something
far more extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage
in the “Jardin de Paris.”297 Being then myself at this moment the
said drinker, suddenly, looking for him in the glass, I caught sight
of him, hideous, a stranger, who was staring at me. The joy of in-
toxication was stronger than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado
I smiled at him, and simultaneously he smiled back at me. And I
felt myself so much under the ephemeral and potent sway of the
minute in which our sensations are so strong that I am not sure

Part One 183

 The Guermantes Way

whether my sole regret was not at the thought that this hideous
self of whom I had just caught sight in the mirror was perhaps
there for his last day on earth, and that I would never meet this
stranger again in the whole course of my life.
Robert was annoyed only because I made no attempt to shine
more in the eyes of his mistress.
“What about that fellow you met this morning, who combines
snobbery with astronomy; tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the
story,” and he watched her out of the corner of his eye.
“But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more than what you’ve just
said.”
“What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the
Champs-­Élysées. She’ll enjoy that.”
“Oh, do! Bobby has told me so much about Françoise.” And
taking Saint-­L oup by the chin, she repeated, for want of any-
thing more original, drawing his chin nearer to the light: “Bon-
jour, you!”
Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the deposi-
taries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had
begun to interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending
that what I saw before me were the characters in some old comic
novel, by watching, struck by the new face of the young nobleman
who had just come into the theater, the heroine listen distract-
edly to the declaration of love that the juvenile lead in the play
was addressing to her, while he, through the fiery torrent of his
impassioned speech, still kept a burning gaze fixed on an old lady
seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his eye;
and thus, thanks especially to the information that Saint-­L oup
gave me about the private lives of the actors, I saw another drama,
mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken
drama, which in itself, although of little merit, interested me also;
for I could feel in it that there were germinating and opening for
an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the aggluti-
nation on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and
pasteboard, on his own individual soul the words of a role. These

184 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

ephemeral and vivid personalities, which the characters are in a

play that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities,
whom one would like to see again after one has left the theater,
but who by that time are already disintegrated into an actor who
is no longer in the position that he occupied in the play, into a text
that no longer shows the actor’s face, into a colored powder that
a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned in short to elements
that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution, effected
so soon after the end of the show, makes us—like the dissolution
of a loved one—begin to doubt the reality of the self and to medi-
tate on the mystery of death.
One number in the program I found extremely painful. A
young woman whom Rachel and some of her friends disliked
was, with a recital of old songs, to make a debut on which she
had based all her hopes for her own future and that of her family.
This young woman had an unduly, almost grotesquely prominent
rump and a pretty but too slight voice, weakened still further by
her excitement and in marked contrast to her muscular develop-
ment. Rachel had posted among the audience a certain number
of friends, male and female, whose business it was by their sar-
castic comments to make the novice, who was known to be timid,
lose her head so that her recital would be a complete fiasco, after
which the manager would refuse to give her a contract. At the first
notes uttered by the wretched woman, several of the male audi-
ence, recruited for that purpose, began pointing to her derrière
with jocular comments; several of the women, also in the plot,
laughed out loud, each flutelike note from the stage increased the
deliberate hilarity, which grew to a public scandal. The unhappy
woman, sweating with anguish through her greasepaint, tried for
a little longer to hold out, then stopped and looked around the
audience with a gaze of misery and anger that succeeded only in
increasing the uproar. The instinct to imitate others, the desire
to show their own wit and daring added to the party several
pretty actresses who had not been forewarned but now glanced
at the others with malicious complicity, and sat convulsed with

Part One 185

 The Guermantes Way

298. See Swann’s Way, 13. laughter, which rang out in such violent peals, that at the end of
the second song, although there were still five more on the pro-
gram, the stage manager rang down the curtain. I tried to make
myself pay no more heed to the incident than I had paid to my
grandmother’s sufferings when my great-uncle, to tease her, used
to give my grandfather cognac,298 the idea of deliberate malicious-
ness being too painful for me to bear. And yet, just as our pity for
misfortune is perhaps not very exact since in our imagination we
re-­create a whole world of grief by which the unfortunate person
who has to struggle against it has no time to think of being moved
to self-­pity, so maliciousness has probably not in the mind of the
malicious person the pure and voluptuous cruelty that it so pains
us to imagine. Hatred inspires him, anger gives him an ardor, an
activity in which there is no great joy; sadism is needed to ex-
tract any pleasure from it; the malicious person supposes himself
to be punishing the maliciousness of his victim; Rachel imagined
certainly that the actress whom she was tormenting was far from
being of interest to anyone, and that in any case, by having her
hissed off the stage, she was herself avenging an outrage on good
taste and teaching an unworthy colleague a lesson. Nevertheless,
I preferred not to speak of this incident since I had had neither
the courage nor the power to prevent it; it would have been too
painful for me, by saying any good of their victim, to make the
sentiments that animated the tormentors of this novice look like
gratifications of cruelty.
But the beginning of this performance interested me in quite
another way. It made me realize in part the nature of the illusion of
which Saint-­L oup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which
had set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had of
his mistress, when we saw her that morning beneath the pear trees
in bloom. Rachel was playing a minor role that was barely more
than a walk-­on in the little play. But seen thus, she was another
woman. She had one of those faces to which distance—and not
necessarily that between the audience and the stage, the world
being in this respect only a larger theater—gives form and outline

186 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

and which, seen up close, dissolve back into dust. Standing beside
her one saw only a nebula, a milky way of freckles, of tiny spots,
nothing more. At a proper distance, all this ceased to be visible
and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed into her face,
rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine, so pure that one would
have liked to be the object of Rachel’s attention, to see her again as
often as one chose, to have her close to one, provided that one had
not already seen her differently and at close range. This was not
my case, but it had been Saint-­L oup’s when he first saw her on the
stage. Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how
come to know her, there had opened in him a whole marvelous
domain—that in which she lived—from which emanated an ex-
quisite radiance but into which he might not penetrate. He had
left the theater telling himself that it would be madness to write
to her, that she would not answer his letter, quite prepared to give
his fortune and his name for the creature who was living in him
in a world so vastly superior to those too familiar realities, a world
made beautiful by desire and dreams of happiness, when from the
theater, an old, small building that itself had the appearance of a
piece of scenery, he saw emerging from the stage door the merry
and daintily hatted band of actresses who had just been playing.
Young men who knew them were there waiting for them outside.
The number of pawns on the human chessboard being less than
the number of combinations that they are capable of forming, in
a theater from which are absent all the people we know and might
have expected to find, there turns up one whom we never imag-
ined we would see again and who appears so opportunely that the
coincidence seems to us providential, although no doubt some
other coincidence would have occurred in its stead had we been
not in that place but in some other, where other desires would
have been born and we would have met some other old acquain-
tance to help us to satisfy them. The golden portals of the world
of dreams had closed again upon Rachel before Saint-­L oup saw
her emerge from the theater, so that the freckles and spots were
of little importance. They displeased him nevertheless, especially

Part One 187

 The Guermantes Way

as, being no longer alone, he did not now have the same power to
dream as in the theater. But she, although he could no longer see
her, continued to dictate his actions like those stars that govern
us by their attraction even during the hours in which they are not
visible to our eyes. And so his desire for the actress with the fine
features that were not now even present in Robert’s memory had
the result that, dashing toward the old friend who happened to
be there, he insisted on an introduction to the person with no
features and with freckles, since she was the same person, telling
himself that later on he would take care to find out which of the
two this same person really was. She was in a hurry, she did not
even on this occasion say a single word to Saint-­L oup, and it was
only some days later that he finally contrived, by inducing her to
leave her colleagues, to escort her home. He loved her already.
The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman
of whom one has dreamed, bring it about that not much time
is required before one entrusts all one’s chances of happiness to
someone who a few days since was but a fortuitous apparition, un-
known, of no interest, upon the boards of a theater.
When, the curtain having fallen, we moved onto the stage,
alarmed at finding myself there for the first time, I felt the need
to begin a spirited conversation with Saint-­L oup. In this way my
attitude, as I did not know what one ought to adopt in a setting
that was new to me, would be entirely dominated by our talk, and
people would think that I was so absorbed in it, so unobservant
of my surroundings, that it was quite natural that I not show the
facial expressions proper to a place in which, to judge by what I
appeared to be saying, I was barely conscious of standing; and
seizing, to make haste, upon the first topic that came to my mind:
“You know,” I said, “I did come to say goodbye to you the day I
left Doncières; I’ve not had an opportunity to mention it. I waved
to you in the street.”
“Don’t speak about it,” he replied, “I was so sorry. I passed you
just outside the barracks, but I couldn’t stop because I was already
very late. I assure you, I felt very bad about that.”

188 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

So he had recognized me! I saw again in my mind the wholly 299. The artist is likely an allusion to
impersonal salute that he had given me, raising his hand to his Léon Bakst (1866–1924), the set de-
signer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
képi, without a glance to indicate that he knew me, without a ges- Proust knew Bakst and admired his
ture to show that he was sorry he could not stop. Evidently this work. See In the Shadow of Young Girls
fiction, which he had adopted at that moment, of not recognizing in Flower, 570, n. 415.

me must have simplified matters for him greatly. But I was amazed
to find that he had been able to assume it so swiftly and before any
reflex had betrayed his original impression. I had already observed
at Balbec that, side by side with that childlike sincerity of his face,
the skin of which by its transparence made visible the sudden tide
of certain emotions, his body had been admirably trained to per-
form a certain number of well-­bred dissimulations, and that, like
a consummate actor, he could, in his regimental and in his social
life, play alternately quite different roles. In one of his roles he
loved me tenderly, he acted toward me almost as if he were my
brother; my brother he had been, he was now again, but for a
moment that day he had been another person who did not know
me and who, holding the reins, his monocle screwed into his eye,
without a look or a smile had raised his hand to the peak of his
képi to give me correctly the military salute!
The stage sets, still in their place, among which I was passing,
seen thus at close range and deprived of all the advantage given
them by those effects of lighting and distance on which the emi-
nent artist299 whose brush had painted them had calculated, were
a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was sub-
jected to a no less destructive force. The curves of her charming
nose had stood out in perspective, between the auditorium and the
stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer she; I recog-
nized her only thanks to her eyes, in which her identity had taken
refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a mo-
ment ago, had vanished. On the other hand—as though we came
close to the moon and it ceased to present the appearance of a disk
of rosy gold—on this face, so smooth a surface until now, I could
distinguish only protuberances, blemishes, pockmarks. Despite
the incoherence into which were resolved at close range not only

Part One 189

 The Guermantes Way

300. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the feminine features but the painted backdrops, I was happy to
(1749–1832) was a German poet, play- be there to wander among the sets, all those surroundings that in
wright, and novelist. The first part of
his novel Wilhelm Meister, “Years of the past my love of nature had prompted me to dismiss as tedious
Apprenticeship,” is almost entirely and artificial, but to which Goethe’s depiction of them in Wilhelm
devoted to the hero’s vocation as an Meister300 had given a certain beauty in my eyes; and I had al-
actor.
301. Jean-­Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) ready observed with delight, in the thick of a crowd of journalists
left a number of red-­chalk sketches of or men of fashion, friends of the actresses, who were greeting one
actors, musicians, and various figures. another, talking, smoking, as though out on the town, a young
302. Proust is thinking of Charles
Baudelaire’s quatrain in Les Phares de- man in a black velvet cap and hortensia-­colored skirt, his cheeks
voted to Antoine Watteau: “Watteau, chalked in red like a page from a Watteau301 album, who with his
ce carnaval où bien des cœurs illus- smiling lips, his eyes raised to the ceiling, tracing graceful gestures
tres, / Comme des papillons, errent en
flamboyant, / Décors frais et légers with the palms of his hands, springing lightly into the air, seemed
éclairés par des lustres / Qui versent la so entirely of another species than the rational people in everyday
folie à ce bal tournoyant,” translated by clothes in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the
Richard Howard as “Festivities where
many famous hearts / flutter like moths course of his ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their
as they go up in flame, / the chande- life, so anterior to the habits of their civilization, so freed from the
liers in this enchanted glade / cast laws of nature, that it was as restful and refreshing a spectacle as
a madness on the minuet”; Charles
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Boston: watching a butterfly302 straying through a crowd to follow with
David R. Godine, 1982), 17. one’s eyes, between the drops, the natural arabesques traced by his
303. Vaslav Nijinsky (1890–1950), a winged, capricious, greasepainted cavorting.303 But at that very
Russian-­born ballet dancer and protégé
of Diaghilev’s, is probably the model moment Saint-­L oup imagined that his mistress was paying undue
here. attention to this dancer, who was engaged now in practicing for
the last time the dance figure with which he was going to take the
stage, and his face darkened.
“You might look the other way,” he warned her gloomily. “You
know that none of those dancers is worth the rope they would
do well to fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of
people who go about afterward boasting that you’ve taken notice
of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to
your dressing room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”
Three men—three journalists—noticing the look of fury on
Saint-­L oup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what we were
saying. And as the stagehands had just set up some scenery on our
other side we were forced into close contact with them.
“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-­L oup’s

190 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how well built he
is; just watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves
like his whole body!”
The dancer turned his head toward her, and his human person
appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavoring to be, the
clear gray jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelids
stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth in
a face plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the young woman, like
a singer who, to oblige us, hums the air of the song in which we
have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat the
movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the finesse of
a pasticheur and the good humor of a child.
“Oh, that’s too lovely, the way he mimics himself,” she cried,
clapping her hands.
“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-­L oup broke in, in a
tone of utter misery, “don’t make a spectacle of yourself, I can’t
stand it; I swear, if you say another word I won’t go with you to
your dressing room, I will walk straight out; come, don’t be so
cruel. You shouldn’t stand there in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll
make you ill,” he added, turning to me, with the solicitude he had
shown for me in our Balbec days.
“Oh! What happiness it would be if you did go.”
“I warn you, if I do, I won’t come back.”
“That’s more than I would dare to hope.”
“Listen; you know, I promised you the necklace if you were
nice to me, but the moment you treat me like this . . .”
“Ah! Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me
your promise; I ought to have known you’d never keep it. You
want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not
a money-­grubber like you. You can keep your damn necklace; I
know someone else who’ll give it to me.”
“No one else can possibly give it to you; I’ve told Boucheron
he’s to keep it for me, and I have his word not to sell it to anyone
else.”
“So that’s it, you intended to blackmail me, you’ve taken all

Part One 191

 The Guermantes Way

304. Rachel is citing an erroneous precautions in advance. That’s exactly what they say: Marsantes,
etymology of a Latinized name. As Mater Semita, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel, quoting an
Jacques Nathan observes, citing Jules
Quicherat: “Even if the etymology were etymology that was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for Se-
correct, the name would mean ‘prin- mita means “path” and not “Semite,”304 but one that the nation-
cipal path’ and not ‘Jewish mother.’” alists applied to Saint-­L oup on account of the Dreyfusard views
Proust was familiar with the work
by Jules Quicherat, De la formation for which, so far as that went, he was indebted to the actress. (She
française des anciens noms de lieux was less entitled than anyone to apply the word “Jew” to Mme
(Paris: Librairie A. Franck, 1867). See de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed
Jacques Nathan, Citations, références et
allusions de Marcel Proust dans À la re- in finding no trace of Jewishness apart from her kinship with the
cherche du temps perdu (Paris: Nizet, Lévy-­Mirepoix305 family.) “But this isn’t the last of it, you can be
1969), 107. sure of that. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You have acted
305. The usual spelling of the name of
this prominent family of Proust’s day is treacherously toward me. Boucheron will be told about it and he’ll
Lévis-­Mirepoix. be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before
306. The gesture used by the French to long; don’t you worry.”
indicate boredom is to move the back
of the hand back and forth against the Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circum-
cheek, imitating the motion made by stances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a
a barber. hundred times may have been once in the wrong. And I could not
help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent remark he
had made at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”
“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made
no formal promise. Once you start doing everything you possibly
can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I not give
it to you; I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that,
or that I am acting out of self-­interest. You can’t seriously main-
tain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m
only a poor devil without a sou to my name. It’s foolish of you
to take it that way, my dear. How am I self-­interested? You know
very well that my one interest in life is you.”
“Oh, yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the
sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor.306 And turning
toward the dancer:
“Ah! He’s really too wonderful with his hands. I’m a woman
and even I couldn’t do the things he’s doing now.” She went closer
to him and, pointing to Robert’s face convulsed with rage: “Look,
he’s hurt,” she murmured, in the momentary elation of a sadistic

192 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

impulse to cruelty totally out of keeping with her genuine feelings

of affection for Saint-­L oup.
“Listen, for the last time, I swear to you it won’t matter how
hard you try, in a week you’ll be giving anything to get me back, I
won’t come; I’ve had it up to here, watch what you do, it’s irrevo-
cable; you will be sorry one day, when it’s too late.”
Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving
his mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of re-
maining with her in certain circumstances.
“But, my dear boy,” he added, addressing me, “you shouldn’t
stand around here, I tell you, it will make you cough.”
I pointed to the scenery that barred my way. He touched his
hat and said to one of the journalists:
“Monsieur, would you mind throwing away your cigar? The
smoke is bad for my friend.”
His mistress, not waiting for him to accompany her, was on her
way to her dressing room, and turning around, from the back of
the stage, she called out to the dancer, in an artificially melodious
tone of girlish innocence:
“Do they do those tricks with women too, those nice little
hands? You look just like a woman yourself. I’m sure I could have
a wonderful time with you and a girl I know.”
“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of; if people aren’t
well, they should just stay at home,” said the journalist.
The dancer smiled mysteriously at the actress.
“Oh! Do stop! You’re driving me crazy,” she cried to him, “oh,
the things we’ll do!”
“In any case, Monsieur, you are not very civil,” said Saint-­L oup
to the journalist, still in a polite and courteous tone, with the air
of observation of someone judging retrospectively the rights and
wrongs of an incident that is already closed.
At that moment I saw Saint-­L oup raise his arm vertically above
his head as if he had been making a sign to someone whom I
could not see, or like the conductor of an orchestra, and indeed—
without any greater transition than when, at a simple wave of

Part One 193

 The Guermantes Way

307. Scott Moncrieff changed Proust’s the baton,307 in a symphony or a ballet, violent rhythms succeed
“simple movement of a [musical] bow” a graceful andante—after the courteous words that he had just
to the baton, influenced no doubt by
the presence of the word “conductor.” uttered, he brought down his hand with a resounding smack upon
308. Ex nihilo is a Latin phrase meaning the journalist’s cheek.
“from” or “out of nothing.” Now that to the measured conversations of the diplomats, to
309. Proust has forgotten that there are
only three and not four journalists. the smiling arts of peace had succeeded the furious outbreak of
war, since blows lead to blows, I would not have been surprised to
see the combatants swimming in one another’s blood. But what
I could not understand (like people who feel that it is not ac-
cording to the rules when a war breaks out between two countries
after some question merely of the rectification of a frontier, or
when a sick man dies after nothing more serious than a swelling
of the liver) was how Saint-­L oup had contrived to follow up those
words, which implied a distinct shade of friendliness, with a ges-
ture that in no way arose out of them, that they had not, so to
speak, announced, the gesture of that arm raised in defiance not
only of the rights of man but of the law of cause and effect, in a
spontaneous generation of anger, that gesture created ex nihilo.308
Fortunately the journalist who, staggering back from the violence
of the blow, had turned pale and hesitated for a moment, did
not retaliate. As for his friends, one of them had promptly turned
away his head and was looking fixedly into the wings at someone
who evidently was not there; the second pretended that a speck
of dust had got into his eye, and began rubbing and squeezing
his eyelid with every sign of being in pain; while the third309 had
rushed off, exclaiming:
“Good heavens, I believe the curtain’s going up; we won’t get
into our seats.”
I wanted to speak to Saint-­L oup, but he was so full of his in-
dignation with the dancer that it adhered exactly to the surface of
his eyeballs; like a subcutaneous structure it distended his cheeks
with the result that, his internal agitation expressing itself exter-
nally in a complete immobility, he had not even the power of
relaxation, the “play” necessary to take in a word from me and
to answer it. The journalist’s friends, seeing that the incident had

194 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

ended, gathered around him again, still trembling. But, ashamed 310. See Swann’s Way, 461.
of having deserted him, they were absolutely determined that
he should be made to suppose that they had noticed nothing.
And so they expanded, one upon the speck of dust in his eye, one
upon his false alarm when he had thought that the curtain was
going up, the third upon the astonishing resemblance between a
man who had just gone by and the speaker’s brother. Indeed they
seemed quite to resent their friend’s not having shared their sev-
eral emotions.
“What, didn’t it strike you? You must be going blind.”
“What I say is that you’re a bunch of cowards,” growled the
journalist who had been slapped.
Forgetting the fictions they had adopted, to be consistent with
which they ought—but they did not think of it—to have pre-
tended not to understand what he meant, they fell back on cer-
tain expressions traditional in the circumstances: “What’s all the
excitement? Don’t fly off the handle. Don’t get carried away.”
I had realized that morning, beneath the pear trees in bloom,
how illusory were the grounds upon which Robert’s love for
“Rachel when from the Lord” was based. I was no less aware, on
the other hand, of how very real was the pain to which that love
gave rise. Gradually the pain that he had suffered for the last hour,
without abating, diminished, receded into him, and a free and
supple zone appeared in his eyes. Saint-­L oup and I left the the-
ater and walked for a while. I had stopped for a moment at a
corner of the avenue Gabriel from which I had often in the past
seen Gilberte appear.310 I tried for a few seconds to recall those
distant impressions, and was hurrying at a jogging pace to over-
take Saint-­L oup when I saw that a man, somewhat shabbily at-
tired, appeared to be talking to him confidentially. I concluded
that this was a personal friend of Robert; meanwhile, they seemed
to be drawing even closer to one another; suddenly, as an astral
phenomenon flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid
bodies assume with a giddy swiftness all the positions necessary
for them to compose, in front of Saint-­L oup, a flickering constel-

Part One 195

 The Guermantes Way

lation. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to

number at the very least seven. They were merely, however, Saint-­
Loup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were
changing their places in this—to all appearance ideal and deco-
rative—arrangement. But this bit of fireworks was nothing more
than a pummeling that Saint-­L oup was administering, the aggres-
sive rather than esthetic character of which was first revealed to
me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed man who appeared to be
losing at once his self-­possession, his lower jaw, and a lot of blood.
He gave mendacious explanations to the people who came up to
question him, turned his head, and, seeing that Saint-­L oup had
made off and was hastening to rejoin me, stood gazing after him
with an offended, crushed, but by no means furious expression
on his face. Saint-­L oup, on the other hand, was furious, although
he himself had received no blow, and his eyes were still blazing
with anger when he reached me. The incident was in no way con-
nected (as I had supposed) with the assault in the theater. It was
an impassioned loiterer who, seeing the handsome young soldier
that Saint-­L oup was, had propositioned him. My friend could not
get over the audacity of this “clique” who no longer even waited
for the shades of night to venture forth, and spoke of the propo-
sition that had been made to him with the same indignation that
the newspapers use in reporting an armed assault and robbery in
broad daylight in the center of Paris. And yet the recipient of his
blows was excusable in one respect, for the trend of the down-
ward slope brings desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that
beauty by itself appears to imply consent. Now, that Saint-­L oup
was beautiful was beyond dispute. Castigation such as he had just
administered has this value, for men of the type that had accosted
him, that it makes them think seriously of their conduct, though
never for long enough to enable them to mend their ways and
thus escape correction at the hands of the law. And so, although
Saint-­L oup had given his thrashing, without much preliminary
thought, all such punishments, even when they reinforce the law,
are powerless to bring about any uniformity in morals.

196 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

These incidents, particularly the one that was weighing most on 311. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
his mind, seemed to have prompted in Robert a desire to be left Flower, 40.

alone for a while. After a moment’s silence he asked me to leave

him, and to go by myself to call on Mme de Villeparisis. He would
join me there, but preferred that we not enter the room together,
so that he might appear to have only just arrived in Paris, instead
of having spent half the day already with me.
As I had supposed before making the acquaintance of Mme
de Villeparisis at Balbec, there was a vast difference between the
world in which she lived and that of Mme de Guermantes. Mme
de Villeparisis was one of those women who, born of an illustrious
house, entering by marriage into another no less illustrious, do
not for all that enjoy any great position in the social world, and,
apart from a few duchesses who are their nieces or sisters-­in-­law,
perhaps even a crowned head or two, old family friends, see their
drawing rooms filled only by third-­rate people, drawn from the
middle classes or from a nobility either provincial or tainted in
some way, whose presence there has long since driven away the
fashionable and snobbish folk who are not obliged to come to
the house by ties of blood or the claims of a friendship too old to
be ignored. Certainly I had no difficulty after the first few min-
utes in understanding how Mme de Villeparisis, at Balbec, had
come to be so well informed, better than ourselves even, as to
the smallest details of the tour through Spain that my father was
then making with M. de Norpois.311 Even this, however, did not
make it possible to rest content with the theory that the liaison—
of more than twenty years’ standing—between Mme de Villepa-
risis and the ambassador could have been responsible for the mar-
quise’s loss of caste in a world where the most captivating women
boasted the attachment of lovers far less respectable than he, not
to mention that it was probably years since he had been anything
more to the marquise than an old friend. Had Mme de Villepa-
risis then had other adventures in days gone by? Being then of
a more passionate temperament than now, in a calm and pious
old age, which nevertheless owed some of its mellow coloring to

Part One 197

 The Guermantes Way

312. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in those ardent, vanished years, had she somehow failed, in the prov-
Flower, 314–15. ince where she had lived for so long, to avoid certain scandals un-
known to the younger generation who simply took note of their
effect in the mixed and defective composition of a visiting list
bound, otherwise, to have been among the purest of any taint of
mediocrity? The “sharp tongue” that her nephew ascribed to her,
had it in those far-­off days made her enemies? Had it driven her
into taking advantage of certain successes with men in order to
avenge herself upon women? All this was possible; nor could the
exquisitely sensitive way in which—giving so delicate a shade not
merely to her words but to her intonation—Mme de Villeparisis
spoke of modesty or kindness be held to invalidate this supposi-
tion; for the people who not only speak with approval of certain
virtues but actually feel their charm and show a marvelous com-
prehension of them (people who will, when they write their mem-
oirs, present a worthy picture of those virtues) are often sprung
from but not actually part of the silent, simple, and artless gen-
eration that practiced them. That generation is reflected in them
but not continued in them. Instead of the character that it pos-
sessed we find a sensibility, an intelligence that are not conducive
to action. And whether or not there had been in the life of Mme
de Villeparisis any of those scandals that the luster of her name
would have effaced, it was this intelligence, an intelligence resem-
bling rather that of a second-­rate writer than that of a woman of
fashion, that was undoubtedly the cause of her social decline.
It is true that the qualities, such as balance and restraint, that
Mme de Villeparisis chiefly extolled, were not especially exalting;
but to speak of restraint in a manner that will be entirely adequate,
restraint is not enough, we require some of the qualities of writers
that presuppose a quite unrestrained exaltation; I had noticed at
Balbec that the genius of certain great artists was completely in-
comprehensible to Mme de Villeparisis,312 and that all she could
do was make delicate fun of them and express her incomprehen-
sion in a graceful and witty manner. But this wit and grace, at
the point to which she carried them, became themselves—on an-

198 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

other plane, and even although they were employed to belittle 313. The model here may be the Com-
the noblest masterpieces—true artistic qualities. Now the effect tesse de Boigne (1781–1866), author of
Récits d’une tante, published in 1907.
of such qualities on any social position is a morbid activity of the
kind that doctors call elective, and so disintegrating that the most
firmly established pillars of society are hard put to resist it for any
length of time. What artists call intelligence seems pure presump-
tion to fashionable people who, incapable of placing themselves at
the sole point of view from which they, the artists, judge things,
incapable of understanding the particular attraction to which they
yield when they choose an expression or make a comparison, feel
in their company an exhaustion, an irritation, from which an-
tipathy very quickly springs. And yet in her conversation, and the
same may be said of the Mémoires that she afterward published,313
Mme de Villeparisis showed nothing but a sort of gracefulness that
was eminently social. Having passed by great works without ex-
amining them more thoroughly, without even noticing them, she
had retained from the period in which she had lived and which,
moreover, she described with great aptness and charm, little more
than the most frivolous things that it had had to offer. But a book
of this sort, even if it treats exclusively of subjects that are not
intellectual, is still a work of the intelligence, and to give in a book
or in conversation, which is almost the same thing, a perfect im-
pression of frivolity, a serious touch is required that a purely frivo-
lous person would be incapable of supplying. In certain memoirs
written by a woman and regarded as a masterpiece, the sentences
that people quote as a model of airy grace have always made me
suspect that, in order to arrive at such a pitch of lightness, the
author must originally have had a rather stodgy education, a re-
barbative culture, and that as a girl she probably appeared to her
friends an insufferable bluestocking. And between certain literary
qualities and lack of social success the connection is so inevitable
that when we open Mme de Villeparisis’s Mémoires today, on any
page a fitting epithet, a sequence of metaphors will suffice to en-
able the reader to reconstruct the deep but icy bow that must have
been bestowed on the old marquise on the staircase of an embassy

Part One 199

 The Guermantes Way

by a snob like Mme Leroi, who perhaps may have left a card on
her when she went to call on the Guermantes, but never set foot
in her house for fear of losing caste among all the doctors’ or law-
yers’ wives whom she would find there. A bluestocking Mme de
Villeparisis had perhaps been in her earliest youth, and, intoxi-
cated with her own knowledge, had perhaps failed to realize the
importance of not applying to people in society, less intelligent
and less educated than herself, those barbs of wit that the injured
party never forgets.
Moreover, talent is not a separate appendage that one artifi-
cially attaches to those different qualities that make for social suc-
cess, in order to create from the whole what people in society call
a “complete woman.” It is the living product of a certain moral
constitution, from which as a rule many qualities are lacking and
in which there predominates a sensibility of which other mani-
festations that we do not notice in a book may make themselves
quite distinctly felt in the course of a life, certain curiosities, for
instance, certain whims, the desire to go to this place or that for
one’s own amusement and not with a view to the extension, the
maintenance, or even the mere exercise of one’s social relations. I
had seen at Balbec Mme de Villeparisis hemmed in by her own
servants and not even glancing, as she passed, at the people sitting
in the lobby of the hotel. But I had had a presentiment that this
abstention was due not to indifference, and it seemed that she had
not always confined herself to it. She would get a sudden craze to
know someone or other who lacked the status to be received in
her house because she had seen him and thought him handsome,
or merely because she had been told that he was amusing, or be-
cause he had struck her as different from the people she knew,
who at this period, when she had not yet begun to appreciate
them because she imagined that they would never abandon her,
belonged, all of them, to the purest cream of the Faubourg Saint-­
Germain. To the bohemian, to the petit bourgeois whom she had
marked out with her favor, she was obliged to address invitations
the value of which he was unable to appreciate, with an insistence

200 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

that gradually depreciated her in the eyes of the snobs who were
in the habit of rating a salon by the people whom its mistress ex-
cluded rather than by those whom she entertained. Certainly, if at
a given moment in her youth Mme de Villeparisis, surfeited with
the satisfaction of belonging to the fine flower of the aristocracy,
had found a sort of amusement in scandalizing the people among
whom she lived, and in deliberately impairing her own position in
society, she had begun to attach importance to that position once
she had lost it. She had wished to show the duchesses that she
was better than they, by saying and doing all the things that they
dared not say or do. But now that they all, except those who were
closely related to her, had ceased to call, she felt herself dimin-
ished, and sought once more to reign, but with another scepter
than that of wit. She would have liked to attract to her house all
those women whom she had taken such pains to drive away. How
many women’s lives, lives of which little enough is known (for we
all live in different worlds according to our ages, and the discretion
of their elders prevents the young from forming any clear idea of
the past and so understanding the whole cycle), have been divided
in this way into contrasted periods, the last being entirely devoted
to the reconquest of what in the second had been so lightheart-
edly flung to the wind! Flung to the wind in what way? The young
people are all the less capable of imagining it, since they see be-
fore them an elderly and respectable Marquise de Villeparisis and
have no idea that the grave memorialist of today, so dignified be-
neath her pile of snowy hair, can ever have been a merry midnight
reveler who was perhaps the delight in those days, who perhaps
devoured the fortunes of men now sleeping in their graves. That
she should also have set to work, with a persevering and natural
industry, to destroy the position that she owed to her high birth
does not in the least imply that even at that remote period Mme
de Villeparisis did not attach great importance to her position. In
the same way the web of isolation, of inactivity in which a neuras-
thenic lives may be woven by him from morning to night without
thereby seeming endurable, and while he is hastening to add an-

Part One 201

 The Guermantes Way

314. Marie-­Amélie de Bourbon (1782– other mesh to the net that holds him captive, it is possible that
1866), daughter of Ferdinand IV, King he is dreaming only of dancing, sport, and travel. We are at work
of the Two Sicilies, was the wife of
Louis-­Philippe I, King of France. every moment to give our life its form, but we do so by copying
315. The Conservatoire National de Mu- unintentionally, like a drawing, the features of the person that we
sique et de Déclamation, founded in are and not of him who we would like to be. The disdainful bows
1784 to train singers and actors for the
national stage, was located at 15, rue of Mme Leroi might to some extent be expressive of the true na-
du Faubourg-­Poissonnière. In 1911, it ture of Mme de Villeparisis; they in no way corresponded to her
moved to the rue de Madrid. ambition.
No doubt at the same moment in which Mme Leroi was—
to use an expression dear to Mme Swann—“cutting” the mar-
quise, the latter could seek consolation in remembering how
Queen Marie-­Amélie314 had once said to her: “You are just like
a daughter to me.” But such marks of royal friendship, secret and
unknown to the world, existed for the marquise alone, as dusty
as the diploma of an old Conservatoire315 medalist. The only real
social advantages are those that create life, that can disappear
without the person who has benefited by them needing to try to
retain them or to make them public, because on the same day a
hundred others will take their place. And for all that she might re-
member the queen’s using those words to her, she would neverthe-
less have bartered them gladly for the permanent faculty of being
invited everywhere that Mme Leroi possessed, as in a restaurant
a great but unknown artist whose genius is written neither in the
lines of his shy face nor in the antiquated cut of his threadbare
coat, would willingly be even the young stockbroker of the lowest
grade of society, who is having lunch with a couple of actresses at
a neighboring table to which in an obsequious and incessant chain
come hurrying owner, headwaiter, waiters, bellhops, and even the
scullions who file out of the kitchen to salute him, as in the fairy
tales, while the sommelier advances, as dust-­covered as his bottles,
limping and dazed, as if on his way up from the cellar he had
twisted his foot before emerging into the light of day.
It must be remarked, however, that in Mme de Villeparisis’s
drawing room the absence of Mme Leroi, if it distressed the lady
of the house, passed unperceived by the majority of her guests.

202 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

They were entirely ignorant of the particular position that Mme 316. François Ferdinand Philippe d’Or-
Leroi occupied, a position known only to the fashionable world, léans, Prince de Joinville (1818–1900),
was one of the eight children of Louis-­
and never doubted that Mme de Villeparisis’s receptions were, as Philippe and Marie-­Amélie de Bourbon.
the readers of her Mémoires today are convinced that they must 317. Elisabeth de Wittelsbach (1837–
have been, the most brilliant in Paris. 98), who married Franz Joseph, Em-
peror of Austria, in 1854, was assassi-
On the occasion of this first visit, which, after leaving Saint-­ nated in Geneva in 1898 by an Italian
Loup, I went to pay on Mme de Villeparisis, following the advice anarchist. She was the sister of Louise-­
given by M. de Norpois to my father, I found her in her drawing Marie d’Orléans and the daughter of
Marie-­Amélie.
room hung with yellow silk, against which the sofas and the admi- 318. Marie-­Félice Orsini, called des
rable armchairs upholstered in Beauvais tapestry stood out with Ursins (1601–66), wife of Henri II, Duc
the almost purple redness of ripe raspberries. Next to the Guer- de Montmorency, who was decapitated
at Toulouse in 1632 for having sided
mantes and Villeparisis portraits, one saw those—gifts from the with Gaston d’Orléans against Louis
sitters themselves—of Queen Marie-­Amélie, the Queen of the XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. In 1634,
Belgians, the Prince de Joinville,316 and the Empress of Austria.317 she retired to the convent of the Visi-
tation Sisters that she had founded at
Mme de Villeparisis herself, capped with an old-­fashioned bonnet Moulins. Proust makes her an ancestor
of black lace (which she preserved with the same shrewd instinct of the fictitious Mme de Villeparisis.
for local or historical color as a Breton innkeeper who, however
Parisian his clientele may have become, feels it more adroit to
make his maids dress in coifs and wide sleeves), was seated at a
little desk on which in front of her, as well as her brushes, her
palette, and an unfinished flower study in watercolor, were ar-
ranged in glasses, in saucers, and in cups, moss roses, zinnias,
maidenhair ferns, which on account of the sudden influx of callers
she had just stopped painting, and which had the effect of being
piled on a florist’s counter in some eighteenth-­century print. In
this drawing room, which had been slightly heated on purpose be-
cause the marquise had caught a cold on the journey from her châ-
teau, there were already, among those present when I arrived, an
archivist with whom Mme de Villeparisis had spent the morning
in selecting the autograph letters to herself from various historical
personages, letters that would figure in facsimile as documentary
evidence in the Mémoires that she was preparing for the press,
and a historian, solemn and tongue-­tied, who hearing that she
had inherited and still possessed a portrait of the Duchesse de
Montmorency,318 had come to ask her permission to reproduce

Part One 203

 The Guermantes Way

319. A fronde is a kind of slingshot it as a plate in his work on the Fronde;319 these guests were pres-
that became the name of two revolts ently joined by my old schoolmate Bloch, now a rising playwright
against the absolutism of the crown
during the minority of Louis XIV. The on whom the marquise counted to secure the gratuitous services
conflicts took place between the court of actors and actresses at her next series of afternoon parties. It
led by Anne d’Autriche and Cardinal was true that the social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning
Mazarin and the parliament.
320. Salaam, whose literal meaning and that the Dreyfus Affair was shortly to hurl the Jews down
in Arabic is “peace,” is a salutation or to the lowest rung of the social ladder. But for one thing, the
ceremonial greeting in the East. anti-­Dreyfus cyclone might rage as it would, it is not in the first
321. Mascarille is a comic character
created by Molière. This valet, a boon hour of a tempest that the waves are highest. In the second place,
companion who is also scheming and Mme de Villeparisis, leaving a whole section of her family to ful-
impudent, appears in L’Étourdi, Le minate against the Jews, had hitherto kept herself entirely aloof
Dépit amoureux, and Les Précieuses ridi-
cules. from the Affair and never gave it a thought. Lastly, a young man
322. Solomon, King of Israel, lived like Bloch, whom no one knew, might pass unperceived, whereas
c. 970–­c. 931 b.c. The story of leading Jews, representatives of their camp, were already threat-
Solomon’s founding of the temple in
Jerusalem is told in the first book of ened. He had his chin pointed now by a goatee, wore a pince-­nez
Kings. and a long frock coat, and carried a glove like a roll of papyrus in
323. Alexandre-­Gabriel Decamps his hand. The Romanians, the Egyptians, the Turks may hate the
(1803–60), a painter whose specialty
was Orientalism, is known for his Jews. But in a French drawing room the differences between those
Turkish scenes. With Eugène Delacroix, peoples are not so apparent, and a Jew making his entry as though
Decamps was one of the most promi- he were emerging from the heart of the desert, his body crouching
nent representatives of Romantic Ori-
entalism. like a hyena’s, his neck thrust obliquely forward, spreading him-
self in profound “salaams,”320 completely satisfies a certain taste
for the Oriental. Only it is essential that the Jew should not be
actually “in” society, otherwise he will readily assume the aspect
of a lord and his manners become so Gallicized that on his face
a rebellious nose, growing like a nasturtium in any but the right
direction, will make one think rather of Mascarille’s321 nose than
of Solomon’s.322 But Bloch, not having been rendered supple by
the gymnastics of the Faubourg, nor ennobled by a crossing with
England or Spain, remained for a lover of the exotic as strange and
savory a spectacle, in spite of his European costume, as one of De-
camps’s Jews.323 Marvelous racial power that from the dawn of
time thrusts to the surface, even in modern Paris, in the corridors
of our theaters, behind the desks of our public offices, at a funeral,
in the street, a solid phalanx, setting their mark on our modern

204 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

ways of hairdressing, absorbing, making us forget, disciplining the 324. Darius I, called the Great (550–
frock coat which on them remains not at all unlike the garment 486 b.c.), King of Persia 522–486, built
a palace at Susa whose façade was
in which Assyrian scribes are depicted in ceremonial attire on the decorated with bas-­reliefs representing
frieze of a monument at Susa defending the gates of the Palace of not Assyrians, whose empire no longer
Darius.324 (An hour later, Bloch was to imagine that it was out of existed at the time of the construction,
but Achaemenid warriors. The Louvre
anti-­Semitic malice that M. de Charlus inquired whether his first has friezes of the archers dressed in
name was Jewish, whereas it was simply from esthetic interest and long yellow and green robes.
love of local color.) But moreover, when we speak of racial persis- 325. The woman Proust most likely
had in mind was Princess Soutzo, née
tence we do not accurately convey the impression we receive from Hélène Chrissoveloni (1879–1975), the
the Jews, the Greeks, the Persians, all those peoples whose variety beautiful daughter of a wealthy Greek
it is better to maintain. We know from classical paintings the faces banker. Proust met her in 1917 through
her lover, and later husband, Paul Mo-
of the ancient Greeks, we have seen Assyrians on the walls of a rand.
palace at Susa. And so we feel, on encountering in a Paris drawing
room Orientals belonging to one or another group, that we are in
the presence of creatures whom the forces of necromancy must
have called to life. We knew hitherto only a superficial image;
behold, it has gained depth, it extends into three dimensions, it
moves. The young Greek lady,325 daughter of a rich banker and
the latest favorite of society, looks exactly like one of those dancers
who in a corps de ballet at once historical and esthetic symbolize
in flesh and blood Hellenic art; and yet in the theater the setting
makes these images somehow trite; the spectacle, on the other
hand, to which the entry into a drawing room of a Turkish lady or
a Jewish gentleman admits us, by animating their features makes
them appear stranger still, as if they really were creatures evoked
by the effort of a medium. It is the soul (or rather the pigmy thing
to which—up to the present, at any rate—the soul is reduced
in this sort of materialization), it is the soul of which we have
caught glimpses hitherto in museums alone, the soul of the an-
cient Greeks, of the ancient Hebrews, torn from a life at once
insignificant and transcendental, which seems to be enacting be-
fore our eyes this disconcerting pantomime. In the young Greek
lady who is leaving the room, what we seek in vain to embrace
is the figure admired long ago on the side of a vase. I felt that if
I had in the light of Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing room taken

Part One 205

 The Guermantes Way

326. This is a type of photography that photographs of Bloch, they would have furnished of Israel the
attempts to capture images of ghosts. same image—so disturbing because it does not appear to emanate
It dates to the late nineteenth century.
327. In such a séance, the participants from humanity, so deceptive because nonetheless it resembles
sit around a table, place their hands on humanity too strongly—that we find in spirit photographs.326
it, and wait for rotations as a means There is nothing, to speak more generally, not even the insignifi-
of communicating with the spirits of
the dead. cance of the remarks made by the people among whom we spend
328. Élie, Duc Decazes (1780–1860), our lives, that does not give us a sense of the supernatural, in our
became minister of the interior in 1819. poor everyday world where even a man of genius from whom we
His constitutional ministry was discred-
ited when the Duc de Berry, nephew of expect, gathered as though around a turning-­table,327 to learn the
Louis XVIII, was assassinated by a ter- secret of the infinite, utters only these words—the same that had
rorist as he left the Opéra on February just issued from the lips of Bloch: “Be careful with my top hat.”
13, 1820. A more authoritarian policy
was demanded, and Decazes was “Oh, ministers, my dear Monsieur,” Mme de Villeparisis was
forced to resign. saying, addressing herself specially to my friend, and picking
329. Marie-­Caroline Ferdinande Louise up the thread of a conversation that had been broken by my ar-
de Bourbon, Princesse des Deux-­Siciles
(1798–1870), Duchesse de Berry by rival: “nobody ever wanted to see them. I was only a child at the
marriage, in 1816, to Charles Ferdinand time, but I can remember so well the king begging my grand-
d’Artois (1778–1820). father to invite M. Decazes328 to a rout at which my father was
330. Armand Charles Augustin de Cas-
tries (1756–1842) was a peer of France to dance with the Duchesse de Berry.329 ‘It will give me pleasure,
and hereditary duke in 1814. Florimond,’ said the king. My grandfather, who was a little deaf,
331. For Vigny’s reception at the Aca- thought he had said M. de Castries,330 which seemed a perfectly
démie, see In the Shadow of Young Girls
in Flower, 328 and note 139. natural thing to ask. When he understood that it was M. De-
cazes, he was furious at first, but he gave in, and wrote the same
evening to M. Decazes, begging him to pay my grandfather the
compliment and give him the honor of his presence at the ball
that he was giving the following week. For we were polite, Mon-
sieur, in those days, and no hostess would have dreamed of simply
sending her card and writing on it ‘Tea’ or ‘Dancing’ or ‘Music.’
But if we understood politeness we were not incapable of imper-
tinence either. M. Decazes accepted, but the day before the ball
it was given out that my grandfather felt indisposed and had can-
celed his invitations. He had obeyed the king, but he had not had
M. Decazes at his ball. . . . Yes, Monsieur, I remember M. Molé
very well, he was a clever man—he showed that in his reception of
M. de Vigny331 at the Académie—but he was very pompous, and

206 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

I can see him now coming downstairs to dinner in his own house 332. Molière, in his play Le Mariage
with his top hat in his hand.” forcé, has Pancrace, the Aristotelian
philosopher, say in act 1, scene 4, that
“Ah! That is very evocative of what must have been a pretty per- according to Aristotle, since a hat is
niciously philistine epoch, for it was no doubt a universal habit to an inanimate body, one should speak
carry one’s hat in one’s hand in one’s own house,” observed Bloch, of the figure of a hat and not the form,
which should be used for animated
eager to make the most of so rare an opportunity of learning from bodies.
an eyewitness details of the aristocratic life of another day, while 333. Such an automaton is found in
the archivist, who was a sort of intermittent secretary to the mar- The Invisible Man (1897) by H. G. Wells
(1866–1946). The novel was translated
quise, gazed at her tenderly as though he were saying to the rest into French as L’Homme invisible in
of us: “There, you see what she’s like, she knows everything, she 1901. The hero, Griffin, puts on a frock
has met everybody, you can ask her anything you like, she’s quite coat in order to appear ordinary and be
able to mingle with other men. Proust
amazing.” has simply “a man in Wells.”
“Oh, dear, no,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, drawing nearer to
herself, as she spoke, the glass containing the maidenhair that pres-
ently she would begin again to paint, “it was a habit of M. Molé;
that was all. I never saw my father carry his hat in the house, ex-
cept of course when the king came, because the king being at
home wherever he is, the master of the house is then only a visitor
in his own drawing room.”
“Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of . . .”332 ventured
M. Pierre, the historian of the Fronde, but so timidly that no one
paid any attention. Having been suffering for some weeks from
a nervous insomnia that resisted every attempt at treatment, he
had given up going to bed, and, half-­dead with exhaustion, went
out only whenever his work made it imperative. Incapable of re-
peating at all often these expeditions, which, simple enough for
other people, cost him as much effort as if, to make them, he was
obliged to come down from the moon, he was surprised to be
brought up so frequently against the fact that other people’s lives
were not organized on a constant and permanent basis so as to fur-
nish the maximum utility to the sudden outbursts of his own. He
sometimes found shut the doors of a library that he had reached
only after planting himself artificially on his feet and in a frock
coat like some automaton in a story by Mr. Wells.333 Fortunately

Part One 207

 The Guermantes Way

334. Princess Sophie of Nassau (1836– he had found Mme de Villeparisis at home and was going to be
1913) in 1857 married Oscar of Sweden shown the portrait.
(1829–1907), who became in 1872 the
King of Sweden and Norway under the Meanwhile, he was cut short by Bloch. “Indeed,” the latter re-
name of Oscar II. marked, referring to what Mme de Villeparisis had said as to the
etiquette for royal visits. “Do you know, I never knew that,” as
though it were strange that he should not have known it always.
“Speaking of that sort of visit, did you hear about the stupid
joke my nephew Basin played on me yesterday morning?” Mme
de Villeparisis asked the archivist. “He told my servants, instead of
announcing him, to say that it was the Queen of Sweden334 who
had called to see me.”
“What! He made them tell you just like that! I say, he must
have a nerve!” exclaimed Bloch with a shout of laughter, while the
historian smiled with a stately timidity.
“I was quite surprised, because I had only been back from the
country a few days; I had asked, so as to be left in peace for a little,
that no one was to be told that I was in Paris, and I asked myself
how the Queen of Sweden could have heard so soon,” went on
Mme de Villeparisis, leaving her guests amazed to find that a visit
from the Queen of Sweden was in itself nothing out of the ordi-
nary to their hostess.
It was true that if earlier in the day Mme de Villeparisis had
been consulting the archivist about the documentation of her Mé-
moires, now she was quite unconsciously trying their effect on an
average audience representative of that from which she would
eventually have to recruit her readers. Mme de Villeparisis’s salon
might be different in many ways from a really fashionable salon
in which you would have been struck by the absence of many
of the bourgeois ladies whom she received and where one would
have noticed instead such brilliant ladies of fashion as Mme Leroi
had in the course of time managed to secure, but this distinction
is not perceptible in her Mémoires, from which certain mediocre
connections of the author have disappeared because there is no
occasion to refer to them; while the absence of those ladies who
did not come to see her leaves no gap because, in the necessarily

208 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

restricted space at the author’s disposal, only a few persons can 335. Achille-­Charles-­Léonce-­Victor,
appear, and if these persons are royal personages, historic person- Duc de Broglie (1785–1870), was a
statesman and diplomat who held im-
alities, then the maximum impression of elegance that any volume portant government posts under Napo-
of memoirs can convey to the public is achieved. In the opinion léon I and later during the Restoration.
of Mme Leroi, Mme de Villeparisis’s salon was a third-­rate salon; 336. Louis-­Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877)
was a journalist, historian, and political
and Mme de Villeparisis felt the sting of Mme Leroi’s opinion. figure who led the liberal opposition
But hardly anyone today remembers who Mme Leroi was, her during the Second Empire. After the
opinions have vanished into thin air, and it is the salon of Mme de Commune, he became, in 1871, the first
president of the Third Republic. He
Villeparisis, frequented as it was by the Queen of Sweden, and as wrote Histoire de la Révolution and His-
it had been by the Duc d’Aumale, the Duc de Broglie,335 Thiers,336 toire du Consulat et de l’Empire.
Montalembert,337 Mgr. Dupanloup,338 that will be considered one 337. Charles Forbes de Tryon, Comte de
Montalembert (1810–70), publicist and
of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by the posterity political figure, was an ardent defender
that has not changed since the days of Homer339 and Pindar,340 of the liberal Catholics.
and for which the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-­ 338. Félix Dupanloup (1802–78), Bishop
of Orléans, député in 1871, senator in
royal, and the friendship of kings, the leaders of the people, and 1876, is the author of numerous reli-
other eminent men. gious works. He was a member of the
Now of all this Mme de Villeparisis had her share in her present Académie Française. He suggested
reforms in the education of young
salon and in the memories—sometimes slightly touched up—by women.
means of which she extended her social activity into the past. And 339. Homer, the most famous of the
then there was M. de Norpois, who, while unable to restore his ancient Greek epic poets, is the author
of The Iliad and The Odyssey. His heroes
friend to any substantial position in society, did indeed bring to often boast about their genealogical
her house such foreign or French statesmen who needed his ser- pedigrees.
vices and knew that the only effective method of securing them 340. The Epinikia (victory odes) of
Pindar (c. 518–438 b.c.) celebrate the
was to pay court to Mme de Villeparisis. Possibly Mme Leroi victors in athletic competitions, who
also knew these eminent European personalities. But as an agree- are for the most part princes or mem-
able woman who avoids anything that suggests the bluestocking, bers of leading families, as the odes
make clear by recalling their more or
she would as little have thought of mentioning the Eastern ques- less legendary lineages.
tion341 to her prime ministers as of discussing the nature of love 341. At the beginning of the nineteenth
with her novelists and philosophers. “Love?” she had once replied century the “question d’Orient” asked
whether or not Europe should preserve
to a pretentious lady who had asked her: “What are your views the integrity of the Ottoman Empire or
on love?” “Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”342 let it disintegrate.
When she had any of these literary or political lions in her house 342. In a letter written in 1893, when
he was twenty-­one, Proust quotes this
she contented herself, as did the Duchesse de Guermantes, with remark as having been made by a lady
setting them down to play poker. They often preferred this to the of the aristocracy. See Correspondance
serious conversations on general ideas in which Mme de Villepa- 1: 201.

Part One 209

 The Guermantes Way

risis forced them to engage. But these conversations, ridiculous

perhaps in the social sense, have furnished the Mémoires of Mme
de Villeparisis with those admirable passages, those dissertations
on politics that read so well in volumes of autobiography as they
do in Corneille’s tragedies. Furthermore, the salons of the Mmes
de Villeparisis of this world are alone destined to be handed down
to posterity, because the Mmes Leroi of this world cannot write,
and, if they could, would not have the time. And if the literary
dispositions of the Mmes de Villeparisis are the cause of the dis-
dain of the Mmes Leroi, the disdain of the Mmes Leroi does, in
its turn, a singular service to the literary dispositions of the Mmes
de Villeparisis by affording the bluestocking ladies the leisure
that the career of letters requires. God, whose will it is that there
should be a few well-­written books in the world, breathes with
that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the Mmes Leroi, for
He knows that if these should invite the Mmes de Villeparisis to
dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and
order their carriages to be brought around at eight.
Presently there came into the room, with slow and solemn step,
an old lady of tall stature who, beneath the raised brim of her
straw hat, revealed a monumental pile of white hair in the style of
Marie-­Antoinette. I did not then know that she was one of three
women who were still to be seen in Parisian society and who, like
Mme de Villeparisis, while all of the noblest birth, had been re-
duced, for reasons that were lost in the mists of time and could
have been told us only by some old gallant of their period, to enter-
taining only certain of the dregs of society who were not sought
after elsewhere. Each of these ladies had her own “Duchesse de
Guermantes,” the brilliant niece who came regularly to pay her re-
spects, but none of them could have succeeded in attracting to her
house the “Duchesse de Guermantes” of either of the others. Mme
de Villeparisis was on the best of terms with these three ladies, but
she did not like them. Perhaps the similarity between their social
position and her own gave her an impression of them that was not
pleasing. Besides, soured bluestockings as they were, seeking, by

210 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

the number and frequency of the drawing room comedies that 343. Princesse-­duchesse de Poix, née
they arranged in their houses, to give themselves the illusion of a Madeleine du Bois de Courval (1870–
1944), was the widow of François
regular salon, there had grown up among them a rivalry that the Joseph Eugène Napoléon de Noailles
decay of their wealth, in the course of a somewhat tempestuous (1866–1900).
existence, by forcing each of them to be frugal, to take advan- 344. The quai Malaquais, which dates
from 1552, is in the sixth arrondisse-
tage of the performance of a professional actor or actress free of ment and runs from the rue de Seine
charge, transformed into a sort of struggle for life. Furthermore, to the rue des Saints-­Pères.
the lady with the Marie-­Antoinette coiffure, whenever she set eyes 345. The rue de Tournon, in the sixth
arrondissement, runs from the rue
on Mme de Villeparisis, could not help being reminded of the fact Saint-­Sulpice to the rue de Vaugirard.
that the Duchesse de Guermantes did not come to her Fridays. In 1541, it was named after the Cardinal
Her consolation was that at these same Fridays she could always de Tournon, abbot of Saint-­Germain-­
des-­Prés in 1530. The street is lined
count on having, blood being thicker than water, the Princesse de with historic hotels.
Poix,343 who was her own personal Guermantes, and who never 346. The rue de la Chaise, which dates
went near Mme de Villeparisis, albeit Mme de Poix was an inti- from 1588, is in the seventh arrondisse-
ment and runs from the rue de Gre-
mate friend of the duchess. nelle to the boulevard Raspail.
Nevertheless from the hotel on the quai Malaquais344 to the 347. The rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honoré
drawing rooms of the rue de Tournon,345 the rue de la Chaise,346 in the eighth arrondissement runs
from the rue Royale to the avenue de
and the Faubourg Saint-­Honoré,347 a bond as strong as it was Wagram. From the time of Louis XIV
hateful united the three fallen goddesses, about whom I would and during the eighteenth century,
have been eager to learn, by leafing through some dictionary of numerous luxurious hotels were con-
structed by eminent architects and the
social mythology, what gallant adventure, what sacrilegious pre- street became the residence of aristo-
sumption had brought about their punishment. Their similar, crats and men of wealth. Edmond de
illustrious origins, the similar present decline entered largely, no Rothschild was one of the Jews who
lived in the Faubourg.
doubt, into the necessity that compelled them, while hating one 348. The Duc de Sagan (1832–1910)
another, to frequent one another’s society. Besides, each of them was one of the leading society figures
found in the others a convenient way of being polite to her own of his time.
349. The most famous member of this
guests. How could these fail to suppose that they had scaled the family of Belgian origin was Charles-­
most inaccessible peak of the Faubourg when they were intro- Joseph de Ligne (1735–1814). He was
duced to a lady with a string of titles, whose sister was married a friend of Marie-­Antoinette, who
entrusted to him various diplomatic
to a Duc de Sagan348 or a Prince de Ligne?349 Especially as there missions. His Mémoires fill more than
was infinitely more in the newspapers about these sham salons thirty volumes.
than about the genuine ones. Indeed these old ladies’ “gratin”
nephews—and Saint-­L oup the foremost of them—when asked
by a friend to introduce him into society would answer at once,
“I will take you to my Aunt Villeparisis’s, or to my Aunt X’s,

Part One 211

 The Guermantes Way

350. In Roman mythology, the Parcae, you meet interesting people there.” They knew very well that
or Fates, were three sisters, goddesses this would mean less trouble for themselves than trying to get
of the Underworld who spin, mea-
sure, and cut the thread of life for each the said friends invited by the fashionable nieces or sisters-­in-­
mortal. law of these ladies. Certain very elderly men, and young women
351. Proust uses the expression filer le who had heard it from those men, told me that if these old ladies
mauvais coton, which means to bring
about the ruin of someone or some- were no longer received in society it was because of the extraor-
thing. Scott Moncrieff ’s translation fits dinary dissoluteness of their conduct, which, when I objected
well with the roles of the three Parcae. that dissoluteness was not necessarily a barrier to social success,
352. In Greek mythology, Icarus is a
mortal, son of Daedalus, who was im- was represented to me as having gone far beyond anything that
prisoned with his father in the labyrinth we know today. The misconduct of these solemn ladies who held
of Minos. When freed, they tried to fly themselves so erect assumed on the lips of those who hinted at it
on wings fixed to their shoulders with
wax. Icarus flew too close to the sun, something that I was incapable of imagining, proportionate to
lost his wings when the wax melted, the magnitude of prehistoric days, to the age of the mammoth.
and fell into the sea. In a word, these three Parcae350 with their white or blue or pink
353. In Greek mythology, Theseus, son
of the Athenian King Aegeus, went to locks had spun the fatal threads351 of an incalculable number of
Crete to kill the Minotaur. There he gentlemen. I felt that the people of today exaggerated the vices
abandoned Ariadne, who had saved of those fabulous times, like the Greeks who created Icarus,352
his life by helping him find his way out
of the labyrinth. He married her sister, Theseus,353 Hercules354 out of men who had been but little dif-
Phaedra. ferent from those who long afterward deified them. But one does
354. Hercules was the son of Zeus and not tabulate the sum of a person’s vices until he has almost ceased
the mortal woman Alcmena.
355. Messalina (c. 22–48), the wife of to be in a fit state to practice them, when from the magnitude
the emperor Claudius, was notorious of his social punishment, which is then nearing the completion
for her debauchery and crimes. She of its term and which alone one can estimate, one measures, one
was accused of killing some of her
lovers and also women of whom she imagines, one exaggerates that of the crime that has been com-
was jealous. Claudius had her put to mitted. In that gallery of symbolical figures that is “society,” the
death. really light women, the true Messalinas,355 invariably present the
356. The Golden Rose is an ornament
made of gold that the pope blesses on solemn aspect of a lady of at least seventy, with an air of lofty dis-
the fourth Sunday of Lent and offers tinction, who entertains everyone she can but not everyone she
to a member of a royal family or other would like to, to whose house women will never consent to go,
dignitaries. The ceremony dates back to
Urban II in 1096. whose own conduct falls in any way short of perfection, to whom
357. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790– the pope regularly sends his “Golden Rose,”356 and who as often
1869) was a major Romantic poet and as not has written—on the early days of Lamartine357—a work
statesman.
that has been crowned by the Académie Française. “How do you
do, Alix?” Mme de V ­ illeparisis greeted the lady with the Marie-­
Antoinette coiffure, which lady cast a searching glance around the

212 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

assembly to see whether there was not in this drawing room any 358. Adélaide Ristori (1822–1906),
item that might be a valuable addition to her own, in which case an Italian dramatic actress, came to
France in 1855 for the World’s Fair.
she would have to discover it for herself, for Mme de Villeparisis, She also gave performances at the
she was sure, would be spiteful enough to try to keep it from her. Comédie-­Française and enjoyed great
Thus Mme de Villeparisis took good care not to introduce Bloch success at the Salle Ventadour in
Médée by Ernest Legouvé. She ap-
to the old lady for fear of his being asked to produce the same play peared regularly in Paris until 1866.
that he was arranging for her in the drawing room of the quai Ma- 359. Antoine Coysevox (1640–1720)
laquais. Besides, it was only tit for tat. For, the evening before, the was a sculptor to Louis XIV. His works
are found in the gardens of the palace
old lady had had Mme Ristori,358 who had recited some poems, of Versailles, in the Jardin des Tuileries,
and had taken care that Mme de Villeparisis, from whom she had and now in the Musée d’Orsay. He cre-
filched the Italian artist, should not hear of this event until it was ated a number of paintings and sculp-
tures inspired by Greek and Roman my-
over. So that she should not read it first in the newspapers and thology. His statue of Marie-­Adélaïde
feel annoyed, the old lady had come to tell her about it, showing de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne
no sense of guilt. Mme de Villeparisis, considering that an intro- (1685–1712), bearing the attributes of
the goddess Diana, was in the Louvre
duction of myself was not likely to have the same disadvantages in Proust’s day.
as that of Bloch, made me known to the Marie-­Antoinette of the 360. Proust knew the Vicomtesse
quai Malaquais. The latter, who sought, by making the fewest Frédéric de Janzé, née Alix de Choiseul-­
Gouffier (1832–1915), a member of a
possible movements, to preserve in her old age those lines, as of prominent aristocratic family that pro-
a Coysevox359 goddess, which had many years ago charmed the duced several Maréchals de France.
young men of fashion and which spurious men of letters still cele- Mme de Janzé wrote a work called
Études et récits (1891) about Alfred de
brated in rhymed couplets—and had acquired the habit of a lofty Musset.
and compensating stiffness common to all those whom a personal 361. See page 203, note 318.
degradation obliges to be continually making advances—just per-
ceptibly lowered her head with a frigid majesty, and, turning the
other way, took no more notice of me than if I had not existed.
Her twofold attitude seemed to be saying to Mme de Villepa-
risis: “You see, I’m nowhere near him; please understand that I’m
not interested—in any sense of the word, you old cat—in young
men.” But when, twenty minutes later, she left the room, taking
advantage of the general hubbub, she slipped into my ear an invi-
tation to come to her box the following Friday with another of the
three, whose high-­sounding name—she had been born a Choi-
seul,360 moreover—had a prodigious effect on me.
“I understand, Monsieur, that you want to write something
about Mme la Duchesse de Montmorency,”361 said Mme de Ville-

Part One 213

 The Guermantes Way

362. Quartering is the division of a he- parisis to the historian of the Fronde in the grouchy tone that she
raldic shield into four equal parts in allowed, quite unconsciously, to spoil the effect of her great amia-
order to place a different coat of arms
or a unique heraldic design in each bility, a tone due to the withered crossness, the bitterness that is
quarter or division to show the arms a physiological accompaniment of age, as well as to the affecta-
of the paternal line. Quarters may be tion of imitating the almost rustic speech of the old nobility: “I’m
further subdivided; and some family
shields can have scores, even hun- going to show you her portrait, the original of the copy they have
dreds, of quarterings. in the Louvre.”
363. The Medicis were a powerful She rose, laying down her brushes beside the flowers, and the
banking and merchant family in Tus-
cany not of noble birth. The family was little apron, which then came into sight at her waist, and which she
twice allied with the House of France: wore so as not to stain her dress with paints, added still further to
in 1533 by the marriage of Catherine de the impression of an old peasant given by her bonnet and her big
Medicis with the future Henri II, and
in 1600 by the marriage of Marie de spectacles, and offered a sharp contrast to the luxury of her house-
Medicis with Henri IV. hold staff, the butler who had brought in the tea and cakes, the
364. Franz Liszt (1811–86), Hungarian liveried footman for whom she now rang to light up the portrait
musician and composer, moved to
Paris when he was twelve years old. of the Duchesse de Montmorency, abbess of one of the most fa-
365. Jeanne Élisabeth Carolyne de Sayn-­ mous chapters in the east of France. Everyone had risen. “What is
Wittgenstein, née Iwanowska (1819– rather amusing,” said our hostess, “is that in these chapters where
87), was a Polish princess, said to have
been the second love of Franz Liszt. our great-­aunts were so often made abbesses, the daughters of the
King of France would not have been admitted. They were very ex-
clusive chapters.” “Not admit the king’s daughters,” cried Bloch in
amazement, “why ever not?” “Why, because the House of France
had not enough quartering362 after that mésalliance.” Bloch’s
bewilderment increased. “A mésalliance? The House of France?
When was that?” “Why, when they married into the Medicis,”363
replied Mme de Villeparisis in the most natural tone. “It’s a fine
portrait, isn’t it, and in a perfect state of preservation,” she added.
“My dear,” put in the lady coiffed à la Marie-­Antoinette, “surely
you remember that when I brought Liszt364 to see you he said that
it was this one that was the copy.”
“I will bow to any opinion of Liszt’s on music, but not on
painting! Besides, he was already soft in the head, and I don’t re-
member his ever saying anything of the sort. But it wasn’t you
that brought him here. I had met him any number of times at
dinner at Princess Sayn-­Wittgenstein’s.”365
Alix’s shot had misfired; she stood silent, erect and motionless.

214 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

Plastered with layers of powder, her face had the appearance of 366. The duchess’s birthdate is un-
stone. And as the profile was noble, she seemed, on a triangular known. Née Andrée de Vivonne,
daughter of André, Baron de La Cha-
and moss-­grown pedestal hidden by her cape, like the crumbling taigneraye and Marie-­Antoinette de
statue of a goddess in a park. Loménie, she must have been about
“Ah, I see another fine portrait,” said the historian. fourteen when she married, in 1628,
François VI de La Rochefoucauld, then
The door opened and the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the only fifteen, and the future author of
room. the famous Maximes. The couple had
“Well, hello,” Mme de Villeparisis greeted her without even a eight children; she died in 1670. Proust
again provides his fictitious Guer-
nod, taking from her apron pocket a hand that she held out to the mantes with a famous ancestor.
newcomer; and then she ceased at once to pay any attention to her
niece in order to return to the historian: “That is the portrait of
the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld . . .”366
A young servant with a bold manner and a charming face (but
so finely chiseled to ensure its perfection that the nose was a little
red and the rest of the skin slightly flushed as though they were
still smarting from a recent, sculptural incision) came in bearing
a card on a tray.
“It’s that gentleman who has been several times to see Madame
la Marquise.”
“Did you tell him I was at home?”
“He heard the voices.”
“Oh, very well then, show him in. It’s a gentleman who was
introduced to me,” she explained. “He told me he was very eager
to come to the house. I certainly never said he might. But here
he’s taken the trouble to call five times now; it doesn’t do to hurt
people’s feelings. Monsieur,” she went on to me, “and you, Mon-
sieur,” to the historian of the Fronde, “let me introduce my niece,
the Duchesse de Guermantes.”
The historian made a low bow, as I did also, and since he seemed
to suppose that some friendly remark ought to follow this salute,
his eyes brightened and he was preparing to open his mouth when
he was chilled by the mien of Mme de Guermantes, who had
taken advantage of the independence of her torso to throw it for-
ward with an exaggerated politeness and bring it neatly back to a
position of rest without letting face or eyes appear to have noticed

Part One 215

 The Guermantes Way

367. Madeleine is the given name of that anyone was standing before them; after breathing a little sigh
both the Princesse de Poix and the she contented herself with manifesting the nullity of the impres-
Marquise de Villeparisis.
sion that had been made on her by the sight of the historian and
myself by performing certain movements of her nostrils with a
precision that testified to the absolute inertia of her unoccupied
attention.
The importunate visitor entered the room, making straight for
Mme de Villeparisis with an ingenuous, fervent air: it was Le-
grandin.
“Thank you so very much for letting me come and see you,
Madame,” he began, laying stress on the word “very.” “It is a plea-
sure of a quality altogether rare and subtle that you confer on an
old solitary; I assure you that its repercussion . . .”
He stopped short on catching sight of me.
“I was just showing this gentleman a fine portrait of the Duch-
esse de La Rochefoucauld, the wife of the author of the Maximes;
it’s a family heirloom.”
Mme de Guermantes meanwhile had greeted Alix, with apolo-
gies for not having been able, that year as in every previous year,
to go and see her. “I hear all about you from Madeleine,”367 she
added.
“She was at lunch with me today,” said the Marquise of the quai
Malaquais, with the satisfying reflection that Mme de Villeparisis
could never say as much.
Meanwhile I had been talking to Bloch, and fearing, from what
I had been told of his father’s change of attitude toward him, that
he might be envying my life, I said to him that his must be the hap-
pier. My remark was prompted solely by my desire to be friendly.
But such friendliness readily convinces those who cherish a high
opinion of themselves of their own good fortune, or gives them a
desire to convince other people. “Yes, I do lead a delightful exis-
tence,” Bloch assured me with a beatified smile. “I have three great
friends, I do not wish for one more, an adorable mistress; I am in-
finitely happy. Rare is the mortal to whom Father Zeus accords so
much felicity.” I believe that he principally sought to extol him-

216 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

self and to make me envious. Perhaps too there was some desire 368. That is, to La Rochefoucauld,
to show originality in his optimism. It was evident that he did not author of the Maximes.
369. This quotation is from Joseph Jou-
wish to reply with the same banalities that everybody uses: “Oh, bert (1754–1824), author of Pensées,
it was nothing, really,” and so forth, when, to my question: “Was essais et maximes.
it good?” apropos of an afternoon dance at his house to which I 370. Marie de Rohan-­Montbazon,
Duchesse de Chevreuse (1600–1679),
had been prevented from going, he replied in a level, indifferent played an important role during the
tone, as if the dance had been given by someone else: “Why, yes, it Fronde, plotting against Richelieu
was quite good, couldn’t have been better. It was really delightful.” and Mazarin. She married the Duc
de Luynes in 1617, then in 1622, as a
“What you have just told us interests me enormously,” said Le- widow, Claude de Lorraine, the Duc de
grandin to Mme de Villeparisis, “for I was saying to myself only Chevreuse.
the other day that you showed a marked likeness to him368 in the 371. Yolande Françoise Marie Julienne
de La Rochefoucauld (1849–1905), Prin-
crisp clarity of your turn of phrase, in a quality that I will venture cesse de Bavière, became Duchesse
to describe by two contradictory terms, lapidary rapidity and im- de Luynes and de Chevreuse in 1867
mortal instantaneousness. I would have liked this afternoon to by her marriage to Charles Honoré
Emmanuel d’Albert (1845–70).
note down all the things you say; but I will remember them. They 372. This is the nom de plume of Éli-
are, in a phrase that comes, I think, from Joubert,369 ‘friends of sabeth Pauline Ottilie Louise de Wied
memory.’ You have never read Joubert? Oh! He would have ad- (1843–1916), Queen of Romania. She
published poems and stories written
mired you so! I will take the liberty this evening of sending you his in German (In der Irre, 1888) and in
works; it will be a privilege to introduce you to his mind. He did French (Pensées d’une reine, 1882).
not have your force. But he too had a great deal of gracefulness.”
I had wanted to go and greet Legrandin at once, but he kept as
far away from me as he could, no doubt in the hope that I might
not overhear the stream of flattery that, with a remarkable pre-
ciosity of expression, he kept pouring out, whatever the topic, to
Mme de Villeparisis.
She shrugged her shoulders, smiling, as though he had been
trying to make fun of her, and turned to the historian.
“And this is the famous Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Che-
vreuse,370 who was married first to M. de Luynes.”
“My dear, speaking of Mme de Luynes reminds me of
Yolande;371 she came to me yesterday evening, and if I had known
that you weren’t engaged, I’d have sent around to ask you to come.
Mme Ristori turned up quite by chance, and recited some poems
by Queen Carmen Sylva372 in the author’s presence. It was too
beautiful!”

Part One 217

 The Guermantes Way

373. The Comtesse de Beaulaincourt-­ “What treachery!” thought Mme de Villeparisis. “Of course
Marles, née Sophie de Castellane that was what she was whispering about the other day to Mme de
(1818–1904), and the Marquise de
Chaponay-­Morancé, née Alexandre Beaulaincourt and Mme de Chaponay.373 I was free,” she replied,
du Bois de Courval (?–­1897), are two “but I would not have come. I heard Ristori in her great days, she’s
women who, although from prominent a mere wreck now. Besides I detest Carmen Sylva’s poetry. Ristori
noble families, were unable to create
the kind of brilliant salon that one came here once, the Duchess of Aosta374 brought her, to recite a
might have expected. They did, how- canto of the Inferno, by Dante. In that sort of thing she’s incom-
ever, inspire certain aspects of Mme parable.”
de Villeparisis, as Proust confided to
Robert de Montesquiou in 1921, about Alix bore the blow without flinching. She remained marble.
the models for some of his characters: Her gaze was piercing and blank, her nose proudly arched. But
“As for Bloqueville, Janzé, etc., I knew the surface of one cheek was flaking. A faint, strange vegetation,
them only by name, and my Madame
de Villeparisis is more like Madame green and pink, was invading her chin. Perhaps another winter
de Beaulaincourt (with a touch of would lay her low.
Madame de Chaponay-­Courval); I even “Now, Monsieur, if you are fond of painting, look at the por-
said she painted flowers rather than
made them, for Madame de Beaulain- trait of Mme de Montmorency,” Mme de Villeparisis said to Le-
court having made artificial flowers, grandin, to stop the flow of compliments that was beginning
the resemblance would have been too again.
close.” Proust, Selected Letters 4: 211.
374. Hélène Louis Henriette de France, Seizing her opportunity, while his back was turned, Mme de
Princesse d’Orléans (1871–1951), Guermantes pointed to him, with an ironical, questioning look
daughter of the Duc d’Orléans, mar- at her aunt.
ried in 1895 Emanuele Filiberto Vittorio
Eugenio Genova Giuseppe Maria, Duke “It’s M. Legrandin,” murmured Mme de Villeparisis, “he has a
of Aoste (1869–1931), grandson of sister called Mme de Cambremer, not that that conveys any more
Victor-­Emmanuel II. to you than it does to me.”
“What! Oh, but I know her quite well!” exclaimed Mme de
Guermantes, putting her hand over her lips. “That is to say, I
don’t know her, but for some reason or other Basin, who meets
the husband heaven knows where, took it into his head to tell
the wretched woman she might call on me. And she did. I can’t
tell you what it was like. She informed me that she had been to
London and gave me a complete catalogue of all the things in
the British Museum. And just as you see me now, the moment I
leave your house, I’m going to drop a card on the monster. And
don’t suppose that it’s an easy thing to do, because on the pre-
text that she’s dying of some disease she’s always at home, and it

218 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

doesn’t matter whether you arrive at seven at night or nine in the 375. The word designates a pen pusher,
morning, she’s ready for you with a dish of strawberry tarts. No, an inferior author. It is derived from
plumeter (plume), which means to
but seriously, you know, she is a monstrosity,” Mme de Guer- make a rough copy.
mantes replied to a questioning glance from her aunt. “She’s an
impossible person, she talks about ‘plumitives’375 and things like
that.” “What does ‘plumitive’ mean?” asked Mme de Villeparisis.
“I haven’t the slightest idea!” cried the duchess in mock indigna-
tion. “I don’t want to know. I don’t speak that sort of French.”
And seeing that her aunt really did not know what a plumitive
was, to give herself the satisfaction of showing that she was a
scholar as well as a purist, and to make fun of her aunt, now, after
making fun of Mme de Cambremer: “Why, of course,” she said,
with a half-­laugh which the last traces of her pretended ill-humor
kept in check, “everybody knows what it means; a plumitive is a
writer, a person who wields a plume. But it’s a horrible word. It’s
enough to make your wisdom teeth drop out. Nothing will ever
make me use words like that. And so that’s the brother, is it? I
hadn’t realized that yet. But after all it’s not inconceivable. She
has the same doormat docility and the same mass of information
like a circulating library. She’s just as much of a toady as he is, and
just as annoying. Yes, I’m beginning to see the family likeness now
quite plainly.”
“Sit down, we’re just going to have some tea,” said Mme de
Villeparisis to her niece. “Help yourself; you don’t want to look at
the portraits of your great-­grandmothers, you know them as well
as I do.”
Presently Mme de Villeparisis sat down again at her desk and
went on with her painting. The rest of the party gathered around
her, and I took the opportunity to go up to Legrandin and, seeing
no harm myself in his presence in Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing
room and never dreaming how much my words would at once
hurt him and make him believe that I had deliberately intended to
hurt him, say: “Well, Monsieur, I am almost excused for being in
a salon when I find you here too.” M. Legrandin concluded from

Part One 219

 The Guermantes Way

these words (at least this was the opinion that he expressed of me
a few days later) that I was a thoroughly spiteful little wretch who
delighted only in doing mischief.
“You might at least have the civility to begin by greeting me,”
he replied, without offering me his hand and in a coarse and
angry voice that I had never suspected him of possessing, a voice
that, bearing no rational relation to what he ordinarily said, did
bear another more immediate and striking relation to something
that he was feeling at the moment. What happens is that since
we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we
have never given any thought to the manner in which we should
express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and ob-
scene animal making itself heard and whose tones may inspire as
much terror in the listener who receives the involuntary, ellip-
tical, and almost irresistible communication of our defect or vice
as would the sudden avowal indirectly and strangely proffered by
a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing a murder
of which one had never imagined him to be guilty. I knew, of
course, that idealism, even subjective idealism, does not prevent
great philosophers from still having hearty appetites or from pre-
senting themselves with untiring perseverance for election to the
Académie. But really Legrandin had no need to remind people so
often that he belonged to another planet when all his uncontrol-
lable outbursts of anger or affability were governed by the desire to
occupy a good position on this one.
“Naturally, when people pester me twenty times on end to go
anywhere,” he went on in lower tones, “although I am perfectly
free to do what I choose, still I can’t behave like an absolute boor.”
Mme de Guermantes had sat down. Her name, accompanied
as it was by her title, added to her physical person the duchy that
projected itself around about her and brought the shadowy, sun-­
splashed coolness of the woods of Guermantes into this drawing
room, to surround the pouf on which she was sitting. I felt sur-
prised only that the likeness of those woods was not more discern-
ible on the face of the duchess, about which there was nothing

220 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

suggestive of vegetation, and at the most the ruddiness of her

cheeks—which ought rather, surely, to have been emblazoned
with the name Guermantes—was the effect, but did not furnish
the image of long gallops in the open air. Later on, when she had
ceased to interest me, I came to know many of the duchess’s pecu-
liarities, notably (to speak for the moment only of that one of
which I already at this time felt the charm though without yet
being able to discover what it was) her eyes, in which was held
captive as in a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in France,
broadly expansive, bathed in light even when no sun shone; and
a voice that one would have thought, from its first hoarse sounds,
to be almost plebeian, through which there trailed, as over the
steps of the church at Combray or the pâtisserie in the square,
the rich and lazy gold of a country sun. But on this first day I dis-
cerned nothing, my ardent attention volatilized at once the little
that I might otherwise have been able to collect and in which I
might have found some indication of the name Guermantes. In
any case, I told myself that it was indeed she who was designated
for all the world by the title Duchesse de Guermantes: the incon-
ceivable life that her name signified, this body did indeed contain;
it had just introduced that life into the midst of different people,
in this room, which enclosed it on every side and on which it pro-
duced so violent a reaction that I thought I could see, where the
extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence out-
line its frontiers: in the circumference of the circle traced on the
carpet by the balloon of her blue pekin skirt, and in the bright
eyes of the duchess at the point of intersection of the preoccu-
pations, the memories, the incomprehensible, scornful, amused,
and curious thoughts that filled them from within and the outside
images that were reflected on their surface. Perhaps I would have
been not quite so deeply stirred had I met her at Mme de Ville-
parisis’s at a soirée, instead of seeing her thus during one of the
marquise’s “at homes,” at one of those tea parties, which are for
women no more than a brief halt in the course of their afternoon’s
outing, when, keeping on the hats in which they have been doing

Part One 221

 The Guermantes Way

their errands, they waft into a succession of salons the quality of

the fresh air outside, and give one a better view of Paris in the late
afternoon than do the tall, open windows through which one can
hear the rumbling of victorias: Mme de Guermantes wore a straw
boater trimmed with cornflowers, and what they recalled to me
was not, among the tilled fields around Combray where I had so
often gathered those flowers, on the slope adjoining the Tanson-
ville hedge, the suns of bygone years; it was the scent and dust
of twilight as they had been an hour ago, when Mme de Guer-
mantes drove through them, in the rue de la Paix. With a smiling,
disdainful, vague air, and a grimace on her pursed lips, with the
point of her sunshade, as with the extreme tip of an antenna of her
mysterious life, she was tracing circles on the carpet; then, with
that indifferent attention that begins by eliminating every point
of contact with what one is actually considering, her gaze fastened
upon each of us in turn; then inspected the sofas and armchairs,
but softened this time by that human sympathy that is aroused
by the presence, however insignificant, of a thing one knows, a
thing that is almost a person; these pieces of furniture were not
like us, they belonged vaguely to her world, they were bound up
with the life of her aunt; then from the Beauvais furniture her gaze
was carried back to the person sitting on it, and resumed then the
same air of perspicacity and the same disapproval that the respect
Mme de Guermantes felt for her aunt would have prevented her
from expressing in words, but which she would obviously have felt
had she discovered on the chairs, instead of our presence, that of
a spot of grease or a layer of dust.
The excellent writer G entered the room; he had come to pay
a call on Mme de Villeparisis, which he regarded as a tiresome
duty. The duchess, although delighted to see him again, gave him
no sign of welcome, but instinctively he made straight for her,
the charm that she possessed, her tact, her simplicity making him
look upon her as a woman of intelligence. He was bound, more-
over, in common politeness to go and talk to her, for, since he
was a pleasant and distinguished man, Mme de Guermantes fre-

222 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

quently invited him to lunch even when there was no one but her 376. Accidence is a part of grammar
and her husband, or in the autumn to Guermantes, taking ad- that deals with inflections. Proust
simply has grammaire, grammar.
vantage of this intimacy to have him to dinner occasionally with 377. See Swann’s Way, 387.
royalties who were curious to meet him. For the duchess liked
to entertain certain eminent men, on condition always that they
were bachelors, a condition that, even when married, they invari-
ably fulfilled for her, for, as their wives, who were bound to be
more or less common, would have been a blot on a salon in which
there were never any but the most fashionable beauties in Paris,
it was always without them that their husbands were invited; and
the duke, to avoid any hurt feelings, used to explain to these in-
voluntary widowers that the duchess never had women in the
house, could not endure feminine society, almost as though this
had been under doctor’s orders, and as he might have said that she
could not stay in a room in which there were smells, or eat over-
salted food, or travel with her back to the engine, or wear a corset.
It was true that these eminent men used to see at the Guermantes’
the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Sagan (whom Françoise,
hearing her constantly mentioned, had taken to calling, in the
belief that this feminine ending was required by the laws of acci-
dence,376 “the Sagante”), and plenty more, but their presence was
accounted for by the explanation that they were relatives, or such
very old friends that it was impossible to exclude them. Whether
or not they were convinced by the explanations that the Duc de
Guermantes had given of the singular malady that made it impos-
sible for the duchess to associate with other women, the great men
duly transmitted them to their wives. Some of these thought that
this malady was only an excuse to cloak her jealousy, because the
duchess wished to reign alone over a court of worshipers. Others
more simple still thought that perhaps the duchess had some
peculiar habit, a scandalous past it might be, so that women did
not care to go to her house and that she gave the name of a whim
to what was stern necessity. The better among them, hearing their
husbands expatiate on the duchess’s marvelous wit,377 assumed
that she must be so far superior to the rest of womankind that she

Part One 223

 The Guermantes Way

378. Émile Augier (1820–89), play- found their society boring since they could not talk intelligently
wright, was the author of Le Gendre de about anything. And it was true that the duchess was bored by
M. Poirier, Les Éffrontés, and Madame
Caverlet, all of which enjoyed a great other women, if their princely rank did not render them espe-
success in their time. cially interesting. But the excluded wives were mistaken when
379. Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908) they imagined that she chose to entertain men only in order to
was a playwright and librettist who
often collaborated with Meilhac. They be able to discuss with them literature, science, and philosophy.
wrote, among other librettos, those for For she never spoke of these, at least with the great intellectuals.
Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Belle If, by virtue of a family tradition such as makes the daughters of
Hélène and for Georges Bizet’s Carmen.
great soldiers preserve, in the midst of their most frivolous dis-
tractions, a respect for military matters, she felt, as the grand-
daughter of women who had been on terms of friendship with
Thiers, Mérimée, and Augier,378 that a place must always be kept
in her drawing room for men of intellect, she had on the other
hand derived from the manner, at once condescending and inti-
mate, in which those famous men had been received at Guer-
mantes, the foible of looking on men of talent as family friends
whose talent does not dazzle one, to whom one does not speak
of their work, and who would not be at all interested if one did.
Moreover, the type of mind illustrated by Mérimée and Meilhac
and Halévy,379 which was hers also, led her by contrast with the
verbal sentimentality of an earlier generation to a style of conver-
sation that rejects everything to do with fine language and the ex-
pression of lofty thoughts, so that she made it a sort of element
of good breeding when she was with a poet or a musician to talk
only of the food that they were eating or the game of cards to
which they would afterward sit down. This abstention had, on a
third person not conversant with her ways, a disturbing effect that
amounted to mystification. Mme de Guermantes having asked
him whether it would amuse him to be invited to meet this or
that famous poet, devoured by curiosity he would arrive at the
appointed hour. The duchess would talk to the poet about the
weather. They would sit down to lunch. “Do you like this way
of doing eggs?” she would ask the poet. On hearing his approval,
which she shared, for everything in her own house appeared to
her exquisite, including a horrible cider that she imported from

224 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

Guermantes: “Give Monsieur some more eggs,” she would tell the
butler, while the anxious fellow guest sat waiting for what must
surely have been the object of the party, since they had arranged
to meet, in spite of every sort of difficulty, before the duchess, the
poet, and he himself left Paris. But the meal went on, one after
another the courses were cleared away, not without having first
provided Mme de Guermantes with opportunities for clever wit-
ticisms or apt anecdotes. Meanwhile the poet went on eating, and
neither duke nor duchess showed any sign of remembering that
he was a poet. And presently the lunch came to an end and the
party broke up, without a word having been said about the poetry,
which, for all that, everyone admired but to which, by a reserve
analogous to that of which Swann had given me a foretaste, no
one referred. This reserve was simply a matter of good form. But
for the fellow guest, if he thought at all about the matter, there
was something strangely melancholy about it all, and these meals
in the Guermantes household made him think of the hours that
timid lovers often spend together in talking trivialities until it is
time to part, without—whether from shyness, from modesty, or
from awkwardness—the great secret that they would have been
happier to confess ever succeeding in passing from their hearts to
their lips. It must, however, be added that this silence with regard
to the profound matters that one was always waiting in vain to see
approached, if it might pass as characteristic of the duchess, was
by no means absolute with her. Mme de Guermantes had spent
her girlhood in a milieu somewhat different, equally aristocratic
but less brilliant and above all less futile than that in which she
now lived, and one of wide culture. It had left beneath her present
frivolity a sort of bedrock of greater solidity, invisibly nutritious,
to which indeed the duchess would repair in search (very rarely,
though, for she detested pedantry) of some quotation from Victor
Hugo or Lamartine, which, extremely appropriate and uttered
with a look of true feeling from her beautiful eyes, never failed to
surprise and charm her audience. Sometimes, even, without any
pretense of authority, pertinently and quite simply, she would give

Part One 225

 The Guermantes Way

some dramatist and academician a piece of sage advice, would

make him modify a situation or alter an ending.
If, in the drawing room of Mme de Villeparisis, just as in the
church at Combray, on the day of Mlle Percepied’s wedding, I
had difficulty in discovering, in the beautiful, too human face of
Mme de Guermantes the unknown essence of her name, I at least
thought that, when she spoke, her conversation, profound, mys-
terious, would have the strangeness of a medieval tapestry or a
Gothic stained-­glass window. But in order for me not to be disap-
pointed by the words that I would hear uttered by a person who
called herself Mme de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love
with her, it would not have sufficed that those words were fine,
beautiful, and profound, they would have had to reflect that ama-
ranthine color of the closing syllable of her name, the color that I
had on my first sight of her been disappointed not to find in her
person and had driven to take refuge in her mind. Of course I
had already heard Mme de Villeparisis, Saint-­L oup, people whose
intelligence was in no way extraordinary, pronounce without any
precaution this name Guermantes, simply as that of a person who
was coming to see them or with whom they were to dine, without
seeming to feel that there were latent in her name the glow of yel-
lowing woods in autumn and a whole mysterious tract of country.
But this must have been an affectation on their part, as when the
classic poets give us no warning of the profound purpose that
they had, all the same, in writing, an affectation that I myself also
strove to imitate, saying in the most natural tone: “The Duchesse
de Guermantes,” as though it were a name that was just like other
names. Besides, everyone assured me that she was a highly intel-
ligent woman, a witty conversationalist, living in a small coterie
of the most interesting people: words that became accomplices of
my dream. For when they spoke of an intelligent coterie, of witty
conversation, it was not at all the sort of intelligence that I knew
that I imagined, not even that of the greatest minds, it was not at
all with men like Bergotte that I peopled this coterie. No, by intel-
ligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by the sun, im-

226 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

pregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed, had she made the most 380. This is an allusion to Jean de La
intelligent remarks (in the sense in which I understood the word Fontaine’s fable “La Grenouille qui
veut se faire aussi grosse que le bœuf ”
“intelligent” when it was used of a philosopher or critic), Mme de (The frog who wished to be as big as
Guermantes would perhaps have disappointed even more keenly the ox), Fables, book I, fable 3.
my expectation of so special a faculty than if, in the course of a
trivial conversation, she had confined herself to discussing kitchen
recipes or the furnishing of a château, to mentioning the names of
neighbors and relatives of her own, which would have given me a
picture of her life.
“I thought I would find Basin here; he was meaning to come
and see you today,” said Mme de Guermantes to her aunt.
“I haven’t set eyes on your husband for some days,” replied
Mme de Villeparisis in a somewhat hurt and angry tone. “In fact, I
haven’t seen him—well, once perhaps—since that charming joke
he played on me of making my servants announce him as the
Queen of Sweden.”
Mme de Guermantes formed a smile by contracting the cor-
ners of her mouth as though she were biting her veil, “We dined
with her last evening at Blanche Leroi’s. You wouldn’t know her
now, she’s positively enormous; I’m sure she must be ill.”
“I was just telling these gentlemen that you said she looked like
a frog,”
Mme de Guermantes uttered a sort of raucous sound intended
to signify that she was snickering for form’s sake.
“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but
if she was one before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in
swelling to the size of the ox.380 Or rather, it isn’t quite that, be-
cause all her swelling is concentrated in her stomach, she’s more
like a frog in an interesting condition.”
“Ah, I do find your description quite droll,” said Mme de Ville-
parisis, secretly proud that her guests were witnessing this display
of her niece’s wit.
“It is purely arbitrary, though,” answered Mme de Guermantes,
ironically detaching this selected epithet, as Swann would have
done, “for I must admit I never saw a frog in the family way.

Part One 227

 The Guermantes Way

Anyhow, the frog in question, who, by the way, is not asking for a
king, for I never saw her so skittish as she’s been since her husband
died, is coming to dine with us one day next week. I promised I’d
let you know just in case.”
Mme de Villeparisis gave vent to a sort of indistinct growl,
from which emerged:
“I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the evening be-
fore last. Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me
about it, and was quite amusing, I must say.”
“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,”
said Mme de Guermantes, who, in view of her close friendship
with M. de Bréauté-­Consalvi, felt that she must advertise their
intimacy by the use of this diminutive. “I mean M. Bergotte.”
I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty;
moreover, I thought of him always as mingling with the intellec-
tual section of humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that
mysterious realm of which I had caught a glimpse through the
crimson hangings of a theater box in which, making the duchess
laugh, M. de Bréauté was holding with her, in the language of the
gods, that unimaginable thing, a conversation between people of
the Faubourg Saint-­Germain. I was sorry to see the balance upset,
and Bergotte rise above M. de Bréauté. But above all, I was dis-
mayed to think that I had avoided Bergotte on the evening of
Phèdre, that I had not gone up and spoken to him, when I heard
Mme de Guermantes say to Mme de Villeparisis:
“He is the only person I have any wish to know,” added the
duchess, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental
tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-­known intellec-
tuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness. “It would
be such a pleasure.”
The presence of Bergotte by my side, a presence it would have
been so easy for me to secure but which I would have thought
liable to give Mme de Guermantes a bad impression of myself,
would no doubt, on the contrary, have had the result that she

228 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

would have signaled to me to join her in her box, and would have
invited me to bring the eminent writer, one day, to lunch.
“I gather that he didn’t behave very well. He was introduced
to M. de Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” said Mme
de Guermantes, dwelling on this odd trait as she might have re-
counted that a Chinese had blown his nose on a sheet of paper.
“He never once said ‘Monseigneur’ to him,” she added, with an air
of amusement at this detail, as important to her mind as the re-
fusal of a Protestant, during an audience with the pope, to kneel
before His Holiness.
Interested by these idiosyncrasies of Bergotte, she did not, how-
ever, appear to consider them reprehensible, and seemed rather to
find a certain merit in them, though she would have been hard
put to say of what sort. Despite this unusual mode of appreci-
ating Bergotte’s originality, it was a fact that I was later to regard
as not wholly negligible that Mme de Guermantes, greatly to the
surprise of many of her friends, did consider Bergotte wittier than
M. de Bréauté. Thus it is that such judgments, subversive, iso-
lated, and yet, after all, right, are delivered in the world of society
by those rare people who are superior to the rest. And they sketch
then the first rough outlines of the hierarchy of values as the next
generation will establish it, instead of abiding eternally by the old
standards.
The Comte d’Argencourt, chargé d’affaires at the Belgian Lega-
tion and a second cousin by marriage of Mme de Villeparisis,
came limping in, followed presently by two young men, the Baron
de Guermantes and H. H. the Duc de Châtellerault, whom Mme
de Guermantes greeted with: “Good evening, my dear Châtelle-
rault,” in a casual tone and without moving from her pouf, for she
was a great friend of the young duke’s mother, which had given
him a deep and lifelong respect for her. Tall, slender, with golden
hair and sunny complexions, thoroughly of the Guermantes type,
these two young men looked like a condensation of the light of
the spring evening that was flooding the spacious room. Following

Part One 229

 The Guermantes Way

381. Saint-­Loup is apparently respecting a custom that was the fashion at that time, they laid their top hats
the practice current in 1897: “When on the floor near them. The historian of the Fronde thought that
a man is a frequent visitor or attends
at a drawing room in the evening, hat they were embarrassed, like a peasant coming into the mayor’s
and stick are relinquished in the hall.” office and not knowing what to do with his hat. Feeling that he
Gareth H. Steel quotes Whittaker’s ought in charity to come to the rescue of the awkwardness and
What to Do and What to Say in France
(Whittaker, London: 1897), 60. See timidity that he ascribed to them:
Steel, Chronology and Time, 127. “No, no,” he said, “don’t leave them on the floor, they’ll be
382. See page 207, note 332. trodden on.”
383. Vicomte Raymond de Borrelli
(spelled thus), poet and playwright, A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of
was the author of a one-­act play written his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing
in verse, Alain Chartier, that premiered azure that froze the well-­meaning historian.
at the Comédie-­Française on May 20,
1889, and enjoyed little success. “What is that gentleman’s name?” I was asked by the baron,
384. Léon-­Gustave Schlumberger who had just been introduced to me by Mme de Villeparisis.
(1844–1929), a historian who was a “M. Pierre,” I whispered.
specialist on Byzantium and the Cru-
sades, frequented the salon of Mme “Pierre what?”
Geneviève Straus before deserting it at “Pierre: it’s his name, he’s an important historian.”
the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. “Really? You don’t say so.”
385. Georges, Vicomte d’Avenel (1855–
1939) was a historian and economist “No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats
who published works on French history. on the floor,” Mme de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can’t
In 1877, he was president of the Société get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always
des Antiquaires de France.
386. Julien Viaud, known as Pierre leaves his in the hall.381 I tell him when I see him come in that he
Loti (1850–1923), was a marine officer looks just like a clockmaker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind
who wrote books inspired by his many the clocks.”
sea voyages. These include Pêcheur
d’Islande, Le Mariage de Loti, and “You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of
Madame Chrysanthème. He was elected M. Molé’s hat; we will soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a
to the Académie Française in 1891. chapter on hats,”382 said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat
387. Edmond Rostand (1868–1918),
poet and playwright, is the author of reassured by Mme de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a
Cyrano de Bergerac and L’Aiglon, based voice that no one but myself heard him.
on the life of Napoléon’s son, Napo- “She really is astonishing, the little duchess,” said M. d’Ar-
léon II, Duc de Reichstadt. Sarah Bern-
hardt created the role of Reichstadt in gencourt, pointing to Mme de Guermantes, who was talking
1900. Both plays enjoyed an enormous to G. “Whenever there’s a prominent man in the room you’re
success. In 1912, Rostand had offered sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion
his aid to help Proust find a publisher
for Swann’s Way. of the party over there. It can’t be M. de Borelli every day,383 or
M. Schlumberger,384 or M. d’Avenel.385 But then it’s bound to be
M. Pierre Loti386 or M. Edmond Rostand.387 Yesterday evening at

230 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

the Doudeauvilles’,388 where by the way she was looking splendid 388. This is a reference to Marie-­
in her emerald tiara and a pink dress with a long train, she had Charles Gabriel Sosthène, Duc de Dou-
deauville (1825–1908), and his wife,
M. Deschanel389 on one side and the German ambassador on the Marie, Princesse de Ligne (1843–98).
other: she was holding forth to them about China; the general The duke served as president of the
public, at a respectful distance where they couldn’t hear what was Jockey Club for twenty-­four years. He
also served as ambassador to Great
being said, were wondering whether there wasn’t going to be war. Britain.
Really, you’d have said she was a queen, holding her circle.” 389. Paul Deschanel (1855–1922) be-
Everyone had gathered around Mme de Villeparisis to watch came president of the Chambre des
Députés in 1898. He was elected to the
her painting. Académie Française in 1899 and served
“Those flowers are a truly celestial pink,” said Legrandin, “I as president of France from February to
should say sky pink. For there is such a thing as sky pink just as September 1920. He was often a guest
in the salons of Madeleine Lemaire and
there is sky blue. But,” he lowered his voice in the hope that he Geneviève Straus, which Proust also
would not be heard by anyone but the marquise, “I think I still attended.
prefer the silky, living flesh tint of your rendering of them. You 390. Antonio di Puccio di Cerreto or
Antonio Pisano, known as Pisanello
leave Pisanello390 and Van Huysum391 a long way behind, with (dates unknown: c. 1395–­c. 1455), was
their meticulous, dead herbals.” an Italian painter and engraver.
An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself 391. Jan van Huysum (1682–1749) was
a Dutch artist, known for his still lifes
preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done of flowers and fruits.
them.
“What makes you think so is that they painted the flowers of
their time, which we don’t have now, but they did it with great
skill.”
“Ah! The flowers of their time! That is a most ingenious theory,”
exclaimed Legrandin.
“I see you’re painting some fine cherry blossoms—or are they
mayflowers?” began the historian of the Fronde, not without hesi-
tation as to the flower, but with a note of confidence in his voice,
for he was beginning to forget the incident of the hats.
“No; they’re apple blossom,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes,
addressing her aunt.
“Ah! I see you’re a good country woman like me; you can tell
one flower from another.”
“Why yes, so they are! But I thought the season for apple
blossom was over now,” ventured the historian, seeking to cover
his mistake.

Part One 231

 The Guermantes Way

392. This proverb is quoted in act 2, “Oh, no; far from it, the trees are not in blossom; they won’t
scene 5, of the play La Fille du paysan be for another two weeks, or for three weeks perhaps,” said the ar-
by Anicet Bourgeois and Adolphe d’En-
nery, which premiered at the Théâtre de chivist, who, since he helped with the management of Mme de
la Gaîté on January 8, 1862. The com- Villeparisis’s estates, was better informed about country matters.
plete quotation is: “When it’s a good “Yes,” put in the duchess, “and it’s the same in the environs of
year for apples, there are no apples; but
when it’s a bad year for apples, there Paris, where they’re very far along. In Normandy, don’t you know,
are apples.” at his father’s place,” she went on, pointing to the young Duc de
Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple trees close to
the seashore, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until
after the twentieth of May.”
“I never see them,” said the young duke, “because they give me
hay fever. Such a bore.”
“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.
“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the archivist in-
formed him.
“That depends, you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good
year for apples. You know the Norman saying: ‘When it’s a good
year for apples . . . ,’”392 said M. d’Argencourt, who, not being
really French, was always trying to give himself a Parisian air.
“You’re quite right,” Mme de Villeparisis told her niece, “these
are from the Midi. It was a florist who sent them around and
asked me to accept them as a present. You’re surprised, I daresay,
Monsieur Vallenères,” she turned to the archivist, “that a florist
should make me a present of apple blossoms. Well, I may be an
old woman, but I’m not quite on the shelf yet, I still have a few
friends,” she went on, with a smile that might have been taken
as a sign of her simple nature but meant rather, I could not help
feeling, that she thought it piquant to pride herself on the friend-
ship of a mere florist when she had such grand connections.
Bloch rose and went over in his turn to admire the flowers that
Mme de Villeparisis was painting.
“Never mind, Marquise,” said the historian, sitting down again,
“even if we were to have another of those revolutions that have
stained so many pages of our history with blood—and, upon my
soul, in these days one can never tell,” he added, with a circular

232 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

and circumspect glance, as though to make sure that there was no 393. Proust apparently drew on some
“subversive” person in the room, though he had not the least sus- of the excesses and errors of his own
youth in creating Bloch. This may be
picion that there actually was, “with a talent like yours and your one of the most obvious examples in
five languages you would be certain to manage quite well.” The that one evening at a party given by
historian of the Fronde was feeling quite refreshed, for he had for- Comtesse Anna de Noailles, he made a
sweeping gesture and “shattered a Ta-
gotten his insomnia. But he suddenly remembered that he had nagra figurine to smithereens.” Proust,
not slept for the last six nights, whereupon a crushing weariness, Selected Letters 2: 62.
born of his mind, took hold of his legs, made him bow his shoul-
ders, and his melancholy face began to droop like an old man’s.
Bloch tried to express his admiration in an appropriate gesture,
but only succeeded in knocking over with his elbow the vase con-
taining the spray of apple blossom, and all the water was spilled
on the carpet.393
“Really, you have the fingers of a fairy,” went on (to the mar-
quise) the historian who, having his back turned at that moment,
had not noticed Bloch’s clumsiness.
But Bloch took this for a sneer at himself and, to cover in inso-
lence his shame for being so awkward, retorted:
“It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.”
Mme de Villeparisis rang the bell and a footman came to wipe
the carpet and pick up the fragments of glass. She invited the two
young men to her theatricals, and also Mme de Guermantes, with
the injunction:
“Remember to tell Gisèle and Berthe” (the Duchesses d’Au­
berjon and de Portefin) “to be here a little before two to help me,”
as she might have told hired waiters to come early to arrange the
fruit bowls.
She treated her princely relatives, as she treated M. de Nor-
pois, without any of the little courtesies that she showed to the
historian, Cottard, Bloch, and myself, and they seemed to have
no interest for her beyond the possibility of serving them up as
food for our social curiosity. This was because she knew that she
need not put herself out to entertain people for whom she was
not a more or less brilliant woman but the touchy old sister—who
needed and received tactful handling—of their father or uncle.

Part One 233

 The Guermantes Way

There would have been no object in her trying to shine in front of

them, she could never have deceived them as to the strength and
weakness of her situation, for they knew, better than anyone, her
whole history and respected the illustrious race from which she
sprang. But above all, they had ceased to be anything more for
her than a dead stock that would not bear fruit again; they would
not introduce her to their new friends, or share their pleasures.
She could obtain from them only their occasional presence, or
the possibility of speaking of them, at her five o’clock receptions
as, later on, in her Mémoires, of which these receptions were only
a sort of rehearsal, a preliminary reading aloud of the manuscript
before a selected audience. And the society that all these noble
kinsmen and kinswomen served to interest, to dazzle, to enthrall,
the society of the Cottards, of the Blochs, of well-­known drama-
tists, of historians of the Fronde, of all kinds, it was in this society
that there existed for Mme de Villeparisis—failing that section
of the fashionable world that did not call upon her—movement,
novelty, entertainment and life; it was from people like these that
she was able to derive social advantages (which made it well worth
her while to let them meet, now and then, though without ever
coming to know her, the Duchesse de Guermantes): dinners with
remarkable men whose work had interested her, a light opera
or a pantomime staged complete by its author in her drawing
room, boxes for interesting shows. Bloch got up to go. He had
said aloud that the incident of the broken vase was of no impor-
tance, but what he said to himself was different, more different
still what he thought: “If people can’t train their servants to put
vases where they won’t risk wetting and even injuring their guests,
they shouldn’t go in for such luxuries,” he muttered angrily. He
was one of those touchy, highly strung people who cannot bear to
think of themselves as having made a blunder, which, though they
do not admit even to themselves that they have made it, is enough
to spoil their whole day. In a black rage, he was just making up
his mind never to go into society again. He had reached the point
at which some distraction was imperative. Fortunately, in another

234 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

minute Mme de Villeparisis was to press him to stay. Either be- 394. According to tradition, the god-
cause she was aware of the general feeling among her friends and dess “with sea-­green eyes” is Athena.
Hera, the sister and wife of Zeus, is
had noticed the tide of anti-­Semitism that was beginning to rise, described in The Iliad as the goddess
or simply from absentmindedness, she had not introduced him “with white arms.” Proust is quoting
to any of the people in the room. He, however, being little used Leconte de Lisle’s translation of
Homer.
to society, felt bound before leaving the room to take leave of
them all, to show his good manners, but without any friendli-
ness; he lowered his head several times, buried his bearded chin
in his collar, scrutinized each of the party in turn through his
pince-­nez with a cold, discontented glare. But Mme de Villepa-
risis stopped him; she had still to discuss with him the little play
that was to be performed in her house, and also she did not wish
him to leave before he had had the pleasure of meeting M. de
Norpois (whose failure to appear surprised her), although as an
inducement to Bloch this introduction was quite superfluous, he
having already decided to persuade the two actresses whose names
he had mentioned to her to come and sing for nothing in the mar-
quise’s drawing room, to enhance their own reputations, at one of
those receptions to which the elite of Europe thronged. He had
even offered her, in addition, a tragic actress “with sea-­green eyes,
fair as Hera,”394 who would recite lyrical prose with a sense of
“plastic beauty.” But on hearing her name Mme de Villeparisis had
declined, for it was that of Saint-­L oup’s mistress.
“I have better news,” she murmured in my ear. “I really believe
he’s quite cooled off now and that before very long they’ll be sepa-
rated—in spite of an officer who has played an abominable part
in the whole business,” she added. (For Robert’s family were be-
ginning to look with a deadly hatred on M. de Borodino, who had
given him leave, at the coiffeur’s instance, to go to Bruges, and
accused him of encouraging an infamous liaison.) “It’s really too
bad of him,” said Mme de Villeparisis, with that virtuous accent
common to all the Guermantes, even the most depraved. “Too,
too bad,” she repeated, giving the word a trio of “t”s. One felt that
she had no doubt of the prince’s being present at all their orgies.
But, as kindness of heart was the marquise’s dominant charac-

Part One 235

 The Guermantes Way

395. Proust uses “sir” and “lady” as the teristic, her expression of frowning severity toward the horrible
titles for the Israëls, presumably be- captain, whose name she articulated with an ironical emphasis:
cause they immigrated from England.
“The Prince de Borodino!”—speaking as a woman for whom the
Empire simply did not count, melted into a gentle smile at my-
self with a mechanical wink indicating a vague understanding be-
tween us.
“I have a great admiration for de Saint-­L oup-­en-­Bray,” said
Bloch, “dirty dog as he is, because he’s so extremely well-­bred.
I have a great admiration, not for him but for well-­bred people,
they’re so rare,” he went on, without realizing, since he was him-
self so extremely ill-­bred, how offensive his words were. “I will
give you an example that I consider most striking of his perfect
breeding. I met him once with a young man just as he was about
to spring into his wheeled chariot, after he himself had buckled
their splendid harness on a pair of steeds nourished with oats and
barley, who had no need to be urged on by the flashing whip. He
introduced us, but I did not catch the young man’s name, for one
never does catch people’s names when one’s introduced to them,”
he explained with a laugh, this being one of his father’s witticisms.
“De Saint-­L oup-­en-­Bray remained perfectly calm, made no fuss
about the young man, and seemed absolutely at his ease. Well, I
found out, by pure chance, a day or two later, that the young man
was the son of Sir Rufus Israëls!”395
The end of this story sounded less shocking than its beginning,
for it remained quite incomprehensible to everyone in the room.
The fact was that Sir Rufus Israëls, who seemed to Bloch and his
father an almost royal personage before whom Saint-­L oup ought
to tremble, was in the eyes of the Guermantes world a foreign up-
start, tolerated in society, on whose friendship nobody would ever
have dreamed of priding himself, far from it!
“I learned this,” said Bloch, “from Sir Rufus’s agent, who is
a friend of my father and quite an extraordinary man. Oh, an
absolutely wonderful individual,” he assured us with that affirma-
tive energy, that note of enthusiasm that one puts only into those
convictions that did not originate with oneself. “But tell me,”

236 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

Bloch went on, lowering his voice to me, “how much is Saint-­ 396. Balzac often begins his novels
Loup worth? Not that it matters to me in the least, you quite with an account of how the family in
question made—and in some cases
understand, don’t you? I’m interested from the Balzacian point made and lost—its fortune.
of view.396 You don’t happen to know what it’s in, French stocks, 397. Antenor is a wise old man who,
foreign stocks, or land?” as counselor of Priam and the Trojans
in The Iliad, advises his compatriots
I could give him no information whatsoever. Suddenly raising to release Helen back to the Greeks.
his voice, Bloch asked if he might open the windows, and without Bloch (or Proust?) is mistaken about
waiting for an answer, went across the room to do so. Mme de the paternity: the son of the big river
Alpheus is Orsilochus.
Villeparisis protested that he must not, that she had a cold. “Of
course, if it’s bad for you!” Bloch was downcast. “But you can’t say
it’s not hot in here!” And breaking into a laugh, he glanced around
the room in an appeal for support against Mme de Villeparisis.
He received none, from these well-­bred people. His blazing eyes,
having failed to seduce any of the guests from their allegiance,
faded with resignation to their normal gravity of expression; he ac-
knowledged his defeat with: “What’s the temperature? It must be
at least seventy-­two. Seventy-­seven! I’m not surprised. I’m simply
dripping. And I have not, like the sage Antenor,397 son of the
river Alpheus, the power to plunge myself in the paternal wave
to stanch my sweat before laying my body in a bath of polished
marble and anointing my limbs with fragrant oils.” And with the
need that we feel to outline, for the use of others, medical theories
the application of which would be beneficial to our own health:
“Well, if you believe it’s good for you! I must say, I think you’re
quite wrong. It’s exactly what gives you your cold.”
Bloch was overjoyed at the idea of meeting M. de Norpois. He
would like, he said, to get him to talk about the Dreyfus Affair.
“There’s a mentality at work there that I don’t altogether under-
stand, and it would be quite sensational to have an interview with
this eminent diplomat,” he said in a tone of sarcasm, so as not to
appear to be judging himself inferior to the ambassador.
Mme de Villeparisis was sorry that he had said this so loud,
but minded less when she saw that the archivist, whose strong
nationalist views kept her, so to speak, on a leash, was too far off
to have overheard. She was more shocked to hear Bloch, led on by

Part One 237

 The Guermantes Way

398. The Russo-­Japanese War lasted that demon of ill-­breeding that made him permanently blind to
from February 1904 to September 1905 the consequences of what he said, inquiring, with a laugh at the
and was disastrous for the Russians.
399. The model here is apparently the paternal pleasantry:
playwright Antoine, Marquis de Cas- “Haven’t I read a learned treatise by him in which he sets forth
tellane (1844–1917). Proust describes a string of irrefutable arguments to prove that the Russo-­Japanese
him in a letter to a friend as being a
man “on casters who swoops with War was bound to end in a Russian victory and a Japanese de-
clumsy and vertiginous speed on the feat?398 He’s fairly senile now, isn’t he? I’m sure he’s the old boy
armchair, the door or the friend he has I’ve seen taking aim at his chair before sliding across the room to
targeted . . .” Proust, Selected Letters
2: 395. it, as if he was on casters.”399
“Good heavens, no! He’s not in the least like that! Just wait
a minute,” the marquise went on, “I don’t know what he can be
doing.”
She rang the bell and, when the servant had appeared, as she
made no secret, and indeed liked to advertise the fact that her old
friend spent the greater part of his time in her house:
“Go and tell M. de Norpois to come,” she ordered him. “He is
sorting some papers in my library; he said he would be twenty min-
utes, and I’ve been waiting now for an hour and three-­quarters.
He’ll talk to you about the Dreyfus Affair, about anything you
want to know,” she said gruffly to Bloch. “He doesn’t approve
much of the way things are going.”
For M. de Norpois was not on good terms with the current
government, and Mme de Villeparisis, although he had never
taken the liberty of bringing any actual ministers to her house
(she still preserved all the unapproachable dignity of a great lady
of the aristocracy, and remained outside and above the political
relations that he was obliged to cultivate), was kept well informed
by him of everything that went on. In the same way, the politi-
cians of the present regime would never have dared to ask M. de
Norpois to introduce them to Mme de Villeparisis. But several of
them had gone down to see him at her home in the country when
they needed his advice or help at critical conjectures. They knew
the address. They went to the château. They did not see the châ-
telaine. But at dinner that evening she would say: “I hear they’ve
been down here bothering you. Are things going better?”

238 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“You are not in a hurry?” she now asked Bloch. 400. This little comedy is based on
“No, not at all. I was thinking of leaving because I am not very the behavior of Anatole France and his
mistress, Mme Arman de Caillavet. See
well; in fact there’s a possibility of my taking a cure at Vichy for Carter, Marcel Proust, 102.
my gall bladder,” he explained, articulating the last words with a
fiendish irony.
“Why, that’s where my nephew Châtellerault has to go; you
should arrange that together. Is he still here? He’s a nice boy, you
know,” said Mme de Villeparisis, sincerely perhaps, thinking that
two people whom she knew had no reason not to be friends with
each other.
“Oh, I don’t know if he would like that; I know him . . . only
slightly. He’s sitting over there,” stammered Bloch, in an ecstasy
of confusion.
The butler must not have delivered his mistress’s message prop-
erly, for M. de Norpois, to make it appear that he had just come
in from the street, and had not yet seen his hostess, had picked up
the first hat that he had found in the hall, and came forward to kiss
Mme de Villeparisis’s hand with great ceremony, asking after her
health with all the interest that people show after a long absence.400
He was not aware that the marquise had already destroyed any
semblance of reality in this charade, which she cut short by taking
M. de Norpois and Bloch into an adjoining room. Bloch, who had
observed all the courtesy that was being shown to a person whom
he had not yet discovered to be M. de Norpois, and the formal, gra-
cious, and deep bows with which the ambassador replied to them,
had said to me in order to seem at his ease: “Who is that old idiot?”
Perhaps, too, all this bowing and scraping by M. de Norpois had
really shocked the better element in Bloch’s nature, the freer and
more straightforward manners of a younger generation, and he was
partly sincere in condemning it as absurd. However that might be,
it ceased to appear absurd, and indeed delighted him the moment
it was himself, Bloch, to whom the salutations were addressed.
“Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” said Mme de Villeparisis, “I would
like you to meet this gentleman. Monsieur Bloch, Monsieur le
Marquis de Norpois.” She made a point, despite her rude treat-

Part One 239

 The Guermantes Way

401. Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour ment of M. de Norpois, of addressing him always as “Monsieur
(1810–61), was an Italian statesman l’Ambassadeur,” as a social convention as well as from an exagger-
who laid the groundwork for the unifi-
cation of Italy. ated respect for his ambassadorial rank, a respect that the marquis
had inculcated in her, and also with an instinctive application to
him of the special manner, less familiar and more ceremonious,
in relation to one particular man—which, in the salon of a dis-
tinguished woman, in contrast to the liberties that she takes with
her other regular guests, marks that man out instantly as her lover.
M. de Norpois drowned his azure gaze in his white beard, bent
his tall body deep down as though he were bowing before all the
famous and (to him) imposing connotations of the name Bloch,
and murmured: “I am delighted,” whereat his young interlocutor,
moved, but feeling that the illustrious diplomat was going too far,
hastened to correct him, saying: “Not at all! On the contrary, it is
I who am delighted.” But this ceremony, which M. de Norpois, in
his friendship for Mme de Villeparisis, repeated for the benefit of
every new person that his old friend introduced to him, did not
seem to her adequate to the deserts of Bloch, to whom she said:
“Just ask him anything you want to know; take him aside if it’s
more convenient; he will be delighted to talk to you. I think you
wished to speak to him about the Dreyfus Affair,” she went on,
no more considering whether this would suit M. de Norpois than
she would have thought of asking leave of the Duchesse de Mont-
morency’s portrait before having it lighted up for the historian, or
of the tea before offering a cup.
“You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf,
but he will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck
very well, and Cavour.401 That is so, isn’t it, Monsieur?” she raised
her voice, “you knew Bismarck well?”
“Have you got anything in the works?” M. de Norpois asked
me with a knowing look as he shook my hand cordially. I took
the opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat that he had felt
obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it
was my own that he had inadvertently taken. “You showed me a
somewhat convoluted little thing in which you went in for a good

240 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

deal of hairsplitting. I gave you my opinion quite frankly; what 402. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
you had written was literally not worth the trouble of putting it Flower, 50–51.
403. Victor Cherbuliez (1829–99) was
on paper.402 Are you preparing something else for us? You were a French novelist of Swiss origin, who
greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re used historical and archaeological
not to say anything against Bergotte,” exclaimed the duchess. “I backgrounds to create large-­scale de-
pictions of a cosmopolitan society in
don’t dispute his talent as a portrayer; no one would, Duchess. He which history is mixed with adventure.
understands all about engraving or etching, if not brushwork on 404. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
a large scale like M. Cherbuliez.403 But it seems to me that these Flower, 57.
405. Proust may be thinking of
days there is some confusion about genres and we forget that the Édouard Manet’s Botte d’asperges
novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers (1880) from the collection of Charles
than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in dry- Ephrussi (1849–1905), one of the
models for Swann.
point. I’ll be seeing your father on Sunday at our good friend 406. Antoine Auguste Ernest Hébert
A. J.’s,” he went on, turning again to me. (1817–1908) painted historical and bib-
I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme lical scenes as well as portraits. His
Vierge de la délivrance is in the Musée
de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting my- de Grenoble and was made popular by
self asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting an engraving. He won several medals
to Mme Swann’s.404 “Another of my great favorites,” I told him, in the Salons and the grand prize at the
Exposition of 1889.
“is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some won- 407. Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-­
derful examples of his work, particularly that admirable Bunch of Bouveret (1852–1929) was one of the
Radishes405 that I remember at the exhibition and would so much favorite portrait painters of Parisian
aristocrats.
like to see again; what a masterpiece that painting is!” And indeed,
if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what
picture I liked best, I would have named this Bunch of Radishes.
“A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and
reproachful air. “It makes no pretense of being even a painting,
it’s merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little
thing of that sort ‘masterpiece,’ what will you have to say about
Hébert’s406 Virgin or Dagnan-­Bouveret?”407
“I heard you refusing to let him bring Robert’s woman,” said
Mme de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the am-
bassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much; she’s a perfect
horror, you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s
grotesquely ugly.”
“Do you mean to say you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Ar-
gencourt.

Part One 241

 The Guermantes Way

408. Le Roi d’Yvetot is a well-­known “Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before
song by Pierre Jean de Béranger (1780– anyone else’s, not that that’s anything for me to be proud of,”
1857), written in May 1813 when France,
weary from the bloody era of the Napo- explained Mme de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless,
leonic wars, yearned for peace. Yvetot is since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she
a town in Normandy whose “king” was herself had had the first fruits of her foolishness. “Oh, well, I sup-
a pacifist hero.
pose I ought to be going now,” she added, without moving.
She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words
were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a
call together, like a newly married couple, rather than to the often
strained relations that existed between her and the enormous,
strapping fellow she had married, who, despite his increasing
years, still led the life of a young bachelor. Ranging over the con-
siderable party that was gathered around the tea table the affable,
mischievous gaze—dazzled a little by the rays of the setting sun—
of the little round pupils lodged in the exact center of his eyes, like
the “bulls” that, excellent marksman that he was, he could always
hit with such perfect aim and precision, the duke came forward
with a bewildered cautious slowness as though, intimidated by
so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts
and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile—suggesting a
slightly tipsy “Good King of Yvetot,”408 a half-­open hand floating
like a shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be clasped indis-
criminately by his old friends and by the strangers who were intro-
duced to him, enabled him, without his having to make a single
movement, or to interrupt his debonair, lazy, royal progress, to
reward the alacrity of them all by simply murmuring: “Evening,
my boy; evening, my dear friend; charmed, Monsieur Bloch; eve-
ning, Argencourt”; and, on coming to myself, who was the most
highly favored, when he had been told my name: “Evening, my
young neighbor, how’s your father? What a splendid fellow he is!”
He made no great demonstration except to Mme de Villeparisis,
who greeted him with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from
a pocket of her little apron.
Being formidably rich in a world where people were becoming
steadily less so, and having secured the permanent attachment to

242 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

his person of the idea of this enormous fortune, he displayed all 409. She does not pronounce the r in
the vanity of the great nobleman reinforced by that of the man sur, the word for “on.”
410. In French, “globe-­trotteur” is a
of means, the refinement and breeding of the former just man- borrowed word from English.
aging to control the smugness of the latter. One could understand, 411. See page 160, note 264.
moreover, that his success with women, which made his wife so
unhappy, was not due merely to his name and fortune, for he was
still extremely handsome, and his profile retained the purity, the
firmness of outline of a Greek god’s.
“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?”
M. d’Argencourt asked the duchess.
“Well, don’t you see, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies
in her hand, and more lilies on409 her dress.” Mme de Guermantes
shared her aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an
exceedingly rustic fashion, but never rolled her “r”s like Mme de
Villeparisis.
Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had
taken Bloch into the little recess where they could talk more
freely, I went up to the old diplomat for a moment and put in
a word about my father’s academic chair. He tried first of all to
postpone the conversation to another day. I pointed out that I
was going to Balbec. “What? Going again to Balbec? Why, you’re
a regular globe-­trotter.”410 Then he listened to what I had to say.
At the name of Leroy-­Beaulieu,411 he looked at me suspiciously.
I conjectured that he had perhaps said something disparaging
to M. Leroy-­Beaulieu about my father and was afraid that the
economist might have repeated it to him. All at once he seemed
animated by a positive affection for my father. And after one of
those opening hesitations out of which suddenly a word explodes
as though in spite of the speaker, whose irresistible conviction pre-
vails over his stammering efforts at silence: “No, no,” he said to
me with emotion, “your father must not stand. In his own interest
he must not; for his own sake; out of respect to his own merits
that are great and would be compromised by such an adventure.
He is too big a man for that. If he were elected, he would have
everything to lose and nothing to gain. He is not an orator, thank

Part One 243

 The Guermantes Way

412. The original “Academus” was heaven. And that is the one thing that counts with my dear col-
a shrine in a grove of olive trees in leagues, even if you only talk platitudes. Your father has an im-
Athens that was sacred to the mytho-
logical hero Academus, credited with portant goal in life; he should march straight ahead toward it, and
saving the city. Plato located his school, not allow himself to turn aside to beat bushes, even the bushes
the Academy, there in the grove of (more thorny than flowery) of the grove of Academe.412 Besides,
trees.
413. L’Italia farà da sè (Italy will act on he would not get many votes. The Académie likes to keep a postu-
her own) was the nineteenth-­century lant waiting for some time before taking him to its bosom. For
motto of Italian nationalists who thus the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I can’t say.
proclaimed the desire to see the unity
of the country achieved without foreign But he must wait until the Society itself comes to seek him out.
intervention. It makes a practice, not a very fortunate practice, a fetish rather,
414. These are the first words of Re- of the farà da sè413 of our friends across the Alps. Leroy-­Beaulieu
media Amoris (Cures for love), a poem
by the Latin writer Ovid (43 b.c.– spoke to me about all this in a way that did not please me at all.
c. a.d. 18). Speaking of love, the poet It seemed to me moreover at a rough guess that he was hand in
suggests that one is wise to “resist the glove with your father? I pointed out to him, a little sharply per-
first advances.”
415. Latin meaning “Arcadians, both of haps, that a man accustomed as he is to dealing with textiles and
them.” The phrase is from book 7 of metals could not be expected to understand the part played by the
Virgil’s Eclogues. Thyrsis and Corydon imponderables, as Bismarck used to say. But whatever happens,
are two young shepherds who are
singers and engage in a competition your father must on no account put himself forward as a candi-
in verse. The phrase is used to indi- date: Principis obsta.414 His friends would find themselves placed
cate two associates of similar tastes, in a delicate position if he suddenly presented them with a fait
and especially those of similar back-
grounds, who like to indulge in pranks accompli. Indeed,” he said brusquely with an air of candor, fixing
and little mischievous jokes. his blue eyes on my face, “I am going to say a thing that you will
be surprised to hear coming from me, who am so fond of your
father. Well, precisely because I am fond of him (we are known as
the inseparables—­Arcades ambo),415 precisely because I know the
immense service that he can still render to his country, the reefs
from which he can steer her if he remains at the helm; out of af-
fection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I would not
vote for him. I think, moreover, that I have given him to under-
stand that I would not.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the stern
Assyrian profile of Leroy-­Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote
now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois re-
peatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other
reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe
to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct con-

244 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

verse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! If
it were only up to me!” than for the satisfaction of making the title
that he has obtained seem more difficult and therefore more flat-
tering. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests
of you all, I would prefer to see your father triumphantly elected
in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words that I assumed to have been
dictated if not by jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of any will-
ingness to oblige, and that were later on, in the course of events,
to receive a different meaning.
“You haven’t thought of giving the Institut an address on the
price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that
movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “You could make
a considerable success of a subject like that” (which was to say,
“give me a colossal advertisement”), he added, smiling at the am-
bassador pusillanimously, but with a warmth of feeling that made
him raise his eyelids and reveal his eyes as big as the sky. I seemed
to have seen this look before, and yet I had met the historian for
the first time this afternoon. Suddenly, I remembered having seen
the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed
to be able to cure the kind of breathlessness from which I suffered
by some absurd inhalation of the essential oils of plants. When,
in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had
told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though
speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if
you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a
most sensational paper for the Académie de Médecine!” He had
not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with
the same air of interrogation, timid, calculating, and suppliant,
which it had just puzzled me to see on the face of the historian of
the Fronde. Obviously, the two men were not acquainted and had
little or nothing in common, but psychological like physical laws
have a more or less general application. And if the requisite condi-
tions are the same, an identical expression lights up the eyes of dif-
ferent human animals, as the same sunrise lights different places,
a long way apart and that have no connection with one another.

Part One 245

 The Guermantes Way

416. The word “drolatic” is inspired by I did not hear the ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a
Balzac’s title, Contes drolatiques (Droll good deal of brouhaha, had again gathered around Mme de Ville-
stories, 1837).
417. This is the title of Richard parisis to watch her paint.
Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, which pre- “You know who we’re talking about, Basin?” the duchess asked
miered in 1870 and is the second part her husband.
of The Ring of the Nibelung.
“I can make a pretty good guess,” said the duke. “Ah! As an
actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tra-
dition.”
“You can’t imagine,” went on Mme de Guermantes to M. d’Ar-
gencourt, “anything more ridiculous.”
“In fact, it was drolatic,”416 put in M. de Guermantes, whose
odd vocabulary enabled people in society to declare that he was
no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a
complete imbecile.
“What I fail to understand,” resumed the duchess, “is how in
the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course
I know one must never discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with
the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last
illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in
love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might
still make fun of modern literature, it, either by its vulgarization
in newspapers or else in the course of conversation, had begun to
infiltrate her mind, “that is the really nice thing about love, be-
cause it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’”
“Mysterious! Oh, I must confess, cousin, that’s a bit beyond
me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt.
“Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the
duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-­natured woman of the
world, but also with the intransigent conviction with which a
Wagnerian assures a bored gentleman from the club that there is
something more than just noise in the Walküre.417 “After all, one
never does know what makes one person fall in love with another;
it may not be at all what we think,” she added with a smile, re-
pudiating at once by this interpretation the idea she had just sug-
gested. “After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she con-

246 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

cluded with an air of weary skepticism. “And so, you see, it’s wiser
never to discuss other people’s choices in love.”
But having laid down this principle, she proceeded at once to
abandon it by criticizing Saint-­L oup’s choice.
“All the same, don’t you know, it is amazing to me that a man
can find any attraction in a person who’s simply ridiculous.”
Bloch, hearing Saint-­L oup’s name mentioned and gathering
that he was in Paris, began to malign him so outrageously that
everybody was shocked. He was beginning to nourish hatreds,
and one felt that he would stop at nothing to gratify them. Having
established the principle that he himself was of great moral worth
and that the sort of people who frequented La Boulie (an athletic
club that he supposed to be highly fashionable) deserved penal
servitude, every blow he could deal them seemed to him praise-
worthy. He once went so far as to speak of a lawsuit that he was
eager to bring against one of his La Boulie friends. In the course
of the trial he proposed to give certain evidence that would be
entirely untrue, though the defendant would be unable to im-
pugn his veracity. In this way Bloch (who, incidentally, never put
his plan into action) counted on disheartening and enraging him
even more. What harm could there be in that, since the man he
sought to injure was a man who thought only of what was chic, a
La Boulie man, and against people like that any weapon was justi-
fied, especially in the hands of a saint such as Bloch himself?
“I say, though, what about Swann?” objected M. d’Argencourt,
who having at last succeeded in understanding the point of his
cousin’s speech, was impressed by her accuracy of observation and
was racking his brains for instances of men who had fallen in love
with women in whom he himself had seen no attraction.
“Oh, but Swann’s case was quite different,” the duchess pro-
tested. “It was a great surprise, I admit, because she’s just a well-­
meaning idiot, but she was never ridiculous, and she was at one
time pretty.”
“Pooh, pooh!” muttered Mme de Villeparisis.
“Ah! You never thought her pretty? Surely, she had some

Part One 247

 The Guermantes Way

418. Proust incorrectly attributes to charming points, very pretty eyes, pretty hair, she used to dress,
Augier a quotation from the dedi- and does still dress, wonderfully. Nowadays, I quite agree, she’s
cation of Alfred de Musset’s collec-
tion of short plays Le Spectacle dans horrible, but in her time she was a ravishing woman. Not that that
un fauteuil: “Aimer est le grand point, made me any less sorry when Charles married her, because it was so
qu’importe la maîtresse / Qu’importe unnecessary.” The duchess had not intended to say anything out of
le flacon, pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse?”
419. This is a play (1891) by Maurice the common, but as M. d’Argencourt began to laugh she repeated
Maeterlinck (1862–1949), a Belgian these last words—either because she thought them amusing or be-
Symbolist writer. The stage directions cause she thought it nice of him to laugh—and looked up at him
describe the set as consisting of a vast
marble room in which there is a marble with a coaxing smile, to add the enchantment of her femininity
staircase with seven steps strewn with to that of her wit. She went on: “Yes, really, it wasn’t worth the
cushions of pale silk on which sleep trouble, was it; still, after all, she did have some charm and I can
seven princesses dressed in white.
420. Joseph Peladan (1858–1918) was quite understand anybody’s falling in love with her, but if you saw
the epitome of the decadent man of Robert’s demoiselle, I assure you, you’d simply die laughing. Oh,
letters and a practitioner of the occult. I know somebody’s going to quote Augier at me: ‘What matters
He added the title “Sâr” to his name,
saying that it had been given to him by the bottle so long as one gets drunk?’418 Well, Robert may have
one of the ancient magi of Chaldea. In got drunk, all right, but he certainly hasn’t shown much taste in
1892, he founded the Salon de la Rose-­ his choice of a bottle! First of all, would you believe that she actu-
Croix Catholique, which organized sev-
eral salons of paintings in the Durand-­ ally expected me to set up a staircase right in the middle of my
Ruel Gallery. A poster announcing one drawing room. Oh, a mere nothing—right?—and she announced
such exhibition showed a staircase that she was going to lie flat on her stomach on the steps. And
strewn with lilies.
then, if you’d heard the things she recited, I only remember one
scene, but I’m sure nobody could imagine anything like it; it was
called The Seven Princesses.”419
“Seven Princesses! Dear, dear, what a snob she must be!” cried
M. d’Argencourt. “But, wait a minute, why, I know the whole
play. The author sent a copy to the king, who couldn’t understand
a word of it and called on me to explain it to him.”
“It isn’t by any chance, by Sâr Peladan?”420 asked the historian
of the Fronde, meaning to make a subtle and topical allusion, but
in so low a tone that his question passed unnoticed.
“So you know The Seven Princesses, do you?” replied the duchess,
“I congratulate you! I only know one, but she’s quite enough; I
have no wish to make the acquaintance of the other six. If they are
all like the one I’ve seen!”

248 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“What a goose!” I thought to myself. Irritated by the glacial

greeting she had given me, I found a sort of bitter satisfaction in
this proof of her complete inability to understand Maeterlinck.
“To think that’s the woman I walk miles every morning to see.
Really, I’m too kind. Well, it’s my turn now not to want to see
her.” These were the words I said to myself; but they ran counter
to my thoughts; they were purely conversational words such as
we say to ourselves at those moments when, too excited to re-
main quietly alone, we feel the need, for want of another listener,
to talk to ourselves, without meaning what we say, as we talk to
a stranger.
“I can’t tell you what it was like,” the duchess went on, “it was
enough to make you split your sides laughing. And we did; rather
too much, I’m sorry to say, for the young person was not at all
pleased, and Robert has never really forgiven me. Though I can’t
say I’m sorry, actually, because if it had been a success the demoi-
selle would perhaps have come again, and I know how much that
would have pleased Marie-­Aynard.”
This was the name given in the family to Robert’s mother,
Mme de Marsantes, the widow of Aynard de Saint-­L oup, to distin-
guish her from her cousin, the Princesse de Guermantes-­Bavière,
also a Marie, to whose given name her nephews and cousins and
brothers-­in-­law added, to avoid confusion, either that of her hus-
band or another of her own, making her Marie-­Gilbert or Marie-­
Hedwige.
“To begin with, there was a sort of rehearsal the night before,
which was a wonderful affair!” went on Mme de Guermantes in
ironical pursuit of her theme. “Just imagine, she uttered a sen-
tence, no, not so much, not a quarter of a sentence, and then she
stopped; she didn’t open her mouth—I’m not exaggerating—for
a good five minutes.”
“Oh, I say,” cried M. d’Argencourt.
“With the utmost politeness I took the liberty of hinting to her
that this might seem a little unusual. And she said—I give you her

Part One 249

 The Guermantes Way

421. A baba au rhum is a rich cake actual words—‘One ought always to repeat a thing as though one
soaked in a rum-­flavored sugar syrup. were just composing it oneself.’ When you think of it, that reply
really is monumental!”
“But I understood she wasn’t at all bad at reciting poetry,” said
one of the two young men.
“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme
de Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell
that. It was quite enough to see her come in with her lilies! I knew
at once that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!”
Everyone laughed.
“I hope, my dear aunt, you aren’t angry with me, over my little
joke the other day about the Queen of Sweden? I’ve come to ask
your forgiveness.”
“Oh, no, I’m not at all angry, I even give you leave to eat at
my table, if you’re hungry. Come along, M. Vallenères, you’re the
daughter of the house,” Mme de Villeparisis went on to the archi-
vist, repeating a time-­honored pleasantry.
M. de Guermantes sat upright in the armchair into which he
had sunk, his hat on the carpet by his side, and examined with a
satisfied smile the plate of petits fours that was being held out to
him.
“Why, certainly, now that I’m beginning to feel at home in this
distinguished company, I’ll take a baba; they look excellent.”421
“This gentleman makes you an admirable daughter,” com-
mented M. d’Argencourt, whom the spirit of imitation prompted
to keep Mme de Villeparisis’s little joke in circulation.
The archivist handed the plate of petits fours to the historian
of the Fronde.
“You perform your functions admirably,” said the latter, startled
into speech, and hoping also to win the sympathy of the crowd. At
the same time he cast a covert glance of connivance at those who
had anticipated him.
“Tell me, my dear aunt,” M. de Guermantes inquired of Mme
de Villeparisis, “who was that rather good-­looking man who was
going out just now as I came in? I must know him, because he

250 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

gave me a sweeping bow, but I couldn’t place him at all; you know
I never can remember names, it’s such a nuisance,” he added with
a self-­satisfied air.
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mis-
taken, was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a
Grandin de l’Éprevier.”
“No,” replied Mme de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are
plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’d be only too
glad to be Grandins of anything you chose to name. This one has
a sister called Mme de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who my aunt means,” cried
the duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great herbivore
creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other
day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I would go mad. But I
began by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person
I didn’t know come browsing into the room looking exactly like
a cow.”
“Listen, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at
home; I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do ex-
aggerate so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plain-
tive tone, though not without a furtive, smiling glance at the audi-
ence.
He knew that his wife’s lively wit needed the stimulus of
contradiction, the contradiction of common sense, which protests
that one cannot, for example, mistake a woman for a cow; by this
process Mme de Guermantes, enlarging upon her original idea,
had been inspired to produce many of her wittiest remarks. And
the duke would play the innocent in order to help her, without
seeming to do so, bring off her effects like the unacknowledged
partner of the three-­card trickster in a railway carriage.
“I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like several,”
exclaimed Mme de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know
what to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my
drawing room in a hat and ask me how I was. I had half a mind

Part One 251

 The Guermantes Way

422. Dulcinea is a character in Cer- to say: ‘Please, herd of cattle, you must be making a mistake, you
vantes’ Don Quixote. She is Don can’t possibly know me, because you’re a herd of cattle,’ but after
Quixote’s idea of the perfect sweet-
heart (dulce in Spanish means racking my brains over her I came to the conclusion that your
“sweet”), and her name has come to Cambremer woman must be the Infanta Dorothea who had said
designate someone’s beloved or mis- she was coming to see me one day, and is rather bovine too, so that
tress.
I was just on the point of saying: ‘Your Royal Highness’ and using
the third person to a herd of cattle. She also has the same sort of
dewlap as the Queen of Sweden. Actually, this massed attack had
been prepared for by long-­range artillery fire, according to all the
rules of war. For I don’t know how long before, I was bombarded
with her cards; I used to find them lying about all over the house,
on all the tables and chairs like prospectuses. I couldn’t think
what they were supposed to be advertising. You saw nothing in
the house but ‘Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer’ with some
address or other that I’ve forgotten and which, for that matter, I
am firmly resolved never to use.”
“But it’s very flattering to look like a queen,” said the historian
of the Fronde.
“Oh! Good God, Monsieur, these days kings and queens don’t
amount to much!” said M. de Guermantes, partly because he
liked to be thought broad-­minded and modern, and also so as not
to seem to attach any importance to his own royal connections,
which he valued highly.
Bloch and M. de Norpois had returned from the other room
and came toward us.
“Well, Monsieur,” asked Mme de Villeparisis, “have you been
talking to him about the Dreyfus Affair?”
M. de Norpois raised his eyes to the ceiling, but with a smile,
as though calling on heaven to witness the monstrosity of the
caprices to which his Dulcinea422 compelled him to submit.
Nevertheless, he spoke to Bloch with great affability of the ter-
rible, perhaps fatal, period through which France was passing. As
this presumably meant that M. de Norpois (to whom Bloch had
confessed his belief in the innocence of Dreyfus) was an ardent
anti-­Dreyfusard, the ambassador’s geniality, his air of tacit admis-

252 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

sion that his interlocutor was in the right, of never doubting that 423. At the end of act 1 of Richard
they were both of the same opinion, of joining forces with him to Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, the hero
appears standing in a boat drawn by
bring down the government, flattered Bloch’s vanity and aroused a swan.
his curiosity. What were the important points that M. de Nor- 424. Émile Zola (1840–1902) was put
pois never specified but on which he seemed implicitly to affirm on trial in February 1898 for defama-
tion after the publication of J’accuse!
that he was in agreement with Bloch; what opinion, then, did he in L’Aurore on January 13, 1898. Zola
hold of the Affair, that could bring them together? Bloch was all proclaimed the innocence of Dreyfus
the more astonished at the mysterious unanimity that seemed to and accused the military hierarchy and
the government of having lied, falsified
exist between him and M. de Norpois, in that it was not confined documents, and violated human rights.
to politics, Mme de Villeparisis having spoken at some length to Found guilty, Zola was sentenced to
M. de Norpois of Bloch’s literary work. a year in prison. A retrial was held on
July 18, and he was again found guilty,
“You are not of your age,” the former ambassador told him, after which he spent a year in exile in
“and I congratulate you on that. You are not of this age in which England.
disinterested work no longer exists, in which writers offer the
public nothing but obscenities or inanities. Efforts such as yours
ought to be encouraged, and would be, if we had a government.”
Bloch was flattered by this picture of himself swimming alone
amid a universal shipwreck. But here again he would have been
glad of details, would have liked to know what were the inanities
to which M. de Norpois referred. Bloch had the feeling that he
was working along the same lines as plenty of others; he had never
supposed himself to be so exceptional. He returned to the Dreyfus
Affair, but did not succeed in untangling M. de Norpois’s own
views. He tried to induce him to speak of the officers whose names
were appearing constantly in the newspapers at that time; they
aroused more curiosity than the politicians who were involved in
the Affair, because they were not, like the politicians, well known
already, but, wearing a special garb, emerging from the obscurity
of a different kind of life and a religiously guarded silence, simply
stood up and spoke, like Lohengrin landing from a skiff drawn by
a swan.423 Bloch had been able, thanks to a nationalist lawyer of
his acquaintance, to secure admission to several hearings of the
Zola trial.424 He would arrive there in the morning and stay until
the evening, with a provision of sandwiches and a flask of coffee,
as though for the final examination for a degree, and this change

Part One 253

 The Guermantes Way

425. Proust attended the trial and wrote of routine stimulating a nervous excitement that the coffee and
about his experience in drafts for his the emotional interest of the trial worked up to a climax, he would
unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil.
426. Général Marie-­François Joseph, come out so enamored of everything that had happened in court
Baron de Miribel (1831–93), had been that, in the evening, as he sat at home, he would long to immerse
chief of the General Staff of the army. himself again in that beautiful dream and would hurry out to a
Lieutenant Colonel Henry served as his
aide-­de-­camp. restaurant frequented by both parties, in search of friends with
427. Hubert Joseph Henry (1846–98) whom he would go over interminably the whole of the day’s pro-
was chief of staff of the army and ceedings, and make up, by a supper ordered in an imperious tone
holder of the Légion d’Honneur. He
later joined the Section of Statistics of that gave him the illusion of power, for the hunger and exhaustion
the Ministry of War, the department of a day begun so early and unbroken by any break for lunch.425
responsible for counterintelligence. The human mind, hovering perpetually between the two planes of
Henry forged documents incriminating
Dreyfus; these forgeries were the only experience and imagination, seeks to fathom the ideal life of the
evidence against the accused. After the people it knows and to know the people whose life it has had to
revelation of the forgeries, Henry was imagine. To Bloch’s questions M. de Norpois replied:
sentenced to prison and committed
suicide on August 31, 1898. “There are two officers involved in the case now being tried of
428. In Greek mythology, Athena is the whom I remember hearing some time ago from a man in whose
goddess of wisdom and war. judgment inspired me with the greatest confidence, and who
429. Moira (Fate) is not a mythological
god, but a mysterious, tremendous praised them both highly—I mean M. de Miribel.426 They are
power stronger even than the gods. Lieutenant Colonel Henry427 and Lieutenant Colonel Picquart.”
“But,” exclaimed Bloch, “the divine Athena,428 daughter of
Zeus, has put in the mind of one the opposite of what is in the
mind of the other. And they are fighting against one another like
two lions. Colonel Picquart had a splendid position in the army,
but his Moira429 has led him to the side that was not rightly his.
The sword of the nationalists will carve his tender flesh, and he
will be cast out as food for the beasts of prey and the birds that
nourish themselves on the fat of the bodies of dead men.”
M. de Norpois made no reply.
“What are those two palavering about over there?” M. de Guer-
mantes asked Mme de Villeparisis, indicating M. de Norpois and
Bloch.
“The Dreyfus Affair.”
“The devil they are. By the way, do you know who is a rabid
supporter of Dreyfus? You’ll never guess. My nephew Robert! I
can tell you that, at the Jockey, when they heard of his goings on,

254 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

there was a fine gathering of the clans, a regular hue and cry. And
as he’s coming up for election next week . . .”
“Of course,” broke in the duchess, “if they’re all like Gilbert,
who has always maintained that all the Jews ought to be sent back
to Jerusalem . . .”
“Ah! then the Prince de Guermantes is quite of my way of
thinking,” interrupted M. d’Argencourt.
The duke made a show of his wife, but did not love her. Ex-
tremely self-­important, he hated to be interrupted, and besides
he was in the habit, at home, of bullying her. Quivering with the
twofold rage of a bad husband when his wife speaks to him, and
a good talker when he is not listened to, he stopped short and
transfixed the duchess with a glare that made everyone feel un-
comfortable.
“What makes you think we want to hear about Gilbert and
Jerusalem?” he said at last. “It has nothing to do with that. But,”
he went on in a gentler tone, “you must admit that if one of our
family were to be refused membership at the Jockey, especially
Robert, whose father was president for ten years, that would be
the limit. What can you expect, my dear, it’s got ’em on the raw,
those fellows; they’re all over it. I don’t blame them, either; per-
sonally, you know that I have no racial prejudice, all that sort of
thing seems to me out of date, and I do claim to move with the
times; but damn it all, when one goes by the name of ‘Marquis de
Saint-­L oup,’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?”
M. de Guermantes uttered the words: “When one goes by the
name of Marquis de Saint-­L oup,” with some emphasis. And yet he
knew very well that it was a far greater thing to go by that of Duc
de Guermantes. But if his self-­esteem had a tendency to exag-
gerate if anything the superiority of the title Duc de Guermantes
over all others, it was perhaps not so much the rules of good taste
as the laws of imagination that urged him thus to diminish it.
Each of us sees in the brightest colors what he sees at a distance,
what he sees in other people. For the general laws that govern per-
spective in imagination apply just as much to dukes as to ordinary

Part One 255

 The Guermantes Way

430. The Ligue de la Patrie Française mortals. And not only the laws of imagination, but also those of
was founded after the Zola trial in speech. Now, either of two laws of speech may apply here. One de-
December 1898, by men of letters who
were anti-­Dreyfusards. They included mands that we express ourselves like others of our mental category
Ferdinand Brunetière, François Coppée, and not of our caste. Under this law M. de Guermantes might, in
Jules Lemâitre, and Maurice Barrès, his choice of expressions, even when he wished to talk about the
who were soon joined by numerous
university professors, members of the nobility, be indebted to the humblest little tradesman, who would
Institut, and distinguished writers such have said: “When one goes by the name of Duc de Guermantes,”
as Jules Verne, Frédéric Mistral, and whereas an educated man, a Swann, a Legrandin would not have
Pierre Louÿs. The membership quickly
grew to forty thousand but lasted only said it. A duke may write novels worthy of a grocer, even about
until 1902. Its aim was to counteract life in high society, titles and pedigrees being of no help to him
the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and there, and the epithet “aristocratic” be earned by the writings of a
defend the country against intellectual
Dreyfusards who demanded a retrial. plebeian. Who had been, in this instance, the inferior from whom
M. de Guermantes had picked up “when one goes by the name,”
he had probably not the least idea. But another law of speech is
that, from time to time, as there appear and then vanish diseases
of which nothing more is ever heard, there come into being, no
one knows how, spontaneously perhaps or by an accident compa-
rable to the one that introduced into France a certain weed from
America, the seeds of which, caught in the wool of a traveling rug,
fell on a railway embankment, forms of speech that one hears in
the same decade on the lips of people who have not in any way
combined together to use them. So, just as in a certain year I
heard Bloch say, referring to himself, that “the most charming
people, the most brilliant, the best known, the most exclusive had
discovered that there was only one man in Paris whom they felt
to be intelligent, agreeable, whom they could not do without—
namely Bloch,” and heard the same phrase used by countless other
young men who did not know him and varied it only by substi-
tuting their own names for his, so I was often to hear this “when
one goes by the name.”
“What can one expect,” the duke went on, “with the influence
he’s come under; it’s easy to understand.”
“Still it is rather comic,” said the duchess, “when you think of
his mother’s attitude, how she bores us to tears with her Patrie
Française, morning, noon, and night.”430

256 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“Yes, but there’s not only his mother to be thought of, you 431. The first known occurrence of the
mustn’t tell us such whoppers. There’s a wench too, a slut of the word mentalité to indicate a “mental
state” was in 1877.
worst type; she has far more influence over him than his mother 432. During the time of the Dreyfus Af-
and she happens to be a compatriot of Master Dreyfus. She has fair, anti-­Semites imagined that France
passed on to Robert her way of thinking.” was the victim of a conspiracy led by a
powerful and secret syndicate of Jews.
“You may not have heard, Monsieur le Duc, that there is a 433. In French, talentueux is attested in
new word to describe a way of thinking,” said the archivist, who 1876 by Paul Robert. It was coined to
was secretary to the Anti-­revisionist Committee. “One says ‘men- create an adjectival form of “talent.”
434. The Cercle artistique et littéraire,
tality.’431 It means exactly the same thing, but it has this advantage founded in 1874, was located at 7, rue
that nobody knows what you’re talking about. It’s the crème de la de Volney, in the second arrondisse-
crème, the ‘dernier cri’ as they say.” ment.
435. Émile Ollivier (1825–1913), a min-
Meanwhile, having heard Bloch’s name, he was watching him ister of justice under Napoléon III,
question M. de Norpois with misgivings that aroused others as voted in 1870 “with a light heart” for
strong though of a different order in the marquise. Trembling be- the declaration of war. He emigrated
to Italy but returned to France in 1873
fore the archivist, and always acting the anti-­Dreyfusard in his and became known for his books on
presence, she dreaded what he would say were he to find out that history.
she had asked to her house a Jew more or less affiliated with the
“Syndicate.”432
“Indeed,” said the duke, “‘mentality,’ you say; I must make
a note of that; I’ll trot it out some day.” (This was no figure of
speech, the duke having a little pocketbook filled with such “quo-
tations,” which he used to consult before dinner parties.) “I like
‘mentality.’ There are a lot of new words like that which people
suddenly start tossing out, but they never last. I read somewhere
the other day that some writer was ‘talentuous.’433 Who knows
what that means. And since then I’ve never come across the word
again.”
“But ‘mentality’ is more widely used than ‘talentuous,’” said
the historian of the Fronde to join the conversation. “I’m on a
committee at the Ministry of Education where I have heard it
used several times, as well as at my club, the Volney,434 and even
at dinner at M. Émile Ollivier’s.”435
“I, who have not the honor to belong to the Ministry of Edu-
cation,” replied the duke with a feigned humility but with a vanity
so intense that his lips could not refrain from curving in a smile,

Part One 257

 The Guermantes Way

436. The Cercle de l’union at 11, boule- nor his eyes from casting around his audience a glance sparkling
vard de la Madeleine, was, like the with joy, the ironical scorn in which made the poor historian
Jockey Club, highly exclusive.
blush, “I who have not the honor to belong to the Ministry of
Education,” he repeated, relishing the sound of his words, “nor
to the Volney Club—my only clubs are the Union436 and the
Jockey—you aren’t in the Jockey, I think, Monsieur?” he asked
the historian, who, blushing a still deeper red, scenting an insult
and failing to understand it, began to tremble in every limb, “I,
who am not even invited to dine with M. Émile Ollivier, I must
confess that I had never heard ‘mentality.’ I’m sure you’re in the
same boat, Argencourt. You know,” he went on, “why they can’t
produce the proofs of Dreyfus’s guilt. Apparently it’s because he’s
the lover of the war minister’s wife, that’s what people are saying
confidentially.”
“Ah! I thought it was the prime minister’s wife,” said M. d’Ar-
gencourt.
“I think you’re all equally tiresome about this wretched Affair,”
said the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, in the social sphere, was
always eager to show that she did not allow herself to be led by
anyone. “It can’t make any difference to me, so far as the Jews are
concerned, for the simple reason that I don’t know any of them,
and I intend to remain in that state of blissful ignorance. But on
the other hand I do think it perfectly intolerable that just because
they’re supposed to be right-­thinking and don’t deal with Jewish
tradesmen, or have ‘Death to the Jews’ printed on their sunshades,
we should have a swarm of Durands and Dubois and so forth,
women we should never have known but for this business, forced
down our throats by Marie-­Aynard or Victurnienne. I went to see
Marie-­Aynard a couple of days ago. It used to be so nice there.
Nowadays one finds all the people one has spent one’s life trying
to avoid, on the pretext that they’re against Dreyfus, and others of
whom you have no idea who they can be.”
“No; it was the war minister’s wife; at least, that’s the bed-
side rumor,” went on the duke, who liked to flavor his conversa-
tion with certain expressions that he imagined to be of the Ancien

258 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

Régime.437 “Personally, of course, as everyone knows, I take just 437. Ancien Régime is the name given
the opposite view to my cousin Gilbert. I am not feudal like him. to the political and social system of
France before the Revolution of 1789.
I would go about with a Negro if he was a friend of mine, and I 438. This remark is from a speech
wouldn’t care two straws what anybody thought; still, after all, you given by Talleyrand in the Chambre des
will agree with me that when one goes by the name of Saint-­L oup Pairs, July 24, 1821, during a debate
about a bill regarding newspapers and
one doesn’t amuse oneself by flying in the face of public opinion, periodicals. He was against censorship
which has more sense than Voltaire438 or even my nephew. Nor and defended freedom of the press.
does one go in for what I may be allowed to call these acrobatics 439. The word intellectuel appeared in
the French language for the first time in
of conscience a week before one comes up for a club. It’s really a the “Manifeste des intellectuels” signed
bit stiff! No, it is probably that little wench of his that has put him in the autumn of 1898 by dozens of
on his high horse. I expect she told him that he would be classed scientists, professors, and writers, in-
cluding Proust, as a protest against
among the ‘intellectuals.’439 The intellectuals, they’re the crème the judicial proceedings taken against
de la crème of those messieurs. It’s given rise, by the way, to a Lieutenant Colonel Picquart, who advo-
rather amusing pun, though a very naughty one.” cated the revision of the conviction of
Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a German
And the duke murmured, lowering his voice, for his wife’s and spy. Dreyfus’s supporters used the
M. d’Argencourt’s benefit, Mater Semita,440 which had already word with pride, while their opponents
made its way into the Jockey Club, for, of all the flying seeds in threw it back at them as an insult. À la
recherche du temps perdu (1987), 2: 92,
the world, that to which are attached the most solid wings, en- n. 1.
abling it to be disseminated at the greatest distance from its parent 440. See page 192, note 304.
branch, is still a joke. 441. Levi is the third son of Jacob. See
Genesis 29:34. The several branches
“We might ask this gentleman, who has a nerudite air, to ex- of the Lévis family, the most impor-
plain it to us,” he went on, pointing to the historian. “But it is tant being that of Mirepoix, have no
better not to repeat it, especially as there’s not a vestige of truth in affiliation with the Hebrew patriarch.
Lévis-­Mirepoix is a prominent family to
the suggestion. I am not so ambitious as my cousin Mirepoix, who which fictitious characters in the novel
claims that she can trace the descent of her family before Christ claim kinship.
to the Tribe of Levi,441 and I’ll make a point of proving that there 442. Cela fera du bruit dans Landerneau
is a proverbial expression used when
has never been a drop of Jewish blood in our family. Still there is an unexpected event upsets one’s
no good in our shutting our eyes to the fact, you may be sure that plans. It is the speech of a valet in the
my dear nephew’s highly original views are liable to make a con- comedy Les Héritiers, by Alexandre
Duval (1767–1842), when an officer, be-
siderable stir at Landerneau.442 Especially as Fezensac is ill just lieved to be dead, suddenly appears in
now, and Duras will be running the election; you know how he the midst of his relatives who are busy
likes to make nuisances,” concluded the duke, who had never suc- dividing up his possessions.

ceeded in learning the exact meaning of certain phrases, and sup-

posed “to make nuisances” to mean not “to bluff ” but “to cause
complications.”

Part One 259

 The Guermantes Way

443. Alfred Dreyfus’s letters were pub- “In any case, if this man Dreyfus is innocent,” the duchess
lished in 1898 under the title Lettres broke in, “he hasn’t done much to prove it. What idiotic, bom-
d’un innocent. Esterhazy wrote a letter
to his mistress, whom he had robbed. bastic letters he writes from that island. I don’t know whether
To avenge herself, she published the M. Esterhazy is any better, but he does show some skill in turning
letter in Le Figaro of November 28, a phrase, a different tone altogether.443 That can’t be very pleasant
1897.
444. The witty remark about swapping for the supporters of M. Dreyfus. What a pity for them that
innocents was made by Geneviève they can’t swap innocents.”444 Everybody burst out laughing.
Straus, whose wit was the primary in- “You heard what Oriane said?” the Duc de Guermantes inquired
spiration for that of the Duchesse de
Guermantes. See Correspondance 7: 215, eagerly of Mme de Villeparisis. “Yes; I think it most amusing.”
where Proust lists for her the bons This was not enough for the duke. “Well, I don’t know, I can’t say
mots that he recalls, some of which that I thought it amusing; or rather it doesn’t make the slightest
he used in his novel.
445. Joseph Prudhomme is a character difference to me whether a thing is amusing or not. I don’t care
created by Henri Monnier (1799–1877) about wit.” M. d’Argencourt protested. “He doesn’t mean a word
in Scènes populaires dessinées à la plume he says,” murmured the duchess. “It is probably because I’ve
(1830). The character reappears in later
works by Monnier. Prudhomme is the been a member of the Chamber, where I have listened to bril-
archetypical romantic petit bourgeois, liant speeches that meant absolutely nothing. I learned there to
banal, sententious, conformist, and value, more than anything, logic. That’s probably why I wasn’t re-
self-­satisfied.
elected. Amusing things leave me cold.” “Basin, don’t play Joseph
Prudhomme445 like that, my dear, you know quite well that no
one admires wit more than you do.” “Please let me finish. It’s pre-
cisely because I am unmoved by a certain type of humor, that I
often find occasion to appreciate my wife’s wit. For you will find it
based, as a rule, upon sound observation. She reasons like a man;
she expresses herself like a writer.”
Bloch was trying to pin M. de Norpois down on Colonel Pic-
quart.
“There can be no question,” replied M. de Norpois, “his evi-
dence had to be taken. I am well aware that, by maintaining this
attitude, I have drawn screams of protest from more than one of
my colleagues, but to my mind the government was bound to
let the colonel speak. One can’t get out of a cul-­de-­sac like that
by merely doing a pirouette, or if one does there’s always the risk
of falling into a quagmire. As for the officer himself, his state-
ment gave one, at the first hearing, a most excellent impression.
When one saw him, looking so well in that smart chasseur uni-

260 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

form, come into court and relate in a perfectly simple and frank 446. Picquart had explained to the jury
tone what he had seen and what he had deduced, and say: ‘On my why he thought that Esterhazy was
guilty and Dreyfus innocent.
honor as a soldier’” (here M. de Norpois’s voice shook with a faint 447. Archivist and officer in the Section
patriotic throb) “‘such is my conviction,’ it is impossible to deny of Statistics, Félix Gribelin was a prose-
that the impression he made was profound.”446 cution witness against Dreyfus. At the
Zola trial on February 11, 1898, he com-
“There, he is a Dreyfusard, there’s not the least doubt of it,” mitted perjury against Picquart at the
thought Bloch. latter’s court-­martial and then said to
“But where he entirely forfeited all the sympathy that he had him: “On my honor as a soldier, that is
true, and you know that I never lie!”
managed to attract was when he was confronted with the regis-
trar, Gribelin.447 When one heard that old public servant, a man
of his word” (here M. de Norpois began to accentuate his words
with the energy of sincere conviction), “when one listened to him,
when one saw him look his superior officer in the face, not afraid
to hold his head up to him, and say to him in a tone that admitted
of no response: ‘Come now, colonel, you know very well that I
have never told a lie, you know that at this moment, as always,
I am speaking the truth,’ the wind changed; M. Picquart might
move heaven and earth at the subsequent hearings; it was a com-
plete fiasco.”
“No, he’s definitely an anti-­Dreyfusard; it’s quite obvious,” said
Bloch to himself. “But if he considers Picquart a traitor and a liar,
how can he take his revelations seriously, and quote them as if he
found them charming and believed them to be sincere? And if,
on the other hand, he sees in him an honest man easing his con-
science, how can he suppose him to have been lying when he was
confronted with Gribelin?”
Perhaps the reason why M. de Norpois spoke in this way to
Bloch, as though they were in agreement, stemmed from the fact
that he himself was so keen an anti-­Dreyfusard that, finding the
government not anti-­Dreyfusard enough, he was its enemy just as
much as the Dreyfusards. Perhaps because the object to which he
devoted himself in politics was something more profound, situ-
ated on another plane, from which Dreyfusism appeared as an un-
important modality that did not deserve the attention of a patriot
concerned about important questions of foreign policy. Perhaps,

Part One 261

 The Guermantes Way

448. Armand Auguste Charles rather, because the maxims of his political wisdom being appli-
Ferdinand-­Marie Mercier, Marquis du cable only to questions of form, of procedure, of expediency, they
Paty de Clam (1853?–­1916), was the
commandant of the Third Bureau of were as powerless to solve questions of fact as in philosophy pure
the General Staff in 1894 when he was logic is powerless to tackle the problems of existence; or else be-
charged with carrying out the first in- cause that very wisdom made him see danger in handling such
vestigation of Dreyfus. He later testi-
fied at the trial of Zola. subjects and so, in his caution, he preferred to speak only of minor
449. On August 13, 1898, Captain incidents. But where Bloch was mistaken was in thinking that
Louis Cuignet, attaché to the cabinet M. de Norpois, even had he been less cautious by nature and of
of the minister of war, Jacques Gode-
froy Cavaignac (1853–1905), discovered a less exclusively formal cast of mind, could, if he had wished,
evidence of the forgeries incriminating have told him the truth as to the part played by Henry, Picquart,
Dreyfus. He immediately informed or du Paty de Clam,448 or as to any of the different aspects of the
Cavaignac, a member of the faction
opposing a retrial, who nonetheless in- Affair. The truth, indeed, as to all these matters Bloch could not
terrogated Henry and obtained his con- doubt that M. de Norpois knew it. How could he fail to know it,
fession, but still continued to believe seeing that he was a friend of all the ministers? Naturally, Bloch
that Dreyfus was guilty and refused
to proceed to a retrial. He was forced thought that the truth in politics could be approximately recon-
to resign on September 4, 1898. Cui- structed by the most lucid minds, but he imagined, like the man
gnet had no scruples about remaining in the street, that it resided permanently, beyond the reach of ar-
an anti-­Dreyfusard. He had been one
of the first members of the Ligue de la gument and in a material form, in the secret files of the president
Patrie Française. of the Republic and the prime minister, who imparted it to the
cabinet. Now, even when a political truth includes written docu-
ments, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radio-
graphic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient’s
disease is inscribed in so many words, when, as a matter of fact,
the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be
combined with a number of others, which the doctor’s reasoning
powers will take into consideration as a whole and on which he
will base his diagnosis. So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes
to well-­informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it,
eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus
case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession,
followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in oppo-
site ways by the Dreyfusard ministers, and by Cavaignac and Cui-
gnet,449 who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery
and conducted the examination; still more so among the Drey-
fusard ministers themselves, men of the same shade of Dreyfusism,

262 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

judging not only from the same documents but in the same spirit, 450. Joseph Reinach (1856–1921), a
the part played by Henry was explained in two entirely different lawyer, was a député during the time of
the Dreyfus Affair, although he lost re-
ways, one set seeing in him an accomplice of Esterhazy, the others election in 1898 because of his belief in
assigning that part to du Paty de Clam, thus rallying in support of Dreyfus’s innocence. He became one of
a theory of their opponent Cuignet and in complete opposition to the most ardent supporters of a retrial.
Proust knew him and corresponded
their supporter Reinach.450 All that Bloch could elicit from M. de with him. Reinach later wrote Histoire
Norpois was that if it were true that the chief of staff, M. de Bois- de l’affaire Dreyfus.
deffre, had had a secret communication sent to M. Rochefort,451 it 451. In November 1897, Victor Henri,
Marquis de Rochefort-­Luçay, known as
was evident that a singularly regrettable irregularity had occurred. Henri Rochefort (1831–1913), editor of
“You may be quite sure that the war minister must, in petto452 L’Intransigeant, had published editorials
at any rate, be consigning his chief of staff to the infernal powers. attacking Général de Boisdeffre and
Général Billot. To stop this campaign
An official disclaimer would not have been, to my mind, a work Commandant Pauffin de Saint-­Morel,
of supererogation. But the war minister expresses himself very and not Général de Boisdeffre him-
bluntly on the matter inter pocula.453 There are certain subjects, self, called on Rochefort and informed
him that the General Staff had proof
moreover, about which it is highly imprudent to create an agita- of Dreyfus’s guilt, which had not yet
tion over which one cannot afterward retain control.” been made public. Rochefort wrote
“But those documents are obviously forged,” said Bloch. about this visit in L’Intransigeant on
December 13, 1897.
M. de Norpois made no reply to this, but announced that he 452. Italian meaning secretly, privately.
did not approve of the public demonstrations made by Prince 453. Latin meaning “between drinks,”
Henri d’Orléans.454 or something shared among friends.
454. During the Zola trial, Esterhazy
“Besides, they can only ruffle the calm of the pretorium,455 and was questioned at length by Georges
encourage agitations that, looked at from either point of view, Clemenceau but refused to answer. He
would be deplorable. Certainly we must put a stop to the anti- received an ovation from the crowd
and was personally congratulated by
militarist intrigues, but we cannot possibly tolerate, either, a brawl Prince Henri d’Orléans (1840–1910) for
encouraged by those elements on the right who instead of serving his “courage.”
the patriotic ideal themselves are hoping to make it serve them. 455. A pretorium was the tent of an an-
cient Roman general. A general kept a
Thank God, France is not a South American replica, and the need small escort force, known as the preto-
has not yet been felt here for a military pronunciamento.” rian guard. After the end of the Roman
Bloch could not get him to speak on the question of Dreyfus’s Republic, Augustus established the Pre-
torian Guard as the emperor’s personal
guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the security detail.
civil trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M. de Norpois
seemed only too ready to provide details about the consequences
of this verdict.
“If it is a conviction,” he said, “it will probably be overturned,
for it is seldom that, in a case where there has been such a number

Part One 263

 The Guermantes Way

456. Nearly two hundred witnesses tes- of witnesses,456 there is not some flaw in the procedure that the
tified at the Zola trial. lawyers can raise on appeal. To return to Prince Henri’s outburst, I
457. Clémentine d’Orléans (1817–1907),
daughter of Louis-­Philippe, Princesse greatly doubt whether it has met with his father’s approval.”
de Saxe-­Cobourg-­Gotha, was the “You think Chartres is for Dreyfus?” asked the duchess with a
mother of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. smile, her eyes rounded, her cheeks bright, her nose buried in her
458. Latin meaning “nothing more be-
yond,” used to designate something plate of petits fours, her whole manner deliciously scandalized.
unsurpassed. “Not at all; I meant only that there runs through the whole
459. Ferdinand de Saxe-­Cobourg-­Gotha family, on that side, a political sense of which we have seen, in the
(1861–1948) was Prince of Bulgaria
from 1887 to 1908. admirable Princesse Clémentine,457 the ne plus ultra,458 and which
460. The expression les doctes Sœurs is her son, Prince Ferdinand, has kept as a priceless inheritance. You
found in the Ode à M. le comte du Luc would never have found the Prince of Bulgaria459 clasping Major
by Jean-­Baptiste Rousseau (1671–1741),
a lyric poet. Esterhazy to his bosom.”
“He would have preferred a private soldier,” murmured Mme
de Guermantes, who often met the Bulgarian at dinner at the
Prince de Joinville’s, and had said to him once, when he asked if
she was not jealous: “Yes, Monseigneur, of your bracelets.”
“You aren’t going to Mme de Sagan’s ball this evening?” M. de
Norpois asked Mme de Villeparisis, to cut short his conversa-
tion with Bloch. The latter had not failed to interest the ambas-
sador, who told us afterward with some naïveté, thinking no
doubt of the traces that survived in Bloch’s speech of the neo-­
Homeric manner which he had on the whole abandoned: “He is
rather amusing, with that way of speaking, a trifle old-­fashioned,
a trifle solemn. You expect him to come out with ‘The Learned
Sisters,’460 like Lamartine or Jean-­Baptiste Rousseau. It has be-
come quite rare in the youth of the present day, as it was indeed
in the generation before them. We ourselves were inclined to be a
bit romantic.” But however exceptional his interlocutor may have
seemed to him, M. de Norpois found that the conversation had
lasted long enough.
“No, Monsieur, I don’t go to balls anymore,” she replied with
the charming smile of an elderly woman. “You’re going, all of you,
I suppose? You’re the right age for that sort of thing,” she added,
embracing in a comprehensive glance M. de Châtellerault, his
friend, and Bloch. “I too was asked,” she went on, pretending, just

264 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

for fun, to be flattered by the distinction. “In fact, they came spe- 461. Princesse de Sagan, née Jeanne-­
cially to invite me.” (“They” being the Princesse de Sagan.) Marie-­Seillière (1859–1937), was the
daughter of a baron under the Second
“I haven’t had an invitation,” said Bloch, thinking that Mme Empire. She was known for her sump-
de Villeparisis would at once offer to procure him one, and that tuous masked balls attended by mem-
Mme de Sagan would be happy to welcome the friend of a woman bers of Parisian high society.

whom she had called in person to invite.

The marquise made no reply, and Bloch did not press the point,
for he had another, more serious matter to discuss with her, and,
with that in view, had already asked her whether he might call
again in a couple of days. Having heard the two young men say
that they had both just resigned from the Cercle de la rue Royale,
which was letting in every Tom, Dick, and Harry, he wished to ask
Mme de Villeparisis to arrange for his election there.
“Aren’t they rather bad form, rather stuck-­up snobs, these
Sagans?” he inquired in a tone of sarcasm.
“Not at all, they’re the best we can do for you in that line,”
M. d’Argencourt, who adopted all the catchphrases of Parisian
society, assured him.
“Then,” said Bloch, still half in irony, “I suppose it’s one of the
solemnities, the great social fixtures of the season.”
Mme de Villeparisis turned merrily to Mme de Guermantes.
“Tell us, is it a great social solemnity, Mme de Sagan’s ball?”461
“It’s no good asking me,” answered the duchess, “I have never
yet succeeded in finding out what a social solemnity is. Besides,
society isn’t my forte.”
“Ah, I thought it was just the opposite,” said Bloch, who sup-
posed Mme de Guermantes had spoken seriously.
He continued, to the desperation of M. de Norpois, to ply him
with questions about the Dreyfus Affair. The ambassador declared
that, looking at it from the outside, du Paty de Clam seemed to
have a somewhat cloudy brain and had perhaps not been very
happily chosen to conduct that delicate operation, which required
so much coolness and discernment, a judicial inquiry.
“I know that the Socialist Party is clamoring for his head on a
charger, as well as for the immediate release of the prisoner from

Part One 265

 The Guermantes Way

462. Alfred Léon Gérault-­Richard Devil’s Island. But I think that we are not yet reduced to the ne-
(1860–1911) was a député from Paris cessity of passing through the Caudine Forks of MM. Gérault-­
and editor in chief of the socialist
newspaper La Petite République. The Richard and company.462 So far, the whole case has been a total
socialists were not originally interested muddle, I don’t say that on one side just as much as on the other
in the Dreyfus Affair and considered it there has not been some pretty dirty work to be hushed up.
a struggle between two factions of the
bourgeois class. It was only at the end That certain of your client’s more or less disinterested protectors
of 1898 that Jean Jaurès, who favored may have the best intentions I will not attempt to deny, but you
a retrial, fired them up. The Caudine know that the road to hell is paved with such things,” he added,
Forks was a narrow mountain pass
where the Roman army was trapped by with a look of great subtlety. “It is essential that the government
the Sammites in 321 b.c. and forced to should give the impression that they are not in the hands of the
surrender. factions of the left nor are they going to surrender, bound hand
463. The Spree is the river that flows
through Berlin. and foot, at the demand of some pretorian guard or other, which,
464. This is an allusion to a story believe me, is not the same thing as the army. It goes without
written in verse by François Andrieux saying that, should any fresh evidence come to light, a new trial
(1759–1833), Le Meunier Sans-­Souci. It
recounts the struggle over a mill be- would be ordered. What follows from that is as plain as the nose
tween King Frederick II and the miller. on your face. To demand a new trial is to force an open door.
The miller won the case when the When the day comes, the government will speak out loud and
judges in Berlin decided against the
king. “We do in fact have judges in clear or it will abandon what is its essential prerogative. Cock and
Berlin” is used when might tries to win bull stories will no longer suffice. We must appoint judges to try
over right. Dreyfus. And that will be an easy matter because, although we
have acquired the habit, in our sweet France, where we love to be-
little ourselves, of thinking or letting it be thought that, in order
to hear the words truth and justice, it is necessary to cross the
Channel, which is very often only a roundabout way of reaching
the Spree,463 there are judges to be found outside Berlin.464 But
once the machinery of government has been set in motion, will
you have ears for the voice of authority? When it bids you perform
your duty as a citizen, will you have ears for its voice, will you take
your stand in the ranks of law and order? When its patriotic ap-
peal sounds, will you have the wisdom not to turn a deaf ear but
to answer: ‘Present!’?”
M. de Norpois put these questions to Bloch with a vehemence
that, while it alarmed my former classmate, flattered him also;
for the ambassador seemed to be addressing a whole party, in-
terrogating Bloch as though he had been in the confidence of that

266 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

party and might assume responsibility for the decisions it would 465. Ultima ratio is a Latin expression
adopt. “Should you fail to disarm,” M. de Norpois went on, to which regum is usually added and
means: “the last argument of kings.”
without waiting for Bloch’s collective answer, “should you, before This motto was created by Cardinal
even the ink had dried on the decree ordering the retrial, obeying I Richelieu (1585–1642), who had it en-
know not what insidious word of command, fail, I say, to disarm, graved on the cannons of the royal
navy.
and band yourselves, rather, in a sterile opposition which seems 466. Émile Auguste Cyprien Driant
to some minds the ultima ratio of policy,465 should you retire to (1855–1916) was an officer and writer
your tents and burn your boats, you would be doing so to your who published his works on the mili-
tary under the pseudonym of Capi-
own detriment. Are you the prisoners of those who foment dis- taine Danrit. He was the son-­in-­law of
order? Have you given them pledges?” Bloch was in doubt how to Général Boulanger, whom he followed
answer. M. de Norpois gave him no time. “If the negative be true, as minister of war in 1886–87. He was
elected député from Nancy in 1910.
as I would like to think, and if you have a little of what seems to 467. Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
me to be lamentably lacking in certain of your leaders and your was elected député in 1870. He became
friends, namely political sense, then, on the day when the criminal an ardent supporter of Dreyfus and
published Zola’s J’accuse! in L’Aurore,
court assembles, if you do not allow yourselves to be dragooned after which he continued to campaign
by the fishers in troubled waters, you will have won your battle. for Dreyfus’s innocence in the news-
I do not guarantee that the whole of the General Staff is going to paper.
468. This is an allusion to a famous
get away unscathed, but it will be so much to the good if some of passage in Pantagruel (book 4, chapters
them at least can save their faces without putting a match to the 5–8) by François Rabelais (c. 1494–
powder keg. It goes without saying, moreover, that it rests with 1553). During an ocean voyage, Panta-
gruel’s attendant Panurge avenges him-
the government to pronounce judgment, and to close the list— self on a bullying sheep merchant by
already too long—of unpunished crimes, not certainly at the bid- throwing one of the man’s sheep into
ding of socialist agitators, nor yet of any obscure military rabble,” the sea, after which, the entire flock
jumps in. This has become a figure of
he added, looking Bloch boldly in the face, perhaps with the in- speech to indicate those who are quick
stinct that leads all conservatives to establish support for them- to imitate others.
selves in the enemy’s camp. “Government action is not to be dic-
tated by the highest bidder, from wherever the bid may come.
The government is not, thank God, under the orders of Colonel
Driant,466 nor, at the other end of the scale, under M. Clemen-
ceau’s.467 We must curb the professional agitators and prevent
them from raising their heads again. France, the vast majority here
in France, desires only to be allowed to work in orderly conditions.
As to that, there can be no question whatever. But we must not be
afraid to enlighten public opinion; and if a few sheep, of the kind
our friend Rabelais468 knew so well, should dash headlong into

Part One 267

 The Guermantes Way

469. In the original, it is Dame Justice the water, it would be as well to point out to them that the water
(Lady Justice) that is set in motion. in question is troubled, that it has been troubled deliberately by
an agency not within our borders, in order to conceal the dangers
lurking in its depths. And the government must not give the im-
pression that it is emerging from its passivity in self-­defense when
it exercises the right that is essentially its own, I mean that of set-
ting the wheels of justice in motion.469 The government will ac-
cept all your suggestions. If it is proved that there has been a judi-
cial error, it can be sure of an overwhelming majority that would
give it room to act with freedom.”
“You, Monsieur,” said Bloch, turning to M. d’Argencourt, to
whom he had been introduced with the rest of the party on that
gentleman’s arrival, “you are a Dreyfusard, of course; everyone is,
abroad.”
“It is a question that concerns only the French themselves,
don’t you think?” replied M. d’Argencourt with that peculiar
form of insolence that consists in ascribing to the other person an
opinion that one obviously knows that he does not hold since he
has just expressed one directly its opposite.
Bloch reddened; M. d’Argencourt smiled, looking around the
room, and if this smile, so long as it was directed at the rest of the
company, was charged with malice at Bloch’s expense, it became
tempered with cordiality when finally it came to rest on the face
of the latter, so as to deprive him of any pretext for annoyance at
the words he had heard uttered, though those words remained just
as cruel. Mme de Guermantes murmured something to M. d’Ar-
gencourt that I could not hear, but which must have referred to
Bloch’s religion, for there flitted at that moment over the face of
the duchess that expression to which one’s fear of being noticed
by the person of whom one is speaking gives a certain hesitancy
and falseness in which there is mixed the inquisitive, malicious
amusement inspired in one by a group of human beings to which
one feels oneself to be fundamentally alien. To retrieve himself,
Bloch turned to the Duc de Châtellerault. “You, Monsieur, as a
Frenchman, you must be aware that people abroad are all Drey-

268 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

fusards, although everyone pretends that in France we never know 470. Japhetics are the descendants of
what is going on abroad. Anyhow, I know I can talk freely to Japhet, a Hebrew patriarch, the third
son of Noah and said to be the father
you, Saint-­L oup told me so.” But the young duke, who felt that of the white race.
everyone was turning against Bloch, and was a coward as people 471. This daily newspaper, founded in
often are in society, employing a mordant and precious form of 1863, had a print run of one million
copies during the time of the Dreyfus
wit that he seemed, by a sort of collateral atavism, to have in- Affair. Its editor, Ernest Judet (1851–
herited from M. de Charlus, replied: “You must forgive me, Mon- 1943), attacked Zola in the newspaper
sieur, if I do not discuss the Dreyfus Affair with you; it is a subject and was vehemently opposed to a re-
trial for Dreyfus.
which, on principle, I never mention except among Japhetics.”470
Everyone smiled, except Bloch, not that he was not himself in
the habit of making ironic references to his Jewish origin, to that
side of his ancestry that came from somewhere near Sinai. But in-
stead of one of these epigrams (doubtless because he had not one
ready), the trigger mechanism of his internal machine brought to
Bloch’s lips something quite different. And we caught only: “But
how on earth did you know? Who told you?” as though he had
been the son of a convict. Whereas, given his name that does not
have exactly a Christian sound, and his face, his surprise revealed
a certain naïveté.
What M. de Norpois had said not having completely satisfied
him, he went up to the archivist and asked him whether Mme de
Villeparisis did not sometimes have in her house M. du Paty de
Clam or M. Joseph Reinach. The archivist made no reply; he was
a nationalist, and never ceased preaching to the marquise that the
social revolution might break out at any moment, and that she
ought to be more prudent in the choice of her acquaintances. He
asked himself whether Bloch might not be a secret emissary of the
Syndicate, come to collect information, and went off at once to
repeat to Mme de Villeparisis the questions that Bloch had put to
him. She decided that, at the best, he was ill-­bred and might be
in a position to compromise M. de Norpois. Also, she wished to
give satisfaction to the archivist, the only person of whom she was
somewhat afraid, by whom she was being indoctrinated, though
without any marked success (every morning he read her M. Judet’s
article in Le Petit Journal ).471 She decided, therefore, to make it

Part One 269

 The Guermantes Way

plain to Bloch that he need not come to the house again, and had
no difficulty finding, in her social repertory, the scene by which
a great lady shows anyone her door, a scene that does not in any
way involve the raised finger and blazing eyes that people imagine.
As Bloch came up to her to say goodbye, buried in her deep arm-
chair, she seemed only half-­awakened from a vague somnolence.
Her sunken eyes gleamed with only the feeble though charming
light of a pair of pearls. Bloch’s farewell, barely unwrinkling a lan-
guid smile on the marquise’s face, drew from her not a word, nor
did she offer him her hand. This scene left Bloch in utter bewil-
derment, but since he was surrounded by a circle of spectators, he
felt that it could not be prolonged without disadvantage to him-
self, and, to force the marquise, he himself thrust out at her the
hand that she had made no effort to take. Mme de Villeparisis
was shocked. But doubtless, while still bent upon giving an im-
mediate satisfaction to the archivist and the anti-­Dreyfusard clan,
she wished at the same time to provide for the future, and so con-
tented herself with letting her eyelids droop over her closing eyes.
“I believe she’s asleep,” said Bloch to the archivist, who, feeling
that he had the support of the marquise, assumed an air of indig-
nation. “Goodbye, Madame,” shouted Bloch.
The marquise made the slight movement with her lips of a
dying woman who wants to open her mouth but whose eyes can
no longer recognize people. Then she turned, overflowing with a
restored vitality, to M. d’Argencourt, while Bloch left the room,
convinced that she must be “soft” in the head. Full of curiosity
and eager to shed more light on so strange an incident, he came
to see her again a few days later. She received him in the most
friendly fashion, because she was a good-­natured woman, because
the archivist was not there, because she was intent on the little
play that Bloch was going to stage in her house, and finally be-
cause she had acted once and for all the little scene of the great
lady that she had wished to act, which had been universally ad-
mired and commented on that very evening in various drawing

270 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

rooms, but in a version that had already ceased to bear any resem- 472. Maurice Maeterlinck was born in
blance to the truth. Ghent, Belgium, in 1862.
473. In Borrelli’s play Alain Chartier, a
“You were speaking just now of The Seven Princesses, Duchess; poet seeks inspiration and finds it by
you know (not that it’s anything to be proud of ) that the author pretending to be asleep and tricking
of that—what shall I call it?—that lampoon is a compatriot of the princess into giving him a kiss.

mine,” said M. d’Argencourt with an irony blended with satis-

faction at knowing more than anyone else in the room about the
author of a work that had been under discussion. “Yes, he’s a Bel-
gian, by nationality,”472 he added.
“Indeed! No, we don’t accuse you of any responsibility for
The Seven Princesses. Fortunately for yourself and your compa-
triots you are not like the author of that absurdity. I know several
charming Belgians, yourself, your king, who is inclined to be shy,
but full of wit, my Ligne cousins, and heaps of others, but you, I
am thankful to say, do not speak the same language as the author
of The Seven Princesses. Besides, if you want to know, it’s not worth
talking about, because really there is absolutely nothing in it. You
know the sort of people who are always trying to seem obscure,
and even plan to make themselves ridiculous to conceal the fact
that they have not an idea in their heads. If there was anything
behind it all, I may tell you that I’m not in the least afraid of a
little daring,” she added in a serious tone, “provided that there is
some idea in it. I don’t know if you’ve seen Borrelli’s play.473 Some
people seem to have been shocked by it, but I must say, even
if they stone me through the streets for saying it,” she went on,
without stopping to think that she ran no very great risk of such
a punishment, “I found it immensely interesting. But The Seven
Princesses! It’s all very well, one of them having a fondness for my
nephew, I cannot carry family feeling quite . . .”
The duchess broke off abruptly, for a lady came in who was
the Comtesse de Marsantes, Robert’s mother. Mme de Mar-
santes was regarded in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain as a superior
being, of a goodness, a resignation that were positively angelic.
So I had been told, and had had no particular reason to feel sur-

Part One 271

 The Guermantes Way

474. Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906) prised, not knowing at the same time that she was the sister of the
was a writer, critic, and a professor Duc de Guermantes. Later, I was always taken aback, whenever
at the Sorbonne. In 1893, he became
editor of La Revue des Deux Mondes. He I learned, in that society, that such women, melancholy, pure,
was against art for art’s sake and ap- self-­sacrificing, venerated like the ideal saints in stained-­glass win-
plied the theories of evolution to the lit- dows, had flowered from the same genealogical stem as brothers
erary genres. Some of his lectures were
open to the public and became popular brutal, debauched, and vile. Brothers and sisters, when they are
among the aristocrats who appreciated identical in features as were the Duc de Guermantes and Mme de
his talent as a lecturer and his nation- Marsantes, ought (I felt) to have a single intellect in common, the
alist views.
475. These were epic poems from the same heart, like a person who may have good and bad moments
eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. but in whom one could not, for all that, expect to find a vast
breadth of outlook if he has a narrow mind or a sublime abnega-
tion if his heart is hard.
Mme de Marsantes attended Brunetière’s lectures.474 She filled
the Faubourg Saint-­Germain with enthusiasm and, by her saintly
life, edified it as well. But the morphological link of handsome
nose and piercing gaze led me, nevertheless, to classify Mme de
Marsantes in the same intellectual and moral family as her brother
the duke. I could not believe that the mere fact of her being a
woman, and perhaps having had an unhappy life and won every-
one’s sympathy, could make a person be so different from the rest
of her family, as in the chansons de geste,475 where all the virtues
and graces are combined in the sister of wild and lawless brothers.
It seemed to me that nature, less at liberty than the old poets,
must make use almost exclusively of the elements common to
the family, and I was unable to credit her with enough power of
invention to construct, out of materials analogous to those that
composed a fool and clod, a lofty mind without the least strain
of silliness, a saint without the stain of brutality. Mme de Mar-
santes was wearing a gown of white surah embroidered with large
palms, on which stood out flowers of a different material, these
being black. This was because, three weeks earlier, she had lost
her cousin, M. de Montmorency, a bereavement that did not pre-
vent her from paying calls or even from going to small dinners,
but always in mourning. She was a great lady. Atavism had filled
her with the frivolity of generations of life at court, with all the

272 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

superficial, rigorous duties that that implies. Mme de Marsantes

had not had the strength of character to mourn her father and
mother for any length of time, but she would not for anything
in the world have appeared in colors in the month following the
death of a cousin. She was more than friendly to me, both be-
cause I was Robert’s friend and because I did not move in the
same world as he. This friendliness was accompanied by a pretense
of shyness, by that sort of intermittent withdrawal of the voice,
the eyes, the mind, which a woman draws back to her like a skirt
that has indiscreetly spread, so as not to take up too much room,
to remain stiff and erect even in her suppleness, as a good up-
bringing teaches. A good upbringing that must not, however, be
taken too literally, many of these ladies passing very swiftly into
a complete dissolution of morals without ever losing the almost
childlike correctness of their manners. Mme de Marsantes was a
trifle irritating in conversation since, whenever she had occasion
to speak of a plebeian, as for example Bergotte or Elstir, she would
say, isolating the word, giving it its full value, intoning it on two
different notes with a modulation peculiar to the Guermantes:
“I have had the honor, the great hon-­or of meeting Monsieur
Bergotte,” or “of making the acquaintance of Monsieur Elstir,”
whether that her hearers might marvel at her humility or from the
same tendency that Mme de Guermantes showed to revert to the
use of obsolete forms, as a protest against the slovenly usages of
the present day, in which people never professed themselves suf-
ficiently “honored.” Whichever of these was the true reason, one
felt that when Mme de Marsantes said: “I have had the honor,
the great hon-­or,” she felt she was fulfilling an important part and
showing that she could take in the names of distinguished men as
she would have welcomed the men themselves at her château in
the country, had they happened to be in the neighborhood. On
the other hand, as her family was large, as she was devoted to all
her relatives, as, slow in speech and fond of explaining things at
length, she was always trying to make clear the exact degree of
kinship, she found herself (without any desire to create an effect

Part One 273

 The Guermantes Way

476. To mediatize is to annex a state to and without really caring to talk about anyone except touching
another state, allowing the former ruler peasants and sublime gamekeepers), referring incessantly to all
to retain his title and some authority.
the mediatized houses in Europe,476 a failing that people less bril-
liantly connected than herself could not forgive, and, if they were
at all intellectual, derided as a sign of stupidity.
In the country, Mme de Marsantes was adored for the good
that she did, but principally because the purity of a strain of blood
into which for many generations there had flowed only what was
greatest in the history of France had taken from her manner every-
thing that the lower orders call “airs,” and had given her a perfect
simplicity. She never shrank from kissing a poor woman who was
in trouble, and would tell her to come up to the château for a cart-
load of wood. She was, people said, the perfect Christian. She was
determined to find an immensely rich wife for Robert. Being a
great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain
extent, playing at simplicity. It is a pastime that costs a great deal,
all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition
that they know that you are not bound to live simply, that is to say
that you are very rich. Someone said to me afterward, when I told
him I had seen her: “You saw of course that she must have been
ravishing as a young woman.” But true beauty is so individual, so
novel always, that one does not recognize it as beauty. I said to
myself this afternoon only that she had a tiny nose, very blue eyes,
a long neck, and a sad expression.
“Listen,” said Mme de Villeparisis to the Duchesse de Guer-
mantes, “I’m expecting a woman at any moment whom you don’t
wish to know. I thought I’d better warn you, to avoid any un-
pleasantness. But you needn’t be afraid, I will never have her here
again, only I was obliged to let her come today. It’s Swann’s wife.”
Mme Swann, seeing the dimensions that the Dreyfus Affair
had begun to assume, and fearing that her husband’s racial origin
might be used against herself, had begged him never again to al-
lude to the prisoner’s innocence. When he was not present she
went further and professed the most ardent nationalism; in doing
which she was only following the example of Mme Verdurin, in

274 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

whom a middle-­class anti-­Semitism, latent hitherto, had awak-

ened and grown to a positive fury. Mme Swann had won by this
attitude the privilege of membership in several of the women’s
leagues that were beginning to be formed in anti-­Semitic society,
and had succeeded in establishing relationships with several mem-
bers of the aristocracy. It may seem strange that, so far from fol-
lowing their example, the Duchesse de Guermantes, so close a
friend of Swann, had on the contrary always resisted his desire,
which he had not concealed from her, to introduce his wife to her.
But we will see in due course that this was an effect of the peculiar
character of the duchess, who held that she was not “bound to” do
things, and laid down with despotic force what had been decided
by her social “free will,” which was extremely arbitrary.
“Thank you for warning me,” said the duchess. “It would in-
deed be most unpleasant. But as I know her by sight I’ll be able
to get away in time.”
“I assure you, Oriane, she is really quite nice; an excellent
woman,” said Mme de Marsantes.
“I have no doubt she is, but I feel no need to assure myself of
it.”
“Have you been invited to Lady Israëls’s?” Mme de Villeparisis
asked the duchess, to change the conversation.
“Why, thank heaven, I don’t know the woman,” replied Mme
de Guermantes. “You must ask Marie-­Aynard. She knows her. I
never could make out why.”
“I did indeed know her at one time,” said Mme de Marsantes.
“I confess my faults. But I have decided not to know her any-
more. It seems she’s one of the very worst of them, and makes no
attempt to conceal it. Besides, we have all been too trusting, too
hospitable. I will never go near anyone of that race again. While
we had old country cousins, people of our own flesh and blood
to whom we closed our doors, we threw them open to Jews. And
now we see what thanks we get from them. Alas! I’ve no right to
speak; I have an adorable son who, young fool that he is, spouts all
the nonsense you can imagine,” she went on, having caught some

Part One 275

 The Guermantes Way

477. The pun in question is made allusion by M. d’Argencourt to Robert. “But, speaking of Robert,
on part of Saint-­Loup’s name. The haven’t you seen him?” she asked Mme de Villeparisis; “Since it’s
common noun loup means wolf. The
saying “Quand on parle du loup, on en Saturday, I thought he might have come to Paris on leave, and in
voit la queue” (when one speaks of the that case he would have been sure to pay you a visit.”
wolf one sees its tail) corresponds to As a matter of fact Mme de Marsantes thought that her son
the English expression “Speak of the
devil.” would not obtain leave that week; but knowing that, even if he
did, he would never dream of coming to see Mme de Villeparisis,
she hoped, by making herself appear to have expected to find him
here, to procure his forgiveness from her susceptible aunt for all
the visits that he had failed to pay her.
“Robert here! But I haven’t had a single word from him; I don’t
think I’ve seen him since Balbec.”
“He is so busy; he has so much to do,” said Mme de Marsantes.
A faint smile made Mme de Guermantes’s eyelashes quiver as
she studied the circle that, with the point of her sunshade, she was
tracing on the carpet. Whenever the duke had been too openly
unfaithful to his wife, Mme de Marsantes had always taken up the
cudgels against her own brother on behalf of her sister-­in-­law. The
latter had a grateful and bitter memory of this protection, and was
not herself seriously shocked by Robert’s pranks. At this point the
door opened again and Robert himself entered the room.
“Well, talk of the Saint!” said Mme de Guermantes.
Mme de Marsantes, who had her back to the door, had not seen
her son come in. When she did catch sight of him, her motherly
bosom was convulsed with joy, as by the beating of a wing; her
body half rose from her seat, her face quivered, and she fastened
on Robert eyes filled with wonder.
“What! You’ve come! How delightful! What a surprise!”
“Ah! Talk of the Saint! I see,” cried the Belgian diplomat with a
shout of laughter.
“Delicious, isn’t it?” came tartly from the duchess, who hated
puns and had ventured on this one only with a pretense of making
fun of herself.477
“Good afternoon, Robert,” she said, “Well, I believe he’s for-
gotten his aunt.”

276 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

They talked for a moment, probably about me, for as Saint-­ 478. Compare the “celestial torrent of
Loup was leaving her to join his mother Mme de Guermantes her smile,” page 58.

turned to me:
“Good afternoon; how are you?” she said to me.
She let rain down on me the light of her azure gaze,478 hesitated
for a moment, unfolded and stretched toward me the stem of her
arm, leaned forward her body that sprang rapidly backward like a
bush that has been pulled down to the ground and, on being re-
leased, returns to its natural position. Thus she acted under the fire
of Saint-­L oup’s eyes, which kept her under observation and were
making frantic efforts to obtain some further concession still from
his aunt. Fearing that our conversation might fail altogether, he
joined in, to sustain it, and answered for me:
“He’s not very well just now, he gets rather tired; I think he
would be a great deal better, by the way, if he saw you more often,
for I can’t help telling you that he enjoys seeing you very much.”
“Oh, but that’s very nice of him,” said Mme de Guermantes in
a deliberately casual tone, as if I had brought her her coat. “I am
most flattered.”
“Look, I must go and talk to my mother for a minute; take my
chair,” said Saint-­L oup, thus forcing me to sit down next to his
aunt.
We were both silent.
“I see you sometimes in the morning,” she said, as though she
were telling me something that I did not know, and I for my part
never saw her. “A walk is so good for one’s health.”
“Oriane,” began Mme de Marsantes in a low voice, “you said
you were going on to Mme de Saint-­Ferréol’s; would you be so
very kind as to tell her not to expect me to dinner, I will stay at
home now that I’ve got Robert. And one other thing, but I hardly
dare to ask you, if you would tell them in passing to send out at
once for a box of the cigars Robert likes. ‘Corona,’ they’re called.
I’ve none in the house.”
Robert came up to us; he had caught only the name of Mme
de Saint-­Ferréol.

Part One 277

 The Guermantes Way

479. Charlotte de Saxe-­Cobourg-­Gotha “Who in the world is Mme de Saint-­Ferréol?” he inquired, in a

(1840–1927) had married in 1857 the surprised but decisive tone, for he affected a studied ignorance of
Archduke Maximilien, brother of Em-
peror Franz Joseph of Austria. In 1863, everything to do with society.
Napoléon III offered her husband “But, my dear boy, you know quite well,” said his mother.
the imperial crown of Mexico and the “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she who gave you that nice bil-
couple left for Central America the
following year. Abandoned by Napo- liard table you liked so much.”
léon III, Maximilien was captured and “What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea of that. Really,
executed by a firing squad in 1867. The my family is amazing,” he went on, half turning toward me and
empress, who had returned to Europe,
became insane after the death of her adopting unconsciously Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed
husband. his ideas, “they know the most unheard-­of people, people called
Saint-­Ferréol” (emphasizing the final consonant of each word)
“and names like that; they go to balls, they drive in victorias, they
lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”
Mme de Guermantes made in her throat a slight, short, sharp
sound, as of an involuntary laugh that one chokes back, meaning
thereby to show that she paid just as much tribute as the laws of
kinship imposed on her to her nephew’s wit. A servant came in to
say that the Prince von Faffenheim-­Munsterburg-­Weinigen had
sent word to M. de Norpois that he was waiting.
“Go and bring him in, Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to
the former ambassador, who started in quest of the German min-
ister. But the marquise called him back.
“Wait, Monsieur; do you think I ought to show him the minia-
ture of the Empress Charlotte?”479
“Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the ambassador in a
tone of conviction, and as though he were envying the fortunate
minister the favor that was in store for him.
“Oh, I know he’s right-­thinking,” said Mme de Marsantes, “and
that is so rare among foreigners. But I’ve found out all about him.
He is anti-­Semitism personified.”
The prince’s name preserved in the boldness with which its
opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—
attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them,
the élan, the mannered simplicity, the heavy “delicacies” of the
Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “heim” of dark

278 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

blue enamel that glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish stained-­ 480. Rhenish means pertaining to the
glass window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the Rhine. Heim is German for “home.”
481. The mountain is the Schlossberg,
German eighteenth century.480 This name included, among the about which Goethe wrote in his auto-
several names of which it was composed, that of a little German biography.
watering place to which as a child I had gone with my grandmother, 482. In July 1895 and in August 1897,
Proust and his mother took the waters
at the foot of a mountain honored by the feet of Goethe,481 from at a spa in Bad Kreuznach, where
the vineyards of which we used to drink, at the Kurhof,482 their they stayed at the Kurhaus-­Hotel. The
illustrious vintages with compound and sonorous names, like the Schlossberg Mountain, whose hillsides
are covered with vineyards, is to the
epithets that Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had northeast of Kreuznach.
I heard the prince’s name spoken than, before I had recalled the 483. This is the name of the empire
watering place, the name itself seemed to shrink, to be permeated founded by Charlemagne in 800.
484. Franconia, named after the
with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my German tribe of Franks, is an old
memory to which it clung, familiar, down-­to-­earth, picturesque, German state that bordered the banks
savory, light, with something about it, too, that was authorized, of the Rhine River.
485. Rheingraf (Rhingrave) is French
prescribed. And then, M. de Guermantes, in explaining who the for the German title composed of
prince was, cited a number of his titles, and I recognized the name “Rhine” and “Graf,” the latter word
of a village traversed by the river on which, every evening, my cure meaning “count,” and is the title borne
by the counts of Rheingrau who inhab-
finished for the day, I used to go in a boat amid the mosquitoes; ited the castle of Rheingrafstein. The
and the name of a forest so far away that the doctor would not elector palatine in the Holy Roman
allow me to make the excursion to it. And indeed it was compre- Empire was any of the German princes
entitled to take part in the election of a
hensible that the suzerainty of the seigneur extended to the sur- new emperor.
rounding places and associated afresh in the enumeration of his 486. Burg is German for château; this
titles the names that one could read side by side on a map. Thus one is apparently fictitious. The word
usually designated a fortified medieval
beneath the visor of the prince of the Holy Roman Empire483 and castle in the valley of the Rhine.
knight of Franconia484 it was the face of a beloved land, on which 487. Martin Luther (1483–1546), theolo-
had often lingered for me the light of the six o’clock sun, that I gian and Protestant reformer, was asso-
ciated with several Burgs—Magdeburg,
saw, at any rate before the prince, Rheingraf, and elector pala- Wittenburg, Wartburg.
tine485 had entered the room. For I quickly learned that the reve- 488. Louis II (c. 805–76), King of the
nues he drew from the forest and the river, peopled with gnomes East Franks, ruled lands from which
the German state later evolved. He was
and undines, and from the enchanted mountain on which rose the the grandson of Charlemagne.
ancient Burg486 that cherished memories of Luther487 and Louis 489. This company was founded in
the German,488 he employed in keeping five Charron automo- 1901 by Ferdinand Charron (1866–
1928), who opened an automobile
biles,489 a house in Paris and one in London, a box on Mondays agency at Puteaux. In 1907, the agency
at the Opéra, and another for the “Tuesdays” at the “Français.” took the name Automobiles Charron.
He did not seem to me, nor did he seem to regard himself as dif-

Part One 279

 The Guermantes Way

ferent from other men of similar fortune and age who had a less
poetic origin. He had their culture, their ideals, he was proud of
his rank, but purely on account of the advantages it conferred on
him, and had now only one ambition in life, to be elected a corre-
sponding member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Poli-
tiques, which was the reason for his coming to see Mme de Ville-
parisis. If he, whose wife was a leader of the most exclusive coterie
in Berlin, had asked to be introduced to the marquise, it was not
the result of any desire on his part for her acquaintance. Devoured
for years past by this ambition to be elected to the Institut, he had
unfortunately never been in a position to reckon above five the
number of academicians who seemed prepared to vote for him.
He knew that M. de Norpois could by himself dispose of at least
ten others, a number that he was capable, by skillful negotiations,
of increasing still further. And so the prince, who had known him
in Russia when they were both there as ambassadors, had gone to
see him and had done everything in his power to win him over.
But in vain might he multiply his friendly overtures, procure for
the marquis Russian decorations, quote him in articles on for-
eign politics; he had had before him an ingrate, a man in whose
eyes all these attentions appeared to count as nothing, who had
not advanced the prospects of his candidature one inch, had not
even promised him his own vote! No doubt M. de Norpois re-
ceived him with extreme politeness, indeed begged that he would
not put himself out and “take the trouble to come so far out of
his way,” went himself to the prince’s residence, and when the
Teutonic Knight had launched his: “I would very much like to be
your colleague,” replied in a tone of deep emotion: “Ah! I would
be most happy!” And no doubt a simpleton, a Dr. Cottard would
have said to himself: “Well, here he is in my house; it was he who
insisted on coming, because he regards me as a more important
person than himself; he tells me that he would be happy to see me
in the Académie; words do have some meaning after all, damn it,
probably if he doesn’t offer to vote for me it is because it hasn’t
occurred to him. He lays so much stress on my great influence;

280 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

presumably he imagines that things will just fall into my lap,490 490. Proust uses a colorful idiom “les
that I have all the support I want, and that is why he doesn’t offer alouettes me tombent toutes rôties” that
Scott Moncrieff translated nearly liter-
me his, but I have only to get him with his back to the wall here, ally: “larks drop into my mouth already
with just the two of us, and say to him: ‘Very well, vote for me, roasted.”
will you?’ and he will be obliged to do it.” 491. The Order of Saint Andrew, cre-
ated in 1698 by Peter the Great, was
But Prince von Faffenheim was no simpleton. He was what the highest of the ancient orders of
Dr. Cottard would have called “a shrewd diplomat,” and he knew Russian chivalry. Its insignia, a light
that M. de Norpois was no less shrewd a one than himself, nor a blue cordon, was worn as a sash over
the shoulder. The order was abolished
man who would have failed to realize without needing to be told in 1917 after the Russian Revolution.
that he could confer a favor on a candidate by voting for him. 492. An aside; Proust uses the Italian
The prince, in his ambassadorships and as minister of foreign af- phrase.

fairs, had conducted, on his country’s behalf instead of, as in the

present instance, his own, many of those conversations in which
one knows beforehand just how far one is prepared to go and at
what point one will decline to commit oneself. He was not un-
aware that in diplomatic language to talk means to offer. And it
was for this reason that he had arranged for M. de Norpois to re-
ceive the Cordon of Saint Andrew.491 But if he had had to report
to his government the conversation that he had subsequently had
with M. de Norpois, he would have stated in his dispatch: “I real-
ized that I had been on the wrong track.” For as soon as he had re-
turned to the subject of the Institut, M. de Norpois had repeated:
“I would like nothing better; nothing could be better, for my
colleagues. They ought, I consider, to feel genuinely honored that
you should have thought of them. It is a really interesting candi-
dature, a little outside our usual practice. As you know, the Aca-
démie is very conventional, it takes fright at everything that has at
all a novel sound. Personally, I deplore this. How often have I had
occasion to say as much to my colleagues. I cannot be sure, God
forgive me, that I did not even once let the word ‘stick-­in-­the-­
mud’ escape me,” he added, in an undertone, with a scandalized
smile, almost a parte,492 as in a scene on the stage, casting at the
prince a rapid, sidelong glance from his blue eyes, like a veteran
actor studying the effect on his audience. “You understand, Prince,
that I would not care to allow a personality so eminent as yourself

Part One 281

 The Guermantes Way

to embark on a venture that was hopeless from the start. So long

as my colleagues’ ideas remain so far behind the times, I consider
that the wiser course is to abstain. But you may rest assured that if
I were ever to discern a spirit that was a little more modern, a little
more alive, emerging in that college, which is tending to become
a necropolis, if I could reckon upon any possible chance of your
success, I would be the first to inform you of it.”
“The Cordon of Saint Andrew was a mistake,” thought the
prince; “the negotiations have not advanced in the least; that is
not what he wanted. I have not yet laid my hand on the right key.”
This was a kind of reasoning of which M. de Norpois, formed
in the same school as the prince, would also have been capable.
One may mock the pedantic silliness with which diplomats of the
Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording
that is, for all practical purposes, meaningless. But their childish-
ness has this compensation: diplomats know that, in the scales
that assure the equilibrium, European or other, that we call peace,
good feeling, fine speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and
that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something
else, in the possibility, which the adversary enjoys (if he is strong
enough) or does not enjoy, of satisfying a desire in exchange for
something in return. With this order of truths, which an entirely
disinterested person, such as my grandmother, for example, would
not have understood, M. de Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim
had frequently had to deal. Chargé d’affaires in countries with
which we had been within an ace of going to war, M. de Norpois,
in his anxiety as to the turn that events were about to take, knew
very well that it was not by the word “Peace,” nor by the word
“War” that it would be revealed to him, but by some other, appar-
ently banal word, a word of terror or blessing, which the diplomat,
by the aid of his cipher, would immediately know how to read
and to which, to safeguard the honor of France, he would respond
in another word, quite as banal, but one beneath which the min-
ister of the enemy nation would at once see written: “War.” More-
over, in accordance with a time-­honored custom, analogous to

282 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

the one that used to give to the first meeting between two young 493. The Théâtre du Gymnase, 38,
people promised to one another in marriage the form of a chance boulevard Bonne-­Nouvelle, was built
in 1829 and specialized in comedies.
encounter at a performance in the Théâtre du Gymnase,493 the Many celebrated playwrights had their
dialogue in the course of which destiny was to dictate the word works performed there, including Alex-
“War” or the word “Peace” took place, as a rule, not in the min- andre Dumas fils and Émile Augier.
494. Kurgarten is German for a garden
ister’s office but on a bench in a Kurgarten494 where the minister in a spa.
and M. de Norpois went independently to a thermal spring to 495. An apache is a member of a gang
drink at its source their little tumblers of some curative water. of criminals, especially one that oper-
ates in Paris.
By a sort of tacit convention they met at the hour appointed for
their cure, began by taking together a short stroll, which, beneath
its benign appearance, each of the speakers knew to be as tragic
as an order for mobilization. And so, in a private matter like this
nomination for election to the Institut, the prince had employed
the same system of induction that had served him in his diplo-
matic career, the same method of reading beneath superimposed
symbols.
And certainly it would be wrong to pretend that my grand-
mother and the few who resembled her would have been alone
in their failure to understand this kind of calculation. For one
thing, the average human being, practicing a profession the lines
of which have been laid down for him from the start, comes near,
by his want of intuition, to the ignorance that my grandmother
owed to her lofty disinterestedness. Often one has to come down
to “kept” persons, male or female, before one finds the hidden
spring of actions or words apparently of the most innocent na-
ture, in self-­interest, in the necessity to stay alive. What man does
not know that when a woman whom he is going to pay says to
him: “Let’s not talk about money,” the speech must be regarded
as what is called in music “a silent bar” and that if, later on, she
declares: “You’ve upset me so; you are always keeping things from
me; I can’t take it anymore,” he must interpret this as: “Someone
else has been offering me more”? And yet this is only the lan-
guage of a cocotte, not so far removed from society women. The
apache495 furnishes more striking examples. But M. de Norpois
and the German prince, if apaches and their ways were unknown

Part One 283

 The Guermantes Way

496. Beginning in 1852, the Livre jaune to them, had been accustomed to living on the same plane as na-
is the name given to the collections of tions, which are also, despite their greatness, creatures of selfish-
diplomatic documents distributed to
the parliament to inform its members ness and cunning, kept in order only by force, by consideration of
about foreign policy. their material interests that may drive them to murder, a murder
497. This review, founded in 1829, be- that is often symbolic also, since its mere hesitation or refusal to
came one of the most important of its
time and continues to be published. fight may spell for a nation the word “Perish.” But inasmuch as all
this is not set forth in the Yellow Books496 or in any others, the
people as a whole are naturally pacific; if they are warlike, it is in-
stinctively, from hatred, from a sense of injury, not for the reasons
that have made up the mind of their ruler on the advice of his
Norpois.
The following winter the prince was seriously ill; he recovered,
but his heart was permanently affected.
“The devil!” he said to himself, “I can’t afford to lose any time
over the Institut. If I wait too long, I may be dead before they elect
me. That really would be disagreeable.”
He wrote, on the foreign politics of the previous twenty years,
an essay for La Revue des Deux Mondes,497 in which he referred
more than once, and in the most flattering terms, to M. de Nor-
pois. The latter called upon him to thank him. He added that he
did not know how to express his gratitude. The prince said to him-
self, like a man who has been trying to fit another key into a stub-
born lock: “Still not the right one!” and, feeling somewhat out of
breath as he showed M. de Norpois to the door, thought: “Damn
it, these fellows will see me in my grave before letting me in. We
must hurry up.”
That very evening he ran into M. de Norpois at the Opéra.
“My dear Ambassador,” he began to him, “you told me this
morning that you did not know what you could do to prove your
gratitude; it was a great exaggeration, for you owe me none, but I
am going to be so indelicate as to take you at your word.”
M. de Norpois had no less high an esteem for the prince’s tact
than the prince had for his. He understood at once that it was not
a request that Prince von Faffenheim was about to present to him,
but an offer, and with a radiant affability he made ready to hear it.

284 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“Well now, you will think me highly indiscreet. There are two 498. Here Proust is thinking of Alex-
people to whom I am greatly attached—in quite different ways, andra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louisa
Julia (1844–1925), daughter of Chris-
as you will understand in a moment—two people both of whom tian IX, King of Denmark, and Albert
have recently settled in Paris, where they intend to live from now Edward, Prince of Wales (1841–1910).
on: my wife, and the Grand Duchess John. They are thinking of They married in 1863, but Edward did
not become king as Edward VII until
giving a few dinners, notably in honor of the King and Queen of after the death of his mother, Queen
England,498 and their dream would have been to be able to offer Victoria, in 1901. Alexandra accompa-
their guests the company of a person for whom, without knowing nied the king on his visit to Paris in
1910.
her, they both of them feel a great admiration. I confess that I did 499. Happy few is the English expres-
not know how I was going to gratify their wish when I learned just sion, best known from Shakespeare’s
now, by the most extraordinary accident, that you were a friend of Henry V (act 4, scene 3), used to in-
dicate the persons to whom Stendhal
this person. I know that she lives a most retired life, and sees only dedicated his books, that is to say, to
a very few people—‘happy few,’499 as Stendhal would say—but if those who alone are able to understand
you were to give me your support, with the kindness that you have and appreciate his writings. To enable
his Anglophone readers to understand
always shown me, I am sure that she would allow you to present the allusion, Scott Moncrieff added “as
me to her and to convey to her the wishes of both the grand Stendhal would say.”
duchess and the princess. Perhaps she would consent to dine with
us when the Queen of England comes, and then, who knows, if
we don’t bore her too much, to spend the Easter holidays with us
at Beaulieu, at the Grand Duchess John’s. The person I allude to is
called the Marquise de Villeparisis. I confess that the hope of be-
coming one of the habitués of such a school of wit would console
me, would make me contemplate without regret the abandoning
of my candidacy for the Institut. For in her house, too, I under-
stand, there is a regular flow of intellect and brilliant talk.”
With an inexpressible sense of pleasure the prince felt that the
lock no longer resisted and that at last the key was turning.
“Such an alternative is wholly unnecessary, my dear Prince,”
replied M. de Norpois; “nothing is more in harmony with the In-
stitut than the house you speak of, which is a veritable breeding
ground of academicians. I will convey your request to Mme la
Marquise de Villeparisis: she will undoubtedly be flattered. As for
her dining with you, she goes out very little and that will per-
haps be more difficult to arrange. But I will introduce you to her
and you can plead your cause in person. You must on no account

Part One 285

 The Guermantes Way

500. A peruke is a wig of a type popular give up the Académie; two weeks from tomorrow, as it happens,
from the seventeenth to the early nine- I will be having lunch, before going on with him to an impor-
teenth century. A ruff is a large round
collar of pleated muslin or linen worn tant meeting, at Leroy-­Beaulieu’s, without whom nobody can be
by men and women of the late six- elected; I had already allowed myself in conversation with him to
teenth and early seventeenth centuries. let fall your name, with which, naturally, he was perfectly familiar.
501. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de
Marivaux (1688–1763) was a play- He raised certain objections. But it so happens that he requires
wright and novelist who wrote Le Jeu de the support of my group at the next election, and I fully intend
l’amour et du hasard (1730) and Fausses to return to the charge; I will tell him quite openly of the wholly
Confidences (1737).
502. Samuel Bernard (1651–1739) was cordial ties that unite us, I will not conceal from him that, if you
a financier to whom the public treasury were to stand, I would ask all my friends to vote for you” (here the
turned for aid several times during the prince breathed a deep sigh of relief ), “and he knows that I have
reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.
503. Elves were winged genies that friends. I consider that if I were to succeed in obtaining his assis-
symbolized air, fire, and earth. Kobolds, tance your chances would become very good. Come that evening,
from German folklore, were mischie- at six, to Mme de Villeparisis’s; I will introduce you and I can give
vous but friendly genies who protected
homes. you an account then of my conversation with him.”
504. During the period about which Thus it was that Prince von Faffenheim had been led to call
Proust is writing, Alsace was part of upon Mme de Villeparisis. My profound disillusionment occurred
Germany, which accounts for Prince
Von Faffenheim’s accent when he when he spoke. It had never struck me that, if an epoch in his-
speaks French. After World War I, tory has features both particular and general that are stronger than
Alsace again became part of France. those of a nationality, so that in a biographical dictionary with
illustrations, which go so far as to include an authentic portrait of
Minerva, Leibniz with his peruke and ruff 500 differs little from
Marivaux501 or Samuel Bernard,502 a nationality has particular
features stronger than those of a caste. In the present instance
these were rendered before me not by a discourse in which I had
expected, before I saw him, to hear the rustling of the Elves and
the dance of the Kobolds,503 but by a transposition that certified
no less plainly that poetic origin: the fact that, as he bowed, short,
red-­faced, and potbellied, over the hand of Mme de Villeparisis,
the Rheingraf said to her: “Ponchour, Matame la Marquise,” in
the accent of an Alsatian concierge.504
“Won’t you let me give you a cup of tea or a little of this tart?
It’s so good,” Mme de Guermantes asked me, eager to have shown
herself as friendly as possible. “I do the honors in this house just
as if it were mine,” she explained in an ironical tone that gave a

286 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

slightly guttural sound to her voice, as though she were trying to 505. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
stifle a hoarse laugh. Flower, 160.

“Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to M. de Norpois, “you

won’t forget that you have something to say to the prince about
the Académie?”
Mme de Guermantes lowered her eyes and gave a semicircular
turn to her wrist to look at the time.
“Gracious! It’s time for me to say goodbye to my aunt, if I’m
to get to Mme de Saint-­Ferréol’s, and I’m dining at Mme Leroi’s.”
And she rose without bidding me goodbye. She had just caught
sight of Mme Swann, who appeared rather embarrassed at finding
me in the room. No doubt she remembered that she had been the
first to assure me that she was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence.
“I don’t want my mother to introduce me to Mme Swann,”
Saint-­L oup said to me. “She’s an ex-­whore.505 Her husband’s
a Jew, and she comes here to pose as a Nationalist. I say, here’s
Uncle Palamède.”
The arrival of Mme Swann had a special interest for me, due to
an incident that had occurred a few days earlier and that it is nec-
essary to relate because of the consequences that it was to have at
a much later date, as the reader will learn in detail in due course.
Well, a few days before this visit to Mme de Villeparisis, I had
myself received a visitor whom I little expected, namely Charles
Morel, the son, whom I did not know, of my great-­uncle’s old
valet. This great-­uncle (the one in whose house I had met the lady
in pink) had died the year before. His valet had more than once
expressed his intention of coming to see me; I had no idea of the
object of his visit, but would have been glad to see him for I had
learned from Françoise that he had a genuine veneration for my
uncle’s memory and made a pilgrimage regularly to the cemetery
in which he was buried. But being obliged, for reasons of health,
to retire to his home in the country, where he expected to remain
for some time, he delegated the duty to his son. I was surprised
to see come into my room a handsome young man of eighteen,
dressed with expensive rather than good taste, but looking, all

Part One 287

 The Guermantes Way

506. These are similar to the photo- the same, like anything in the world except the son of a valet.
graphs that Proust inherited from his He made a point, moreover, at the start of our conversation, of
Great-­Uncle Louis Weil. See Carter,
Marcel Proust, 76. severing all connection with the domestic class from which he
sprang, by informing me, with a smile of satisfaction, that he had
won the first prize at the Conservatoire. The object of his visit to
me was as follows: his father, when going through the effects of
my Uncle Adolphe, had set aside some that he felt were inappro-
priate to send to my parents but were, he thought, of a nature
likely to interest a young man of my age. These were the photo-
graphs of the famous actresses, the notorious cocottes whom my
uncle had known, the last fading pictures of that pleasure-­seeking
life of a man about town that he separated by a watertight com-
partment from his family life. While young Morel was showing
them to me, I noticed that he affected to speak to me as to an
equal. He derived from saying “you” to me as often, and “Mon-
sieur” as seldom as possible, the pleasure natural in one whose
father had never used, when addressing my parents, anything but
the third person. Almost all these photographs bore an inscrip-
tion such as: “To my best friend.”506 One actress, less grateful
and more circumspect than the rest, had written: “To the best of
friends,” which enabled her (so I was assured) to say afterward that
my uncle was in no sense and had never been her best friend but
was merely the friend who had done the most little services for
her, the friend she made use of, a good, kind man, in other words,
an old fool. In vain might young Morel seek to divest himself of
his lowly origin, one felt that the shade of my Uncle Adolphe, ven-
erable and gigantic in the eyes of the old valet, had never ceased to
hover, almost a sacred vision, over the childhood and youth of the
son. While I was turning over the photographs, Charles Morel ex-
amined my room. And as I was looking for some place in which I
might keep them, “How is it,” he asked me (in a tone in which the
reproach had no need to find expression, so implicit was it in the
words themselves), “that I don’t see a single photograph of your
uncle in your room?” I felt the blood rise to my cheeks and stam-
mered: “Why, I don’t believe I have any.” “What, you don’t have

288 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

one photograph of your Uncle Adolphe, who was so fond of you! 507. Achille Tenaille de Vaulabelle
I will send you one of my old man’s—he has quantities of them— (1799–1879) was a journalist, politician,
and historian. See Swann’s Way, 89.
and I hope you will set it up in the place of honor above that chest 508. Proust puts the word in quota-
of drawers, which, as it happens, came to you from your uncle.” It tions to indicate that Morel is very
is true that, as I had not even a photograph of my father or mother much a social climber.

in my room, there was nothing so very shocking in there not being

one of my Uncle Adolphe. But it was easy enough to see that for
old Morel, who had trained his son in the same way of thinking,
my uncle was the important person in the family, my parents only
reflecting a diminished light from his. I was in higher favor, be-
cause my uncle used constantly to say that I would turn out to be
a sort of Racine, or Vaulabelle,507 and Morel regarded me almost
as an adopted son, as a child by election of my uncle. I soon dis-
covered that this young man was very “arriviste.”508 Thus at this
first meeting he asked me, being something of a composer as well
and capable of setting short poems to music, whether I knew any
poet who had a good position in “aristo” society. I mentioned
one. He did not know the work of this poet and had never heard
his name, of which he made a note. Well, I found out that shortly
afterward he wrote to the poet telling him that, as a fanatical ad-
mirer of his work, he, Morel, had composed a musical setting for
one of his sonnets and would be grateful if the author would ar-
range for its performance at the Comtesse So-­and-­So’s. This was
going a little too fast, and exposing his hand. The poet, taking
offense, made no reply.
For the rest, Charles Morel seemed to have, besides his am-
bition, a strong leaning toward more concrete realities. He had
noticed, as he came through the courtyard, Jupien’s niece at work
on a waistcoat, and although he explained to me only that he hap-
pened to want a fancy waistcoat at that very moment, I felt that
the girl had made a vivid impression on him. He had no hesita-
tion about asking me to come downstairs and introduce him to
her, “but not as a connection of your family, you follow me, I
rely on your discretion not to drag in my father, say just a distin-
guished artist of your acquaintance, you know how important it

Part One 289

 The Guermantes Way

509. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in is to make a good impression on tradespeople.” Albeit he had sug-
Flower, 466, 478. gested to me that, not knowing him well enough to call him, he
510. See Swann’s Way, 86–89.
quite realized, “dear friend,” I might address him, before the girl,
in some such terms as “not dear master, of course, . . . although
. . . well, if you like, dear distinguished artist,” once in the shop,
I avoided “qualifying” him, as Saint-­Simon would have expressed
it, and contented myself with reiterating his “you.” He picked out
from several patterns of velvet one of the brightest red imaginable
and so loud that, for all his bad taste, he was never able to wear the
waistcoat when it was made. The girl settled down to work again
with her two “apprentices,” but it struck me that the impression
had been mutual, and that Charles Morel, whom she regarded
as belonging to “her own world” (only smarter and richer), had
proved singularly attractive to her. As I had been greatly surprised
to find among the photographs that his father had sent me one of
the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir,509 I
said to Charles Morel as I went with him to the porte cochère: “I
don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady
well? I don’t see at what stage in his life I can situate her; and it
interests me, because of M. Swann . . .” “Oh, I was about to forget
to tell you that my father asked me specially to draw your atten-
tion to that lady’s picture. As a matter of fact, she was having
lunch with your uncle the last time you ever saw him. My father
was of two minds whether to let you in. It seems you made a great
impression on the wench, and she hoped to see more of you. But
just at that time there was some trouble in the family, from what
my father tells me, and you never set eyes on your uncle again.”
He broke off with a smile of farewell, across the courtyard, at Ju-
pien’s niece. She was watching him and admiring, no doubt, his
thin face and regular features, his fair hair and sparkling eyes. I,
as I shook his hand, was thinking of Mme Swann and saying to
myself with amazement, so far apart, so different were they in my
memory, that I would have henceforth to identify her with the
“Lady in pink.”510
M. de Charlus was soon seated by the side of Mme Swann. At

290 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

every social gathering at which he appeared, contemptuous toward

the men, courted by the women, he promptly attached himself to
the most elegant of the latter, whose garments he seemed almost
to put on as an ornament to his own. The baron’s frock coat or
tailcoat made one think of a portrait by some great colorist of a
man dressed in black but having by his side, thrown over a chair,
the brilliantly colored coat that he is about to wear at some cos-
tume ball. This tête-­à-­tête, generally with some royal lady, secured
for M. de Charlus various privileges that he liked to enjoy. For
example, one result of it was that his hostesses, at theatricals or
concerts, allowed the baron alone to have a front seat in a row of
ladies, while the rest of the men jostled one another at the back
of the room. And then besides, completely absorbed, it seemed,
in telling, at the top of his voice, amusing stories to the enrap-
tured lady, M. de Charlus was dispensed from the necessity of
going to shake hands with any of the others, was set free, in other
words, from all social duties. Behind the scented barrier in which
the beauty of his choice enclosed him, he was isolated amid a
crowded drawing room, as, in a crowded theater, behind the ram-
part of a box; and when anyone came up to greet him, through,
so to speak, the beauty of his companion, it was permissible for
him to reply quite curtly and without interrupting his conversa-
tion with a lady. Certainly Mme Swann was scarcely of the rank
of the people with whom he liked thus to flaunt himself. But he
professed admiration for her friendship, for Swann, knew that she
would be flattered by his attentions, and was himself flattered at
being compromised by the prettiest woman in the room.
Mme de Villeparisis, meanwhile, was not too well pleased to
receive a visit from M. de Charlus. He, while admitting serious
defects in his aunt’s character, was genuinely fond of her. But
every now and then, carried away by anger, by an imaginary griev-
ance, he would sit down and write to her, without making any at-
tempt to resist his impulse, letters full of the most violent abuse,
in which he made the most of trifling incidents that until then
he seemed never even to have noticed. Among other examples I

Part One 291

 The Guermantes Way

may cite the following, which my stay at Balbec brought to my

knowledge: Mme de Villeparisis, fearing that she had not brought
enough money with her to Balbec to enable her to prolong her
vacation there, and not caring, since she was of a thrifty dispo-
sition and shrank from unnecessary expenditure, to have money
sent to her from Paris, had borrowed three thousand francs from
M. de Charlus. A month later, annoyed, for some trivial reason,
with his aunt, he asked her to repay him this sum by telegraphic
money order. He received two thousand nine hundred and ninety-­
odd francs. Meeting his aunt a few days later in Paris, in the course
of a friendly conversation, he drew her attention, with the utmost
politeness, to the mistake that her banker had made when sending
the money. “But there was no mistake,” replied Mme de Ville-
parisis, “the money order cost six francs seventy-­five.” “Oh, of
course, if it was intentional, that’s fine,” said M. de Charlus, “I
mentioned it only in case you didn’t know, because in that case, if
the bank had done the same thing with anyone who didn’t know
you as well as I do, it might have led to unpleasantness.” “No,
no, there was no mistake.” “After all, you were quite right,” M. de
Charlus concluded gaily, stooping to kiss his aunt’s hand. And in
fact he bore no resentment and was only amused at this little in-
stance of her stinginess. But some time afterward, imagining that,
in a family matter, his aunt had been trying to get the better of
him and had “worked up a regular conspiracy” against him, as she
took shelter, foolishly enough, behind the lawyers with whom he
suspected her of having plotted to undo him, he had written her
a letter boiling over with insolence and rage. “I will not be satis-
fied with having my revenge,” he added as a postscript; “I will take
care to make you a laughingstock. Tomorrow I will tell everyone
the story of the money order and the six francs seventy-­five you
kept back from me out of the three thousand I lent you; I will dis-
grace you publicly.” Instead of so doing, he had gone to his aunt
the next day to beg her pardon, having already regretted a letter in
which he had used some really dreadful language. But apart from
this, to whom could he have told the story of the money order?

292 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

Seeking no longer vengeance but a sincere reconciliation, now was 511. See Swann’s Way, 39, for the rumor
the time for him to keep silence. But already he had repeated the that Odette and Charlus were lovers;
see In the Shadow of Young Girls in
story everywhere, while still on the best of terms with his aunt; he Flower, 365, for Saint-­Loup’s denial that
had told it without any malice, as a joke, and because he was the this was so.
soul of indiscretion. He had repeated the story, but without Mme 512. Epistle of Paul to Titus 1:15.

de Villeparisis’s knowledge. With the result that, having learned

from his letter that he intended to disgrace her by divulging a
transaction in which he had told her with his own lips that she had
acted rightly, she concluded that he had been deceiving her from
the first, and had lied when he pretended to be fond of her. All
this had now died down, but neither of them knew what opinion
exactly the other had of her or him. This sort of intermittent
quarrel is of course somewhat exceptional. Of a different order
were the quarrels of Bloch and his friends. Of a different order
again were those of M. de Charlus, as we will see, with people
wholly unlike Mme de Villeparisis. In spite of which we must bear
in mind that the opinions that we hold of one another, our rela-
tions with friends and family, are in no sense permanent, except in
appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself. Whence all
the rumors of divorce between couples who have always seemed
so perfectly united and will soon afterward speak of one another
with affection, hence all the terrible things said by one friend of
another from whom we supposed him to be inseparable and with
whom we will find him once more reconciled before we have had
time to recover from our surprise; all the ruptures of alliances,
after so short a time, between nations.
“I say, my uncle and Mme Swann are getting warm over
there!”511 remarked Saint-­L oup. “And look at Mamma in the
innocence of her heart going across to disturb them. To the pure
all things are pure!”512
I studied M. de Charlus. The tuft of his gray hair, his eye, the
brow of which was raised by his monocle to emit a smile, the red
flowers in his buttonhole formed, so to speak, the three mobile
apexes of a convulsive and striking triangle. I had not ventured
to greet him, for he had given me no sign of recognition. And

Part One 293

 The Guermantes Way

513. In the original, rousse, which is yet, even though he had not turned his head in my direction, I
slang for police. was convinced that he had seen me; while he related some story
to Mme Swann, whose sumptuous, pansy-­colored cloak floated
over the baron’s knee, his roving eye, like that of a street hawker
who is watching all the time for the “cops”513 to appear, had cer-
tainly explored every corner of the room and taken note of all the
people who were in it. M. de Châtellerault came up to say hello
to him without any indication on M. de Charlus’s face that he
had seen the young duke until he was actually standing in front
of him. In this way, in fairly numerous gatherings such as this,
M. de Charlus kept almost continuously on show a smile without
any definite direction or particular object, which, preexisting be-
fore the greetings of new arrivals, found itself, when these entered
its zone, devoid of any indication of friendliness toward them.
Nevertheless, it was obviously my duty to go across and speak to
Mme Swann. But as she was not certain whether I already knew
Mme de Marsantes and M. de Charlus, she was distinctly cold,
fearing no doubt that I might ask her to introduce me to them.
I then approached M. de Charlus, and at once regretted it, for
though he could not have helped seeing me, he showed no sign
whatsoever of having done so. As I stood before him and bowed
I found standing out from his body, which it prevented me from
approaching by the full length of his outstretched arm, a finger
widowed, one would have said, of an episcopal ring, of which he
appeared to be offering, for the kiss of the faithful, the conse-
crated site, and I was made to appear to have penetrated, without
leave from the baron and by an act of trespass for which he would
hold me permanently responsible, the anonymous and vacant dis-
persion of his smile. This coldness was hardly of a kind to en-
courage Mme Swann to melt from hers.
“How tired and worried you look,” said Mme de Marsantes to
her son, who had come up to greet M. de Charlus.
And indeed the expression in Robert’s eyes seemed at times
to reach a depth from which it rose at once like a diver who

294 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

has touched bottom. This bottom that hurt Robert so when he 514. Honnête homme, in the original,
touched it that he left it at once, to return to it a moment later, is now a borrowed French expression
in English and means an honest man,
was the thought that he had broken with his mistress. a respectable and honorable citizen of
“Never mind,” his mother went on, stroking his cheek, “never the middle class. Scott Moncrieff trans-
mind; it’s good to see my little boy again.” lated this as “honest Injun.”

But this show of affection seeming to irritate Robert, Mme de

Marsantes led her son away to the other end of the room where
in an alcove hung with yellow silk a group of Beauvais armchairs
massed their violet-­hued tapestries like purple irises in a field of
buttercups. Mme Swann, finding herself alone and having real-
ized that I was a friend of Saint-­L oup, beckoned to me to come
and sit beside her. Not having seen her for so long I did not know
what to talk to her about. I was keeping an eye on my hat among
all those that littered the carpet, and I asked myself with a vague
curiosity to whom could belong the one that was not the Duc de
Guermantes’s and yet in the lining of which a capital “G” was sur-
mounted by a ducal coronet. I knew who everyone in the room
was, and could not think of anyone whose hat this could pos-
sibly be.
“What a pleasant man M. de Norpois is,” I said to Mme Swann,
pointing him out to her. “It’s true that Robert de Saint-­L oup says
he’s a pest, but . . .”
“He’s quite right,” she replied.
Seeing from her face that she was thinking of something that
she was keeping from me, I plied her with questions. Content,
perhaps, to appear to be greatly preoccupied by someone in this
room where she knew hardly anyone, she took me into a corner.
“I am sure this is what M. de Saint-­L oup meant,” she began,
“but you must never tell him I said so, for he would think me
indiscreet, and I value his esteem very highly; I am very much
an “honnête homme,”514 you know. The other day, Charlus was
dining at the Princesse de Guermantes’s; I don’t know how it was,
but your name was mentioned. M. de Norpois seems to have told
them—it’s all too silly for words, don’t go and worry yourself to

Part One 295

 The Guermantes Way

death over it, nobody paid any attention to it, they all knew only
too well the mischievous tongue that said it—that you were a
hypocritical little flatterer.”
I have recorded a long way back my stupefaction at the dis-
covery that a friend of my father, such as M. de Norpois was, could
have expressed himself thus in speaking of me. I was even more as-
tonished to learn that my emotion on that evening long ago when
I had spoken about Mme Swann and Gilberte was known to the
Princesse de Guermantes, whom I imagined never to have heard
of my existence. Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is
cut off from the “world,” from the people who have not directly
perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite
variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by
experience that some important utterance that we eagerly hoped
would be disseminated (such as those so enthusiastic speeches that
I used at one time to make to everyone and at every opportu-
nity on the subject of Mme Swann, thinking that among so many
good scattered seeds that at least one would sprout) has found
itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden
under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some
tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never
uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refrac-
tion of a different word, can be transported without ever halting
for any obstacle to infinite distances—in the present instance to
the Princesse de Guermantes—and succeed in diverting at our
expense the banquet of the gods. What we remember of our con-
duct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have
forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies
to provoke hilarity in another planet, and the image that other
people form of our actions and behavior no more resembles the
one we form of them ourselves than does a botched drawing in
which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for
a blank space an inexplicable contour. It may be, all the same, that
what has not been transcribed is some nonexistent feature that we
behold merely in our purblind self-­esteem, and that what seems

296 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as 515. In French, réaliser means to make
to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print that seems to real or concrete. Mme Swann should
say “Je ne me rendais pas compte” to
us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the ­indicate “I was not aware.”
same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and
useful, as an X-­ray photograph. Not that that is any reason why
we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of
smiling in the mirror at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if
you show him their X-­ray, will have, face to face with that rosary
of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion
of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the por-
trait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later
on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according to whether
it was our own hand that drew them or another’s, I was to register
in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of
a collection of photographs that they themselves had taken while
around about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a
rule, but plunging them into a stupor if an accident were to reveal
them with the warning: “This is you.”
A few years earlier I would have been only too glad to tell Mme
Swann in what connection I had fawned upon M. de Norpois,
since the connection had been my desire to know her. But I no
longer felt this desire, I was no longer in love with Gilberte. On
the other hand, I had not succeeded in identifying Mme Swann
with the lady in pink of my childhood. Accordingly, I spoke of the
woman who was on my mind at the moment.
“Did you see the Duchesse de Guermantes just now?” I asked
Mme Swann.
But since the duchess did not greet Mme Swann when they
met, the latter chose to appear to regard her as a person of no im-
portance, whose presence in a room one did not even notice.
“I don’t know; I didn’t realize,”515 she replied sourly, using an
expression borrowed from English.
I was eager, nevertheless, for information with regard not only
to Mme de Guermantes, but to all the people who came in con-
tact with her, and (for all the world like Bloch), with the tactless-

Part One 297

 The Guermantes Way

ness of people who seek in their conversations not to give plea-

sure to others but to elucidate, from sheer egoism, points that are
interesting to themselves, in my effort to form an exact idea of
the life of Mme de Guermantes, I questioned Mme de Villeparisis
about Mme Leroi.
“Oh, yes, I know who you mean,” she replied with an affecta-
tion of contempt, “the daughter of those rich timber merchants.
I’ve heard that she’s begun to go about quite a lot lately, but I must
explain to you that I am rather old now to make new acquain-
tances. I have known such interesting, such delightful people in
my time that really I do not believe Mme Leroi would be any
addition to what I already have.”
Mme de Marsantes, who was playing lady-­in-­waiting to the
marquise, introduced me to the prince and scarcely had she done
so when M. de Norpois also introduced me in the most glowing
terms. Perhaps he found it convenient to do me a courtesy that
could in no way damage his credit since I had just been intro-
duced, perhaps it was because he thought that a foreigner, even so
distinguished a foreigner, was unfamiliar with French society and
might think that he was having introduced to him a young man of
fashion, perhaps to exercise one of his prerogatives, that of adding
the weight of his personal recommendation as an ambassador, or
in his taste for the archaic to revive in the prince’s honor the old
custom, flattering to his rank as a Highness, that two sponsors
were necessary if one wished to be introduced to him.
Mme de Villeparisis appealed to M. de Norpois, feeling it im-
perative that I should have his assurance that she had nothing to
regret in not knowing Mme Leroi.
“Am I not right, M. l’Ambassadeur, that Mme Leroi is quite
uninteresting, very inferior to all the people who come here and
that I was quite right not to make friends with her?”
Whether from independence or because he was tired, M. de
Norpois replied merely in a bow full of respect but devoid of
meaning.
“Monsieur,” went on Mme de Villeparisis with a laugh, “there

298 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

are some absurd people in the world. Would you believe that I 516. Claude Henri de Fusée, abbot of
had a visit this afternoon from a gentleman who tried to persuade Voisenon (1708–75), led a rather de-
bauched life. He is the author of licen-
me that he found more pleasure in kissing my hand than a young tious stories and poems, such as
woman’s?” Zulmis et Zelmaïde and Misapouf.
I guessed at once that this was Legrandin. M. de Norpois 517. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon,
known as Crébillon fils (1707–77),
smiled with a slight quiver of the eyelid, as though such a remark wrote, among other things, licentious
had been prompted by a concupiscence so natural that one could novels, such as Le Sopha and L’Écu-
not find fault with the person who had felt it, almost as though it moire, for which he served several years
in prison.
were the beginning of a romance that he was prepared to forgive, 518. Beginning in 1864, Henri Fantin-­
even to encourage, with the perverse indulgence of a Voisenon516 Latour (1836–1904), a painter and
or Crébillon fils.517 lithographer, exhibited his still lifes and
portraits in all the Salons. Six of his
“Many young women’s hands would be incapable of doing flower studies were exhibited in 1900
what I see there,” said the prince, pointing to Mme de Villepari- on the occasion of the Centennial Exhi-
sis’s unfinished watercolors. bition in Paris.
519. Herr August Wilhem von Schlegel
And he asked her whether she had seen the flower paintings by (1767–1845), German poet, commen-
Fantin-­L atour518 that had recently been exhibited. tator, and translator, was one of the
“They are of the first order, and indicate, as people say nowa- promoters of Romanticism. A friend of
Goethe and Schiller, he is the author
days, a fine painter, one of the masters of the palette,” declared of studies on Greek, French, and Pro-
M. de Norpois; “I consider, all the same, that they stand no vençal literature. He was also the tutor
comparison with these, in which I find it easier to recognize the to the children of Mme de Staël, who,
through him, discovered German lit-
coloring of the flower.” erature. This encounter influenced her
Even supposing that the partiality of an old lover, the habit of studies on Romanticism that made
flattering people, the critical opinions admissible in a coterie, had her one of the leading authorities on
European Romanticism. Her book De
dictated this speech to the former ambassador, it proved on what l’Allemagne (Germany) was published
an absolute vacuum of true taste the artistic judgment of society in 1810.
people is based, so arbitrary that the smallest trifle can make it 520. The château de Broglie, in the
Eure département, has been the prop-
rush to the wildest absurdities, on the way to which it is stopped erty of the Ducs de Broglie since 1716.
by no genuinely felt impression. 521. Cordelia Louisa Eucharis Greffulhe
“I claim no credit for knowing about flowers, I’ve lived all my (1796–1847), wife of Comte Boniface
de Castellane (1788–1862), received
life among the fields,” replied Mme de Villeparisis modestly. “But,” the title of maréchal five years after her
she added graciously, turning to the prince, “if I did, when I was death. When she was twenty-­seven,
quite a girl, form rather more serious notions about them than do Chateaubriand fell madly in love with
her. Her daughter, Mme de Beaulain-
other country children, I owe that to a distinguished countryman court, is one of the models for the fic-
of yours, Herr von Schlegel.519 I met him at Broglie,520 where I was titious Mme de Villeparisis, who claims
taken by my Aunt Cordelia (Maréchal de Castellane’s wife).521 I re- her as an aunt.

Part One 299

 The Guermantes Way

522. Pierre Antoine Lebrun (1785–1873), member so well M. Lebrun,522 M. de Salvandy,523 M. Doudan,524
poet and playwright, was elected to the getting him to talk about flowers. I was only a little girl, I wasn’t
Académie Française in 1828. He had
a short political career under Napo- able to understand all he said. But he liked playing with me, and
léon III. when he went back to your country he sent me a beautiful botany
523. Narcisse-­Achille de Salvandy book to remind me of a drive we took together in a phaeton to
(1795–1856) was ambassador to Madrid
and a member of Molé’s cabinet. the Val Richer,525 when I fell asleep on his knee. I still have the
524. The writer Ximenès Doudan book, and it taught me to observe many things about flowers that
(1800–1872) was the Duc de Broglie’s I would not have noticed otherwise. When Mme de Barante pub-
private secretary and the tutor to his
children. lished some of Mme de Broglie’s letters,526 charming and affected
525. The ancient abbey of Val Richer is like herself, I hoped to find among them some record of those
located at Saint-­Ouen-­le-­Pin, between conversations with Herr von Schlegel. But she was a woman who
Lisieux and Cambremer in the départe-
ment of Calvados. looked for nothing from nature but arguments in support of reli-
526. Achille-­Charles-­Léonce-­Victor, Duc gion.”
de Broglie (1785–1870), married Alber- Robert called me away to the far end of the room, where he and
tine Ida de Staël-­Holstein (1797–1838),
the daughter of Mme de Staël. She was his mother were.
the author of several pious books: La “How nice you’ve been,” I said to him, “how can I thank you?
Présence de Dieu (1868) and Catherine Can we dine together tomorrow?”
de Sienne (1875). Her letters (Lettres de
la duchesse de Broglie 1814–1838) were “Tomorrow? Yes, if you like, but it will have to be with Bloch.
not published by Marie Joséphine Cé- I met him just now on the doorstep; he was rather stiff with me
sarine d’Houdetot, Baronne de Barante at first because I had quite forgotten to answer his last two let-
(1794–1877), but by her own son, the
Duc de Broglie. ters. (At least, he didn’t tell me that that was what had offended
him, but I guessed it.) But after that he was so friendly to me that
I simply can’t disappoint him. Between ourselves, on his side at
least, I can feel it’s a lifelong friendship.”
I do not think that Robert was altogether mistaken. Furious
detraction was often, with Bloch, the effect of a keen affection
that he had supposed to be unrequited. And as he had little or no
ability to imagine the lives of other people and never dreamed that
one might have been ill, or away from home, or otherwise occu-
pied, a week’s silence was at once interpreted by him as meaning
a deliberate coldness. And so I never believed that his most vio-
lent outbursts as a friend, or in later years as a writer, went very
deep. They became exacerbated if one replied to them with an icy
dignity, or by a platitude that encouraged him to redouble his on-
slaught, but yielded often to a warmly sympathetic attitude. “As

300 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

for my being nice,” went on Saint-­L oup, “as you say I have been to
you, I haven’t been nice at all; my aunt tells me that it’s you who
avoid her, that you never say a word to her. She wonders whether
you have something against her.”
Fortunately for myself, if I had been taken in by these words,
our departure for Balbec, which I believed to be imminent, would
have prevented my making any attempt to see Mme de Guer-
mantes again, to assure her that I had nothing against her, and so
to put her under the necessity of proving that it was she who had
something against me. But I had only to remind myself that she
had not even offered to let me see her Elstirs. Besides, this was not
a disappointment; I had never expected her to talk to me about
them; I knew that I did not appeal to her, that I need have no
hope of ever making her like me; the most that I had been able
to look forward to was that, thanks to her kindness, I might there
and then receive, since I would not be seeing her again before I left
Paris, an entirely pleasing impression that I could take with me to
Balbec indefinitely prolonged, intact, instead of a memory broken
by anxiety and sorrow.
Mme de Marsantes kept on interrupting her conversation with
Robert to tell me how often he had spoken to her about me, how
fond he was of me; she treated me with a deference that almost
pained me because I felt it to be prompted by her fear of being
at loggerheads, because of me, with this son whom she had not
seen all day, with whom she was eager to be alone, and over whom
she must accordingly have supposed that the influence that she
wielded was not equal to and must conciliate mine. Having heard
me earlier ask Bloch for news of his uncle, M. Nissim Bernard,
Mme de Marsantes inquired whether it was he who had at one
time lived at Nice.
“In that case, he knew M. de Marsantes there before our mar-
riage,” she told me. “My husband used often to speak of him as an
excellent man, with such a delicate, generous nature.”
“To think that for once in his life he wasn’t lying! It’s incred-
ible,” Bloch would have thought.

Part One 301

 The Guermantes Way

All this time I would have liked to explain to Mme de Mar-

santes that Robert felt infinitely more affection for her than for
myself, and that had she shown any hostility toward me it was
not in my nature to attempt to set him against her, to detach him
from her. But now that Mme de Guermantes had left the room, I
had more leisure to observe Robert, and I noticed only then that,
once again, a sort of flood of anger seemed to be coursing through
him, rising to the surface of his stern and somber features. I was
afraid that, remembering the scene in the theater that afternoon,
he might be feeling humiliated in my presence at having allowed
himself to be treated so harshly by his mistress without making
any riposte.
Suddenly he broke away from his mother, who had put her arm
around his neck, and, coming toward me, led me behind the little
flower-­strewn counter at which Mme de Villeparisis had resumed
her seat, and then beckoned me to follow him into the smaller
drawing room. I was hurrying after him when M. de Charlus, who
must have supposed that I was leaving the house, turned abruptly
from Prince von Faffenheim, to whom he had been talking, and
made a rapid circuit that brought him face to face with me. I saw
with alarm that he had taken the hat in the lining of which were
a capital G and a ducal coronet. In the doorway into the drawing
room he said, without looking at me:
“As I see that you have taken to going into society, you must
give me the pleasure of coming to see me. But it’s a little compli-
cated,” he went on with a distracted, calculating air, as if the plea-
sure had been one that he was afraid of not securing again once
he had let slip the opportunity of arranging with me the means by
which it might be realized. “I am very seldom at home; you will
have to write to me. But I would prefer to explain things to you
more quietly. I’m about to leave. Will you walk a short way with
me? I will keep you only a moment.”
“You’d better take care, Monsieur,” I warned him; “you have
picked up the wrong hat by mistake.”
“Do you want to prevent me from taking my own hat?”

302 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

I assumed, a similar mishap having recently occurred to myself, 527. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
that someone else having taken his hat he had seized upon one at Flower, 363–65.
528. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82)
random, so as not to go home bareheaded, and that I had placed was an American idealist philosopher,
him in a difficulty by exposing his stratagem. I told him that I essayist, and founder of Transcenden-
must say a few words to Saint-­L oup. “He’s talking to that idiot talism. In 1895, Proust read the works
of Emerson and used a number of quo-
the Duc de Guermantes,” I added. “That’s really a charming thing tations from Emerson as epigraphs to
to say; I will tell my brother.” “Oh! You think that would interest chapters in Pleasures and Days. Proust
M. de Charlus?” (I imagined that, if he had a brother, that brother wrote this to Reynaldo Hahn: “My
dearly beloved child, this morning I
must be called Charlus also. Saint-­L oup had indeed explained his shall go to the Bois if I get up soon
family tree to me at Balbec, but I had forgotten the details.)527 enough, for I am still in bed, drunk
“Who’s been talking to you about M. de Charlus?” said the baron with reading Emerson.” Proust, Selected
Letters 1: 87.
in an arrogant tone. “Go to Robert. I know that you took part 529. Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), a Nor-
this morning in one of those lunchtime orgies that he has with a wegian playwright whose works ex-
woman who is disgracing him. You would do well to use your in- amine social and moral issues, was first
published in France in 1890.
fluence with him to make him realize the pain he is causing his 530. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) also pro-
poor mother, and all of us, by dragging our name in the mud.” moted social reforms. Proust con-
I would have liked to reply that at this degrading lunch the sidered Emerson, Ibsen, and Tolstoy
as representatives of elevated philo-
conversation had been entirely about Emerson,528 Ibsen,529 and sophical and esthetic ideas.
Tolstoy,530 and that the young woman had lectured Robert to
make him drink nothing but water. In the hope of bringing some
balm to Robert, whose pride had, I believed, been wounded, I
sought to find an excuse for his mistress. I did not know that at
that moment, in spite of his anger with her, it was on himself that
he was heaping reproaches. But it always happens, even in quar-
rels between a good man and a worthless woman, and when the
right is all on one side, that some trifle crops up that enables the
woman to appear not to have been in the wrong on one point.
And as she ignores all the other points, the moment the man be-
gins to feel the need of her company, or is demoralized by sepa-
ration from her, his weakness will make him more scrupulous, he
will remember the absurd reproaches that have been flung at him
and will ask himself whether they have not some foundation in
fact.
“I’ve come to the conclusion I was wrong about that matter of
the necklace,” Robert said to me. “Of course, I never meant for a

Part One 303

 The Guermantes Way

moment to do anything wrong, but I know very well that other

people don’t look at things in the same way as oneself. She had
a very hard time when she was young. In her eyes, I am bound
to appear just the rich man who thinks he can get anything he
wants with his money and with whom a poor person cannot com-
pete, whether in trying to influence Boucheron or to win a law-
suit. Of course she has been very cruel to me, when I have never
thought of anything but her good. But I do see clearly that she
believes that I wanted to make her feel that one could keep a
hold on her with money, and that’s not true. And she’s so fond of
me; what must she be thinking! Poor darling, if you only knew,
she has such charming ways, I simply can’t tell you, she has often
done the most adorable things for me. How wretched she must
be feeling now! In any case, whatever happens in the long run, I
don’t want to let her think me a cad; I’ll dash off to Boucheron’s
and get the necklace. Who knows? Perhaps when she sees me with
it, she will admit that she’s been in the wrong. Don’t you see, it’s
the idea that she is suffering at this moment that I can’t bear!
One knows what one’s own self suffers; that’s nothing. But with
her—to say to oneself that she’s suffering and not to be able to
form any idea of what she feels—I think I’ll go mad—I’d much
rather never see her again than let her suffer. All I ask is that she
should be happy—without me, if need be. Listen; you know, to
me everything that concerns her is enormously important, it be-
comes something cosmic; I’ll run to the jeweler’s and then go and
ask her to forgive me. But until I get down there what will she be
thinking of me? If she could only know that I was on my way!
What about your going down there and telling her? For all we
know, that might settle the whole business. Perhaps,” he went on
with a smile, as though he hardly ventured to believe in so idyllic
a possibility, “we can all three dine together in the country. But
we can’t tell yet. I never know how to handle her. Poor child. I
will perhaps only upset her again. Besides, her decision may be ir-
revocable.”
Robert swept me back to his mother.

304 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“Goodbye,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t know

when I will get leave again. Probably not for a month. I’ll write to
you as soon as I know.”
Certainly Robert was not in the least one of those sons who,
when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exas-
peration toward her ought to counterbalance the smiles and greet-
ings that he bestows on strangers. Nothing is more widespread
than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear
to believe that rudeness to one’s own family is the natural com-
plement to ceremonial behavior. Whatever the wretched mother
may say, her son, as though he had been taken along against his
will and wished to make her pay dearly for his presence, refutes
immediately, with an ironical, precise, cruel contradiction, the
timidly ventured assertion; the mother at once conforms, though
without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior
being of whom she will continue to boast to everyone, when he is
not present, as having a delightful nature, and who all the same
spares her none of his most sarcastic remarks. Saint-­L oup was not
at all like this; but the anguish that Rachel’s absence provoked in
him brought it about that, for different reasons, he was no less
harsh with his mother than the sons I have been describing are
with theirs. And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like
that of a beating wing, that Mme de Marsantes had been unable
to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole
body once again; but this time it was an anxious face, eyes wide
with grief that she fastened on him.
“What, Robert, you’re going away? Seriously? My little son!
The one day I’ve seen anything of you!”
And then quite softly, in the most natural tone, in a voice from
which she strove to banish all sadness so as not to inspire her son
with a pity that would perhaps have been painful to him, or else
useless and might serve only to irritate him, like an argument
prompted by simple common sense she added:
“You know, it’s not at all nice of you.”
But to this simplicity she added so much timidity to show him

Part One 305

 The Guermantes Way

that she was not trespassing on his freedom, so much affection so

that he would not reproach her with spoiling his pleasures, that
Saint-­L oup could not fail to observe in himself as it were the pos-
sibility of a similar wave of affection, that was to say an obstacle to
his spending the evening with his mistress. And so he grew angry.
“It’s unfortunate, but, nice or not, that’s how it is.”
And he heaped on his mother the reproaches that no doubt he
felt that he himself perhaps deserved; thus it is that egoists have
always the last word; having posited at the start that their resolu-
tion is unshakable, the more the sentiment in them to which one
appeals to make them abandon it is touched, the more fault they
find, not with themselves who resist the appeal but with those
who put them under the necessity of resisting it, with the result
that their own harshness may be carried to the utmost degree of
cruelty, which only aggravates all the more in their eyes the cul-
pability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in
the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting
against their natural instinct of pity. But of her own accord Mme
de Marsantes ceased to insist, for she felt that she would not be
able to detain him.
“I’ll leave you here,” he said to me, “but you’re not to keep him
long, Mamma, because he has to go pay a visit somewhere else in
a short while.”
I was fully aware that my company could not afford any plea-
sure to Mme de Marsantes, but I preferred, by not going with
Robert, not to let her suppose that I was involved in these plea-
sures that deprived her of him. I would have liked to find some
excuse for her son’s conduct, less from affection for him than from
pity for her. But it was she who spoke first.
“Poor boy,” she began, “I am sure I must have hurt him dread-
fully. You see, Monsieur, mothers are such selfish creatures, after
all he hasn’t many pleasures, and he comes so seldom to Paris. Oh,
dear, if he hadn’t gone already I would have liked to stop him, not
to keep him of course, but just to tell him that I’m not vexed with

306 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

him, that I think he was quite right. Do you mind if I go and look 531. The Folies Bergère is a music hall
over the staircase?” that opened on May 2, 1869, at 32, rue
Richer. Around 1900 the music hall was
I accompanied her there. half cabaret, half theater.
“Robert! Robert!” she called. “No; he’s gone; we are too late.”
At that moment I would as gladly have undertaken a mission
to make Robert break with his mistress as, a few hours earlier, to
make him go and live with her altogether. In one case Saint-­L oup
would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family
would have called me his evil genius. Yet I was the same man, at
an interval of a few hours.
We returned to the drawing room. Seeing that Saint-­L oup was
not with us, Mme de Villeparisis exchanged with M. de Norpois
that skeptical, mocking, and not too pitying glance with which
people point out to one another an overjealous wife or an over-
loving mother (spectacles that to outsiders are amusing), as if to
say: “There now, there’s been trouble.”
Robert went to his mistress, taking with him the splendid orna-
ment that, after what had been said on both sides, he ought not
to have given her. But it came to the same thing, for she would
not look at it, and even after their reconciliation he could never
persuade her to accept it. Certain of Robert’s friends thought that
these proofs of disinterestedness that she furnished were deliber-
ately planned to tie him to her. And yet she was not greedy about
money, except perhaps to be able to spend it lavishly. I have seen
her bestow recklessly on people whom she believed to be in need
the most insensate charity. “At this moment,” Robert’s friends
would say to him, seeking to counterbalance by their malicious
words a disinterested action on Rachel’s part, “at this moment she
will be in the promenade at the Folies Bergère.531 She’s an enigma,
that girl is, a veritable sphinx.” After all, how many venal women,
since they are kept women, have we not seen, with a delicacy that
flowers in the midst of their sordid existence, set countless little
limits to the generosity of their lovers!
Robert was unaware of almost all of the infidelities of his mis-

Part One 307

 The Guermantes Way

tress and tormented his mind over what were mere nothings com-
pared with the real life of Rachel, a life that began every day only
after he had left her. He was unaware of nearly all of these infideli-
ties. One could have told him of them without shaking his confi-
dence in Rachel. For it is a charming law of nature, which mani-
fests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that
we live in perfect ignorance of those we love. On one side of the
mirror the lover says to himself: “She is an angel, she will never
give herself to me, I may as well die—and yet she does love me;
she loves me so much that perhaps—but no, it can never pos-
sibly happen!” And in the exaltation of his desire, in the anguish
of waiting, what jewels he flings at the feet of this woman, how
he runs to borrow money to save her from inconvenience; mean-
while, on the other side of the partition, through which their con-
versation will no more pass than that which visitors exchange in
front of an aquarium, the public is saying: “You don’t know her?
I congratulate you, she has robbed, in fact, ruined I don’t know
how many men. There isn’t a worse girl in Paris. She’s a common
swindler. And cunning isn’t the word!” And perhaps the public
is not entirely wrong in their use of the last epithet, for even the
skeptical man who is not really in love with the woman and whom
she merely attracts says to his friends: “No, no, my dear fellow,
she is not in the least a cocotte; I don’t say she hasn’t had an ad-
venture or two in her time, but she’s not a woman one pays, she’d
be a damned sight too expensive if she were. With her it’s fifty
thousand francs or nothing.” Well, he has spent fifty thousand
francs on her, he has had her once, but she (finding, moreover,
a willing accomplice in the man himself ) has managed to per-
suade him that he is one of those who have had her for nothing.
Such is society, in which every one of us has two aspects, in which
the most obvious, the most notorious will never be known by a
certain other person unless embedded in and under the protec-
tion of a shell, a smooth cocoon, a delicious curiosity of nature.
There were in Paris two thoroughly respectable men whom Saint-­
Loup no longer greeted, and to whom he could not refer without

308 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

a tremor in his voice, calling them exploiters of women: this was

because they had both been ruined by Rachel.
“I blame myself for one thing only,” Mme de Marsantes mur-
mured in my ear, “and that was my telling him that he wasn’t nice
to me. He, such an adorable, unique son, there’s no one else like
him in the world, the only time I see him, to have told him he
wasn’t nice to me, I would far rather have been beaten, because
I am sure that whatever pleasure he may be having this evening,
and he hasn’t many, will be spoiled for him by that unfair word.
But, Monsieur, I mustn’t keep you, since you’re in a hurry.” Anx-
iously, Mme de Marsantes bade me goodbye. These sentiments
concerned Robert; she was sincere. But she ceased to be, to be-
come a great lady once more.
“I have been so interested, so glad, so flattered to have this little
talk with you. Thank you! Thank you!”
And with a humble air she fastened on me a look of gratitude,
of exhilaration, as though my conversation were one of the keenest
pleasures that she had experienced in her life. These charming
glances went very well with the black flowers on her white skirt;
they were those of a great lady who knew her business.
“But I am in no hurry,” I replied; “besides, I must wait for
M. de Charlus; I am going with him.”
Mme de Villeparisis overheard these last words. They appeared
to vex her. Had the matter in question not been one that could
not possibly give rise to such a sentiment, it might have struck me
that what seemed to be at that moment alarmed in Mme de Ville-
parisis was her sense of propriety. But this hypothesis never even
entered my mind. I was delighted with Mme de Guermantes,
with Saint-­L oup, with Mme de Marsantes, with M. de Charlus,
with Mme de Villeparisis; I did not stop to reflect, and I spoke
lightheartedly and at random.
“You’re leaving here with my nephew Palamède?” she asked me.
Thinking that it might produce a highly favorable impression
on Mme de Villeparisis if she learned that I was on intimate terms
with a nephew whom she esteemed so greatly, “He has asked me

Part One 309

 The Guermantes Way

532. The statue of Olympian Zeus to walk a short way with him,” I answered blithely. “I am de-
was one of the seven wonders of the lighted. Besides, we are greater friends than you think, and I’ve
world. Erected on Mount Olympus
by the Greek sculptor Phidias (490?– quite made up my mind that we’re going to be better friends still.”
431? b.c.), the statue was made of gold From being vexed, Mme de Villeparisis seemed to have grown
and ivory and measured sixty feet high. anxious. “Don’t wait for him,” she said to me, with a preoccupied
It was later moved to Constantinople
and destroyed in a fire. air. “He is talking to M. de Faffenheim. He’s already forgotten
what he said to you. You’d much better go now, quickly, while his
back is turned.”
The first emotion shown by Mme de Villeparisis would have
suggested, but for the circumstances, an offended sense of pro-
priety. Her insistence, her opposition might well, if one had
studied her face alone, have appeared to be dictated by virtue. I
was not, myself, in any hurry to join Robert and his mistress. But
Mme de Villeparisis seemed to make such a point of my going
that, thinking perhaps that she had some important business to
discuss with her nephew, I said goodbye to her. Next to her M. de
Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One
would have said that the notion omnipresent in all his limbs of
his vast riches gave him a particular high density, as though they
had been melted in a crucible into a single human ingot to form
this man whose value was so immense. At the moment of my
saying goodbye to him he rose politely from his seat, and I sensed
the inert mass of thirty millions that his old-­fashioned French
breeding set in motion, raised, until it stood before me. I seemed
to be looking at that statue of Olympian Zeus that Phidias532 is
said to have cast in solid gold. Such was the power that a Jesuit
education had over M. de Guermantes, over the body of M. de
Guermantes at least, for it did not reign with equal mastery over
the ducal mind. M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but
did not even smile at other people’s.
As I went downstairs I heard behind me a voice calling out to
me:
“So this is how you wait for me, Monsieur?”
It was M. de Charlus.
“You don’t mind if we go a little way on foot?” he asked dryly,

310 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

when we were in the courtyard. “We’ll walk until I find a fiacre 533. According to legend, the Greek
that suits me.” philosopher Diogenes (413–327 b.c.)
lived in a tub due to his scorn for
“You wished to speak to me about something, Monsieur?” riches and excess and his desire for
“Oh yes, as a matter of fact there were some things I wished to austerity and self-­mortification. In
say to you, but I am not so sure now whether I will. As far as you order to show his disdain for humanity,
he carried a lighted lamp in the streets
are concerned, I am sure that they might be the starting point that of Athens at noon saying, “I am looking
would lead you to inestimable benefits. But I can see also that they for an honest man.”
would bring into my existence, at an age when one begins to value
tranquility, a great loss of time, great inconveniences of all sorts. I
ask myself whether you are worth all the pains that I would have
to take with you, and I don’t have the pleasure of knowing you
well enough to be able to say. Perhaps also you do not find what
I could do for you sufficiently attractive for me to go to so much
trouble, for I repeat quite frankly, Monsieur, that for me it can
only be trouble.”
I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This
summary end to the discussion did not seem to be to his liking.
“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly.
“There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person
who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts,
a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, suc-
cedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out
for a man.533 We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort,
because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we would
like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure
that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you
must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble
or not?”
“I would not for anything in the world, Monsieur, be a cause of
anxiety to you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you
may be sure that everything that comes to me from you will be a
very great pleasure to me. I am deeply touched that you should
be so kind as to take notice of me in this way and try to help me.”
Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he
thanked me for these words. Slipping his arm through mine with

Part One 311

 The Guermantes Way

that intermittent familiarity that had already struck me at Balbec,

and was in such contrast to the coldness of his tone:
“With the want of consideration common at your age,” he told
me, “you are liable to say things at times which would open an un-
bridgeable gulf between us. What you have said just now, on the
other hand, is exactly the sort of thing that is capable of touching
me, and makes me want to do a great deal for you.”
As he walked arm in arm with me and uttered these words that,
although tinged with disdain, were so affectionate, M. de Charlus
now fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity, that piercing
hardness that had struck me the first morning when I saw him
outside the casino at Balbec, and indeed many years before that,
through the pink hawthorns, standing beside Mme Swann, whom
I supposed then to be his mistress, in the park at Tansonville, now
let it stray around him and examine the fiacres that at this time
of the day were passing in considerable numbers on the way to
their stables, staring so insistently at them that several stopped,
the drivers supposing that he wished to engage them. But M. de
Charlus immediately dismissed them.
“They’re not what I want,” he explained to me, “it’s all a ques-
tion of the color of their lamps, and the direction they’re going
in. I hope, Monsieur,” he went on, “that you will not in any way
misinterpret the purely disinterested and charitable nature of the
proposal that I am going to make to you.”
I was struck by the similarity of his diction to Swann’s, closer
now than at Balbec.
“You are intelligent enough, I suppose, not to imagine that my
proposal is inspired by ‘want of society,’ by fear of solitude and
boredom. I do not need to speak to you about my family, for I be-
lieve that a young man of your age belonging to the petite bour-
geoisie” (he accented the phrase with a note of self-­satisfaction)
“must know the history of France. It’s the people of my world,
who read nothing and are as ignorant as lackeys. In the olden
days the king’s valets were recruited among the great seigneurs,
nowadays the great seigneurs are scarcely better than valets. But

312 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

young bourgeois like you do read, and I am certain that you know 534. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was
Michelet’s534 fine passage about my family: ‘I see them as being an important historian whose works
include Histoire de France (17 vols.,
very great, these powerful Guermantes. And beside them what is 1833–67) and Histoire de la Révolution
the poor little King of France, shut up in his palace in Paris?’ As française (1847–53).
for what I am personally, it’s a subject, Monsieur, that I do not 535. The Times is a London daily news-
paper, founded in 1785; by the time of
like to talk about very much, but you may possibly have heard— Proust’s death, it was considered to be
it was alluded to in a leading article in The Times,535 which made the most reliable and best-­informed
a considerable impression—that the Emperor of Austria, who has newspaper about global events.
536. Henri de Bourbon, Duc de Bor-
always honored me with his friendship, and is good enough to in- deaux, Comte de Chambord (1820–83),
sist on keeping up terms of cousinship with me, declared the other was the last legitimate pretender to the
day in an interview which was made public that if the Comte de throne after the abdication of Charles X
in 1830. Exiled in 1830, he nearly re-
Chambord536 had had by his side a man as thoroughly conversant gained the throne in 1873 due to the
with the undercurrents of European politics as myself he would alliance between the legitimists and
be King of France today. I have often thought, Monsieur, that Orléanists. He might have succeeded
had he been willing to give up the
there was in me, thanks not to my own humble gifts but to cir- white royal flag and adopt the tricolor
cumstances that you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth flag of blue, white, and red. The last of
of experience, a sort of secret dossier of incalculable value, of the Bourbons, he died childless in the
castle of Frohsdorf in Austria.
which I have not felt myself at liberty to make use, personally, but
which would be a priceless acquisition to a young man to whom I
would hand over in a few months what it has taken me more than
thirty years to acquire, what I am perhaps alone in possessing. I
do not speak of the intellectual enjoyment that you would find in
learning certain secrets that a Michelet of our day would give years
of his life to know, and in the light of which certain events would
assume for him an entirely different aspect. And I do not speak
only of events that have already occurred, but of the chain of cir-
cumstances.” (This was a favorite expression with M. de Charlus,
and often, when he used it, he joined his hands as if in prayer, but
with his fingers stiffened, as though to illustrate by this complexus
the said circumstances, which he did not specify, and the chain
that linked them.) “I could give you an explanation that no one
has dreamed of, not only of the past but of the future.”
M. de Charlus broke off to question me about Bloch, whom he
had heard discussed, though without appearing to be listening, in
Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing room. And with that ironical ac-

Part One 313

 The Guermantes Way

537. At Saint-­Cyr, near Versailles, Mme cent from which he so skillfully detached what he was saying that
de Maintenon founded in 1684 a he seemed to be thinking of something else altogether, and to be
school known as the Maison royale de
Saint-­Louis that was dedicated to the speaking mechanically, simply out of politeness, he asked whether
education of girls of noble birth who my friend was young, good-­looking, and so forth. Bloch, if he
had no fortune. The girls organized had heard him, would have been more puzzled even than with
plays, including Racine’s two biblical
tragedies, Esther and Athalie, that were M. de Norpois, but for very different reasons, to know whether
performed there before the king, as M. de Charlus was for or against Dreyfus. “It is not a bad idea,
were Racine’s Cantiques spirituels in if you wish to learn about life,” went on M. de Charlus when
1694. The Cantiques spirituels are what
Proust has in mind, apparently, since he had finished questioning me about Bloch, “to include among
Racine wrote no psalms. your friends a few foreigners.” I replied that Bloch was French.
538. The story of young David, future “Indeed,” said M. de Charlus, “I took him to be a Jew.” His asser-
King of Israel, slaying the giant Goliath
with a slingshot, is told in the first book tion of this incompatibility made me suppose that M. de Charlus
of Samuel, chapter 17. was more anti-­Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. He protested,
however, against the charge of treason leveled against Dreyfus.
But his protest took this form: “I believe the newspapers say that
Dreyfus has committed a crime against his country—so I under-
stand; I pay no attention to the newspapers; I read them as I wash
my hands, without finding that it is worth my while to take any
interest in what I am doing. In any case, the crime is nonexistent;
your friend’s compatriot would have committed a crime if he had
betrayed Judaea, but what has he to do with France?” I pointed
out that if there should be a war the Jews would be mobilized
just as much as anyone else. “Perhaps so, and I am not sure that
it would not be an imprudence. If we bring over Senegalese and
Malagasies, I hardly suppose that their hearts will be in the task
of defending France, and that’s only natural. Your Dreyfus might
rather be convicted of a breach of the laws of hospitality. But we
need not discuss that. Perhaps you could ask your friend to allow
me to attend some great festival in the Temple, a circumcision,
some Jewish chants. He might perhaps rent a hall, and give me
some biblical entertainment, as the young ladies of Saint-­Cyr per-
formed scenes taken from the Psalms by Racine, to amuse Louis
XIV.537 You might even arrange some parties to give us a good
laugh. For instance, a fight between your friend and his father, in
which he would smite him as David smote Goliath.538 That would

314 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

make quite an amusing farce. He might even, while he was about 539. As Proust is about to explain,
it, strike some heavy blows at his hag539 (or, as my old nurse would “hag” (carogne in the original, the
Norman form of charogne) is a word
say, his ‘haggart’) of a mother. That would be an excellent show taken from Molière’s plays Sganarelle
and would not be unpleasing to us, eh, my young friend, since and George Dandin, ou le Mari con-
we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-­European crea- fondu. It means a shrewish woman.
540. Émile Mâle, in L’Art religieux du
ture would be giving a well-­earned punishment to an old cow.” As 13e siècle en France, translated by Dora
he poured out these terrible, almost insane words, M. de Charlus Nussey as Religious Art in France of the
squeezed my arm until it hurt. I reminded myself of all that his Thirteenth Century (New York: Dover,
2000), explains that “the great fig-
family had told me of his wonderful kindness to this old nurse, ures of the Church and of the Syna-
whose Molièresque vocabulary he had just quoted, and thought gogue with veiled eyes on the façade of
to myself that the connections, hitherto, I felt, little studied, be- Notre-­Dame at Paris, proclaimed to the
Jew that the Bible had no longer any
tween goodness and wickedness in the same heart, various as they meaning for the Synagogue, and to the
might be, would be an interesting subject for research. Christian that it held no riddle for the
I warned him that in any case Mme Bloch no longer existed, Church” (193).

while as for M. Bloch, I wondered to what extent he would enjoy

a sport that might easily result in his being blinded. M. de Charlus
seemed annoyed. “That,” he said, “is a woman who made a great
mistake in dying. As for blinding him, surely the Synagogue is
blind, it does not perceive the truth of the Gospel.540 In any case,
just think, at this moment, when all these unhappy Jews are trem-
bling before the stupid fury of the Christians, what an honor
it would be for him to see a man like myself condescend to be
amused by their sports.” At this point I caught sight of M. Bloch
senior, who was coming toward us, probably on his way to meet
his son. He did not see us, but I offered to introduce him to M. de
Charlus. I had no conception of the torrent of rage that my words
were to let loose. “Introduce him to me! But you must have sin-
gularly little idea of social values! People do not get to know me
as easily as that. In the present instance, the impropriety would
be twofold, on account of the youth of the introducer and the
unworthiness of the person introduced. At the most, if I am ever
permitted to enjoy the Asiatic spectacle that I outlined to you, I
might address to the awful bonhomme a few words indicative of
bonhomie. But on condition that he has allowed himself to be
thoroughly thrashed by his son, I might go so far as to express my

Part One 315

 The Guermantes Way

541. Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) was satisfaction.” As it happened, M. Bloch paid no attention to us. He
the author of La France juive (1886), a was occupied in greeting Mme Sazerat with a series of sweeping
pamphlet that enjoyed a big success.
He was one of the principal racists bows, which were very favorably received. I was surprised at this,
who spread xenophobic ideas among for in the old days at Combray she had been indignant at my par-
the French middle class. In 1892, he ents for having young Bloch in the house, so anti-­Semitic was she
founded the daily anti-­Semitic news-
paper La Libre Parole, whose motto was then. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind, had, a few days
“La France aux Français” (France for before this, wafted M. Bloch to her feet. My friend’s father had
the French). found Mme Sazerat charming and was particularly gratified by
the anti-­Semitism of the lady, which he regarded as a proof of the
sincerity of her faith and the soundness of her Dreyfusard opin-
ions, and which also enhanced the value of the call that she had
authorized him to pay her. He had not even been offended when
she had said to him thoughtlessly: “M. Drumont has the impu-
dence to put the Revisionists in the same bag as the Protestants
and the Jews.541 A delightful promiscuity!” “Bernard,” he had said
with pride, on reaching home, to M. Nissim Bernard, “you know,
she has that prejudice!” But M. Nissim Bernard had said nothing,
only raising his eyes to heaven in an angelic gaze. Saddened by the
misfortunes of the Jews, remembering his old friendships with
Christians, grown mannered and precious with increasing years,
for reasons that the reader will learn in due course, he had now the
air of a pre-­Raphaelite larva on to which hair had been incongru-
ously grafted, like threads in the heart of an opal.
“All this Dreyfus business,” went on the baron, still clasping me
by the arm, “has only one drawback. It destroys society (I do not
say polite society; society has long ceased to deserve that lauda-
tory epithet) by the influx of M. and Mme Cow and Cowsheds
and Cowpens, whom I find even in the houses of my own cousins,
because they belong to the Patrie Française, or the Anti-­Jewish, or
some such league, as if a political opinion entitled one to a social
qualification.”
This frivolity in M. de Charlus brought out his family likeness
to the Duchesse de Guermantes. I pointed out to him the resem-
blance. Since he appeared to think that I did not know her, I re-
minded him of the evening at the Opéra when he had seemed to

316 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

be trying to avoid me. He assured me with such insistence that he 542. Proust is most likely thinking of
had never even seen me there that I would have begun to believe the Eulenburg affair. Philip von Eulen-
burg (1847–1921) was a German prince
him if presently a trifling incident had not led me to think that who, in 1907, was accused of being a
M. de Charlus, in his excessive pride perhaps, did not care to be homosexual, as a result of which Kaiser
seen with me. Wilhelm II was left with only militaristic
advisers. See Carter, Marcel Proust, 439.
“Let us return to yourself,” he said, “and my plans for you. The Eulenburg affair will be alluded to
There exists among certain men, Monsieur, a Freemasonry of in the next volume, Sodom and Go-
which I cannot now say more than that it numbers in its ranks morrah.
543. Proust is using a sentence from
four of the reigning sovereigns of Europe. Now, the entourage a letter that Prosper Mérimée sent to
of one of these, who is the emperor of Germany, is trying to cure Mrs. Senior, July 29, 1855.
him of his chimera.542 That is a very serious matter, and may lead
us to war. Yes, Monsieur, that is a fact. You know the story of the
man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a
bottle. It was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as
he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid.543 There are mala-
dies that we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us
from others that are more serious. A cousin of mine had a stomach
disease; he could not digest anything. The most learned stomach
specialists treated him, to no avail. I took him to a certain doctor
(another highly interesting man, by the way, of whom I could tell
you a great deal). He guessed at once that the trouble was ner-
vousness, he persuaded his patient that this was so, ordered him
to eat whatever he liked without fear and assured him that his di-
gestion would tolerate it. But my cousin had nephritis also. What
the stomach can digest perfectly well the kidneys cease, after a
time, to be able to eliminate, and my cousin, instead of living
to a good old age with an imaginary disease of the stomach that
obliged him to keep to a diet, died at forty with his stomach cured
but his kidneys ruined. Given a very considerable advantage over
people of your age, for all one knows, you will perhaps become
what some eminent man of the past might have been if a benefi-
cent genie had revealed to him, in the midst of a humanity that
knew nothing of them, the secrets of steam and electricity. Do
not be foolish, do not refuse from discretion. Understand that,
if I do you a great service, I expect my reward from you to be no

Part One 317

 The Guermantes Way

less great. It is many years now since people in society ceased to

interest me. I have but one passion left, to seek to redeem the mis-
takes of my life by conferring the benefit of my knowledge on a
soul that is still virgin and capable of being inspired by virtue. I
have had great sorrows, Monsieur, of which I may tell you perhaps
someday; I have lost my wife, who was the loveliest, the noblest,
the most perfect creature that one could dream of seeing. I have
young relatives who are not—I do not say worthy, but who are not
capable of accepting the intellectual heritage of which I have been
speaking. For all I know, you may be the one into whose hands it
is to pass, the one whose life I will be able to guide and to raise to
so lofty a plane. My own would gain in return. Perhaps in teaching
you the great secrets of diplomacy I might recover a taste for them
myself, and begin at last to do things of real interest in which you
would have an equal share. But before I can be sure of this I must
see you often, very often, every day.”
I was thinking of taking advantage of this unexpected kindness
on M. de Charlus’s part to ask him whether he could not arrange
for me to meet his sister-­in-­law when, suddenly, I felt my arm vio-
lently jerked, as though by an electric shock. It was M. de Charlus
who had hurriedly withdrawn his arm from mine. Although as
he talked he had allowed his eyes to wander in all directions, he
had only just caught sight of M. d’Argencourt, who was emerging
from a side street. On seeing us, M. d’Argencourt appeared an-
noyed, cast at me a look of distrust, almost that look intended for
a creature of another race with which Mme de Guermantes had
quizzed Bloch, and tried to avoid us. But one would have said that
M. de Charlus was determined to show him that he was not at all
anxious not to be seen by him, for he called to him, simply to tell
him something that was of no importance. And fearing perhaps
that M. d’Argencourt had not recognized me, M. de Charlus in-
formed him that I was a great friend of Mme de Villeparisis, of
the Duchesse de Guermantes, of Robert de Saint-­L oup, and that
he himself, Charlus, was an old friend of my grandmother, glad to
be able to show her grandson a little of the affection that he felt

318 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

for her. Nevertheless, I observed that M. d’Argencourt, although

I had barely been introduced to him at Mme de Villeparisis’s, and
M. de Charlus had now spoken to him at great length about my
family, was distinctly colder to me than he had been an hour ago,
and from then on, for a long time he showed the same aloof-
ness whenever we met. He observed me now with a curiosity in
which there was no sign of friendliness, and seemed even to have
to overcome an instinctive repulsion when, on leaving us, after a
moment’s hesitation, he held out a hand to me that he at once
withdrew.
“I am sorry about that encounter,” said M. de Charlus. “That
fellow Argencourt, well born but ill-bred, more than mediocre as
a diplomat, a detestable and womanizing husband, as deceitful
as a character in a play, is one of those men who are incapable of
understanding but perfectly capable of destroying the things in
life that are really great. I hope that our friendship will be one of
them, if it is ever to be formed, and I hope also that you will do
me the honor of keeping it—as I will—well clear of the hooves of
any of those donkeys who, from idleness or clumsiness or delib-
erate wickedness trample on what seemed made to endure. Un-
fortunately, that is the mold in which most society people have
been cast.”
“The Duchesse de Guermantes seems to be very intelligent. We
were talking this afternoon about the possibility of war. It appears
that she is especially knowledgeable on that subject.”
“She is nothing of the sort,” replied M. de Charlus tartly.
“Women, and most men, for that matter, understand nothing
about the things I wished to tell you. My sister-­in-­law is a charming
woman who imagines that we are still living in the days of Balzac’s
novels, when women had an influence on politics. Going often to
her house could at present have only a bad effect on you, as for
that matter could any social engagement. That was one of the very
things I was just going to tell you when that fool interrupted me.
The first sacrifice that you must make for me—I will claim them
from you in proportion to the gifts I bestow on you—is to give

Part One 319

 The Guermantes Way

544. In The Arabian Nights, these are up going into society. It distressed me this afternoon to see you at
the magic words discovered by Ali Baba that idiotic gathering. You will tell me that I was there myself, but
that gave him access to the cave of the
forty thieves. The expression has be- for me it was not a social gathering, it was simply a family visit.
come proverbial and serves to desig- Later on, when you have established your position, if it amuses
nate the means for opening doors and you to stoop for a moment to that sort of thing, it may perhaps do
surmounting all obstacles.
545. Thirion is a name found in no harm. And then, I need not point out how invaluable I can be
Balzac’s Le Cabinet des Antiques. to you. The ‘Open Sesame’544 to the Guermantes house and any
546. La Tour d’Auvergne, along with the others that it is worthwhile throwing open the doors of to you,
Houses of Toulouse and Montmorency,
is among the oldest and most distin- rests with me. I will be the judge, and intend to remain master
guished aristocratic families. of the situation. At present you are a catechumen. Your presence
547. Villeparisis is a commune in the up there amounted to something scandalous. Above all, you must
département of Seine-­et-­Marne.
avoid impropriety.”
Since M. de Charlus was referring to my visit to Mme de Ville-
parisis’s, I wanted to ask him his exact kinship to the marquise,
her birth, but the question took another form on my lips than I
had intended, and I asked him instead what the Villeparisis family
was.
“Mon Dieu, that’s not an easy question to answer,” Charlus re-
plied in a voice that seemed to skate over the words. “It’s as if you
had asked me to tell you what nothing is. My aunt, who is capable
of anything, had the fanciful notion, by marrying for the second
time a little M. Thirion,545 of plunging the greatest name in France
into oblivion. This Thirion thought that he could safely assume an
extinct aristocratic name as people do in novels. History does not
tell us whether he was tempted by La Tour d’Auvergne, whether
he hesitated between Toulouse and Montmorency.546 In any case
he made a different choice and became M. de Villeparisis. Since
there had been none since 1702, I thought that he simply wanted
to indicate modestly thereby that he was a gentleman from Ville-
parisis, a little place outside Paris, that he had a law office or a
barber shop at Villeparisis.547 But my aunt didn’t see things that
way—for that matter she’s reaching the age when she can barely
see at all. She tried to make out that there was such a marquisate
in the family; she wrote to us all and wanted to put things on a
proper footing; I don’t know why. When one takes a name to

320 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

which one has no right, it’s best not to make such a fuss, like our 548. Léonora de Rothschild (1837–1911)
excellent friend, the so-­called Comtesse de M who, ignoring the was the wife of Alphonse de Rothschild
(1827–1905), the regent of the Banque
advice of Mme Alphonse Rothschild,548 refused to swell the cof- de France.
fers of Saint Peter549 for a title that would not have been rendered 549. This is a reference to the pence
more authentic thereby. The funny part of it is that ever since of Saint Peter, an offering given by the
faithful to the pope. It is used here to
then my aunt has monopolized all the paintings linked to the real refer to a person who refuses to con-
Villeparisis family, to whom the late Thirion was in no way re- vert to Catholicism. À la recherche du
lated. My aunt’s château has become a sort of hoarding place for temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade
edition], 1988), 2: 590, n. 3.
their portraits, authentic or not, under the rising flood of which
several Guermantes and several Condés, who are not small beer
by any means, have had to disappear. The art dealers produce new
ones for her every year. And she even has in her dining room in the
country a portrait of Saint-­Simon because of his niece’s first mar-
riage to a M. de Villeparisis, as though the author of the Mémoires
did not have perhaps other claims to the interest of visitors than
not having been the great-­grandfather of M. Thirion.”
Mme de Villeparisis being merely Mme Thirion completed the
fall that had begun in my estimation of her when I had seen the
composite nature of her salon. I felt it to be unfair that a woman
whose title and name were of quite recent origin should be able
thus to delude her contemporaries, with the prospect of similarly
deluding posterity by virtue of her friendships with royal person-
ages. Now that she had become once again what I had supposed
her to be in my childhood, a person who had nothing aristocratic
about her, these distinguished kinsfolk who gathered around her
seemed to remain alien to her. She did not cease to be charming to
us all. I went occasionally to see her and she sent me little presents
from time to time. But I had never any impression that she be-
longed to the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, and if I had wanted any
information about it she would have been one of the last people to
whom I would have applied.
“At present,” went on M. de Charlus, “by going into society,
you will only damage your position, warp your intellect and char-
acter. Furthermore, you must be particularly careful in choosing
your friends. Keep mistresses, if your family has no objection, that

Part One 321

 The Guermantes Way

550. Truqueur is slang for a young man doesn’t concern me, indeed I can only encourage it, you young
who prostitutes himself to other men. rascal, young rascal who will soon have to start shaving,” he said,
touching my chin. “But the choice of your men friends is more
important. Eight out of ten young men are little scoundrels, little
wretches capable of doing you an injury that you will never be
able to repair. Now my nephew Saint-­L oup is quite a suitable
companion for you, in a pinch. As far as your future is concerned,
he can be of no possible use to you, but for that I am sufficient.
And really when all’s said and done, as a person to go about with,
at times when you have had enough of me, he does not seem to
present any serious drawback that I know of. At least he is a man,
not one of those effeminate creatures one sees so many of nowa-
days, who look like little rent boys,550 and at any moment may
bring their innocent victims to the gallows.” (I did not know the
meaning of this slang word “rent boy”; anyone who had known
it would have been as greatly surprised by his use of it as myself.
People in society always like talking slang, and people who might
be accused of certain things like to show that they are not afraid
to mention them. A proof of innocence in their eyes. But they
have lost their sense of proportion, they are no longer capable of
realizing the point at which a certain pleasantry will become too
technical, too shocking, will be a proof rather of corruption than
of naïveté.) “He is not like the rest of them; he’s very nice; he’s
very serious.”
I could not help smiling at this epithet “serious,” to which the
intonation that M. de Charlus gave to it seemed to impart the
sense of “virtuous,” of “steady,” as one says of a little shopgirl that
she is “serious.” At that moment a fiacre passed, zigzagging along
the street; a young coachman, who had deserted his box, was
driving it from inside, where he lay sprawling upon the cushions,
apparently half tipsy. M. de Charlus instantly stopped him. The
driver began to negotiate:
“Which way are you going?”
“Yours.” (This surprised me, for M. de Charlus had already re-
fused several fiacres with similarly colored lamps.)

322 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“Well, I don’t want to get up on the box. D’you mind if I stay 551. This allegorical story about Her-
down here?” cules at the crossroads is by the Greek
philosopher Prodicos of Ceos (465–
“No, only put down the hood. Well, think over my proposal,” 395 b.c.). Hercules, finding himself
said M. de Charlus, preparing to leave me, “I’ll give you a few at the intersection of two paths, one
days to consider it; write to me. I repeat, I will need to see you rising steeply toward a mountain, the
other descending sharply toward the
every day, and to receive from you guarantees of loyalty, of discre- plain, is met at the fork by two fair
tion, which, for that matter, you do appear, I must say, to offer. maidens; one, modest and earnest,
But in the course of my life I have been so often deceived by ap- urges him to take the steep path; the
other, sly and seductive, tries to per-
pearances that I never wish to trust them again. Damn it, it’s the suade him to go the easier way. Her-
least I can expect that before giving up a treasure I should know cules chooses the first way, which is
into what hands it is going to pass. At any rate, bear in mind what obviously that of virtue.
552. The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme
I’m offering you; you are like Hercules, though, unfortunately for was founded in February 1898 by
yourself, you do not appear to me to have quite his muscular de- Senator Ludovic Trarieux. Inspired by
velopment, at the parting of the ways.551 Try not to have to regret Zola’s J’accuse!, published the month
before, it assembled Dreyfusard intel-
all your life not having chosen the way that leads to virtue. What!” lectuals. Its purpose was to defend
he turned to the coachman, “you haven’t put the hood down? I’ll human rights against the arbitrary deci-
do it myself. I think, too, I’d better drive, seeing the state you ap- sions of political and judicial powers.

pear to be in.”
He jumped in beside the coachman, took the reins, and the
fiacre took off at a fast trot.
As for myself, no sooner had I turned in at our gate than I
found the pendant to the conversation that I had heard ex-
changed that afternoon between Bloch and M. de Norpois, but
in another form, brief, inverted, and cruel: this was a dispute be-
tween our butler, who was a Dreyfusard, and the Guermantes’,
who was an anti-­Dreyfusard. The truths and countertruths that
came into conflict above ground, among the intellectuals of the
rival Leagues, the Patrie Française and the Droits de l’Homme,552
were fast spreading downward into the subsoil of popular opinion.
M. Reinach was manipulating, by appeals to sentiment, people
whom he had never seen, while for himself the Dreyfus Affair
simply presented itself to his reason as an irrefutable theory that
he “demonstrated” in the sequel by the most astonishing victory
for rational politics (a victory against France, according to some)
that the world has ever seen. In two years he replaced a Billot

Part One 323

 The Guermantes Way

553. Général Jean-­Baptiste Billot (1828– ministry553 with a Clemenceau ministry, revolutionized public
1907) was minister of war from 1896 opinion from top to bottom, took Picquart from his prison to in-
to 1898. Zola accused him of having
kept secret the proofs of Dreyfus’s stall him, ungrateful, in the Ministry of War. Perhaps this ratio-
innocence, an innocence proclaimed nalist manipulator of crowds has himself manipulated his own an-
by Georges Clemenceau and Joseph cestry. When we find that the systems of philosophy that contain
Reinach.
the most truths were dictated to their authors, in the last analysis,
by reasons of sentiment, how are we to suppose that in a simple
affair of politics like the Dreyfus Affair reasons of this order may
not, unknown to the reasoner, have governed his reason? Bloch
believed himself to have been led by a logical sequence to choose
Dreyfusism, yet he knew that his nose, his skin, and his hair
had been imposed on him by his race. Doubtless reason enjoys
more freedom; yet it obeys certain laws that it has not prescribed
for itself. The case of the Guermantes’ butler and our own was
peculiar. The waves of the two currents of Dreyfusism and anti-­
Dreyfusism that now divided France from top to bottom were,
on the whole, silent, but the occasional echoes that they emitted
were sincere. When you heard anyone in the middle of a conversa-
tion that was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce fur-
tively some piece of political news, generally false but always with
a hopefulness of its truth, you could induce from the nature of
his predictions where his heart lay. Thus there came into conflict
on certain points, on one side a timid apostolate, on the other a
righteous indignation. The two butlers whom I heard arguing as I
came in furnished an exception to the rule. Ours let it be under-
stood that Dreyfus was guilty, the Guermantes’ butler that he was
innocent. This was done not to conceal their personal convictions,
but from cunning, and in the asperity of their rivalry. Our butler,
being uncertain whether the retrial would be ordered, wished be-
forehand, in the event of failure, to deprive the duke’s butler of the
joy of seeing a just cause vanquished. The duke’s butler thought
that, in the event of a refusal to grant a retrial, ours would be more
indignant at the detention on Devil’s Island of an innocent man.
The concierge looked on. I had the impression that it was not he
who was the cause of dissension in the Guermantes household.

324 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

I went upstairs, and found my grandmother not so well. For 554. In December 1889, Proust’s ma-
some time past, without knowing exactly what was wrong, she ternal grandmother was put on a milk
diet several days before her death.
had been complaining of her health. It is in moments of illness 555. Fernand Widal (1862–1929) was
that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but a professor of clinical medicine at the
chained to a being from a different kingdom, from whom we are Faculté de Médecine de Paris. As a
doctor and bacteriologist, he is espe-
worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is im- cially known for his work that helped
possible to make ourselves understood: our body. If we were met to diagnose typhoid fever. In 1903,
by a brigand on the road, we might yet convince him by an appeal he produced evidence that showed
the harmful effects of salt on persons
to his personal interest, if not to our own plight. But to ask pity of suffering from nephritis and recom-
our body is like discoursing before an octopus, for which our mended a low-salt diet.
words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and
with which we would be appalled to find ourselves condemned to
live. My grandmother’s maladies passed, often enough unnoticed
by her attention, which she kept always diverted toward us. When
the pain they caused was severe, in the hope of curing it, she
would try in vain to understand what the trouble was. If the
morbid phenomena of which her body was the theater remained
obscure and beyond the reach of her mind, they were clear and in-
telligible to certain beings belonging to the same natural kingdom
as themselves, beings to whom the human mind has learned
gradually to have recourse in order to understand what the body
is saying to it, as when a foreigner accosts us we try to find someone
from his country who will act as interpreter. These can talk to our
body and tell us if its anger is serious or will soon be appeased.
Cottard, whom we had called in to see my grandmother, and who
had infuriated us by asking with a sly smile, the moment we told
him that she was ill: “Ill? You’re sure it’s not what they call a diplo-
matic illness?” He tried to soothe his patient’s restlessness by a
milk diet.554 But incessant bowls of milk soup gave her no relief,
because my grandmother sprinkled them liberally with salt (the
harmful effects of which were then unknown, Widal555 not having
made his discoveries). For, medicine being a compendium of the
successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners,
when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are
that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will

Part One 325

 The Guermantes Way

556. Heinrich Dreser (1860–1924) was be recognized in a few years’ time. So that to believe in medicine
a German chemist who created aspirin would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater
in 1899.
folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the
course of time many truths. Cottard had told us to take her tem-
perature. A thermometer was fetched. Throughout almost all its
length it was clear of mercury. Scarcely could one make out,
crouching at the foot of the tube, in its little cell, the silver sala-
mander. It seemed dead. The glass reed was slipped into my grand-
mother’s mouth. We had no need to leave it there for long; the
little sorceress had not been slow in casting her horoscope. We
found her motionless, perched halfway up her tower and declining
to move, showing us with precision the figure that we had asked
of her, a figure with which all the most careful examination that
my grandmother’s mind might have devoted to herself would
have been incapable of furnishing her: 101 degrees. For the first
time we felt some anxiety. We shook the thermometer well, to
erase the fateful line, as though we were able thus to reduce the
patient’s fever simultaneously with the temperature indicated.
Alas, it was only too clear that the little sibyl, unreasoning as she
was, had not pronounced judgment arbitrarily, for the next day,
scarcely had the thermometer been inserted between my grand-
mother’s lips when almost at once, as though with a single bound,
exulting in her certainty and in her intuition of a fact that to us
was imperceptible, the little prophetess had come to a halt at the
same point, in an implacable immobility, and pointed once again
to that figure 101 with the tip of her gleaming wand. Nothing
more did she tell us; in vain might we long, wish, pray; she was
deaf to our entreaties; it seemed as though this were her final
utterance, a warning and a menace. Then, in an attempt to con-
strain her to modify her response, we had recourse to another
creature of the same kingdom, but more potent, which is not con-
tent with questioning the body but can command it, a febrifuge
of the same order as the modern aspirin, which had not then come
into use.556 We had not shaken the thermometer down below
99.5, and hoped that it would not have to rise from there. We

326 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

made my grandmother swallow this drug and then replaced the 557. In Greek mythology, Python was a
thermometer in her mouth. Like an implacable warder to whom monstrous female serpent whose den
was on the slopes of Parnassus, where
one presents a permit signed by a higher authority whose pro- she rendered oracles and massacred
tecting influence one has sought and who, finding it to be in order, beasts and men. She was killed by
replies: “Very well; I have nothing to say; if that’s how it is, you Apollo, who had come to found a sanc-
tuary at the foot of Mount Olympus,
may pass,” this time the vigilant watcher in the tower did not near Delphi.
budge. But morosely she seemed to be saying: “What use will that
be to you? Since you know quinine, she may give me the order not
to go up, once, ten times, twenty times. And then she will grow
tired of telling me, I know her; get along with you. This won’t last
forever. Then a lot of good you’ll have done.” Thereupon my
grandmother felt the presence within her of a creature who knew
the human body better than herself, the presence of a contempo-
rary of the races that have vanished from the earth, the presence of
earth’s first inhabitant—long anterior to the creation of thinking
man—she felt that aeonian ally who was sounding her, a little
roughly even, in the head, the heart, the elbow; he knew the ter-
rain, organized everything for the prehistoric combat that began
at once to be fought. In a moment, crushed like the Python,557 the
fever was vanquished by the potent chemical substance to which
my grandmother, across the series of kingdoms, reaching out be-
yond all animal and vegetable life, would have liked to be able to
give thanks. And she remained moved by this glimpse that she
had caught, through the mists of so many centuries, of a climate
anterior to the creation even of plants. Meanwhile the ther-
mometer, like a Parca momentarily vanquished by some more an-
cient god, held motionless her silver spindle. Alas! other inferior
creatures that man has trained to hunt the mysterious quarry that
he cannot pursue in the depths of himself, reported cruelly to us
every day a certain quantity of albumen, not large, but constant
enough for it also to appear to bear relation to some persistent
malady that we could not detect. Bergotte had shocked the
scrupulous instinct in me that made me subordinate my intellect
when he spoke to me of Dr. du Boulbon as of a physician who
would not bore me, who would discover methods of treatment

Part One 327

 The Guermantes Way

558. Jean-­Martin Charcot (1825–93), that, however strange they might appear, would adapt themselves
author of Leçons sur les maladies du to the singularity of my mind. But ideas transform themselves in
système nerveux (1872–83), who spe-
cialized in disorders of the nervous us, they overcome the resistance with which we at first meet them
system, is the founder of modern neu- and feed upon rich intellectual reserves that we did not know to
rology. Charcot’s most famous student have been prepared for them. So, as happens whenever anything
was Sigmund Freud.
we have heard said about someone whom we do not know has had
the faculty of awakening in us the idea of great talent, of a sort of
genius, in my inmost mind I gave Dr. du Boulbon the benefit of
that unlimited confidence that is inspired in us by the person
who, with an eye more penetrating than other men’s, perceives the
truth. I knew indeed that he was more of a specialist in nervous
diseases, the man to whom Charcot558 before his death had pre-
dicted that he would reign supreme in neurology and psychiatry.
“Ah! I don’t know about that. It’s quite possible,” put in Françoise,
who was in the room and heard Charcot’s name, as she heard du
Boulbon’s, for the first time. But this in no way prevented her
from saying “It’s possible.” Her “possibles,” her “perhapses,” her “I
don’t knows” were peculiarly irritating at such a moment. One
wanted to say to her: “Naturally you don’t know, since you haven’t
the faintest idea of what we are talking about; how can you even
say whether it’s possible or not, since you know nothing about it?
Anyhow, you can’t say now that you don’t know what Charcot
said to du Boulbon, etc. You do know because we have just told
you, and your ‘perhapses’ and ‘possibles’ don’t come into play, be-
cause it’s a fact.”
In spite of this more special competence in cerebral and ner-
vous matters, as I knew that du Boulbon was a great physician, a
superior man, of a profound and inventive intellect, I begged my
mother to send for him, and the hope that, by a clear perception
of the malady, he might perhaps cure it finally prevailed over the
fear that we had, if we called in a specialist, of alarming my grand-
mother. What decided my mother was the fact that, encouraged
unwittingly by Cottard, my grandmother no longer went out of
doors, and scarcely rose from her bed. In vain might she answer
us in the words of Mme de Sévigné’s letter on Mme de La Fayette:

328 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

“Everyone said she was mad not to wish to go out. I said to these 559. This is an incomplete quotation
persons, so hasty in their judgment: ‘Mme de La Fayette is not from a letter that Mme de Sévigné sent
to the Comtesse de Guitaut on June 3,
mad!’ and I stuck to that. It has taken her death to prove that she 1693, about the death, on May 25, of
was quite right not to go out.”559 When du Boulbon came he de- her best friend, Mme de La Fayette. See
cided against—if not Mme de Sévigné, whom we did not quote to À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris:
Gallimard [Pléiade edition], 1988),
him—my grandmother, at any rate. Instead of sounding her chest, 2: 597, n. 2.
gazing at her steadily with his wonderful eyes, in which there was
perhaps the illusion that he was making a profound scrutiny of his
patient, or the desire to give her that illusion, which seemed spon-
taneous but must have become mechanical, or else not to let her
see that he was thinking of something quite different, or simply to
gain control over her, he began talking about Bergotte.
“Ah! I think so, indeed, Madame, he’s magnificent; you are
quite right to admire him! But which of his books do you prefer?
Indeed! Good heavens, perhaps that is the best one after all. In any
case it’s the best composed of his novels. Claire is quite charming
in it; of his male characters which one appeals to you most?”
I supposed at first that he was making her talk like this about
literature because he himself found medicine boring, perhaps also
to display his breadth of mind and even, with a more therapeutic
aim, to restore confidence to his patient, to show her that he was
not alarmed, to take her mind off the state of her health. But after-
ward I realized that, being distinguished particularly as an alienist
and by his work on the brain, he had been seeking to ascertain by
these questions whether my grandmother’s memory was in good
order. As though reluctantly he began to inquire about her life,
fixing a stern and somber eye on her. Then suddenly, as though
catching sight of the truth and determined to reach it at all costs,
with a preliminary rubbing of his hands, which he seemed to have
some difficulty in shaking free of the final hesitations that he him-
self might feel and of all the objections that we might have raised,
looking down at my grandmother with a lucid eye, boldly and
as though he were at last on solid ground, punctuating his words
in a quiet, impressive tone, every nuance of which bore the mark
of intelligence (his voice, for that matter, throughout this visit

Part One 329

 The Guermantes Way

remained what it naturally was, caressing, and under his bushy

brows his ironical eyes were full of kindness):
“You will be quite well, Madame, on the day—when it comes,
and it depends entirely on you whether it comes today—on which
you realize that there is nothing wrong with you, and resume your
ordinary life. You tell me that you have not been eating, not going
out?”
“But, Monsieur, I have a temperature.”
He laid a finger on her wrist.
“Not just now, at any rate. Besides, what a fine excuse! Don’t
you know that we keep out in the open air and overfeed tubercular
patients with temperatures of 102?”
“But I have a little albumen as well.”
“You ought not to know anything about that. You have what I
have described as ‘mental albumen.’ We have all of us had, when
we have not been very well, little albuminous phases that our
doctor has done his best to make permanent by calling our atten-
tion to them. For one disorder that doctors cure with drugs (as I
am assured that they do occasionally succeed in doing) they pro-
duce a dozen others in healthy subjects by inoculating them with
that pathogenic agent a thousand times more virulent than all the
microbes in the world, the idea that one is ill. A belief of that sort,
which has a powerful effect on any temperament, acts with special
force on neurotic people. Tell them that a shut window is open
behind their back, they will begin to sneeze; make them believe
that you have put magnesia in their soup, they will be seized with
colic; that their coffee is stronger than usual, they will not sleep
a wink all night. Do you imagine, Madame, that I needed to do
any more than look into your eyes, listen to the way in which you
express yourself, observe, if I may say so, Madame, your daughter
and your grandson, who resemble you so much, to know what
was the matter with you?”
“Your grandmother might perhaps go and sit, if the doctor
allows it, in some quiet path in the Champs-­Élysées, near that

330 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

clump of laurels where you used to play when you were little,” 560. Apollo was the god of healing and
said my mother to me, thus indirectly consulting Dr. du Boulbon, the laurel tree was sacred to him.

her voice for that reason assuming a tone of timid deference that
it would not have had if she had been addressing me alone. The
doctor turned to my grandmother and, being apparently as well
read in literature as in science, adjured her as follows:
“Go to the Champs-­Élysées, Madame, to the clump of lau-
rels that your grandson loves. The laurel will be salutary to your
health. It purifies. After he had exterminated the serpent Python,
it was with a branch of laurel in his hand that Apollo made his
entry into Delphi.560 He sought thus to guard himself from the
deadly germs of the venomous monster. So you see that the laurel
is the most ancient, the most venerable, and, I will add—what is
of therapeutic as well as of prophylactic value—the most beautiful
of antiseptics.”
Inasmuch as a great part of what doctors know is taught them
by the sick, they are easily led to believe that this knowledge that
“patients” exhibit is common to them all, and they pride them-
selves on taking the patient of the moment by surprise with some
remark picked up at a previous bedside. Thus it was with the su-
perior smile of a Parisian who, in conversation with a peasant,
might hope to surprise him by using suddenly a word of the local
dialect that Dr. du Boulbon said to my grandmother: “Prob-
ably a windy night will make you sleep when the strongest sopo-
rifics would have no effect.” “On the contrary, Monsieur, when
the wind blows I can never sleep at all.” But doctors are touchy
people. “Ach!” muttered du Boulbon, knitting his brows, as if
someone had stepped on his toes, or as if my grandmother’s in-
somnia on stormy nights were a personal insult to himself. He
was not, however, too prideful, and since, in his character as a
“superior” person, he felt himself bound not to put any faith in
medicine, he quickly recovered his philosophic serenity.
My mother, in her passionate longing for reassurance from Ber-
gotte’s friend, added in support of his verdict that a first cousin of

Part One 331

 The Guermantes Way

561. This word, now archaic, was used my grandmother’s, who suffered from a nervous complaint, had
to designate different types of psy- remained for seven years cloistered in her bedroom at Combray,
choses of long duration that were due
entirely to mental conditions rather without leaving her bed more than once or twice a week.
than to organic ones. “You see, Madame, I didn’t know that, and yet I could have
562. Proust may be engaging in a self-­ told you.”
parody here. For one of the many let-
ters in which he describes his various “But Monsieur, I am not in the least like her; on the contrary,
ailments to his mother and the ne- my doctor complains that he cannot get me to stay in bed,” said
cessity of “cooling off,” see Proust, my grandmother, whether because she was a little annoyed by the
Selected Letters 2: 92. See Carter, Marcel
Proust, 379 and 634. doctor’s theories or was eager to submit to him any objections that
might be raised to them, in the hope that he would refute these
and that, once he had gone, she would no longer find any doubt
lurking in her own mind as to the accuracy of his encouraging
diagnosis.
“Why, naturally, Madame, you cannot have all the forms of—
if you’ll excuse my saying so—vesania561 at once; you have others,
but not that particular one. Yesterday I visited a home for neuras-
thenics. In the garden, I saw a man standing on a bench, motion-
less as a fakir, his neck bent in a position that must have been
highly uncomfortable. On my asking him what he was doing
there, he replied, without moving a muscle or turning his head:
‘You see, Doctor, I am extremely rheumatic and catch cold very
easily; I have just been taking a lot of exercise, and while I was get-
ting hot, like a fool, my neck was touching my flannels. If I move
it away from my flannels now before letting myself cool down,
I am certain to get a stiff neck and possibly bronchitis.’ Which
he would, in fact, have done. ‘You’re a fine specimen of neur-
asthenia,562 that’s what you are,’ I told him. And do you know
what argument he advanced to prove that I was mistaken? It was
this; that while all the other patients in the place had a mania
for testing their weight, so much so that the weighing machine
had to be padlocked so that they would not spend the whole day
weighing themselves, he had to be lifted on to it bodily, so little
did he want to be weighed. He gloated over not sharing the mania
of the others without thinking that he had also one of his own,
and that this was what saved him from the other. You must not be

332 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

offended by the comparison, Madame, for the man who dared not
turn his neck for fear of catching a cold is the greatest poet of our
day. That poor maniac is the loftiest intellect that I know. Submit
to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and piti-
able family that is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we
know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone
who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never
will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor
above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts
on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful paintings, a thousand exqui-
site things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought
them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma,
epilepsy, a terror of death that is worse than any of these, and
which you perhaps have felt, Madame,” he added with a smile at
my grandmother, “for admit it now, when I came into the room,
you were not feeling very confident. You thought that you were
ill; dangerously ill, perhaps. Heaven only knows what the dis-
ease was of which you thought you had detected in yourself the
symptoms. And you were not mistaken; they were there. Neu-
rosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness
that it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce lifelike imita-
tions of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the nausea of pregnancy, the
arrhythmia of the cardiac, the feverishness of the consumptive.
If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to de-
ceive the patient? Ah, do not think I’m making fun of your suf-
ferings. I would not undertake to heal them unless I understood
them thoroughly. And, well, they say there’s no good confession
unless it’s reciprocal. I have told you that without neuroses there
can be no great artist. What is more,” he added, raising a solemn
forefinger, “there can be no great scientist either. I will go fur-
ther, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble,
he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor
to treat nervous diseases. In the pathology of nervous diseases a
doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-­
cured, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a

Part One 333

 The Guermantes Way

563. Proust’s word, rare in French and policeman a burglar who has retired from practice. I, Madame, I
in English, is nervosisme. It denotes do not, like you, believe myself to be suffering from albuminuria,
a nervous disorder, especially neur-
asthenia. I do not have your neurotic fear of food, nor of fresh air, but I can
564. Proust used this quotation in a never go to sleep without getting out of bed at least twenty times
1909 letter to Reynaldo Hahn: “What to see whether my door is shut. And in that nursing home where
a nice remark of Talleyrand’s: ‘One
should be in imaginary good health.’” I found the poet yesterday who would not move his neck, I had
Proust, Selected Letters 2: 447. Talley- gone to secure a room, for—this is between ourselves—I spend
rand was obviously inspired by a play my vacations there looking after myself when I have increased my
by Molière whose title, Le Malade
imaginaire, is translated as The Imagi- own troubles by wearing myself out in the attempt to cure those
nary Invalid. of others.”
“But, Monsieur, do you want me to take a similar cure?” asked
my grandmother in a frightened voice.
“It is not necessary, Madame. The symptoms that you describe
will vanish at my bidding. Besides, you have with you a very effi-
cient person whom I appoint henceforth to be your doctor. That
is your malady itself, your nervous hyperactivity. Even if I knew
how to cure you of that, I would take good care not to. All I
need do is to control it. I see on your table there one of Bergotte’s
books. Cured of your nervosism563 you would no longer care for
it. Now, would I feel entitled to substitute for the joys that it pro-
cures for you a nervous stability that would be quite incapable of
giving you those joys? But those joys themselves are a powerful
remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps. No; I have nothing to
say against your nervous energy. All I ask is that it should listen to
me; I leave you in its charge. It must reverse its engines. The force
that it is now using to prevent you from getting up, from taking
sufficient food, let it employ in making you eat, in making you
read, in making you go out, and in distracting you in every pos-
sible way. You needn’t tell me that you are fatigued. Fatigue is the
organic realization of a preconceived idea. Begin by not thinking
it. And if ever you have a slight indisposition, which is a thing that
may happen to anyone, it will be just as if you hadn’t it, for your
nervous energy will have made you what M. de Talleyrand, in a
profound remark, called an ‘imaginary healthy person.’564 See, it
has begun to cure you already; you have been sitting up in bed lis-

334 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

tening to me without once leaning back on your pillows; your eyes

are bright, you look well, and I have been talking to you for at least
half an hour and you have never noticed the time. Well, Madame,
I will now bid you good day.”
When, after seeing Dr. du Boulbon to the door, I returned to
the room in which my mother was alone, the anxiety that had
been weighing on me for the last few weeks lifted; I felt that my
mother was going to break out with a cry of joy and would see my
own joy; I felt that inability to endure the suspense of the coming
moment at which a person is going to be overcome with emotion
in our presence, which in another category is similar to the fear
that you feel when you know that somebody is going to enter and
startle you by a door that is still closed; I tried to speak to Mamma
but my voice broke, and, bursting into tears, I remained for a long
time, my head on her shoulder, weeping, savoring, accepting,
cherishing my grief, now that I knew that it had departed from
my life, as we like to exalt ourselves by forming virtuous plans that
circumstances do not permit us to put into execution. Françoise
annoyed me by her refusal to share in our joy. She was quite agi-
tated because there had just been a terrible scene between the
lovesick footman and the tattletale concierge. It had required the
duchess herself, in her benevolence, to intervene, restore a sem-
blance of calm to the household and forgive the footman. For she
was a good mistress, and that would have been the ideal “place” if
only she didn’t listen to “tittle-­tattle.”
During the previous few days people had begun to hear of my
grandmother’s illness and to inquire for news of her. Saint-­L oup
had written to me: “I do not wish to take advantage of a time
when your dear grandmother is unwell to convey to you what is
far more than mere reproaches, on a matter with which she has
no concern. But I would not be speaking the truth were I to say
to you, even out of politeness, that I will ever forget the perfidy of
your conduct, or that there can ever be any forgiveness for your
deceitfulness and betrayal.” But some other friends, supposing
that my grandmother was not seriously ill or not knowing that she

Part One 335

 The Guermantes Way

565. Françoise is using the abbreviated was ill at all, had asked me to meet them next day in the Champs-­
form for an express letter transmitted Élysées, to go with them from there to pay a call together, ending
by pneumatic tube. These were also
called petits bleus. up with a dinner in the country, the thought of which appealed
to me. I had no longer any reason to forgo these two pleasures.
When my grandmother had been told that it was now imperative,
if she was to obey Dr. du Boulbon’s orders, for her to go out as
much as possible, she had herself at once suggested the Champs-­
Élysées. It would be easy for me to escort her there; and, while
she sat reading, to arrange with my friends where I should meet
them later; and I should still be in time, if I made haste, to take
the train with them to Ville-­d’Avray. When the time came, my
grandmother did not want to go out, because she felt tired. But
my mother, acting on du Boulbon’s instructions, had the strength
of mind to be firm and to insist on obedience. She was almost in
tears at the thought that my grandmother was going to relapse
again into her nervous weakness, and might never recover from it.
Never again would there be such a fine, warm day for an outing.
The sun as it moved through the sky interspersed here and there
in the broken solidity of the balcony its unsubstantial muslins,
and gave to the freestone ledge a warm epidermis, an indefinite
halo of gold. As Françoise had not had time to send a “tube”565 to
her daughter, she left us immediately after lunch. She very kindly
consented, however, to call first at Jupien’s, to get a stitch put in
the cloak that my grandmother was going to wear when she went
out. Returning at that moment from my morning walk, I accom-
panied her into the shop. “Is it your young master who brings you
here,” Jupien asked Françoise, “is it you who are bringing him
to see me, or is it some good wind and Fortune that bring you
both?” For all his want of education, Jupien respected the laws of
grammar as instinctively as M. de Guermantes, in spite of every
effort, broke them. With Françoise gone and the cloak mended,
it was time for my grandmother to get ready. Having obstinately
refused to let Mamma stay in the room with her, she took, left to
herself, an endless time over her dressing, and now that I knew her
to be quite well, with that strange indifference that we feel toward

336 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

our relatives so long as they are alive, which makes us put everyone 566. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
else before them, I felt it to be very selfish of her to take so long, to Flower, 71–72.

risk making me late when she knew that I had a rendezvous with
my friends and was to dine at Ville-d’Avray. In my impatience I
finally went downstairs without waiting for her, after I had twice
been told that she was about to be ready. At last she joined me,
without apologizing to me, as she generally did, for having kept
me waiting, flushed and bothered like a person who has come to a
place in a hurry and has forgotten half her belongings, just as I was
reaching the half-­opened glass door that let in the liquid, throb-
bing, tepid air from outside, as though the sluices of a reservoir
had been opened between the glacial walls of the hotel without
warming them in the least.
“Oh, dear, if you’re going to meet your friends I ought to have
put on another cloak. I look rather wretched in this one.”
I was startled to see her so flushed, and supposed that having
begun by making herself late she had had to hurry a lot over her
dressing. When we left the fiacre at the end of the avenue Gabriel,
in the Champs-­Élysées, I saw my grandmother, without a word
to me, turn aside and make her way to the little old pavilion with
its green trellis,566 at the door of which I had once waited for
Françoise. The same parkkeeper who had been standing there
then was still talking to Françoise’s “Marquise” when, following
my grandmother, who, doubtless because she was feeling nause-
ated, had her hand in front of her mouth, I climbed the steps of
that little rustic theater erected there among the gardens. At the
entrance, as in those circus booths where the clown, dressed for
the ring and smothered in flour, stands at the door and takes the
money himself for the seats, the “Marquise,” collecting the en-
trance fees, was still there in her place with her huge, uneven face
smeared with a coarse paint and her little bonnet of red flowers
and black lace surmounting her auburn wig. But I do not suppose
that she recognized me. The parkkeeper, abandoning his watch
over the greenery, with the color of which his uniform had been
designed to harmonize, was talking to her, seated by her side.

Part One 337

 The Guermantes Way

“So you’re still here?” he was saying. “You don’t think of re-
tiring?”
“And why would I retire, Monsieur? Will you kindly tell me
where I will be better off than here, where I’d live more at my
ease, and with every comfort? And then there’s all the coming
and going, plenty of distraction; my little Paris, I call it; my cus-
tomers keep me in touch with everything that’s going on. Just to
give you an example, Monsieur, there’s one of them who went
out not more than five minutes ago; he’s a magistrate, in the very
highest position there is. Very well, Monsieur!” she exclaimed ar-
dently, as though prepared to maintain the truth of this asser-
tion by violence, should the agent of civic authority show any
sign of challenging its accuracy, “for the last eight years, do you
follow me, every day God has made, regularly on the stroke of
three o’clock he’s been here, always polite, never saying one word
louder than another, never making any mess; and he stays half
an hour and more to read his newspapers and take care of his
little needs. There was one day he didn’t come. I never noticed
it at the time, but that evening, all of a sudden I said to myself:
‘Why, that monsieur never came today; perhaps he’s dead!’ And
that gave me a regular start, you know, because, of course, I get
quite fond of people when they behave nicely. And so I was very
glad when I saw him come in again next day, and I said to him:
‘I hope nothing happened to you yesterday, Monsieur?’ Then he
told me that nothing had happened to him, it was his wife that
had died, and he’d been so distressed that he hadn’t been able to
come. He had that really sad look, you know, people have when
they’ve been married twenty-­five years, but he seemed pleased, all
the same, to be back here. You could see that all his little habits
had been quite upset. I did what I could to cheer him up. I said
to him: ‘You mustn’t let yourself go, Monsieur. Just come here
the same as before, it will be a little distraction for you in your
sorrow.’”
The “Marquise” resumed a gentler tone, for she had observed
that the guardian of groves and lawns was listening to her with

338 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

bonhomie and with no thought of contradiction, keeping harm-

lessly in its scabbard a sword that looked more like some horticul-
tural implement or some symbol of a garden god.
“And besides,” she went on, “I choose my customers, I don’t let
everyone into my little salons, as I call them. And doesn’t the place
just look like a salon with all my flowers? Such friendly customers
I have; there’s always someone or other brings me a spray of nice
lilac, or jasmine or roses; my favorite flowers, roses are.”
The thought that we were perhaps being judged unfavorably by
this lady because we never brought any sprays of lilac or fine roses
to her bower made me blush, and in the hope of making a bodily
escape—or of being condemned only in absentia—from an ad-
verse judgment, I moved toward the exit. But it is not always in
this world the people who bring us fine roses to whom we are most
friendly, for the “Marquise,” thinking that I was bored, turned to
me.
“You wouldn’t like me to open a little cabin for you?”
And, on my declining:
“No? You’re sure you won’t?” she persisted, smiling. “You’re
welcome to it, but I know quite well, not having to pay for a thing
won’t make you want to do it if you don’t have to.”
At this moment a shabbily dressed woman, who seemed to be
feeling precisely the want in question, hurried into the place. But
she did not belong to the “Marquise’s” world, for the latter, with
the ferocity of a snob, said to her drily:
“I’ve nothing vacant, Madame.”
“Will they be long?” asked the poor lady, reddening beneath
the yellow flowers in her hat.
“Well, Madame, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll try somewhere
else; you see, there are still these two gentlemen waiting,” she said,
looking at me and the parkkeeper, “and I’ve only one cabin; the
others are out of order.”
“That one looked like a poor payer to me,” she explained when
the other had gone. “It’s not the sort we want here, either; they’re
not clean, don’t treat the place with respect; I’d be the one who

Part One 339

 The Guermantes Way

567. Philinthe in Molière’s Le Misan- would have to spend the next hour cleaning up after her ladyship.
thrope says this about a sonnet by I’m not sorry to lose her two sous.”
Oronte: “Dieu! qu’en termes galants ces
choses-­là sont mises!” Finally my grandmother emerged, and feeling that she prob-
568. This is a paraphrase of a sentence ably would not seek to atone by a lavish gratuity for the indiscre-
from Mme de Sévigné’s letter of June tion that she had shown by remaining so long inside, I beat a re-
21, 1680, to Mme de Grignan: “Je me
ménage les délices d’un adieu charmant.” treat, so as not to have to share in the scorn that the “Marquise”
would no doubt heap on her, and began strolling along a path,
but slowly, so that my grandmother would not have to hurry to
overtake me; as presently she did. I expected her to begin: “I am
afraid I’ve kept you waiting quite a while; I hope you’ll still be
in time for your friends,” but she did not utter a single word, so
much so that, feeling a little hurt, I was disinclined to speak first;
until finally looking up at her I noticed that as she walked beside
me she kept her face turned the other way. I was afraid that she
might be feeling sick again. I looked at her more carefully and
was struck by the disjointedness of her gait. Her hat was crooked,
her cloak stained; she had the confused and annoyed look, the
flushed, slightly dazed face of a person who has just been knocked
down by a carriage or pulled out of a ditch.
“I was afraid you were feeling nauseated, Grandmother; are
you feeling better now?” I asked her.
No doubt she thought that it would be impossible for her,
without alarming me, not to give some answer.
“I heard the entire conversation between the ‘Marquise’ and the
parkkeeper,” she told me. “Could anything have been more typical
of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little nucleus?
Heavens, in what gallant terms those things were put!”567 And
she added, with deliberate application, this from her own special
marquise, Mme de Sévigné: “As I listened to them I thought that
they were preparing for me the delights of a farewell.”568
Such were the remarks that she made to me, remarks into
which she had put all her critical delicacy, her love of quotations,
her memory of the classics more thoroughly even than she would
naturally have done, and as though to prove that she retained pos-
session of all these faculties. But I guessed rather than heard what

340 Part One

 The Guermantes Way

she said, so inaudible was the voice in which she muttered her sen-
tences, clenching her teeth more than could be accounted for by
the fear of vomiting.
“Come,” I said to her lightly, so as not to seem to be taking her
illness too seriously, “since you’re feeling a little sick, if you’d like,
we can go home now? I don’t want to trundle a grandmother with
indigestion about the Champs-­Élysées.”
“I didn’t like to suggest it, because of your friends,” she replied.
“Poor boy! But if you don’t mind, I think it would be wiser.”
I was afraid of her noticing the strange way in which she uttered
these words.
“Come!” I said to her sharply, “you mustn’t tire yourself talking
since you’re feeling sick; it’s silly; wait at least until we get home.”
She smiled at me sorrowfully and gripped my hand. She had
realized that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once
guessed, that she had had a slight stroke.

Part One 341

This page intentionally left blank
 Part Two
Chapter 1

My grandmother’s illness—Bergotte’s illness—The Duke 1. Proust seldom used chapter head-

and the Doctor—My grandmother’s decline—her death1 ings. He added these to the original
edition published in May 1921.
2. The avenue Gabriel in the eighth
We made our way back along the avenue Gabriel,2 through the arrondissement runs parallel to the
strolling crowd. I left my grandmother to rest on a bench and gardens of the Champs-­Élysées on the
north side from the place de la Con-
went in search of a fiacre. She, in whose heart I always placed corde to the avenue Matignon. The
myself when I had to form an opinion of the most insignificant avenue is named in memory of the
person, she was now closed to me, had become part of the external architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698–
1782).
world, and, more than from any casual passerby, I was obliged to
keep from her what I thought of her condition, to say no word of
my anxiety. I could not have spoken of it to her in greater con-
fidence than to a stranger. She had suddenly handed back to me
the thoughts, the griefs that, from the days of my infancy, I had
entrusted for all time to her keeping. She was not yet dead. I
was already alone. And even those allusions that she had made
to the Guermantes, to Molière, to our conversations about the
little clan, assumed an air of being without point or occasion, fan-
tastic, because they sprang from the nullity of this very being who
tomorrow possibly would have ceased to exist, for whom they
would no longer have any meaning, from the nullity, incapable of
conceiving them, that my grandmother would shortly be.
“Monsieur, I don’t like to say no, but you did not make an ap-
pointment, you don’t have a number. Besides, this is not my day
for seeing patients. You surely have a doctor of your own. I cannot
substitute for him, unless he were to call me in for a consultation.
It’s a question of professional etiquette . . .”
Just as I was signaling to a fiacre, I had caught sight of the fa-
mous Professor E, almost a friend of my father and grandfather,

343
 The Guermantes Way

acquainted at any rate with them both, who lived on the avenue
Gabriel, and, on a sudden inspiration, had stopped him just as
he was entering his house, thinking that he would perhaps be the
very person to advise my grandmother. But he was evidently in a
hurry and, after collecting his letters he seemed anxious to get rid
of me, so that my only chance of speaking to him was to go up
with him in the elevator, of which he begged me to allow him to
press the buttons himself, this being a mania with him.
“But, Monsieur, I am not asking you to see my grandmother
here; you will realize from what I am trying to tell you that she is
not in a fit state; what I am asking is that you should call at our
house in half an hour’s time, when I have taken her home.”
“Call at your house? Really, Monsieur, you must not expect
me to do that. I am dining with the minister of commerce. I have
a call to pay first. I must change at once, and to make matters
worse I have torn one of my two black frock coats and the other
one has no buttonhole for my medals. I beg you, please, to oblige
me by not touching the elevator buttons. You don’t know how the
elevator works; one can’t be too careful. Getting that buttonhole
made means more delay. Well, since I am a friend of your family,
if your grandmother comes here at once I will see her. But I warn
you that I will be able to give her only a quarter of an hour, not a
moment more.”
I had started off at once, without even getting out of the ele-
vator that Professor E had himself set in motion to take me down
again, casting a suspicious glance at me as he did so.
We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but
when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a
vague and remote expanse of time, we never think that it can have
any connection with the day that has already dawned, or may sig-
nify that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us,
after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this
very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour
of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You insist
on taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will

344 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over
which coat you will take, which coachman to call, you are in the
fiacre, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be
at home early, because a friend is coming to see you; you hope
that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and you have no suspicion
that death, which has been making its way toward you along an-
other plane, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its
appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less, at the moment
when the carriage has reached the Champs-­Élysées. Perhaps those
who are haunted as a rule by the fear of the utter strangeness of
death will find something reassuring in this kind of death—in
this kind of first contact with death—because death thus assumes
a known, familiar guise of everyday life. A good lunch has pre-
ceded it, and the same outing that people take who are in perfect
health. A drive home in an open carriage comes on top of its first
onslaught; ill as my grandmother was, there were, after all, sev-
eral people who could testify that at six o’clock, as we came home
from the Champs-­Élysées, they had bowed to her as she drove
past in an open carriage, in perfect weather. Legrandin, making
his way toward the place de la Concorde, raised his hat to us, stop-
ping to look after us with an air of surprise. I, who was not yet
detached from life, asked my grandmother whether she had ac-
knowledged his greeting, reminding her of his readiness to take
offense. My grandmother, thinking me no doubt very frivolous,
raised her hand in the air as though to say: “What does it matter?
It is not of the least importance.”
Yes, one might have said that, a few minutes earlier, when I was
looking for a fiacre, my grandmother was seated on a bench in the
avenue Gabriel, and that a little later she had driven past in an
open carriage. But would that have been really true? The bench,
for instance, to maintain its position at the side of an avenue—for
all that it may be subjected also to certain conditions of equilib-
rium—has no need of energy. But in order for a living person to
be stable, even when supported by a bench or in a carriage, there is
required a tension of forces that we do not ordinarily perceive any

Chapter 1 345
 The Guermantes Way

more than we perceive (because it exerts itself in every direction)

atmospheric pressure. Perhaps if one created a vacuum in us and
left us to bear the pressure of the air, we might feel, in the moment
that preceded our destruction, the terrible weight that there was
nothing left in us to neutralize. Similarly when the abyss of sick-
ness and death opens within us, and we have nothing left to op-
pose to the tumult with which the world and our own body rush
upon us, then to sustain even the tension of our own muscles, the
shudder that freezes us to the marrow, then even to keep ourselves
immobile in what we ordinarily regard as nothing but the simple
negative position of a thing, requires, if we wish our head to re-
main erect and our eyes calm, an expense of vital energy and be-
comes the object of an exhausting struggle.
And if Legrandin had looked back at us with that astonished air,
it was because to him, as to the other people who passed us then,
in the fiacre in which my grandmother was apparently seated on
the banquette, she had seemed to be foundering, sliding into the
abyss, clinging desperately to the cushions that could barely arrest
the downward plunge of her body, her hair disheveled, her eye
wild, unable any longer to face the assault of the images that their
pupils were not strong enough now to bear. She had appeared,
although I was still by her side, to be plunged in that unknown
world wherein she had already received the blows, traces of which
she still bore when I had looked up at her a few minutes earlier in
the Champs-­Élysées, her hat, her face, her cloak left in disorder
by the hand of the invisible angel with whom she had wrestled.
I have thought, since, that this moment of her stroke cannot
have altogether surprised my grandmother, that indeed she had
perhaps foreseen it a long time back, had lived in expectation of
it. She had not known, naturally, when this fatal moment would
come, had never been certain, any more than those lovers whom
a similar doubt leads alternately to found unreasonable hopes and
unjustified suspicions on the fidelity of their mistresses. But it is
rare for these grave maladies, like that which now at last had struck
her full in the face, not to take up residence in the sick person for a

346 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

long time before killing him, during which time they make haste,
like a “sociable” neighbor or tenant, to become acquainted with
him. A terrible acquaintance, not so much from the sufferings
that it causes as from the strange novelty of the definitive restric-
tions that it imposes upon life. We see ourselves dying, in these
cases not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes
years before, when death has hideously come to dwell in us. The
sufferer makes the acquaintance of the stranger whom she hears
coming and going in her brain. She does not know him by sight, it
is true, but from the sounds that she hears him regularly make she
can form an idea of his habits. Is he a criminal? One morning, she
can no longer hear him. He has gone. Ah! If it were only forever!
In the evening he has returned. What are his plans? Her doctor,
put to the question, like an adored mistress, replies with avowals
that one day are believed, another day are placed in doubt. Or
rather it is not the mistress’s part but that of the servants one in-
terrogates that the doctor plays. They are only third parties. The
person whom we press for an answer, whom we suspect of being
about to betray us, is life itself, and although we feel it to be no
longer the same, we believe in it still or at least remain undecided
until the day on which it finally abandons us.
I helped my grandmother into Professor E’s elevator and a mo-
ment later he came to us and took us into his consulting room. But
there, pressed for time as he was, his arrogant manner changed,
such is the force of habit, and his habit was to be friendly, even
playful, with his patients. Since he knew that my grandmother
was a great reader, and was himself one also, he devoted the first
few minutes to quoting various favorite passages of poetry ap-
propriate to the glorious summer weather. He had placed her in
an armchair and himself with his back to the light so as to have
a good view of her. His examination was minute and thorough,
even obliging me to leave the room for a moment. He continued
it after my return, then, having finished, went on, although the
quarter of an hour was almost at an end, repeating various quota-
tions to my grandmother. He even made a few jokes, which were

Chapter 1 347
 The Guermantes Way

3. Armand Fallières (1841–1931) was witty enough, though I would have preferred to hear them on
president of the senate in 1899 and some other occasion, but which completely reassured me by the
president of the Republic from 1906 to
1913. On January 30, 1883, the day fol- tone of amusement in which he uttered them. I then remembered
lowing his being named prime minister, that M. Fallières, the President of the Senate, had, many years
he became ill during a session of the earlier, had a false seizure, and that to the consternation of his
Chambre des Députés and asked for an
adjournment, after which he fainted. political rivals he had returned a few days later to his duties and
He remained bedridden for a week; a had begun, it was said, his preparations for a not-­too-­distant can-
few days after his recovery he called for didacy for the presidency of the Republic.3 My confidence in my
the resignation of his government.
grandmother’s prompt recovery was all the more complete in that,
just as I was recalling the example of M. Fallières, I was distracted
from thinking about the similarity by a shout of laughter that
served as conclusion to one of the professor’s jokes. He took out
his watch, frowned feverishly on seeing that he was five minutes
late, and while he bade us goodbye rang for his frock coat to be
brought to him at once. I waited until my grandmother had left
the room, closed the door, and asked him to tell me the truth.
“There is not the slightest hope for your grandmother,” he said
to me. “It is a stroke brought on by uremia. In itself, uremia is not
necessarily fatal, but this case seems to me hopeless. I need not
tell you that I hope I am mistaken. In any case, you have Cot-
tard, you’re in excellent hands. Excuse me,” he broke off as a maid
came into the room with his frock coat over her arm. “As I told
you, I’m dining with the minister of commerce, and I have a call
to pay first. Ah! Life is not all a bed of roses, as one is apt to think
at your age.”
And he graciously offered me his hand. I had shut the door
behind me, and a footman was showing my grandmother and
me into the anteroom when we heard a loud shout of rage. The
maid had forgotten to cut and hem the buttonhole for the medals.
This would take another ten minutes. The professor continued to
storm while I stood on the landing gazing at a grandmother for
whom there was not the slightest hope. Each of us is indeed alone.
We started for home.
The sun was sinking, it burnished an interminable wall along
which our fiacre had to pass before reaching the street where we

348 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

lived, a wall against which the shadow cast by the setting sun of 4. There were very few painted vases
horse and carriage stood out in black on a ruddy background, like found at Pompei. Archaeologists did
discover a terra-­cotta bas-­relief on
a hearse on some Pompeian terra-­cotta.4 At length we arrived at which a chariot is depicted.
the house. I made the invalid sit at the foot of the staircase in the
hall, and went up to warn my mother. I told her that my grand-
mother had come home feeling slightly unwell, after an attack
of giddiness. As soon as I began to speak, my mother’s face was
convulsed by the paroxysm of a despair that was yet already so re-
signed that I realized that for many years she had been holding
herself quietly in readiness for a day that was unpredictable but
final. She asked me no questions; it seemed that, just as malevo-
lence likes to exaggerate the sufferings of others, she in her deep
affection did not want to admit that her mother was seriously
ill, especially with a disease that might affect the brain. Mamma
shuddered, her eyes wept without tears, she ran to give orders for
the doctor to be fetched at once; but when Françoise asked who
was ill she could not reply, her voice stuck in her throat. She came
running downstairs with me struggling to banish from her face
the sob that contracted it. My grandmother was waiting below on
the sofa in the hall, but, as soon as she heard us coming, drew her-
self together, stood up, and waved her hand cheerfully at Mamma.
I had partially wrapped her head in a white lace shawl, telling
her that it was so that she would not catch cold on the stairs. I
had hoped that my mother would not notice the change in her
face, the distortion of her mouth; my precaution proved unneces-
sary; my mother went up to my grandmother, kissed her hand
as though it were that of her God, held on to her and helped her
to the elevator with infinite precautions in which there was, with
the fear of being clumsy and hurting her, the humility of one who
felt herself unworthy to touch the most precious thing, to her,
in the world, but never once did she raise her eyes and look at
the sufferer’s face. Perhaps this was in order that my grandmother
might not be saddened by the thought that the sight of her could
alarm her daughter. Perhaps from fear of a grief so piercing that
she dared not face it. Perhaps from reverence, because she did not

Chapter 1 349
 The Guermantes Way

5. See Swann’s Way, 139. feel it permissible for hers, without impiety, to remark the trace
of any mental weakening on those venerated features. Perhaps to
be better able to preserve intact in her memory the image of the
true face of my grandmother, radiant with wisdom and goodness.
So they went up side by side, my grandmother half hidden by her
shawl, my mother turning away her eyes.
Meanwhile there was one person who never took hers from
what could be made out of my grandmother’s altered features,
at which her daughter dared not look, a person who fastened on
them a gaze dumbfounded, indiscreet, and of ill omen: this was
Françoise. Not that she was not sincerely attached to my grand-
mother (indeed she had been disappointed and almost scandal-
ized by the coldness shown by Mamma, whom she would have
liked to see fling herself weeping into her mother’s arms), but she
had a certain tendency always to look at the worse side of things,
and she had retained from her childhood two peculiarities that
would seem to be mutually exclusive, but which when combined
strengthened one another: the want of restraint common among
people of humble origin who make no attempt to conceal the im-
pression, in other words the painful alarm aroused in them by
the sight of a physical change that it would be in better taste to
appear not to notice, and the unfeeling coarseness of the peasant
who tears the wings off dragonflies until she is allowed to wring
the necks of chickens,5 and lacks the decency that would make her
conceal the interest that she feels in the sight of suffering flesh.
When, thanks to the faultless ministrations of Françoise, my
grandmother had been put to bed, she discovered that she could
speak much more easily, the little rupture or obstruction of a blood
vessel that had produced the uremia having apparently been quite
slight. And at once she was anxious not to fail Mamma in her hour
of need, to assist her in the cruelest moments through which she
had yet to pass.
“Well, my child,” she began, taking my mother’s hand in one
of her own, and keeping the other in front of her lips, so as to ac-
count for the slight difficulty that she still found in pronouncing

350 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

certain words. “So this is all the pity you show your mother! You
look as if you thought that indigestion was quite a pleasant thing!”
Then for the first time my mother’s eyes gazed passionately into
those of my grandmother, not wishing to see the rest of her face,
and she replied, beginning the list of those false promises that we
swear but are unable to keep:
“Mamma, you will soon be quite well again, your daughter will
see to that.”
And embodying all her dearest love, all her determination that
her mother should recover, in a kiss to which she entrusted them,
and which she followed with her mind, with her whole being until
it flowered upon her lips, she bent down to lay it humbly, rever-
ently upon the beloved brow.
My grandmother complained of a sort of alluvial deposit of
bedclothes that kept gathering all the time in the same place,
over her left leg, and from which she could never manage to free
herself. But she did not realize that she was herself the cause of
this (so that day after day she accused Françoise unjustly of not
“doing” her bed properly). By a convulsive movement she kept
flinging to that side the whole flood of those billowing blankets of
fine wool, which gathered there like the sand in a bay which is very
soon transformed into a beach (unless the inhabitants construct a
breakwater) by the successive deposits of the tide.
My mother and I (whose mendacity was exposed before we
spoke by the obnoxious perspicacity of Françoise) would not even
admit that my grandmother was seriously ill, as though such an
admission might give pleasure to her enemies (not that she had
any) and it was more loving to feel that she was not so ill as all
that, in short from the same instinctive sentiment that had led
me to suppose that Andrée pitied Albertine too much to be really
fond of her. The same individual phenomena are reproduced in
the mass, in great crises. In a war, the man who does not love his
country says nothing against it, but regards it as doomed, pities it,
sees everything in the blackest colors.
Françoise was immensely helpful to us owing to her faculty

Chapter 1 351
 The Guermantes Way

6. Some tradesmen paid domestics of doing without sleep, of performing the most arduous tasks.
sent to buy provisions five centimes And if, when she had gone to bed after several nights in the sick-
per franc spent.
room, we were obliged to call her a quarter of an hour after she
had fallen asleep, she was so happy to be able to do the most tiring
duties as if they had been the simplest things in the world that,
so far from looking cross, her face would light up with a satisfac-
tion tinged with modesty. Only when the time came for mass, or
for breakfast, then, had my grandmother been in her death agony,
still Françoise would have quietly slipped away so as not to make
herself late. She neither could nor would let her place be taken by
her young footman. It was true that she had brought from Com-
bray an extremely exalted idea of everyone’s duty toward us; she
would not have tolerated that any of our servants should “fail” us.
This doctrine had made her so noble, so imperious, so efficient an
instructor that we had never had any servants, however corrupted,
who had not speedily modified, purified their conception of life so
far as to refuse to touch the usual commissions from tradesmen6
and to come rushing—however little they might previously have
sought to oblige—to take from my hands and not let me tire my-
self by carrying the smallest package. But at Combray Françoise
had contracted also—and had brought with her to Paris—the
habit of not being able to put up with any assistance in her work.
The sight of anyone coming to help her seemed to her like re-
ceiving a deadly insult, and servants had remained for weeks in the
house without receiving from her any response to their morning
greeting, had even gone off on their vacations without her bidding
them goodbye or their guessing her reason, which was simply and
solely that they had offered to do a share of her work on some
day when she had not been well. And at this moment when my
grandmother was so ill Françoise’s duties seemed to her peculiarly
her own. She would not allow herself, she, the official incumbent,
to be robbed of her role in the ritual of these gala days. And so
her young footman, sent packing by her, did not know what to
do with himself, and not content with having copied Victor’s ex-
ample and supplied himself with notepaper from my desk had

352 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

begun as well to borrow volumes of poetry from my bookshelves.

He sat reading them for a good half of the day, out of admiration
for the poets who had written them, but also so as, during the rest
of his time, to sprinkle with quotations the letters that he wrote
to his friends in his native village. Naturally, he expected these
to dazzle them. But as there was little consistency in his ideas, he
had formed the notion that these poems, picked out at random
from my shelves, were matters of common knowledge, to which it
was customary to refer. So much so that in writing to these peas-
ants, whom he expected to stupefy, he interspersed his own reflec-
tions with lines from Lamartine, just as he might have said “Who
laughs last, laughs longest!” or merely “Bonjour?”
To ease her pain my grandmother was given morphine. Un-
fortunately, if this relieved the pain, it increased the quantity of
albumin. The blows that we aimed at the wicked ogre that had
taken up residence in my grandmother were always wide of the
mark, and it was she, her poor interposed body that had to bear
them, without her ever uttering more than a faint groan by way
of complaint. And the pain that we caused her found no compen-
sation in a benefit that we were unable to give her. The ferocious
ogre whom we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded
in grazing, and all we did was to enrage him still further, and pos-
sibly hasten the moment when his captive would be devoured.
On certain days when the discharge of albumin had been exces-
sive, Cottard, after some hesitation, stopped the morphine. In this
man, so insignificant, so common, there was, in these brief mo-
ments in which he deliberated, in which the relative dangers of
one and another course of treatment presented themselves alter-
nately to his mind until he arrived at a decision, the same sort of
greatness as in a general who, vulgar in all the rest of his life, is a
great strategist, and in an hour of peril, after a moment’s reflec-
tion, decides upon what is from the military point of view the
wisest course, and gives the order: “Advance eastward.” Medically,
however little hope there might be of ending this attack of uremia,
it was vital not to put a strain on the kidneys. But on the other

Chapter 1 353
 The Guermantes Way

hand, when my grandmother did not have morphine, her pain be-
came unbearable; she perpetually attempted a certain movement
that it was difficult for her to perform without groaning: to a great
extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make
itself familiar with a new state that torments it, to adapt its sensi-
bility to that state. We can discern this origin of pain in the case
of certain discomforts that are not such for everyone. Into a room
filled with a pungent smoke two men of a coarse fiber will come
and attend to their business; a third, with a more delicate consti-
tution, will betray an incessant distress. His nostrils will continue
to sniff anxiously the odor that he ought, so it seems, to try not
to perceive and will seek continually to adapt, by a more exact ap-
prehension of it, to his troubled sense of smell. One consequence
of which may well be that his intense preoccupation will prevent
him from complaining of a toothache. When my grandmother
was suffering thus, the sweat trickled over the mauve expanse of
her brow, gluing to it her white locks, and if she thought that none
of us was in the room she would cry out: “Oh, it’s dreadful!” but
if she caught sight of my mother, at once she employed all her
energy in banishing from her face every sign of pain, or—an alter-
native stratagem—repeated the same plaints, accompanying them
with explanations that gave a different sense, retrospectively, to
those that my mother might have overheard.
“Ah! My dear, it’s dreadful to have to stay in bed on a beau-
tiful sunny day like this when one wants to be out in the air; I am
weeping with rage at your instructions.”
But she could not get rid of the look of anguish in her eyes, the
sweat on her brow, the convulsive start, checked at once, of her
limbs.
“I am not in pain. I’m complaining because I’m not lying very
comfortably. I feel my hair is disheveled, I feel nauseated, I banged
myself against the wall.”
And my mother, at the foot of the bed, riveted to that suf-
fering form, as though, by dint of piercing with her gaze that pain-­
bedewed brow, the body that hid the evil thing within it, she must

354 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

finally succeed in reaching that evil thing and carrying it away, my 7. As we have seen in the imagery used
mother said: in describing the grandmother’s death,
statuary becomes a motif in The Guer-
“No, no, Mamma dear, we won’t let you suffer like that, we will mantes Way. In the last section of this
find something to take it away, have patience just for a moment; volume, such analogies will be used to
let me give you a kiss—no, you’re not to move.” describe the duke’s former mistresses.
This imagery will later be used in pas-
And stooping over the bed, with bended knees, almost sages to describe Albertine.
kneeling, as though by an exercise of humility she would have a 8. Scott Moncrieff has given a rather lit-
better chance of making acceptable the impassioned gift of her- eral translation of the French saying “on
ne sait plus à quel saint se vouer,” which
self, she lowered toward my grandmother her whole life con- is the equivalent of being at your wits’
tained in her face as in a ciborium that she was holding out to end or not knowing which way to turn.
her, adorned in relief with dimples and folds so passionate, so sor-
rowful, so sweet that one knew not whether they had been carved
by the chisel of a kiss, a sob, or a smile. My grandmother also tried
to lift up her face to Mamma’s. It was so altered that probably,
had she been strong enough to go out, she would have been recog-
nized only by the feather in her hat. Her features, like the clay in
a sculptor’s hands, seemed to be straining, with an effort that dis-
tracted her from everything else, to conform to some particular
model that we failed to identify. This work of statuary was nearing
its end, and if my grandmother’s face had shrunk in the process,
it had at the same time hardened.7 The veins that ran beneath
its surface seemed those not of marble but of some more rugged
stone. Constantly thrust forward by the difficulty that she found
in breathing and as constantly forced back onto her pillow by ex-
haustion, her face, worn, diminished, terribly expressive, seemed
like, in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture, the rude, flushed,
purplish, desperate face of some savage guardian of a tomb. But
the entire work was not yet finished. Next, it must be broken,
and into that tomb—the entrance to which had been so painfully
guarded, with that tense contraction—descend.
In one of those moments in which, as the saying goes, one does
not know what saint to invoke,8 as my grandmother was coughing
and sneezing a good deal, we took the advice of a relative who as-
sured us that if we sent for the specialist X he would get rid of all
that in a couple of days. Society people say that sort of thing about

Chapter 1 355
 The Guermantes Way

9. Aeolus is a son of Zeus and god of their own doctors, and their friends believe them just as Françoise
the winds, whose goatskin contains evil always believed the advertisements in the newspapers. The spe-
winds.
cialist came with his bag packed with all the colds and coughs of
his other patients, like Aeolus’s goatskin.9 My grandmother re-
fused point-­blank to let herself be examined. And we, out of con-
sideration for the doctor, who had had his trouble for nothing,
deferred to the desire that he expressed to inspect each of our
noses in turn, although there was nothing the matter with any of
them. According to him, however, there was; everything, whether
headache or colic, heart disease or diabetes, was a disease of the
nose that had been wrongly diagnosed. To each of us he said: “I
would like to have another look at that little snout. Don’t put it
off too long. I can cure it for you with a hot needle.” We were, of
course, thinking of something quite different. And yet we asked
ourselves: “Cure it of what?” In a word, every one of our noses was
diseased; his mistake lay only in his use of the present tense. For
by the following day his examination and provisional treatment
had taken effect. Each of us had his or her catarrh. And when
in the street he ran into my father doubled up with a cough, he
smiled to think that an ignorant layman might suppose the attack
to be due to his intervention. He had examined us at a moment
when we were already ill.
My grandmother’s illness gave occasion to various people to
manifest an excess or deficiency of sympathy that surprised us
quite as much as the sort of chance that led one or another of
them to reveal to us connecting links of circumstances, or of
friendship for that matter, that we had never suspected. And the
signs of interest shown by the people who called incessantly at
the house to inquire revealed to us the gravity of an illness that,
until then, we had not sufficiently detached from the countless
painful impressions that we received at my grandmother’s bed-
side. Informed by telegram, her sisters declined to leave Combray.
They had discovered a musician there who gave them excellent
chamber concerts, in listening to which they thought that they
could enjoy, better than by the invalid’s bedside, a contemplative

356 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mood, a melancholy exaltation the form of which was, to say the 10. Albuminuria is the presence of
least, unusual. Mme Sazerat wrote to Mamma, but in the tone of albumin in the urine and is often symp-
tomatic of kidney disease.
a person whom the sudden breaking off of a betrothal (the cause 11. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
of the rupture being Dreyfusism) has separated from one forever. Flower, 133.
Bergotte, on the other hand, came every day and spent several
hours with me.
He had always liked going regularly for some time to the same
house, where, accordingly, he need not stand on ceremony. But
formerly it had been in order that he might talk without being
interrupted; now it was so that he might sit for as long as he chose
in silence, without being expected to talk. For he was very ill, some
people said with albuminuria,10 like my grandmother. According
to another version, he had a tumor. He grew steadily weaker; it
was with difficulty that he came up our staircase, with greater dif-
ficulty still that he went down it. Even though he held on to the
banisters, he often stumbled, and he would, I believe, have stayed
at home had he not been afraid of losing altogether the habit of
going out, the capacity to go out, he, the “man with the goatee”11
whom I had seen so alert, not very long since. He was now quite
blind and even his speech was often muddled.
But at the same time, by a directly opposite process, his works,
known only to a few literary people at the period when Mme
Swann used to patronize their timid efforts to disseminate it, now
grown in stature and strength in the eyes of all, had acquired an
extraordinary power of expansion among the general public. The
general rule is, no doubt, that only after his death does a writer
become famous. But it was while he still lived, and during his
slow progress toward a death that he had not yet reached, that
this writer witnessed the progress of his works toward Renown. A
dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on him-
self. The effulgence of his name stops short at the stone upon his
grave. In the deafness of the eternal sleep he is not importuned
by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He
existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult. He still moved
about, though with difficulty, while his books, bounding about

Chapter 1 357
 The Guermantes Way

12. Aristide Briand (1862–1932) was a him, like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youth-
statesman who served eleven terms as fulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after day, to his
prime minister during the Third Re-
public. very bedside, a crowd of new admirers.
13. Paul Claudel (1868–1955) was a The visits that he now began to pay us came for me several
Catholic poet, dramatist, and diplomat. years too late, for I no longer had the same admiration for him as
of old. Which is not in any sense incompatible with the growth of
his reputation. A man’s work seldom becomes completely under-
stood and successful before that of another writer, still obscure,
has begun in the minds of certain people, more difficult to please,
to substitute a fresh cult for one that has almost ceased to com-
mand observance. In the books of Bergotte that I often reread, his
sentences stood out as clearly before my eyes as my own thoughts,
the furniture in my room, and the carriages in the street. All the
details were easily visible, not perhaps precisely as one had always
seen them but at any rate as one was accustomed to see them now.
But a new writer had recently begun to publish works in which
the relations between things were so different from those that con-
nected them for me that I could understand hardly anything of
what he wrote. He would say, for instance: “The garden hoses ad-
mired the fine upkeep of the roads” (and so far it was simple, I
followed him smoothly along those roads) “which started every
five minutes from Briand12 and Claudel.”13 At that point I ceased
to understand, because I had expected the name of a city and
was given that of a person instead. Only I felt that it was not
the sentence that was badly constructed but I myself that lacked
the strength and agility necessary to reach the end. I would start
afresh, striving tooth and nail to climb to the pinnacle from which
I would see things in their new relationships between things. And
each time, after I had got about halfway through the sentence, I
would fall back again, as later on, when I joined the army, in my
attempts at the exercise known as the horizontal bar. I felt never-
theless for the new writer the admiration that an awkward boy
who receives zero for gymnastics feels when he watches another
more nimble. And from then onward I felt less admiration for
Bergotte, whose limpidity began to strike me as insufficient. There

358 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

was a time at which people recognized things quite easily when it 14. Eugène Fromentin (1820–76),
was Fromentin14 who had painted them, and could not recognize painter, writer, and art critic. His novel
Dominique was published in 1863 and
them at all when it was Renoir.15 his book on painting, Maîtres d’autre-
People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great painter fois: Belgique, Hollande, in 1902, the
of the eighteenth century.16 But in so saying they forget the ele- year that Proust went to Holland and
took along with him Fromentin’s book
ment of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the on art.
height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a 15. Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original was an Impressionist painter and
sculptor.
painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by ocu- 16. Proust’s point is that, since we have
lists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by become accustomed to viewing the
their prose is not always enjoyable. When it is at an end the prac- world as Renoir depicted it, his paint-
ings are seen as simply and as clearly
titioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world as those of the eighteenth century.
around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created 17. The notion of the artist as creator
afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely of new worlds is a constant analogy in
Proust.
different from the old world, but perfectly clear.17 Women pass in
the street, different from what they used to be, because they are
Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women.
The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we
feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest just like the one that,
when we first saw it, looked like anything in the world except
a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable nuances but
lacking precisely the nuances proper to forests. Such is the new
and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until
the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or
writer of original talent.
This writer who had taken Bergotte’s place in my affections
wearied me not by the incoherence but by the novelty of asso-
ciations—perfectly coherent—that I was not used to following.
The point—always the same—at which I felt myself relinquish
my grasp, indicated the identity of each tour de force that I had to
make. Moreover, when once in a thousand times I did succeed in
following the writer to the end of his sentence, what I saw there
was always of a humor, a truth, a charm similar to those that I
had found long ago in reading Bergotte, only more delightful. I
reflected that it was not so many years since a similar reconstruc-

Chapter 1 359
 The Guermantes Way

18. Proust is using irony to mock the tion of the world, like that which I was waiting now for his suc-
notion that inspired the long draft of cessor to produce, had been wrought for me by Bergotte himself.
his essay Against Sainte-­Beuve. Sainte-­
Beuve believed that a writer should be And I was led to ask myself whether there was indeed any truth
judged in large part by his character in the distinction that we are always making between art, which is
and social standing rather than by his no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and science with its
works.
continuous progress. Perhaps, on the contrary, art was in this re-
spect like science; each new original writer seemed to me to have
advanced beyond the stage of his immediate predecessor; and how
was I to know that in twenty years’ time, when I would be able
to accompany without strain or effort the newcomer of today, an-
other might not appear at whose approach the present writer in
turn would go the way of Bergotte? I spoke to the latter of the new
writer. He gave me a distaste for him not so much when he said
that his art was uncouth, facile, and vacuous, as when he told me
that he had seen him, and had almost mistaken him (so strong was
the likeness) for Bloch. From that moment my friend’s features
outlined themselves on the printed pages, and I no longer felt any
obligation to make the effort necessary to understand them.18 If
Bergotte had decried him to me it was less, I believe, out of jeal-
ousy for a success that was yet to come than out of ignorance of
his work. He read scarcely anything. The bulk of his thought had
long since passed from his brain into his books. He had grown
thin, as though they had been extracted from him by surgical
operations. His reproductive instinct no longer impelled him to
any activity, now that he had given an independent existence to
almost all his thoughts. He led the vegetative life of a convales-
cent, of a woman after childbirth; his fine eyes remained motion-
less, vaguely dazed, like the eyes of a man who lies on the seashore
and in a vague daydream sees only each little breaking wave. How-
ever, if it was less interesting to talk to him now than I would once
have found it, I felt no compunction about that. He was so far a
creature of habit that the simplest habits, like the most luxurious,
once he had formed them, became indispensable to him for a cer-
tain length of time. I do not know what made him come to our
house the first time, but after that every day it was simply because

360 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

he had been there the day before. He would come to the house as 19. In the original, camériste, from the
he might have gone to a café, so that no one should talk to him, so Spanish camarista, indicates a femme
de chambre, a lady’s maid. Originally,
that he might—very rarely—talk himself; one might in short have the word designated a lady-­in-­waiting
found in his conduct a sign that he was moved by our grief, or that of a princess.
he enjoyed my company, had one sought to draw any conclusion 20. Proust did not include these prom-
ised pages on Cottard in his novel.
from such assiduity. It did not fail to impress my mother, sensi- They were published posthumously by
tive to everything that might be regarded as an act of homage to Denis Mayer as “Un chapitre inédit du
her invalid. And every day she reminded me: “See that you don’t Temps perdu” in Commentaire, n. 22,
1983, 370–78.
forget to thank him nicely.” 21. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
We had also—a discreet feminine attention like the refresh- the Duchy of Luxembourg, a small
ments that are brought to us in the studio, between sittings, by a neutral state in Central Europe, was
upgraded to a Grand Duchy of the
painter’s mistress—a courteous supplement to those that her hus- German Confederation.
band paid us professionally, a visit from Mme Cottard. She came 22. Adolphe de Nassau (1817–1905)
to offer us her “waiting-­woman,”19 or, if we preferred the services was the monarch of the Grand Duchy
of Luxembourg.
of a man, she would “scour the country” for one, and, on our de-
clining, said that she did hope this was not just a “put-­off ” on our
part, a word that in her world signifies a false pretext for not ac-
cepting an invitation. She assured us that the professor, who never
referred to his patients when he was at home, was as sad about it
as if it had been she herself who was ill. We will see in due course
that even if this had been true it would have been at once very
little and a great deal on the part of the most unfaithful and the
most attentive of husbands.20
Offers as helpful and infinitely more touching owing to the way
in which they were expressed (which was a blend of the highest
intelligence, the warmest sympathy, and a rare felicity of expres-
sion) were addressed to me by the heir to the Grand Duchy of
Luxembourg.21 I had met him at Balbec, where he had come on a
visit to one of his aunts, the Princesse de Luxembourg, being him-
self at that time merely Comte de Nassau.22 He had married, some
months later, the ravishing daughter of another Luxembourg prin-
cess, extremely rich, because she was the only daughter of a prince
who was the proprietor of an immense flour mill business. Where-
upon the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who had no children of
his own and was devoted to his nephew Nassau, had obtained the

Chapter 1 361
 The Guermantes Way

23. See Swann’s Way, 22. approval of the Chamber of Deputies to his declaring the young
man his heir. As with all marriages of this nature, the origin of
the bride’s fortune was the obstacle as it was also the deciding
factor. I remembered this Comte de Nassau as one of the most
remarkable young men I had ever met, already devoured, at that
time, by a dark and blazing passion for his betrothed. I was deeply
touched by the letters that he wrote me, day after day, during
my grandmother’s illness, and Mamma herself, in her emotion,
quoted sadly one of her mother’s expressions: “Sévigné would not
have put it better.”23
On the sixth day Mamma, yielding to my grandmother’s en-
treaties, left her for a little and pretended to go and lie down.
I would have liked (so that my grandmother might go to sleep)
Françoise to sit quite still and not disturb her by moving. In spite
of my supplications, she got up and left the room; she was genu-
inely devoted to my grandmother; with her clairvoyance and her
natural pessimism, she regarded her as doomed. She would there-
fore have liked to give her every possible care and attention. But
word had just reached her that an electrician was in the house, one
of the oldest in his firm, the head of which was his brother-­in-­law,
highly esteemed throughout the building, where he had worked
for many years, and especially by Jupien. This man had been sent
for before my grandmother’s illness. It seemed to me that he
might have been sent away again or told to wait. But Françoise’s
code of manners would not permit this; it would have been a want
of courtesy toward this worthy man; my grandmother’s condi-
tion ceased at once to matter. When, after waiting a quarter of an
hour, I lost my patience and went to look for her in the kitchen, I
found her chatting with him on the landing of the back staircase,
the door of which stood open, a stratagem that had the advan-
tage, should any of us come on the scene, of letting it be thought
that they were just saying goodbye, but had also the drawback
of sending terrible drafts through the house. Françoise tore her-
self from the workman, not without turning to shout down after
him various greetings, forgotten in her haste, to his wife and

362 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

brother-­in-­law. A concern characteristic of Combray, not to be 24. The Russo-­Japanese War lasted
found wanting in politeness, that Françoise extended even to for- eighteen months, from February 1904
to September 1905. France did not ac-
eign politics. People foolishly imagine that the vast dimensions of tively participate but sided with Russia
social phenomena afford them an excellent opportunity to pene- against Japan’s encroachment on Chi-
trate farther into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to nese territory.
25. Nicholas II (1868–1918), son of
realize that it is by plumbing the depths of a single personality that Alexander III, was tsar of Russia from
they might have a chance of understanding those phenomena. A 1894 to 1918. His reign was marked
thousand times over Françoise told the gardener at Combray that by the Russo-­Japanese War, revolu-
tionary troubles in 1905–6, and World
war was the most senseless of crimes, that the only thing that War I and ended with the revolution of
mattered was life. Yet when the Russo-­Japanese War broke out, October 1917. Nicholas and his family
she was quite ashamed, when she thought of the tsar, that we had were shot on Lenin’s orders. He had
come to France on an official visit in
not gone to war also to help the “poor Russians,” “since,” she re- 1896.
minded us, “we’re allianced to them.”24 She felt this abstention
to be impolite to Nicholas II,25 who had always “said such nice
things about us”; it was a corollary of the same code that would
have prevented her from refusing a glass of cognac from Jupien,
knowing that it would “upset her digestion,” and which brought it
about that now, with my grandmother lying at death’s door, had
she not gone in person to make her apologies to this good electri-
cian who had been put to so much trouble, she would have been
committing the same disloyalty of which she considered France
guilty in remaining neutral with regard to Japan.
Luckily for ourselves, we were soon rid of Françoise’s daughter,
who was obliged to be away for some weeks. To the regular stock
of advice that people at Combray gave to the family of an invalid:
“You haven’t tried taking her away for a little, the change of air, you
know, pick up her appetite, etc.?” she had added the almost unique
idea, which she had specially made up, and repeated accordingly
whenever we saw her, without fail, as though hoping by dint of re-
iteration to force it through the thickness of people’s heads: “She
ought to have taken care of herself radically from the first.” She did
not recommend any one cure rather than another, provided that
the cure was “radical.” As for Françoise herself, she noticed that we
were not giving many medicines to my grandmother. Since, ac-
cording to her, they only destroyed the stomach, she was glad about

Chapter 1 363
 The Guermantes Way

this, but at the same time even more humiliated. She had, in the
Midi, some cousins—relatively well-­to-­do—whose daughter, after
falling ill in her adolescence, had died at twenty-­three; for several
years the father and mother had ruined themselves on remedies,
on different doctors, on pilgrimages from one thermal spa to an-
other, until her decease. Now all this seemed to Françoise, for the
parents in question, a kind of luxury, as though they had owned
racehorses, a château. They themselves, in the midst of their afflic-
tion, derived a certain pride from the thought of so many expen-
ditures. They had now nothing left, least of all their most precious
possession, their child, but they did enjoy telling people how they
had done as much for her and more than the richest in the land.
The ultraviolet rays to which the poor girl had been subjected, sev-
eral times a day for months on end, delighted them more than
anything. The father, elated in his grief by the glory of it all, was
led to speak of his daughter at times as of a star at the Opéra for
whose sake he had ruined himself. Françoise was not unmoved by
this wealth of scenic effect; that which framed my grandmother’s
sickbed seemed to her a trifle meager, suited rather to an illness on
the stage of a small provincial theater.
There came a time when her uremic trouble affected my grand-
mother’s eyes. For some days she could not see at all. Her eyes were
not at all like those of a blind person, but remained just the same
as before. And I gathered that she could see nothing only from
the strangeness of a certain smile of welcome that she assumed the
moment one opened the door, until one had come up to her and
taken her hand, a smile that began too soon and remained stereo-
typed on her lips, fixed, but always full-­faced, and endeavoring to
be visible from all points, because she could no longer rely upon
her sight to regulate it, to indicate the right moment, the proper
direction, to focus it, to make it vary according to the change
of position or of facial expression of the person who had come
in; because it was left isolated, without the accompanying smile
in her eyes that would have distracted a little from it the atten-
tion of the visitor, it assumed in its awkwardness an undue impor-

364 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

tance, giving the impression of an exaggerated friendliness. Then

her sight was completely restored; from her eyes the wandering
affliction passed to her ears. For several days my grandmother was
deaf. And since she was afraid of being taken by surprise by the
sudden entry of someone whom she would not have heard come
in, all day long (although she was lying with her face to the wall)
she kept turning her head sharply toward the door. But the move-
ment of her neck was clumsy, for one cannot adapt oneself in a
few days to this transposition of faculties, so as, if not actually to
see sounds, to listen with one’s eyes. Finally her pain grew less, but
the impediment of her speech increased. We were obliged to ask
her to repeat almost everything she said.
And now my grandmother, realizing that we could no longer
understand her, gave up altogether the attempt to speak and lay
perfectly still. When she caught sight of me she gave a sort of
convulsive start like a person who suddenly finds himself unable
to breathe; she tried to speak to me, but could make no intelli-
gible sound. Then, overcome by her sheer powerlessness, she let
her head drop on to the pillows, stretched herself out flat in her
bed, her face grave, like a face of marble, her hands motionless
on the sheet or occupied in some purely physical action such as
that of wiping her fingers with her handkerchief. She made no
effort to think. Then came a state of perpetual agitation. She was
incessantly trying to get up. But we restrained her so far as we
could from doing so, for fear of her discovering how paralyzed she
was. One day when she had been left alone for a moment I found
her standing on the floor in her nightgown trying to open the
window. At Balbec, once, when a widow who had jumped into
the sea had been rescued against her will, my grandmother had
told me (moved perhaps by one of those presentiments that we
discern at times in the mystery—so obscure, for all that—of our
organic life, in which nevertheless it seems that the future is fore-
shadowed) that she could think of nothing so cruel as to snatch a
desperate woman from the death that she had deliberately sought
and restore her to her living martyrdom.

Chapter 1 365
 The Guermantes Way

We were just in time to catch my grandmother, she put up an

almost violent resistance to my mother, then, overpowered, seated
forcibly in an armchair, she ceased to will, to regret, her face re-
sumed its impassivity and she began laboriously to pick off the
hairs that had been left on her nightgown by a fur cloak that had
been thrown over her shoulders.
The look in her eyes changed completely; often uneasy, plain-
tive, haggard, it was no longer the look we knew, it was the sullen
expression of a doddering old woman.
By dint of repeatedly asking her whether she would not like
her hair done, Françoise ended up by persuading herself that the
request had come from my grandmother. She armed herself with
brushes, combs, eau de Cologne, and a peignoir. “It can’t hurt
Madame Amédée,” she said to herself, “if I just comb her; no-
body’s ever too weak for a good combing.” In other words, one
was never too weak for another person to be able, for her own
satisfaction, to comb one’s hair. But when I came into the room
I saw between the cruel hands of Françoise, as blissfully happy as
though she were in the act of restoring my grandmother to health,
beneath a thin rain of aged tresses that had not the strength to re-
sist the action of the comb, a head that, incapable of maintaining
the position into which it had been forced, was rolling to and fro
with a ceaseless swirling motion in which sheer debility alternated
with spasms of pain. I felt that the moment at which Françoise
would have finished her task was approaching, and I dared not
hasten it by suggesting to her: “That is enough,” for fear of her
disobeying me. But I did forcibly intervene when, in order that
my grandmother might see whether her hair had been done to her
liking, Françoise, with innocent savagery, brought her a mirror.
I was glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from
her in time, before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept
away from mirrors, could catch even a stray glimpse of a face un-
like anything she could have imagined. But, alas, when, a moment
later, I leaned over her to kiss that dear forehead that had been so

366 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

harshly treated, she looked up at me with a puzzled, distrustful, 26. This is another example of
shocked expression: she did not recognize me. Françoise’s imperfect knowledge of
French.
According to our doctor, this was a symptom that the conges- 27. In Greek mythology, Medusa is one
tion of her brain was increasing. It must be relieved in some way. of the three Gorgons, whose beautiful
Cottard was of two minds. Françoise hoped at first that they were hair was turned to serpents by the god-
dess Athena.
going to apply “clarified cups.” She looked for the effects of this
treatment in my dictionary, but could find no reference to it. Even
if she had said “scarified” instead of “clarified” she still would not
have found any reference to this adjective, since she did not look
any more for it under c than under s; she did indeed say “clarified,”
but she wrote (and consequently assumed that the printed word
was) “esclarified.”26 Cottard, to her disappointment, gave the
preference, though without much hope, to leeches. When, a few
hours later, I went into my grandmother’s room, fastened to her
neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black serpents were writhing
among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of Medusa.27 But
in her pale and peaceful, entirely motionless face I saw wide open,
luminous and calm, her own beautiful eyes, as in days gone by
(perhaps even more charged with the light of intelligence than
they had been before her illness, since, as she could not speak and
must not move, it was to her eyes alone that she entrusted her
thought, the thought that at one time occupies an immense place
in us, offering us undreamed-­of treasures, at another time seems
reduced to nothing, then may be reborn, as though by sponta-
neous generation, by the withdrawal of a few drops of blood), her
eyes, soft and liquid like two pools of oil in which the rekindled
fire that was now burning lighted before the face of the invalid a
reconquered universe. Her calm was no longer the wisdom of de-
spair, but that of hope. She realized that she was better, wished
to be careful, not to move, and made me the present only of a
charming smile so that I would know that she was feeling better,
as she gently pressed my hand.
I knew the disgust that my grandmother felt at the sight of
certain animals, let alone being touched by them. I knew that it

Chapter 1 367
 The Guermantes Way

was in consideration of a higher utility that she was enduring the

leeches. And so it infuriated me to hear Françoise repeating to
her with the little giggle that people use with a baby to make it
play: “Oh, look at the little beasties running about on Madame.”
This was, moreover, treating our patient with a want of respect, as
though she had lapsed into her second childhood. But my grand-
mother, whose face had assumed the calm fortitude of a stoic, did
not seem even to hear her.
Alas! No sooner had the leeches been taken off than the con-
gestion returned and grew steadily worse. I was surprised to find
that at this stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise was
constantly disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered her-
self a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep her dressmaker
waiting. In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest
sorrow, resolves itself into a question of “trying-­on.”
A few days later, when I was in bed and sleeping, my mother
came to call me in the middle of the night. With that tender con-
sideration which, in great crises, people who are crushed by grief
show even for the slightest discomfort of others:
“Forgive me for disturbing your sleep,” she said to me.
“I was not asleep,” I answered as I awoke.
I said this in good faith. The great modification that the act
of awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us
to the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all
memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our
mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The
tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, over which we
were drifting still a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion per-
fectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakeful-
ness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of
memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we
no longer remember them. And when that bright star shines at the
moment of waking, illuminates behind the sleeper the whole ex-
panse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that
this was not a sleeping but a waking state, a shooting star, indeed,

368 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

that blots out with the fading of its light not only the false exis-
tence but the very appearance of our dream, and merely enables
him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”
In a voice so gentle that she seemed to be afraid of hurting me,
my mother asked whether it would tire me too much to get out of
bed, and, stroking my hands, went on:
“My poor boy, you have only your Papa and Mamma to rely
on now.”
We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semicircle on the bed
a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of wild beast that
had rigged itself with her hair and couched in her bedclothes lay
panting, groaning, making the blankets heave with its convul-
sions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because the one nearer
me did not shut properly, rather than because it opened at all that
it left visible a chink of eye, misty, rheumy, reflecting the dim-
ness both of an organic sense of vision and of an internal pain.
All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw
nor knew. But if this was only a beast that was stirring there,
where was my grandmother? Yes, I could recognize the shape of
her nose, which bore no relation now to the rest of her face, but
to the corner of which a beauty spot still adhered, and the hand
that kept thrusting the blankets aside with a gesture that formerly
would have meant that those blankets were bothering her, but
now meant nothing.
Mamma asked me to go get a little vinegar and water with
which to sponge my grandmother’s forehead. It was the only thing
that refreshed her, thought Mamma, who saw that she was trying
to push back her hair. But now one of the servants was signaling to
me from the doorway. The news that my grandmother was at the
point of death had spread like wildfire through the house. One of
those “extra helps” whom people engage at exceptional times to
relieve the strain on their servants (a practice that gives deathbeds
something of the air of being social functions) had just opened the
front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in
the hall and had asked for me: I could not escape him.

Chapter 1 369
 The Guermantes Way

28. Dr. Georges Dieulafoy (1839–1911) “I have just, my dear Monsieur, heard your macabre news.
was one of the most distinguished I would like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake hands with your
physicians of the day. He held the chair
of internal pathology at the Faculté father.”
de Médecine in Paris. He wrote many I made the excuse that I could not very well disturb him at the
articles on various infectious diseases. moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as
In 1890, he was elected to the Aca-
démie de médecine. one is about to start on a journey. But he felt so intensely the im-
29. Françoise Marie Amélie d’Orléans portance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to
(1844–1925) married her cousin the all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing room.
Duc de Chartres in 1863.
30. Poiré Blanche was an ice cream As a general rule, he made a point of going resolutely through the
parlor and pâtisserie located in the formalities with which he had decided to honor anyone, and took
seventh arrondissement at 196, boule- little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.
vard Saint-­Germain, right in the heart
of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain. It was “Have you sent for Dieulafoy?28 No? That was a great mistake.
also known in Proust’s day as “À la And if you had only asked me, I would have got him to come, he
dame blanche.” never refuses me anything, although before now he has refused
31. Rebattet, a confectioner, founded
in 1820, was located at 12, rue du Fau- the Duchesse de Chartres.29 You see, I set myself squarely above
bourg Saint-­Honoré. a Princess of the Blood. However, in the presence of death we are
all equal,” he added, not in order to persuade me that my grand-
mother was becoming his equal, but perhaps because he felt that a
prolonged discussion of his power over Dieulafoy and his preemi-
nence over the Duchesse de Chartres would not be in very good
taste. His advice did not in the least surprise me. I knew that, in
the Guermantes set, the name of Dieulafoy was regularly quoted
(only with slightly more respect) among those of other tradesmen
who were “quite the best” in their respective lines. And the old
Duchesse de Mortemart née Guermantes (I never could under-
stand, by the way, why, the moment one speaks of a duchess, one
almost invariably says: “The old Duchess of So-­and-­so” or, alter-
natively, in a delicate Watteau tone, if she is still young: “The
little Duchess of So-­and-­so”) would prescribe almost automati-
cally, with a wink of the eye, in serious cases: “Dieulafoy, Dieu-
lafoy!” as, if one wanted a place for ice cream, she would advise:
“Poiré Blanche,”30 or for petits fours “Rebattet, Rebattet.”31 But
I was not aware that my father had, as a matter of fact, just sent
for Dieulafoy.
At this point my mother, who was waiting impatiently for

370 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

some cylinders of oxygen that would help my grandmother to 32. Saint-­Loup believes that the Nar-
breathe more easily, came out herself to the hall, where she little rator is siding with Saint-­Loup’s family,
who wish to see him break up with
expected to find M. de Guermantes. I would have liked to conceal Rachel.
him, had that been possible. But convinced in his own mind that
nothing was more essential, could be more gratifying to her or
more indispensable to the maintenance of his reputation as a per-
fect gentleman, he seized me violently by the arm and, although
I defended myself as against an assault with repeated protesta-
tions of “Monsieur, Monsieur, Monsieur,” dragged me across to
Mamma, saying: “Will you do me the great honor of introducing
me to Madame your mother?” faltering slightly on the word
mother. And it was so plain to him that the honor was hers that
he could not help smiling at her even while he was composing a
grave face. There was nothing to do but to introduce him, which
at once set him off bowing and scraping, and he was just going to
begin the complete ritual of salutation. He apparently proposed
to enter into conversation, but my mother, overwhelmed by her
grief, told me to come at once and did not reply to the speeches
of M. de Guermantes, who, expecting to be received as a visitor
and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would have been
obliged to leave had he not at that moment caught sight of Saint-­
Loup, who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us
in haste to ask for news. “I say, this is a piece of luck!” cried the
duke joyfully, catching his nephew by the sleeve, which he nearly
tore off, regardless of the presence of my mother, who was again
crossing the hall. Saint-­L oup was not sorry, I believe, despite his
genuine sympathy, to avoid seeing me, considering his attitude
toward me.32 He left the house, carried off by his uncle, who,
having had something very important to say to him and having
very nearly gone down to Doncières on purpose to say it, was be-
side himself with joy at being able to save himself so much exer-
tion. “Ah, if anybody had told me I had only to cross the court-
yard and I would find you here, I would have thought it a huge
joke; as your friend M. Bloch would say, it’s a regular farce.” And
as he disappeared down the stairs with Robert, whom he held by

Chapter 1 371
 The Guermantes Way

33. The duke’s total egotism is seen the shoulder: “All the same,” he went on, “it’s quite clear I must
when he prefers to attend social events have touched the hangman’s rope or something; I do have the
rather than admit that his cousin is
in agony and at the very end of this most astounding luck.” It was not that the Duc de Guermantes
volume, where he exhibits similar be- was ill-­mannered; far from it. But he was one of those men who
havior in relation to Swann’s illness. are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others,33 who
resemble in that respect undertakers and the majority of doctors,
and who, after composing their faces and saying: “This is a very
painful occasion,” and, if need be, embracing you and advising
you to rest, cease to regard a deathbed or a funeral as anything but
a social gathering of a more or less restricted kind at which, with
a joviality that has been checked for a moment only, they scan
the room in search of the person to whom they can talk about
their own little affairs, or ask to introduce them to someone else,
or “offer a lift” in their carriage when it is time to go home. The
Duc de Guermantes, while congratulating himself on the “good
wind” that had blown him into the arms of his nephew, was still
so surprised at the reception—natural as it was—that had been
given him by my mother, that he declared later on that she was as
disagreeable as my father was civil, that she had “mental blanks”
during which she seemed literally not to hear a word you said to
her, and that in his opinion she was out of sorts and perhaps even
was not quite “all there.” At the same time he was quite prepared
(according to what I was told) to put this state of mind down,
in part at any rate, to the “circumstances,” and declared that my
mother had seemed to him greatly “affected” by the event. But he
had still stored up in his limbs all the residue of bows and rever-
ences that he had been prevented from using up, and had so little
idea of the real nature of Mamma’s grief that he asked me, the
day before the funeral, whether I was not doing anything to dis-
tract her.
My grandmother’s brother-­in-­law, who was a monk, and whom
I had never seen, had telegraphed to Austria, where the head of
his order was, and having as a special privilege obtained leave,
arrived that day. Bowed down with grief, he sat by the bedside
reading prayers and meditations from a book, without, however,

372 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

taking his piercing eyes off the invalid’s face. At one point, when
my grandmother was unconscious, the sight of this priest’s grief
began to upset me, and I looked at him tenderly. He appeared sur-
prised by my pity, and then an odd thing happened. He joined his
hands in front of his face, like a man absorbed in painful medi-
tation, but, on the assumption that I would then cease to watch
him, left, as I observed, a tiny chink between his fingers. And at
the moment when my gaze left his face, I saw his sharp eye, which
had been making use of its vantage point behind his hands to ob-
serve whether my sympathy were sincere. He was hidden there as
in the darkness of a confessional. He saw that I was still looking
and at once shut tight the lattice that he had left ajar. I met him
again later, but never has any reference been made by either of us
to that minute. It was tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he
was spying on me. In the priest as in the alienist, there is always
an element of the examining magistrate. Besides, what friend is
there, however cherished, in whose and our common past there
has not been some such episode that we find it convenient to be-
lieve that he must have forgotten?
The doctor gave my grandmother an injection of morphine, and
to make her breathing less painful ordered cylinders of oxygen. My
mother, the doctor, the nursing sister held these in their hands; as
soon as one was exhausted another was put in its place. I had
left the room for a few minutes. When I returned I found my-
self face to face with a miracle. Accompanied by a muted inces-
sant murmur, my grandmother seemed to be addressing us with
a long and blissful chant that filled the room, rapid and musical.
I soon realized that this was scarcely less unconscious, that it was
as purely mechanical as the hoarse rattle that I had heard before
leaving the room. Perhaps to a slight extent it reflected some im-
provement brought about by the morphine. Principally it was
the result (the air not passing quite in the same way through the
bronchial tubes) of a change in the register of her breathing. Re-
leased by the twofold action of the oxygen and the morphine, my
grandmother’s breath no longer labored, no longer groaned, but,

Chapter 1 373
 The Guermantes Way

34. Cambrousse is a familiar and pejora- swift and light, shot like a skater along the delightful stream. Per-
tive term meaning the middle of no- haps with her breath, imperceptible like that of the wind in the
where, the boondocks.
35. That is, to become a peasant or hollow stem of a reed, there were blended in this chant some of
country bumpkin. those more human sighs that, liberated at the approach of death,
make us imagine impressions of suffering or happiness in minds
that already have ceased to feel, and these sighs came now to add
a more melodious accent, but without changing its rhythm, to
the long phrase that rose, mounted still higher, then subsided, to
soar up again, from her alleviated chest in pursuit of the oxygen.
Then, having risen to so high a pitch, having been sustained with
so much vigor, the chant, mingled with a murmur of supplication
from the midst of her ecstasy, seemed at times to stop altogether
like a spring that has ceased to flow.
Françoise, in any great sorrow, felt the need but did not pos-
sess the art—as simple as that need was futile—to give it expres-
sion. Regarding my grandmother’s case as quite hopeless, it was
her own personal impressions that she was impelled to communi-
cate to us. And all that she could do was to repeat: “It makes me
feel very sad” in the same tone in which she would say, when she
had taken too much cabbage soup: “It’s like there’s a load on my
stomach,” sensations both of which were more natural than she
seemed to think. Though so feebly expressed, her grief was never-
theless very great, and was aggravated moreover by her annoyance
that her daughter, detained at Combray (to which this young Pari-
sian now referred as “cambrousse”34 and where she felt herself
growing “pétrousse,”35 in other words fossilized), would not, pre-
sumably, be able to return in time for the funeral ceremony, which
was certain, Françoise felt, to be a superb spectacle. Knowing that
we were not inclined to be expansive, she made Jupien promise at
all costs to keep every evening in the week free. She knew that he
would be engaged elsewhere at the hour of the funeral. She was
determined at least to “go over it all” with him on his return.
For several nights now my father, my grandfather, and one of
our cousins had been keeping vigil and no longer left the house.
Their continuous devotion ended by assuming a mask of indiffer-

374 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ence, and their interminable idleness around the deathbed made

them indulge in that small talk that is an inseparable accompa-
niment of prolonged confinement in a railway carriage. Anyhow,
this cousin (a nephew of my great-­aunt) aroused in me an an-
tipathy as strong as the esteem that he deserved and generally en-
joyed.
He was always “sent for” in times of great trouble, and was so
assiduous in his attentions to the dying that their mourning fami-
lies, on the pretext that he was in delicate health, despite his ro-
bust appearance, his bass voice and bristling beard, invariably be-
sought him, with the customary euphemisms, not to come to the
cemetery. I could tell already that Mamma, who thought of others
in the midst of the most crushing grief, would soon be saying to
him in very different terms what he was in the habit of hearing
said on all such occasions.
“Promise me that you won’t come ‘tomorrow.’ Please, for ‘her
sake.’ At any rate, you won’t go ‘all the way’ to the cemetery. It’s
what she would have wished.”
But there was nothing for it; he was always the first to arrive “at
the house,” by reason of which he had been given, among another
set, the nickname (unknown to us) of “No flowers by request.”
And before attending “everything” he had always “attended to
everything” which entitled him to the formula: “We don’t know
how to thank you.”
“What’s that?” came in a loud voice from my grandfather, who
had grown rather deaf and had failed to catch something that our
cousin had just said to my father.
“Nothing,” answered the cousin. “I was just saying that I’d
heard from Combray this morning. The weather is appalling
down there and here we’ve got too much sun.”
“Yet the barometer is very low,” put in my father.
“Where did you say the weather was bad?” asked my grand-
father.
“At Combray.”
“Ah! I’m not surprised; whenever it’s bad here it’s fine at Com-

Chapter 1 375
 The Guermantes Way

36. The raisonneur is the character in a bray, and vice versa. Good gracious! Speaking of Combray, has
play who seems to act as the spokes- anyone remembered to tell Legrandin?”
person for the author and who usually
has a superior or more impartial view “Yes, don’t worry about that, it’s been done,” said my cousin,
of the action compared with the other whose cheeks, bronzed by an irrepressible growth of beard, smiled
characters. Scott Moncrieff has arguer faintly with the satisfaction of having thought of it.
here, reasoner when the term recurs.
37. A stock character in the Italian com- At this point my father hurried from the room. I supposed
media dell’arte that burlesques the that a sudden change, for better or worse, had occurred. It was
Spanish don and is characterized by simply that Dr. Dieulafoy had just arrived. My father went to
boastfulness and cowardliness.
38. In Molière’s play Le Malade imagi- receive him in the drawing room, like the actor who is to come
naire, there is a Dr. Diafoirus and a next on the stage. We had sent for him not to cure but to cer-
notary named M. Bonnefoy. tify, almost like a notary. Dr. Dieulafoy might indeed have been
a great physician, a marvelous professor; to these two roles, in
which he excelled, he added a third, in which he remained for
forty years without a rival, a part as original as that of the rea-
soner,36 the Scaramouche,37 or the noble father, which consisted
in coming to certify an agony or a death. The mere sound of his
name presaged the dignity with which he would sustain the part,
and when the servant announced: “M. Dieulafoy,” one imagined
oneself at a play by Molière.38 To the dignity of his demeanor
was added, without being conspicuous, the suppleness of a per-
fect figure. A face that in itself appeared too handsome was toned
down by the decorum appropriate to distressing circumstances.
In the majesty of his black frock coat the professor would enter
the room, melancholy without affectation, utter not one word of
condolence that might have been thought insincere, nor commit
the slightest infringement of the rules of tact. At the foot of a
deathbed it was he and not the Duc de Guermantes who was
the great nobleman. Having examined my grandmother without
tiring her, and with an excess of reserve that was an act of cour-
tesy to the doctor who was treating the case, he murmured a few
words to my father, bowed respectfully to my mother, to whom I
felt that my father had positively to restrain himself from saying:
“Professor Dieulafoy.” But already the latter had turned away, not
wishing to importune, and left the room in the most polished
manner conceivable, simply taking with him the sealed envelope

376 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

that was slipped into his hand. He had not appeared to see it,
and we ourselves were left wondering for a moment whether we
had really given it to him, such a conjurer’s nimbleness had he
put into the act of making it vanish without thereby losing any-
thing of the gravity—which was increased rather—of the great
consultant in his long frock coat with its silken lapels, and his
handsome head full of a noble commiseration. The slowness and
vivacity of his movements showed that, even if he had a hundred
other calls to pay, he refused to appear hurried. For he was the em-
bodiment of tact, intelligence, and kindness. That eminent man
is no longer with us. Other physicians, other professors may have
rivaled, may indeed have surpassed him. But the “capacity,” in
which his knowledge, his physical endowments, his distinguished
manners made him triumph, exists no longer for want of any suc-
cessor capable of taking his place. Mamma had not even noticed
M. Dieulafoy, everything that was not my grandmother having
no existence for her. I remember (and here I anticipate) that at
the cemetery, where we saw her, like a supernatural apparition, go
up timidly to the grave and seem to be gazing at a being who had
already flown far away, my father having remarked to her: “Old
Norpois came to the house, to the church, and to the cemetery; he
gave up a most important committee meeting to come; you ought
really to say a word to him, he’ll be very touched if you do,” my
mother, when the ambassador stood before her and bowed, could
do no more than gently incline a face that showed no tears. A
couple of days earlier—to anticipate once again before returning
to where we were just now by the bed on which my grandmother
lay dying—while they were watching by the body, Françoise, who,
not disbelieving entirely in ghosts, was terrified by the least sound,
had said: “I believe that’s her.” But in place of fear it was an inef-
fable sweetness that her words aroused in my mother, who would
have been so glad that the dead should return, to have her mother
with her sometimes still.
To return now to those last hours, “You heard about the tele-
gram her sisters sent us?” my grandfather asked the cousin.

Chapter 1 377
 The Guermantes Way

39. In a letter to a friend in November “Yes, Beethoven,39 they told me about it, it’s worth framing;
1920, Proust, as he does elsewhere in still, I’m not surprised.”
his correspondence, identifies himself
with the Narrator: “My grandmother’s “My poor wife, who was so fond of them, too,” said my grand-
sisters (a little mad if you remember father, wiping away a tear. “We mustn’t blame them. They’re stark
Swann’s Way) did not come to see her mad, both of them, as I’ve always said. What’s the matter now;
because they had discovered a musi-
cian who played Beethoven so well.” aren’t you going on with the oxygen?”
Correspondance 19: 602. My mother spoke:
“Oh, but then Mamma will be having more trouble with her
breathing.”
The doctor reassured her: “Oh, no! The effect of the oxygen will
last a good while yet; we can begin it again presently.”
It seemed to me that he would not have said this of a dying
woman, that if this good effect was to last it meant that we
could still do something to keep her alive. The hiss of the oxygen
ceased for a few moments, but the happy plaint of her breathing
poured out steadily, light, troubled, unfinished, ceaselessly begin-
ning again. Now and then it seemed that all was over, her breath
stopped, whether owing to one of those transpositions to another
octave that occur in the breathing of a sleeper, or else from a
natural intermittence, an effect of the anesthesia, the progress of
asphyxia, some failure of the heart. The doctor stooped to feel my
grandmother’s pulse, but already, as if a tributary were pouring its
current into the dried riverbed, a new chant broke out from the
interrupted measure. And the first was resumed in another pitch
with the same inexhaustible force. Who knows whether, without
my grandmother’s even being conscious of them, a countless
throng of happy and tender memories compressed by suffering
were not escaping from her now, like those lighter gases that had
long been compressed in the cylinders? One would have said that
everything that she had to tell us was pouring out, that it was to
us that she was addressing herself with this prolixity, this earnest-
ness, this effusion. At the foot of the bed, convulsed by every gasp
of this agony, not weeping but now and then drenched with tears,
my mother presented the unreasoning desolation of a leaf that the

378 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

rain lashes and the wind twirls on its stem. They made me dry my 40. Proust’s mother died on September
eyes before I went up to kiss my grandmother. 26, 1905. The following day he wrote
this to Anna de Noailles: “She has died
“But I thought she could no longer see?” said my father. at fifty-­six, looking no more than thirty
“One can never be sure,” replied the doctor. since her illness made her so much
When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quiv- thinner and especially since death re-
stored to her the youthfulness of the
ered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, a reflex perhaps, days before her sorrows; she hadn’t a
or perhaps because certain kinds of affection have their hyper- single white hair.” Proust, Selected Let-
esthesia that recognizes through the veil of unconsciousness what ters, 2: 207.

they barely need senses to enable them to cherish. Suddenly my

grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, like someone strug-
gling to resist an attempt on her life. Françoise could not endure
this sight and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor
had just said I tried to make her leave the room. At that mo-
ment my grandmother opened her eyes. I thrust myself hurriedly
in front of Françoise to hide her tears, while my parents were
speaking to the sufferer. The sound of the oxygen had ceased; the
doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead.
An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and
without causing them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses
that had only begun to turn gray and hitherto had seemed not so
old as my grandmother herself. But now on the contrary it was
they alone that set the crown of age on a face grown young again,
from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swell-
ings, the strains, and the hollows that in the long course of years
had been carved on it by suffering. As at the far-­off time when her
parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features deli-
cately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with
a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent
gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in with-
drawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A
smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that
funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid
her down in the form of a young maiden.40

Chapter 1 379
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 2

A visit from Albertine1—Prospects of a wealthy marriage 1. Of all the chapter headings given by
for several of Saint-­L oup’s friends—The wit of the Guermantes Proust, this is the only one that Scott
Moncrieff retained.
in the presence of the Princesse de Parme—A strange visit 2. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in
from M. de Charlus—I understand his character less C minor, Opus 67. According to Bee-
and less—The duchess’s red shoes thoven’s secretary Anton Schindler,
the composer said of the symphony’s
opening measure, “It is the sound of
Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born destiny knocking on the door.” Some
again; life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succes- Beethoven scholars have questioned
the authenticity of this remark, finding
sion of mild days, there had been a cold fog that had not cleared it too pat.
until nearly midday. A change in the weather is sufficient to create 3. For a similar longing, see Swann’s
the world and ourselves anew. Formerly, when the wind howled in Way, 5.

my chimney, I would listen to the blows that it struck on the iron

trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous bow strokes
with which the C Minor Symphony opens,2 they had been the ir-
resistible calls of a mysterious destiny. Every change in the aspect
of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our de-
sires so as to harmonize with the new form of things. The mist,
from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of
the centrifugal being that one is on fine days, an introverted man,
longing for the chimney corner and the nuptial couch, a shivering
Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve,3 in this different world.
Between the soft gray tint of a morning landscape and the taste
of a cup of chocolate, I tried to account for all the originality
of the physical, intellectual, and moral life that I had taken with
me, about a year earlier, to Doncières, and that, blazoned with
the oblong form of a bare hillside—always present even when it
was invisible—formed in me a series of pleasures entirely distinct
from all others, incommunicable to my friends, in the sense that

381
 The Guermantes Way

the impressions, richly interwoven with one another, that orches-

trated them were a great deal more characteristic of them to my
subconscious mind than any facts that I might have related. From
this point of view the new world in which this morning’s fog had
immersed me was a world already known to me (which only made
it more real) and forgotten for some time (which restored all its
freshness). And I was able to look at several of the pictures of
misty landscapes that my memory had acquired, notably a series
of “Mornings at Doncières,” including my first morning there in
barracks and another, in a neighboring château, where I had gone
with Saint-­L oup to spend twenty-­four hours: in which from the
windows, whose curtains I had drawn back at daybreak, before
getting into bed again, from the first window, a cavalier, in the
second one (on the thin margin of a pond and a wood all the rest
of which was engulfed in the uniform and liquid softness of the
mist) a coachman busy polishing a strap had appeared to me like
those rare figures, scarcely visible to the eye obliged to adapt itself
to the mysterious vagueness of their half-­lights, which emerge
from a faded fresco.
It was from my bed that I was looking this afternoon at these
pictorial memories, for I had gone back to bed to wait until the
hour came at which, taking advantage of the absence of my par-
ents, who had gone for a few days to Combray, I proposed to get
up and go to a little play that was being given that evening in Mme
de Villeparisis’s drawing room. Had they been at home I would
perhaps not have dared to do this; my mother, in the delicacy of
her respect for my grandmother’s memory, wished the tokens of
regret that were paid to it to be freely and sincerely given; she
would not have forbidden me this outing, but she would have
disapproved of it. From Combray, on the other hand, had I con-
sulted her wishes, she would not have replied in a melancholy:
“Do just as you like; you are old enough now to know what is
right or wrong,” but, reproaching herself for having left me alone
in Paris, and measuring my grief by her own, would have wished
for it distractions of a sort that she would have refused to herself,

382 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

and that she persuaded herself that my grandmother, solicitous

above all things for my health and my nervous stability, would
have recommended for me.
That morning the new central heating system had been turned
on for the first time. The disagreeable sound that it let out from
time to time—an intermittent hiccup—had no connection with
my memories of Doncières. But its prolonged encounter, in me
that afternoon, with them was to give it so lasting an affinity with
them that whenever, after succeeding more or less in forgetting it,
I heard the central heating again, it would bring them back to me.
There was no one else in the house but Françoise. The gray
light, falling like a fine rain on the earth, wove without ceasing
a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared
in a silvery sheen. I had flung to the foot of my bed Le Figaro,
for which I had been sending out religiously every morning, ever
since I had sent in an article that it had not yet printed; despite
the absence of the sun, the intensity of the daylight was an in-
dication that we were still only halfway through the afternoon.
The tulle window curtains, vaporous and friable as they would not
have been on a fine day, had that same blend of beauty and fra-
gility that dragonflies’ wings have, and Venetian glass. It depressed
me all the more that I should be spending this Sunday by my-
self because I had sent a note that morning to Mlle de Stermaria.
Robert de Saint-­L oup, whom his mother had at length succeeded
in parting—after painful and abortive attempts—from his mis-
tress, and who immediately afterward had been sent to Morocco
in the hope of his forgetting the one whom he had already for
some little time ceased to love, had sent me a note, which had
reached me the day before, announcing his arrival, presently, in
France on a very short leave. As he would only be passing through
Paris (where his family was doubtless afraid of seeing him renew
relations with Rachel), he informed me, to show me that he had
been thinking of me, that he had met at Tangier Mlle, or rather
Mme (for she had divorced her husband three months after their
marriage) de Stermaria. And Robert, remembering what I had

Chapter 2 383
 The Guermantes Way

told him at Balbec, had asked the young woman, on my behalf,

to arrange a rendezvous. She would be delighted to dine with
me, she had told him, on one of the evenings that, before her re-
turn to Brittany, she would be spending in Paris. He told me to
lose no time in writing to Mme de Stermaria, for she would cer-
tainly have arrived. Saint-­L oup’s letter had come as no surprise
to me, even though I had had no news of him since, at the time
of my grandmother’s illness, he had accused me of perfidy and
treachery. I had understood at once what must have happened.
Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy—she had other reasons
also for wishing me harm—had persuaded her lover that I had
made sly attempts to have relations with her in his absence. It
is probable that he continued to believe in the truth of this alle-
gation, but he had ceased to be in love with her, which meant
that its truth or falsehood had become a matter of complete in-
difference to him, and our friendship alone remained. When, on
meeting him again, I tried to talk to him about his accusations,
he simply gave me a nice, affectionate smile, by which he seemed
to be asking my forgiveness; then he changed the subject. All this
was not to say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasion-
ally when he was in Paris. Those fellow creatures who have played
an important part in our lives rarely disappear from it suddenly
for good. They return to take their old place in it at odd moments
(so much so that some people believe in a renewal of old love) be-
fore leaving it forever. Saint-­L oup’s breach with Rachel had very
soon become less painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure
that was given him by her incessant demands for money. Jealousy,
which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing
many more ingredients than are the other forms of imagination.
If one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four
images, which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such
as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the
Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk is already pretty
full. When one parts from a mistress one would be just as glad,
until one has begun to forget her, that she should not become the

384 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

property of three or four potential protectors whom one sees in

one’s mind’s eye, of whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those
whom one does not so picture count for nothing. Now frequent
demands for money from a cast-­off mistress no more give one a
complete idea of her life than charts showing a high temperature
would of her illness. But the latter would at any rate be an indica-
tion that she was ill, and the former furnish a presumption, vague
enough, it is true, that the forsaken one or forsaker (whichever
she be) cannot have found anything very remarkable in the way
of a rich protector. And so each demand is welcomed with the joy
that a lull produces in the jealous one’s sufferings, while he re-
sponds to it at once by dispatching money, for naturally he does
not like to think of her being in want of anything, except lovers
(one of the three lovers he has in his mind’s eye), until time has
enabled him to regain his composure and he can learn without the
slightest emotion the name of his successor. Sometimes Rachel
came in so late at night that she could ask her former lover’s per-
mission to lie down beside him until the morning. This was a great
comfort to Robert, for it refreshed his memory of how they had,
after all, lived in intimacy together merely to see that even if he
took the greater part of the bed for himself it did not in the least
interfere with her sleep. He realized that she was more comfort-
able, lying close to his body, than she would have been elsewhere,
that she felt herself, by his side—even in a hotel—to be in a bed-
room known of old, in which the force of habit prevails and one
sleeps better. He felt that his shoulders, his legs, all of him were
for her, even when he was unduly restless from insomnia or from
the thought of tasks to be done, so entirely usual that they could
not disturb her, and that the perception of them added still fur-
ther to her sense of repose.
To revert to where we were, I had been all the more aroused by
the letter that Saint-­L oup had written me from Morocco in that I
could read between the lines what he had not dared to write more
explicitly. “You can most certainly ask her to dine in a private
room,” he told me. “She is a charming young person, with a de-

Chapter 2 385
 The Guermantes Way

lightful nature; you will get on splendidly with her, and I am sure
you will have a most pleasant evening together.” Since my parents
were returning at the end of the week on Saturday or Sunday, and
as after that I would be forced to dine every evening at home, I
had written at once to Mme de Stermaria, proposing any evening
that might suit her, up to Friday. A message was brought back that
I would hear from her in writing, about eight o’clock, that very
evening. The time would have passed quickly enough if I had had,
during the afternoon that separated me from her letter, the help
of a visit from anyone else. When the hours pass wrapped in con-
versation one ceases to measure, or indeed to notice them, they
vanish, and suddenly it is a long way beyond the point at which
it escaped you that there reappears before you the nimble truant
time. But if we are alone, our preoccupation, by bringing before
us the still distant and incessantly awaited moment with the fre-
quency and uniformity of a ticking pendulum, divides, or rather
multiplies the hours by all the minutes that, had we been with
friends, we would not have counted. And confronted, by the in-
cessant return of my desire, with the ardent pleasure that I was
going to taste—not for some days though, alas!—in Mme de Ster-
maria’s company, this afternoon, which I would have to spend by
myself, seemed to me very empty and very melancholy.
Every now and then I heard the sound of the elevator coming
up, but it was followed by a second sound, not that for which
I was hoping, namely the sound of its coming to a halt at our
landing, but another very different sound that the elevator made
in continuing its progress to the floors above and that, because it
so often meant the desertion of my floor when I was expecting a
visitor, remained for me at other times, even when I had no wish
to see anyone, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there echoed,
as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement. Weary, resigned,
occupied for several hours still with its immemorial task, the gray
day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it
saddened me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that
knew me no more than would a seamstress who, installed by the

386 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

window so as to see better while she finished her work, paid no

attention to the person present with her in the room. Suddenly,
although I had heard no bell, Françoise opened the door to let in
Albertine, who came forward smiling, silent, plump, containing
in the plenitude of her body, made ready so that I might con-
tinue living them, come in search of me, the days we had spent
together at that Balbec to which I had never since returned. No
doubt, whenever we see again a person with whom our relations—­
however trivial they may have been—are altered, it is like a juxta-
position of two different epochs. For this, we do not require that
a former mistress pay a call upon us as a friend, all that we need
is the visit to Paris of someone whom we had known in the daily
round of some particular kind of life, and that this life should
have ceased for us, were it no more than a week ago. On each of
Albertine’s smiling, questioning, blushing features I could read
the questions: “And Madame de Villeparisis? And the dance in-
structor? And the pâtissier?” When she sat down her back seemed
to be saying: “Gracious! There’s no cliff here; you don’t mind if I
sit down beside you, all the same, as I used to do at Balbec?” She
was like an enchantress handing me a mirror that reflected time.
In this she was like all the people whom we seldom see now but
with whom at one time we lived on more intimate terms. With
Albertine, however, there was something more than this. Cer-
tainly, even at Balbec, in our daily encounters, I had always been
surprised when I caught sight of her, so variable was her appear-
ance from day to day. But now it was difficult to recognize her.
Cleared of the pink vapor that used to bathe them, her features
had emerged like those of a statue. She had another face, or rather
she had a face at last; her body too had grown. There remained
scarcely anything now of the sheath in which she had been envel-
oped and on the surface of which, at Balbec, her future outline
had been barely visible.
This time, Albertine had returned to Paris earlier than usual. As
a rule she did not arrive until the spring, which meant that, already
disturbed for some weeks past by the storms that were beating

Chapter 2 387
 The Guermantes Way

down the first flowers, I did not distinguish, in the pleasure that
I felt, the return of Albertine from that of the fine weather. It was
enough that I should be told that she was in Paris and that she had
called at the house, for me to see her again like a rose flowering
by the sea. I cannot say whether it was the desire for Balbec or for
her that took hold of me then; possibly my desire for her was itself
a lazy, cowardly, and incomplete method of possessing Balbec,
as if to possess a thing materially, to take up residence in a town,
were equivalent to possessing it spiritually. Besides, even materi-
ally, when she was no longer swaying in my imagination before a
horizon of sea but sitting still beside me, she seemed to me often a
very poor specimen of a rose, so poor, indeed, that I would gladly
have shut my eyes in order not to observe this or that blemish of
its petals, and to imagine instead that I was inhaling the salt air
on the beach.
I may say such a thing at this point, although I was not then
aware of what was to happen only later on. Certainly, it is more
reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps
or old snuffboxes, even to paintings or statues. But the example
of other collections should be a warning to us to make changes,
to have not one woman only but several. Those charming associa-
tions that a girl presents with a seashore, with the braided tresses
of a statue, with a church, with an old print, with everything that
makes one love in her, whenever she appears, a charming tableau,
those suggestions are not very stable. Live with a woman con-
stantly and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made
you love her; though I must add that these two sundered ele-
ments can be reunited by jealousy. If, after a long period of life in
common, I was to end by seeing nothing more in Albertine than
an ordinary woman, an intrigue between her and some person
whom she had loved at Balbec would still suffice, perhaps, to re-
incorporate in her, to amalgamate the beach and the unrolling of
the tide. Only, since these secondary suggestions no longer capti-
vate our eyes, it is to the heart that they are perceptible and fatal.
We cannot, under so dangerous a form, regard the renewal of the

388 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

miracle as a thing to be desired. But I am anticipating the course 4. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
of years. And here I need only state my regret that I did not have Flower, 533–36.

the sense simply to have kept my collection of women as people

keep their collections of old lorgnettes, never so complete, in their
cabinet, that there is not room always for another lorgnette new
and rarer still.
Contrary to the usual order of her vacation movements, this
year she had come straight from Balbec, where furthermore she
had not stayed nearly so late as usual. It was a long time since
I had seen her. And as I did not know even by name the people
with whom she was in the habit of mixing in Paris, I could form
no impression of her during the periods in which she abstained
from coming to see me. These lasted often for quite a time. Then,
one fine day, in would burst Albertine, whose rosy apparitions and
silent visits left me little if any better informed as to what she
might have been doing in an interval that remained plunged in
that darkness of her hidden life that my eyes felt little anxiety to
pierce.
This time, however, certain signs seemed to indicate that some
new experience must have entered into that life. And yet, perhaps,
all that one was entitled to conclude from them was that girls
change very rapidly at the age that Albertine had now reached. For
example, her intelligence was now more in evidence, and on my re-
minding her of the day when she had insisted with so much ardor
on the superiority of her idea of making Sophocles write: “My
dear Racine,” she was the first to laugh wholeheartedly. “Andrée
was quite right; it was stupid of me,” she admitted. “Sophocles
ought to have begun: ‘Monsieur.’” I replied that the “Monsieur,”
and “Cher Monsieur,” of Andrée were no less comic than her own
“My dear Racine,” or Gisèle’s “My dear Friend,” but that, after
all, the really stupid people were the professors who still made
Sophocles write letters to Racine.4 Here, however, Albertine was
unable to follow me. She could not see in what the stupidity con-
sisted; her intelligence was opening up, but had not fully devel-
oped. There were other more attractive novelties in her; I sensed,

Chapter 2 389
 The Guermantes Way

in this same pretty girl who had just sat down by my bed, some-
thing that was different; and in those lines that, in one’s eyes and
facial features, express one’s usual volition, a change of front, a
partial conversion, as though there had now been shattered those
resistances against which I had hurled myself at Balbec, one eve-
ning, now remote in time, on which we formed a couple symmet-
rical with but the converse of the one we formed this afternoon,
since then it had been she who was lying down and I by her bed-
side. Wishing and not daring to ascertain whether now she would
let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to
stay a little longer. This was a concession not very easy to obtain,
for although she had nothing to do (otherwise she would have
rushed from the house), she was a person methodical in her habits
and moreover not very gracious toward me and moreover scarcely
seemed to enjoy my company. And yet each time, after looking at
her watch, she sat down again at my request until finally she had
spent several hours with me without my having asked her for any-
thing; the things I was saying to her followed logically those that
I had said during the preceding hours, and bore no relation to
what I was thinking about, to what I desired from her, remained
indefinitely parallel to those things. There is nothing like desire
for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance
to what one has on one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as
though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects abso-
lutely alien to the one that preoccupies us. We continue chatting,
whereas the sentence we would like to utter would by now have
been accompanied by a gesture, supposing that—to give ourselves
the pleasure of immediate action and to gratify the curiosity we
feel as to the reactions that will follow it—without a word said,
without even a by-­your-­leave, we have not already made this ges-
ture. Certainly I was not in the least in love with Albertine; child
of the mists outside, she could merely content the imaginative
desire that the change of weather had awakened in me and that
was midway between the desires that are satisfied by the arts of
the kitchen and of monumental sculpture respectively, for it made

390 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

me dream simultaneously of mingling with my flesh a substance 5. Genesis 2:21–22. See Swann’s Way, 5.
different and warm, and of attaching at some point to my out- 6. When Vesuvius erupted on August
24, a.d. 79, the lava engulfed the flour-
stretched body a body divergent, as the body of Eve barely holds ishing Roman towns of Pompei and
by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost Herculaneum. In excavations, winged
perpendicular, in those Romanesque bas-­reliefs on the church at cupids were found on frescoes discov-
ered in both towns.
Balbec that represent in so noble and so reposeful a fashion, still 7. The Fontainebleau golf club opened
almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman;5 God in them in 1909. Fontainebleau is a commune
is everywhere followed, as by two ministers, by two little angels in about thirty miles from Paris. It has a
beautiful forest and a famous château
whom one recognizes—like winged, swarming summer creatures built by François I that was a favorite of
that winter has surprised and spared—cupids from Herculaneum, Napoléon’s.
still surviving well into the thirteenth century,6 and winging their 8. On February 6, 1897, Proust fought
a duel with Jean Lorrain. His sec-
last slow flight, weary but never failing in the grace that might be onds were Gustave de Borda, who had
expected of them, over the whole front of the porch. the reputation of being a “marvelous
As for this pleasure, which by accomplishing my desire would duelist,” and the renowned painter Jean
Béraud (1849–1935). See Carter, Marcel
have set me free from this reverie and which I would have sought Proust, 215, 234–36.
quite as readily from any other pretty woman, had I been asked
upon what—in the course of this endless chatter throughout
which I took care to keep from Albertine the one thing that was
on my mind—was based my optimistic hypothesis with regard to
her possible complaisance, I would perhaps have answered that
this hypothesis was due (while the forgotten outlines of Alber-
tine’s voice retraced for me the contour of her personality) to the
appearance of certain words that did not form part of her vocabu-
lary, or at least not in the meaning that she now gave them. Thus
when she said to me that Elstir was stupid and I protested:
“You don’t understand,” she replied, smiling, “I mean that he
was stupid in that circumstance, but I know perfectly well that
he’s someone who is quite distinguished.”
Similarly, wishing to say of the Fontainebleau golf club7 that it
was elegant, she declared: “It’s quite a selection.”
Speaking of a duel that I had fought,8 she said of my seconds:
“What very choice seconds,” and looking at my face confessed
that she would like to see me “wear a moustache.” She even went
so far (and then my chances appeared to me very great) as to an-
nounce, in a phrase of which I would have sworn that she was

Chapter 2 391
 The Guermantes Way

9. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–82), ignorant a year earlier, that since she had last seen Gisèle there had
English naturalist, author of The Origin passed a certain “lapse of time.” This was not to say that Albertine
of the Species by Means of Natural Selec-
tion, or the Preservation of Favored Races had not already possessed, when I was at Balbec, a quite adequate
in the Struggle for Life (1859). This work assortment of those expressions that reveal at once that one comes
was translated into French in 1862. from a well-­to-­do family, and which, year by year, a mother passes
on to her daughter just as she bestows on her, gradually, as the girl
grows up, on important occasions, her own jewels. It was evident
that Albertine had ceased to be a little girl when one day, to ex-
press her thanks for a present that a strange lady had given her, she
had said: “I am quite overwhelmed.” Mme Bontemps could not
help looking across at her husband, whose comment was:
“Well, upon my word, and she’s not quite fourteen.”
Her more pronounced nubility was evident when Albertine,
speaking of another girl who was ill-­behaved, said: “One can’t even
tell whether she’s pretty, she paints her face a foot thick.” Finally,
though still a girl, she already displayed the manner of a grown
woman of her upbringing and station when she said, of someone
whose face twitched: “I can’t look at him, because it makes me
want to do the same,” or, if someone else were being imitated:
“The absurd thing about it is that when you imitate her voice you
look exactly like her.” All these are drawn from the common trea-
sury. But it did not seem to me possible that Albertine’s natural
environment could have supplied her with “distinguished,” used
in the sense in which my father would say of a colleague whom
he had not actually met, but whose intellectual attainments he
had heard praised: “It appears he’s quite a distinguished person.”
“Selection,” even when used of a golf club, seemed to me as in-
compatible with the Simonet family as it would be if preceded
by the adjective “natural,” with a text published centuries before
the researches of Darwin.9 “Lapse of time” struck me as being of
better augury still. Finally there appeared the evidence of certain
upheavals, the nature of which was unknown to me, but sufficient
to justify me in all my hopes when Albertine announced, with the
satisfaction of a person whose opinion is by no means to be de-
spised:

392 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“That is, to my mind, the best thing that could possibly happen. 10. This is the text (Luke 1:46–55) of
I regard it as the best solution, the stylish way out.” the canticle of the Blessed Virgin Mary
sung at vespers. It begins: “My soul
This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit giving one doth magnify the Lord.”
to suspect such capricious wanderings over terrains hitherto un-
known to her, that on hearing the words “to my mind” I drew
Albertine toward me, and at “I regard” sat her down on my bed.
No doubt it does happen that women of moderate culture, on
marrying well-­read men, receive such expressions as a part of their
dowry. And shortly after the metamorphosis that follows the wed-
ding night, when they begin to pay calls, and talk shyly to their
girlhood friends, one notices with surprise that they have become
women if, in deciding that some person is intelligent, they sound
both “l”s in the word; but that is precisely the sign of a change of
state, and I could see a world of difference when I thought of the
vocabulary of the Albertine I had known of old—a vocabulary in
which the most daring flights were to say of any unusual person:
“He’s a type,” or, if you suggested a game of cards to her: “I’ve no
money to lose,” or again, if any of her friends were to reproach her,
in terms which she felt to be undeserved: “That really is magnifi-
cent!” expressions dictated in such cases by a sort of middle-­class
tradition almost as old as the Magnificat itself,10 and one that a
girl slightly out of temper and confident that she is in the right
employs, as the saying is, “quite naturally,” that is to say because
she has learned the words from her mother, just as she has learned
to say her prayers or to greet a friend. All these expressions Mme
Bontemps had imparted to her at the same time as her hatred
of the Jews and her respect for black, which was always suitable
and becoming, indeed without any formal instruction, but as the
piping of the parent goldfinches serves as a model for that of the
young goldfinches, recently hatched, so that they in turn grow
into true goldfinches also. But when all was said, “selection” ap-
peared to me of alien growth and “I regard” encouraging. Alber-
tine was no longer the same; which meant that she would not per-
haps act, would not react in the same way.
Not only did I no longer feel any love for her, but I had no

Chapter 2 393
 The Guermantes Way

11. A mousmé is a girl or young woman. longer to fear, as I might have at Balbec, the risk of shattering in
The word was introduced by Pierre Loti her an affection for myself, which no longer existed. There could
in his 1887 novel Madame Chrysan-
thème and is a French transliteration be no doubt that she had long since become quite indifferent to
of the Japanese word musume. À la me. I was well aware that to her I was in no sense a member now of
recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli- the “little band” into which I had at one time so anxiously sought
mard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 653,
n. 1. and had then been so happy to have secured admission. Besides,
12. Scott Moncrieff used the identical as she had no longer even, as in Balbec days, an air of frank good
English cognate for Proust’s horripliant. nature, I felt no serious scruples: still I believe that what made me
The word, rare in both French and
English, means to greatly exasperate or finally decide was another philological discovery. As, continuing
to make one’s flesh crawl. to add fresh links to the external chain of remarks behind which
I hid my intimate desire, I spoke, having Albertine secure now
on the corner of my bed, of one of the girls of the little band,
one smaller than the rest, whom, nevertheless, I had thought
quite pretty, “Yes,” answered Albertine, “she reminds me of a little
mousmé.”11 Clearly, when I first knew Albertine, the word mousmé
was unknown to her. It is probable that, had things followed their
normal course, she would never have learned it, and for my part
I would have seen no cause for regret in that, for no word in the
language is more horripliant.12 The mere sound of it makes one’s
teeth ache as they do when one has put too large a spoonful of ice
in one’s mouth. But coming from Albertine, pretty as she was, not
even “mousmé” could strike me as unpleasant. On the contrary, I
felt it to be a revelation, if not of an external initiation, at any rate
of an inward evolution. Unfortunately, it was now time for me to
bid her goodbye, if I wished her to reach home in time for her
dinner, and myself to be out of bed and dressed in time for my
own. It was Françoise who was preparing it; she did not like for
it to be kept waiting, and must already have found it an infringe-
ment of one of the articles of her code that Albertine, in the ab-
sence of my parents, should be paying me so prolonged a visit, and
one that was going to make everything late. But before mousmé all
these arguments fell to the ground and I hastened to say:
“Just imagine, I’m not in the least ticklish; you can go on tick-
ling me for an hour on end and I won’t even feel it.”
“Really?”

394 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“I assure you.” 13. Plato (429–347 b.c.) was a Greek

She understood, doubtless, that this was the awkward expres- philosopher who was the disciple of
Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle.
sion of a desire on my part, for, like a person who offers to give Proust is thinking perhaps of the cre-
you an introduction for which you have not dared to ask, though ation myth put forth by Aristophanes
what you have said has shown him that it would be of great ser- in Plato’s Symposium. In the begin-
ning, there were three sexes: some
vice to you: were male, some were female, and
“Would you like me to try?” she inquired, with womanly some were hermaphrodites. The males
meekness. descended from the sun, the females
from the earth, and the hermaphrodites
“Just as you like, but you would be more comfortable if you lay from the moon.
down properly on the bed.”
“Like that?”
“No; get right on top.”
“You’re sure I’m not too heavy?”
As she uttered these words the door opened and Françoise,
carrying a lamp, entered. Albertine had just time to sit back down
on her chair. Perhaps Françoise had chosen this moment to con-
found us, having been listening at the door or even peeping through
the keyhole. But there was no need for me to suppose anything of
the sort; she might have scorned to assure herself, by the use of her
eyes, of what her instinct must plainly enough have detected, for
by dint of living with me and my parents her fears, her prudence,
her alertness, her cunning had ended by giving her that instinctive
and almost prophetic knowledge of us all that the mariner has of
the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and, of the malady, if not the
physician, often at any rate the patient. The amount of knowledge
that she managed to acquire would have astounded a stranger, and
with as good reason as does the advanced state of certain arts and
sciences among the ancients, seeing that there was practically no
source of information open to them. (Her sources were no larger;
they were a few casual remarks forming barely a twentieth part of
our conversation at dinner, caught on the wing by the butler and
inaccurately transmitted to the kitchen.) Again, her mistakes were
due, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato13 believed, rather
to a false conception of the world and to preconceived ideas than
to the insufficiency of the materials at her disposal. It is thus that

Chapter 2 395
 The Guermantes Way

14. We know from a draft that Proust even in our own day, it has been possible for the most important
is thinking of the entomologist Jean-­ discoveries about the habits of insects to have been made by a sci-
Henri Fabre, whose work on the bur-
rowing wasp Proust used as an analogy entist14 who had access to no laboratory and used no instruments
in Swann’s Way (141) to describe of any sort. But if the drawbacks arising from her menial position
Françoise’s cruelty to other servants. had not prevented her from acquiring a stock of learning indis-
Fabre (1823–1915) published the ten-­
volume Souvenirs entomologiques from pensable to the art that was its ultimate goal—and which con-
1879 to 1907. sisted in putting us to confusion by communicating to us the re-
sults of her discoveries—the limitations under which she worked
had done more; in this case the impediment, not content with
merely not paralyzing the flight of her imagination, had greatly
strengthened it. Of course Françoise neglected no artificial de-
vices, those for example of diction and attitude. Since (if she never
believed what we said to her, hoping that she would believe it)
she admitted without any shadow of doubt the truth of anything
that any person of her own condition in life might tell her, how-
ever absurd, which might at the same time prove shocking to our
ideas, just as her way of listening to our assertions bore witness
to her incredulity, so the accents in which she reported (the use
of indirect speech enabling her to hurl the most deadly insults at
us with impunity) the narrative of a cook who had told her how
she had threatened her employers, and won from them, by calling
them “dung” in front of everyone, any number of privileges and
concessions, showed that the story was to her as gospel. Françoise
went so far as to add: “I’m sure, if I had been the mistress I would
have been quite vexed.” In vain might we, despite our scant sym-
pathy at first with the lady on the fourth floor, shrug our shoul-
ders, as though at an unlikely fable, at this report of so shocking
an example; in making it the tone of the teller was able to speak
with the crushing, the lacerating force of the most unquestion-
able, most irritating affirmation.
But above all, just as writers often attain to a power of con-
centration from which they would have been dispensed under
a system of political liberty or literary anarchy, when they are
bound by the tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by
the severity of prosodic laws or of a state religion, so Françoise,

396 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

not being able to reply to us in an explicit fashion, spoke like 15. In Greek mythology, Tiresias is
Tiresias15 and would have written like Tacitus.16 She managed to a blind prophet and a most revered
citizen of Thebes.
embody everything that she could not express directly in a sen- 16. Proust’s text contains discreet allu-
tence for which we could not find fault with her without accusing sions to the theme of sexual ambiva-
ourselves, indeed in less than a sentence, in a silence, in the way lence, preparing thus for developments
to come in Sodom and Gomorrah
in which she placed an object. and The Captive. Tiresias was a man
Thus when I happened to leave inadvertently on my table, changed into a woman who then be-
among a pile of other letters, one that it was imperative that she came a man again, and thus was con-
sidered the only person capable of re-
should not see, because, let us say, it referred to her with a ma- solving the dispute between Zeus and
levolence that afforded a presumption of the same feeling toward Hera over who, between a man and a
her in the recipient as in the writer, that evening, if I came home woman, feels the most pleasure in sex.
Tiresias answered that on a scale of
feeling uneasy and went straight to my room, there on top of my ten the woman gets nine parts of plea-
letters, neatly arranged in a symmetrical pile, the compromising sure to the man’s one. Françoise thus
document caught my eye as it could not possibly have failed to combines the enigmatic style of the
clairvoyant with the concision of the
catch the eye of Françoise, placed by her right at the top, almost Roman historian Tacitus. Publius Cor-
apart from the rest, in a prominence that was a form of speech, nelius Tacitus (a.d. 55?–­120?) wrote in
that had an eloquence all its own, and, as I stood in the doorway, a concise, expressive, and often candid
style and was often nostalgic for an-
made me shudder like a cry. She excelled in the preparation of cient liberties and virtues.
these stage effects, intended so to enlighten the spectator, in her 17. Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905) was
absence, that he already knew that she knew everything when in an English actor of the Victorian era
who distinguished himself in Shake-
due course she made her entry. She possessed, for thus making an speare’s plays. He was the first actor to
inanimate object speak, the art, at once inspired and painstaking, be awarded a knighthood.
of Irving17 or Frédéric Lemaître.18 On this occasion, holding over 18. The actor Antoine Louis Prosper Le-
maître, called Frédéric Lemaître (1800–
Albertine and myself the lighted lamp whose searching beams 1876), played in the great Romantic
missed none of the still visible depressions that the girl’s body dramas, such as Lucrèce Borgia and Ruy
had hollowed in the quilt, Françoise made one think of a pic- Blas, and was closely linked to the the-
atrical projects of Honoré de Balzac.
ture of Justice Throwing Light upon Crime.19 Albertine’s face did 19. This is apparently a reference to the
not suffer by this illumination. It revealed on her cheeks the same painting La Justice et la Vengeance divine
sunny burnish that had charmed me at Balbec. This face of Alber- poursuivant le Crime (1808) by Pierre-­
Paul Prud’hon (1758–1823). In Proust’s
tine, the general effect of which sometimes was, out of doors, a day it hung in the Salon des Sept
sort of milky pallor, now showed, according as the lamp shone Cheminées of the Louvre. Vengeance
on them, surfaces so dazzlingly, so uniformly colored, so firm and carries a flaming torch in her left hand;
Justice carries a sword in her right hand
so smooth that one might have compared them to the sustained and the scales of judgment in her left.
flesh tints of certain flowers. Taken aback meanwhile by the unex-
pected entry of Françoise, I exclaimed:

Chapter 2 397
 The Guermantes Way

20. In the original, the word is éteindre “What? The lamp already? Good heavens, the light is so bright!”
(to extinguish) that Françoise conju- My object, as may be imagined, was by the second of these ex-
gates incorrectly; Albertine whispers
the correct ending, teigne, which, as a clamations to dissimulate my confusion, by the first to excuse my
separate word means figuratively an ill-­ lateness in rising. Françoise replied with a cruel ambiguity:
tempered woman. “Do you want me to extinglish it?”
“—guish!”20 Albertine murmured in my ear, leaving me
charmed by the familiar alertness with which, taking me at once
for teacher and for accomplice, she insinuated this psychological
affirmation as though asking a grammatical question.
When Françoise had left the room and Albertine was seated
once again on my bed:
“Do you know what I’m afraid of?” I asked her. “It is that if we
go on like this I may not be able to resist the temptation to kiss
you.”
“That would be a fine pity.”
I did not respond at once to this invitation. Another man
might even have found it superfluous, for Albertine’s way of pro-
nouncing her words was so carnal, so seductive that merely in
speaking to you she seemed to be caressing you. A word from her
was a favor, and her conversation covered you with kisses. And yet
it was highly pleasing to me, this invitation. It would have been
so, indeed, coming from any pretty girl of Albertine’s age; but that
Albertine should be now so accessible to me gave me more than
pleasure, brought before my eyes a series of images that bore the
stamp of beauty. I remembered the Albertine first of all on the
beach, almost painted upon a background of sea, having for me
no more real an existence than those theatrical tableaux in which
one does not know whether one is looking at the actress herself
who is supposed to appear, at an understudy who for the moment
is taking her principal’s part, or simply a projection. Then the real
woman had detached herself from the luminous beam, had come
toward me, with the sole result that I had been able to see that she
had nothing in real life of that amorous facility that one supposed
to be stamped upon her in the magic tableau. I had learned that
it was not possible to touch her, to kiss her, that one might only

398 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

talk to her, that for me she was no more a woman than the clusters 21. This anticipates the subject matter
of jade grapes, an inedible decoration at one time in fashion on of The Captive and The Fugitive.
22. In this sentence Proust switches
dinner tables, are really grapes. And now she was appearing to me from the third person (on) to the
on a third plane, real as in the second experience that I had had of second person (vous), which seems to
her but complaisant as in the first; complaisant, and all the more make it more personal to the Narrator.

deliciously so in that I had so long imagined that she was not. My

surplus knowledge of life (of a life less uniform, less simple than
I had at first supposed it to be) inclined me p ­ rovisionally toward
agnosticism. What can one positively affirm, when the thing that
one thought probable at first has then shown itself to be false
and in the third instance turns out true? (And alas, I was not yet
at the end of my discoveries with regard to Albertine.)21 In any
case, even if there had not been the romantic attraction of this
disclosure of a greater wealth of planes revealed one after another
by life (an attraction the opposite of that which Saint-­L oup had
felt during our dinners at Rivebelle on recognizing beneath the
mask with which the course of existence had superimposed on a
calm face, features to which his lips had once been pressed), the
knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s cheeks was a possible thing
was for me a pleasure perhaps greater even than that of kissing
them. What a difference there is between possessing a woman to
whom one applies one’s body alone, because she is no more than
a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl whom one used to see on
the beach with her friends on certain days without even knowing
why one saw her on those days and not on others, which made
one tremble to think that one might not see her again. Life had
obligingly revealed to you22 in its whole extent the novel of this
little girl, had lent you, for the study of her, first one optical in-
strument, then another, and had added to carnal desire an ac-
companiment that multiplies it a hundredfold and diversifies it
with those other desires, more spiritual and less easily assuaged,
that do not emerge from their torpor and leave carnal desire to
go on alone, when it aims only at the conquest of a piece of flesh,
but which, to gain possession of a whole tract of memories from
which they have felt nostalgically exiled, rise in a tempest around

Chapter 2 399
 The Guermantes Way

23. Proust used a similar analogy in a about it, enlarge, extend it, are unable to follow it to the ful-
letter of July 1912 to Mme de Caillavet fillment, to the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it
(née Jeanne Pouquet) regarding her
daughter Simone. Simone is the model is looked for, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire
for Mlle de Saint-­Loup, who appears in halfway and at the moment of recollection, of return, provide it
Time Regained. “My memory and my anew with their escort; to kiss, instead of the cheeks of the first
imagination offer me from time to time
stereoscopic sessions of your daugh- comer, however cool and fresh they might be, but anonymous,
ter’s smile and gramophone records of without mystery, without glamor, those of which I had so long
her voice.” Proust, Selected Letters 3: 79. been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor of a color
Jeanne was one of the main inspira-
tions for the character of Gilberte. on which I had endlessly gazed. One has seen a woman, a mere
image in the decorative setting of life, like Albertine, silhouetted
against the sea, and then one has been able to take that image,
to detach it, to bring it close to oneself, gradually to discern its
volume, its colors, as though one had placed it behind the lens
of a stereoscope.23 It is for this reason that the women who are
somewhat difficult, whom one cannot possess at once, of whom
one does not indeed know at first whether one will ever possess
them, are alone interesting. For to know them, to approach them,
to conquer them is to make vary in form, in dimensions, in re-
lief the human image, is a lesson in relativity in the appreciation
of a body, of a woman beautiful to behold afresh when she has
resumed the slender proportions of a silhouette in the setting of
one’s life. The women one meets first of all in a brothel are of no
interest because they remain invariable.
In addition, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her,
all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particu-
larly fond. I felt that it was possible for me, by kissing the girl’s
two cheeks, to kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.
“If you really don’t mind my kissing you, I would rather put
it off for a little and choose a good moment. Only you mustn’t
forget that you’ve said I may. I will want a voucher: ‘Valid for one
kiss.’”
“Will I have to sign it?”
“But if I took it now, would I be entitled to another later on?”
“You do make me laugh with your vouchers; I will issue a new
one every now and then.”

400 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“Tell me; just one thing more. You know, at Balbec, before I 24. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
got to know you, you used often to have a hard, calculating look; Flower, 404.
25. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
could you tell me what you were thinking about when you looked Flower, 557.
like that?”
“No; I don’t remember at all.”
“Wait; this may remind you: one day your friend Gisèle jumped
with her feet together over the chair an old gentleman was sitting
in.24 Try to remember what was in your mind at that moment.”
“Gisèle was the one we saw least of; she did belong to the band,
I suppose, but not properly. I expect I thought that she was very
ill-­bred and common.”
“Oh, is that all?”
I would certainly have liked, before kissing her, to be able to
fill her again with the mystery that she had had for me on the
beach before I knew her, to find latent in her the place in which
she had lived earlier still; in its place at least, if I knew nothing of
it, I could substitute all my memories of our life at Balbec, the
sound of the waves rolling up and breaking beneath my window,
the shouts of the children. But when I let my eyes glide over the
charming pink globe of her cheeks, the gently curving surfaces
of which ran up to expire beneath the first foothills of her beau-
tiful black tresses, which ran in undulating mountain chains,
thrust out escarped ramparts, and molded the hollows and ridges
of their valleys, I could not help saying to myself: “Now at last,
after failing at Balbec,25 I am going to learn the fragrance of the
secret rose that blooms in Albertine’s cheeks. And, since the
cycles through which we are able to make things and people pass
in the course of our existence are comparatively few, perhaps I
ought now to regard mine as nearing its end when, having made
to emerge from its distant frame the flowering face that I had
chosen from among all others, I will have brought it into this new
plane in which I will at last have knowledge of it by my lips.” I
told myself this because I believed that there was such a thing as
knowledge acquired by the lips; I told myself that I was going to
know the taste of this fleshly rose, because I had never stopped to

Chapter 2 401
 The Guermantes Way

26. In Venice, the Piazzetta is an open think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary in structure
square that connects the Piazza, the than the sea urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain
enclosed Saint Mark’s Square, with
the sea. number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will
27. The church of Santa Maria della serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and
Salute, which dates from the seven- thereby arrives perhaps at a slightly more satisfying result than if
teenth century, is on the right bank
of the Grand Canal, not far from the he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. But a
Piazzetta. pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever
whets the appetite, must be content, without ever understanding
their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming
over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the im-
penetrable but irresistible cheek. Besides, at such moments, at the
actual contact with the flesh, the lips, even supposing them to be-
come more expert and better endowed, could taste no better prob-
ably the savor that nature prevents their ever actually grasping, for,
in that desolate zone in which they are unable to find their proper
nourishment, they are alone; the sense of sight, then that of smell
have long since deserted them. At first, as my mouth began gradu-
ally to approach the cheeks that my eyes had suggested to it that it
should kiss, my eyes, changing their position, saw a different pair
of cheeks; the neck, studied at closer range and as though through
a magnifying glass showed in its coarse grain a robustness that
modified the character of the face.
Apart from the most recent applications of the art of photog-
raphy—which set crouching at the foot of a cathedral all the
houses that so often, when we stood near them, have appeared
to us to reach almost to the height of the towers, drill and de-
ploy like a regiment, in file, in open order, in serried masses, the
same monuments, bring together the two columns on the Piaz-
zetta26 that a moment ago were so far apart, thrust away the ad-
joining dome of the Salute,27 and in a pale and toneless back-
ground manage to include a whole immense horizon within the
span of a bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the leaves
of a tree that stands in the foreground and, in a more vigorous
tone, give successively as a frame to the same church the arcades
of all the others—I can think of nothing that can so effectively as a

402 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

kiss evoke from what we believe to be a thing with one definite as- 28. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
pect, the hundred other things which it may equally well be since Flower, 556.

each is relative to a perspective no less legitimate. In short, just as

at Balbec Albertine had often appeared to me different, so now,
as if, wildly accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective
and changes of coloring that a person presents to us in the course
of our various encounters with her, I had sought to contain them
all in the space of a few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally
the phenomenon that diversifies the individuality of a fellow crea-
ture, and to draw out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the
possibilities that it contains, in this brief passage of my lips toward
her cheek it was ten Albertines that I saw; this one girl being like
a goddess with several heads, the one that I had last seen, if I tried
to approach it, gave place to another. At least so long as I had not
touched it, that head, I could still see it, a faint perfume reached
me from it. But alas—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and
eyes are as ill placed as our lips are shaped—suddenly my eyes
ceased to see; next, my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer
perceived any odor, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea
of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these detest-
able signs, that at last I was in the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.
Was it because we were enacting (as may be illustrated by the
rotation of a solid body) the converse of our scene together at
Balbec,28 because it was I, now, who was lying in bed and she who
sat beside me, capable of evading any brutal attack and of dictating
her pleasure to me, that she allowed me to take so easily now what
she had refused me on the former occasion with so forbidding a
look? (No doubt from that earlier look the voluptuous expression
that her face assumed now at the approach of my lips differed only
by an infinitesimal deviation of its lines but one in which may be
contained all the disparity that there is between the gesture of fin-
ishing off a wounded man and that of bringing him succor, be-
tween a sublime and a hideous portrait.) Not knowing whether I
had to give the credit, and to feel grateful for this change of atti-
tude to some unwitting benefactor who in these last months, in

Chapter 2 403
 The Guermantes Way

29. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in Paris or at Balbec, had been working on my behalf, I supposed
Flower, 73–74. that the respective positions in which we were now placed was the
principal cause of this change. It was quite another explanation,
however, that Albertine offered me; precisely this: “Oh, well, you
see, that time at Balbec I didn’t know you properly. For all I knew,
you might have meant mischief.” This argument left me in per-
plexity. Albertine was no doubt sincere in advancing it. So difficult
is it for a woman to recognize in the movements of her limbs, in
the sensations felt by her body in the course of a tête-­à-­tête with
a male friend, the unknown sin into which she would tremble to
think that a stranger was planning her fall.
In any case, whatever the modifications that had occurred at
some recent time in her life (and might perhaps have explained
why it was that she now readily accorded to my momentary and
purely physical desire what at Balbec she had with horror refused
to allow to my love), another far more surprising manifested itself
in Albertine that same evening as soon as her caresses had pro-
cured in me the satisfaction that she could not have failed to
notice, which, indeed, I had been afraid might provoke in her
the instinctive movement of revulsion and offended modesty that
Gilberte had given at a corresponding moment behind the clump
of laurels in the Champs-­Élysées.29
The exact opposite happened. Already, when I had first made
her lie on my bed and had begun to caress her, Albertine had as-
sumed an air that I did not remember in her, of docile goodwill, of
an almost childish simplicity. Obliterating every trace of her cus-
tomary preoccupations and pretensions, the moment preceding
pleasure, similar in that to the moment that follows death, had
restored to her rejuvenated features what seemed like the inno-
cence of earliest childhood. And no doubt everyone whose spe-
cial talent is suddenly brought into play becomes modest, dili-
gent, and charming; especially if by this talent he knows that he
is giving us a great pleasure, he is himself happy by it and wants
to give it to us in full. But in this new expression on Albertine’s
face there was more than a mere profession of disinterestedness,

404 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

conscience, generosity, there was a sort of conventional and unex- 30. See Swann’s Way, 172–73, 181.
pected devotion; and it was farther than to her own childhood, it
was to the infancy of her race that she had reverted. Very different
from myself, who had looked for nothing more than a physical
alleviation, which I had finally secured, Albertine seemed to feel
that it would indicate a certain coarseness on her part were she to
seem to believe that this material pleasure could be unaccompa-
nied by a moral sentiment or was to be regarded as terminating
anything. She, who had been in so great a hurry a moment ago,
now, presumably because she felt that kisses implied love and that
love took precedence of all other duties, said when I reminded her
of her dinner:
“Oh, but that doesn’t matter in the least; I have plenty of time.”
She seemed embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going
immediately after what had happened, embarrassed from a sense
of propriety, just as Françoise when, without feeling thirsty, she
had felt herself bound to accept with a seemly gaiety the glass of
wine that Jupien offered her, would never have dared to leave him
as soon as the last drops were drained, however urgent the call
of duty. Albertine—and this was perhaps, with another that we
will learn in due course, one of the reasons that had made me un-
consciously desire her—was one of the incarnations of the little
French peasant whose type may be seen in stone at Saint-­André-­
des-­Champs.30 As in Françoise, who presently, nevertheless,
was to become her deadly enemy, I recognized in her a courtesy
toward the host and the stranger, a sense of decency, of respect for
the bedside.
Françoise who, after the death of my aunt, felt obliged to speak
only in a plaintive tone, would, in the months that preceded her
daughter’s marriage, have been quite shocked if, when the young
couple walked out together, the girl had not taken her lover’s arm.
Albertine lying motionless beside me said:
“What nice hair you have; what nice eyes; you are a dear boy.”
When, after pointing out to her that it was getting late, I
added: “You don’t believe me?” she replied, what was perhaps true

Chapter 2 405
 The Guermantes Way

31. Proust himself was subject to such but could be so only since the minute before and for the next few
fits of hilarity, which became a social hours:
embarrassment for him. See Carter,
Marcel Proust, 206. “I always believe you.”
32. The avenue de Messine, in the She spoke to me of myself, my family, my social position. She
eighth arrondissement, runs from the said: “Oh, I know your parents know some very nice people. You
boulevard Haussmann to the rue de
Lisbonne. It is named for the Sicilian are a friend of Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage.” For a mo-
city Messina. ment these names conveyed absolutely nothing to me. But sud-
33. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in denly I remembered that I had indeed played as a child in the
Flower, 461–62.
Champs-­Élysées with Robert Forestier, whom I had never seen
since then. As for Suzanne Delage, she was the great-­niece of
Mme Blandais, and I had once been due to go to a dancing lesson
and even to take a small part in a play that was being performed
in her mother’s drawing room. But the fear of being sent into
fits of laughter,31 and a nosebleed, had made me decline, so that
I had never set eyes on her. I had at the most a vague idea that I
had once heard that the Swanns’ governess with the feather in her
hat had at one time been with the Delages, but perhaps it was
only a sister of this governess, or a friend. I protested to Albertine
that Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage occupied a very small
place in my life. “That may be; but your mothers are friends, I can
place you by that. I often pass Suzanne Delage on the avenue de
Messine,32 I admire her style.” Our mothers were acquainted only
in the imagination of Mme Bontemps, who having heard that
I had at one time played with Robert Forestier, to whom, it ap-
peared, I used to recite poetry, had concluded from that that we
were bound by family ties. She could never, I gathered, hear my
mother’s name mentioned without observing: “Oh, yes, she is in
the Delage Forestier set,” giving my parents a good mark that they
had done nothing to deserve.
Apart from this, Albertine’s social notions were fatuous in the
extreme. She regarded the Simonnets with a double “n” as inferior
not only to the Simonets with a single “n” but to everyone in the
world.33 That someone else should bear the same name as your-
self without belonging to your family is an excellent reason for
despising him. Of course there are exceptions. It may happen that

406 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

two Simonnets (introduced to one another at one of those gather-

ings where one feels the need to converse, no matter on what sub-
ject, and where moreover one is instinctively well disposed toward
strangers, for instance in a funeral procession on its way to the
cemetery), finding that they have the same name, will seek with
a mutual friendliness though without success to discover a pos-
sible kinship. But that is only an exception. Plenty of people are
of dubious character, but we either know nothing or care nothing
about them. If, however, a similarity of names brings to our door
letters addressed to them, or vice versa, we at once feel a mistrust,
often justified, as to their moral worth. We are afraid of being
confused with them, we forestall the mistake by a grimace of dis-
gust when anyone refers to them in our hearing. When we read
our own name, as borne by them, in the newspaper, they seem to
have usurped it. The transgressions of other members of the social
organism leave us cold. We lay the burden of them more heavily
upon our namesakes. The hatred that we bear toward the other Si-
monnets is all the stronger in that it is not a personal feeling but
has been transmitted hereditarily. After the second generation we
remember only the expression of disgust with which our grand-
parents used to refer to the other Simonnets, we know nothing of
the reason, we would not be surprised to learn that it had begun
with a murder. Until, as is not uncommon, the day comes when
a male and female Simonnet, who are not related in any way, are
joined together in matrimony and so repair the breach.
Not only did Albertine speak to me of Robert Forestier and
Suzanne Delage, but spontaneously, with that impulse to confide
that the proximity of two human bodies creates, at least at first,
before it has engendered a special duplicity and reticence in one
person toward the other, she told me a story about her own family
and one of Andrée’s uncles, of which, at Balbec, she had refused
to say a word, but thinking that now she ought not to appear to
keep any secrets from me. Now, had her dearest friend said any-
thing to her against me, she would have made it her duty to in-
form me. I insisted upon her going home, and finally she did go,

Chapter 2 407
 The Guermantes Way

but so ashamed on my account at my discourtesy that she laughed

almost as though to apologize for me, as a hostess to whose party
you have gone without wearing the proper attire makes the best of
you but is offended nevertheless.
“Are you laughing at me?” I inquired.
“I am not laughing, I am smiling at you,” she replied tenderly.
“When am I going to see you again?” she went on, as though de-
clining to admit that what had just happened between us, since
it is generally the crowning consummation of it, might not be at
least the prelude to a great friendship, a friendship already existing
that we owed it to ourselves to discover, to confess, and that alone
could account for the surrender we had made of ourselves.
“Since you give me leave, I will send for you when I can.”
I dared not let her know that I was subordinating everything
else to the chance of seeing Mme de Stermaria.
“It will have to be at short notice, unfortunately,” I went on, “I
never know beforehand. Would it be possible for me to send for
you in the evenings, when I am free?”
“It will be quite possible soon, because I am going to have my
own latchkey. But just at present it can’t be done. Anyhow I will
come around tomorrow or next day in the afternoon. You needn’t
see me if you’re busy.”
On reaching the door, surprised that I had not anticipated her,
she offered me her cheek, feeling that there was no need now for
any coarse physical desire to prompt us to kiss one another. The
brief relations in which we had just indulged being of the sort to
which an absolute intimacy and a heartfelt choice sometimes lead,
Albertine had felt it incumbent upon her to improvise and add
provisionally to the kisses that we had exchanged on my bed the
sentiment of which those kisses would have been the symbol for
a knight and his lady such as they might have been conceived by
a Gothic minstrel.
When she had left me, this young Picard, who might have been
carved on his porch by the sculptor of Saint-­André-­des-­Champs,
Françoise brought me a letter that filled me with joy, for it was

408 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

from Mme de Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner 34. A bergère is an upholstered arm-
for Wednesday. From Mme de Stermaria, that was to say for me chair of an eighteenth-­century style
having an exposed wood frame.
not so much from the real Mme de Stermaria as from her of whom
I had been thinking all day before Albertine’s arrival. It is the ter-
rible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not
with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned and
kept in our brain, the only one moreover that we have always at
our disposal, the only one that we will ever possess, one that the
arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of imagi-
nation, may have made as different from the real woman as had
been from the real Balbec the Balbec of my dreams; an artificial
creation that by degrees, and to our own hurt, we will force the
real woman to resemble.
Albertine had made me so late that the play had just finished
when I entered Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing room; and having
little desire to be caught in the stream of guests who were pouring
out, discussing the great piece of news, the separation, said to
be already effected, of the Duc de Guermantes from his wife, I
had, while waiting for an opportunity to greet my hostess, taken
a seat on an empty bergère34 in the outer room, when from the
other, in which she had no doubt been sitting in the front row,
I saw emerging, majestic, ample and tall in a flowing gown of
yellow satin upon which stood out in relief huge black poppies,
the duchess herself. The sight of her no longer disturbed me in the
least. There had been a day when, laying her hands on my fore-
head (as was her habit when she was afraid of hurting my feelings)
and saying: “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet
Mme de Guermantes. All the neighbors are talking about you.
Besides, look how ill your grandmother is, you really have some-
thing more serious to think about than waylaying a woman who
only laughs at you,” immediately, like a hypnotist who brings you
back from the distant country in which you imagined yourself to
be, and opens your eyes for you, or like the doctor who, by re-
calling you to a sense of duty and reality, cures you of an imagi-
nary disease in which you have been wallowing, my mother had

Chapter 2 409
 The Guermantes Way

35. “Farewell, strange voices / Call thee awakened me from an unduly protracted dream. The rest of the
away from me, celestial sister of the day had been consecrated to a last farewell to this malady, which
angels” is from a lied composed (1824)
not by Schubert but by the German I was renouncing; I had sung, for hours on end and weeping as I
musician August Heinrich von Wey- sang, the words of Schubert’s Adieu:
rauch (1788–1865) based on a poem
by Karl Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel. In
1840, A. Bélanger published the melody . . . Adieu, des voix étranges
under the title Adieu and attributed it T’appellent loin de moi, céleste sœur des anges.35
to Schubert. Émile Deschamps later
adapted it again. This last is the ver-
sion incorrectly cited by Proust. À la And then it had ended. I had given up my morning walks,
recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli- and with so little difficulty that I thought myself justified in the
mard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 666, prophecy (which we will see was to prove false later on) that I
n. 1.
would easily grow accustomed in the course of my life to no
longer see a woman. And when, shortly afterward, Françoise had
reported to me that Jupien, eager to enlarge his business, was
looking for a shop in the neighborhood, wishing to find one for
him (quite happy, moreover, when strolling along a street, which
already from my bed I had heard luminously vociferous like a
peopled beach, to see behind the raised iron shutters of the dairy
shops the young milkmaids with their white sleeves), I had been
able to begin these outings again. Nor did I feel the slightest con-
straint; for I was conscious that I was no longer going out with the
object of seeing Mme de Guermantes; much as a married woman
who takes endless precautions so long as she has a lover, from the
day she has broken with him leaves his letters lying about, at the
risk of disclosing to her husband an infidelity that ceased to alarm
her the moment she ceased to be guilty of it.
What troubled me now was the discovery that almost every
house sheltered some unhappy person. In one the wife was always
in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her. In the next
it was the other way around. In another a hardworking mother,
beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was trying to conceal her
sufferings from the eyes of the neighbors. Quite half of the human
race was in tears. And when I came to know the people who com-
posed it, I saw that they were so exasperating that I asked myself
whether it might not be the adulterous husband and wife (who

410 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

were so simply because their lawful happiness had been denied

them, and showed themselves charming and loyal to everyone but
their respective wife and husband) who were in the right. Pres-
ently I ceased to have even the excuse of being useful to Jupien for
continuing my morning peregrinations. For we learned that the
cabinetmaker in our courtyard, whose workrooms were separated
from Jupien’s shop only by the flimsiest of partitions, was shortly
to be “given notice” by the duke’s agent because his hammering
made too much noise. Jupien could have hoped for nothing
better; the workrooms had a basement for storing timber, which
communicated with our cellars. He could keep his coal there, he
could knock down the partition, and would then have one huge
shop. However, Jupien, finding the rent that M. de Guermantes
was asking him exorbitant, was having the premises inspected in
the hope that, discouraged by his failure to find a tenant, the duke
would resign himself to accepting a lower offer. Françoise, noticing
that, even at an hour when no prospective tenant was likely to call,
the concierge left the door of the shop for rent closed but not
locked, scented a trap laid by him to entice the young woman
who was engaged to the Guermantes footman (they would find a
lovers’ retreat there), and to catch them red-­handed.
However that might be, and for all that I had no longer to find
Jupien a new shop, I still went out before lunch. Often, on these
outings, I met M. de Norpois. It would happen that, conversing
as he walked with a colleague, he cast at me a glance that, after
making a thorough scrutiny of my person, returned to his com-
panion without his having smiled at me or given me any more
sign of recognition than if he had never set eyes on me before.
For, with these eminent diplomats, looking at you in a certain
way is intended to let you know not that they have seen you but
that they have not seen you and that they have some serious ques-
tion to discuss with the colleague who is accompanying them. A
tall woman whom I frequently encountered near the house was
less discreet with me. For although I did not know her, she would
turn around to look at me, would wait for me, unavailingly, before

Chapter 2 411
 The Guermantes Way

shop windows, smile at me as though she were going to kiss me,

make gestures indicative of a complete surrender. She resumed an
icy coldness toward me if anyone appeared whom she knew. For
a long time now in these morning walks, according to what I had
to do, even if it was only to purchase the most trivial newspaper,
I had chosen the shortest way, with no regret if it was outside
the ordinary course that the duchess followed in her walks, and
if on the other hand it lay along that course, without either com-
punction or concealment, because it no longer appeared to me
the forbidden way on which I should snatch from an ungrateful
woman the favor of setting eyes on her against her will. But it
had never occurred to me that my recovery, by restoring me to a
normal attitude toward Mme de Guermantes, would have a cor-
responding effect on her, and so render possible a friendliness,
even a friendship that no longer mattered to me. Until then, the
efforts of the entire world banded together to bring me into touch
with her would have been powerless to counteract the evil spell
that is cast by an ill-­starred love. Fairies more powerful than man-
kind have decreed that in such cases nothing can avail us until the
day when we have uttered sincerely in our hearts the formula: “I
am no longer in love.” I had been vexed with Saint-­L oup for not
having taken me to see his aunt. But he was no more capable than
anyone else of breaking a spell. So long as I was in love with Mme
de Guermantes, the marks of kindness that I received from others,
their compliments actually distressed me, not only because they
did not come from her but because she would never hear of them.
And yet even if she had known of them it would not have been of
the slightest use to me. Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries that
lead to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation
to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more
service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. There
would be plenty of social success, if people were taught, along
these lines, the art of succeeding.
As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her mind
filled with thoughts of friends whom I did not know and whom

412 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

she would perhaps be meeting presently at some other soirée,

Mme de Guermantes caught sight of me on my bergère, genu-
inely indifferent and seeking only to be polite whereas while I
was in love I had tried so desperately, without ever succeeding,
to assume an air of indifference; she swerved aside, came toward
me and, reproducing the smile she had worn that evening at the
Opéra, which the unpleasant feeling of being loved by someone
whom she did not love was no longer there to obliterate: “No,
don’t move; you don’t mind if I sit down beside you for a mo-
ment?” she asked, gracefully gathering in her immense skirt that
otherwise would have covered the entire bergère.
She was taller than I and made larger by the volume of her
gown; I was almost brushed by her exquisite bare arm on which
a nearly indiscernible and abundant down perpetually smoldered
like a golden mist, and by the blond twists of her golden hair,
which wafted their fragrance over me. Having barely room to sit
down, she could not turn easily to face me, and so obliged to look
straight before her rather than in my direction, assumed the sort
of expression, dreamy and sweet, that one sees in a portrait.
“Have you any news of Robert?” she inquired.
At that moment Mme de Villeparisis entered the room.
“Well, Monsieur, you arrive at a fine time, when we do see you
here for once!”
And noticing that I was talking to her niece, concluding, per-
haps, that we were more intimate than she had supposed: “But
don’t let me interrupt your conversation with Oriane,” she went
on, and (for the good offices of a procuress are part of the duties
of the perfect hostess): “You wouldn’t care to dine with her here
on Thursday?”
It was the day on which I was to dine with Mme de Stermaria,
so I declined.
“Saturday, then?”
Since my mother was returning on Saturday or Sunday, it
would have been unkind of me not to stay at home every evening
to dine with her; I therefore declined this invitation also.

Chapter 2 413
 The Guermantes Way

“Ah, you’re not an easy person to invite.”

“Why do you never come to see me?” inquired Mme de Guer-
mantes when Mme de Villeparisis had left us to go and congratu-
late the performers and present the leading lady with a bunch of
roses upon which the hand that offered it conferred all its value,
for it had cost no more than twenty francs. (This, incidentally,
was as high as she ever went when an artist had performed only
once. Those who gave their services at all her afternoons and eve-
nings throughout the season received roses painted by the mar-
quise.) “It’s such a bore that we never see each other except in
other people’s houses. Since you won’t dine with me at my aunt’s,
why not come and dine with me?” Various people who had stayed
to the last possible moment, on one pretext or another, but were
at length preparing to leave, seeing that the duchess had sat down
to talk to a young man on a seat so narrow as just to contain them
both, thought that they must have been misinformed, that it was
not the duchess, but the duke, who was seeking a separation, and
on my account. Whereupon they hastened to spread abroad this
intelligence. I had better grounds than anyone to be aware of its
falsehood. But I was myself surprised that at one of those difficult
periods in which a separation that is not yet completed is begin-
ning to take effect, the duchess, instead of withdrawing from so-
ciety should go out of her way to invite a person whom she knew
so slightly. The suspicion crossed my mind that it had been the
duke alone who had been opposed to her having me in the house,
and that now that he was leaving her she saw no further obstacle
to her surrounding herself with the people that she liked.
Two minutes earlier I would have been astonished had anyone
told me that Mme de Guermantes was going to ask me to call on
her, let alone to dine with her. I might be perfectly aware that the
Guermantes salon could not furnish those distinctive features that
I had extracted from that name, the fact that it had been forbidden
territory to me, by obliging me to give it the same kind of exis-
tence that we give to the salons of which we have read the descrip-
tion in a novel, or seen the image in a dream, made me, even when

414 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

I was certain that it was just like any other, imagine it as quite dif-
ferent; between myself and it was the barrier at which reality ends.
To dine with the Guermantes was like traveling to a place I had
long wished to see, making a desire emerge from my head and take
shape before my eyes, forming acquaintance with a dream. At the
most, I might have supposed that it would be one of those dinners
to which the hosts invite someone by saying: “Do come; there’ll
be absolutely nobody but ourselves,” pretending to attribute to the
pariah the alarm that they themselves feel at the thought of his
mixing with their other friends, seeking indeed to convert into
an enviable privilege, reserved for their intimates alone, the quar-
antine of the outsider, and—in spite of himself—unsociable and
favored. I felt on the contrary that Mme de Guermantes was eager
for me to enjoy the most delightful society that she had to offer me
when she went on to say, projecting as she spoke before my eyes as
it were the violet-­hued loveliness of a visit to Fabrice’s aunt with
the miracle of an introduction to Count Mosca:
“On Friday, now, you wouldn’t be free, for a small dinner
party? There are just a few people coming; the Princesse de Parme,
who is charming, not that I’d ask you to meet anyone who wasn’t
agreeable.”
Discarded in the intermediate social grades that are engaged
in a perpetual movement of ascent, the family still plays an im-
portant part in certain stationary grades, such as the lower middle
class and the semiroyal aristocracy, which the latter cannot seek
to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view,
there exists nothing higher. The friendship shown me by her “Aunt
Villeparisis” and Robert had perhaps made me, for Mme de Guer-
mantes and her friends, living always upon themselves and in the
same little circle, the object of a curious interest of which I had
no suspicion.
She had of those two relatives a familiar, everyday, homely
knowledge, of a sort, utterly different from what we imagine, and
in which, if we happen to be included in it, so far from our actions
being ejected, like the speck of dust from the eye or the drop of

Chapter 2 415
 The Guermantes Way

water from the windpipe, they are capable of remaining engraved,

and will still be related and discussed years after we ourselves have
forgotten them, in the palace in which we are astonished to find
them preserved, like a letter in our own handwriting, among a
priceless collection of autographs.
People who are merely fashionable may close their doors if they
are too freely invaded. But the Guermantes door was not that.
Hardly ever did a stranger have occasion to pass by it. If, for once,
the duchess had one pointed out to her, she never dreamed of
troubling herself about the social increment that he would bring,
since this was a thing that she conferred and could not receive.
She thought only of his real merits. Both Mme de Villeparisis
and Saint-­L oup had testified to mine. Doubtless she might not
have believed them if she had not at the same time observed that
they could never manage to secure me when they wanted me, and
therefore that I attached no importance to society, which seemed
to the duchess a sign that the stranger was to be numbered among
what she called “agreeable people.”
It was worth seeing, when one spoke to her of women for whom
she did not care, how her face changed as soon as one named, in
connection with one of these, let us say, her sister-­in-­law. “Oh, she
is charming!” the duchess would exclaim in a judicious, confident
tone. The only reason that she gave was that this lady had declined
to be introduced to the Marquise de Chaussegros and the Prin-
cesse de Silistrie. She did not add that the lady had declined also
an introduction to herself, the Duchesse de Guermantes. This had,
nevertheless, been the case, and ever since the mind of the duchess
had been at work trying to unravel the motives of a woman who
was so hard to know. She was dying to be invited to call on her.
People in society are so accustomed to being sought after that the
person who shuns them seems to them a phoenix and at once mo-
nopolizes their attention.
Was the real motive in the mind of Mme de Guermantes for
thus inviting me (now that I was no longer in love with her) that
I did not seek out her relatives, although apparently I was sought

416 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

out by them? I cannot say. In any case, having made up her mind 36. Ahasuerus, King of Persia and
to invite me, she was eager to do me the honors of the best com- Media, chose for his wife Esther, a
Jewish maiden who saved her people
pany at her disposal and to keep away those of her friends whose from his persecution. This biblical story
presence might have dissuaded me from coming again, those is the subject of the play Esther (1689)
whom she knew to be boring. I had not known to what to at- by Jean Racine.
37. “Beset by surging cares, a Prince’s
tribute her change of direction, when I had seen her deviate from mind / Toward fresh matters ever is
her stellar path, come to sit down beside me, and invite me to inclined” are lines from Racine’s play
dinner, the effect of causes unknown; for want of a special sense to Esther, act 2, scene 3.
38. Esther’s Uncle Mordecai was an
enlighten us in this respect, we imagine the people who know us eminent captive in Babylon. In Racine’s
but slightly—such as, in my case, the Duchesse de Guermantes— play, he is Esther’s adoptive father, who
as thinking of us only at the rare moments at which they set eyes informs Esther of Haman’s plot against
the Jewish people.
on us. But this ideal oblivion in which we picture them as holding 39. In the book of Esther (6:10),
us is a purely arbitrary conception on our part. So that while, in Mordecai is designated as “the Jew,
our solitary silence, like that of a cloudless night, we imagine the that sitteth at the king’s gate.”
40. Ahasuerus richly rewards Mordecai
various queens of society pursuing their course in the heavens at for his role in revealing the plot against
an infinite distance, we cannot help an involuntary start of dismay the Jews. Esther 8:1–2.
or pleasure if there falls upon us from that starry height, like a me-
teorite engraved with our name that we supposed to be unknown
on Venus or in Cassiopeia, an invitation to dinner or a piece of
malicious gossip.
Perhaps now and then when, following the example of the Per-
sian princes who, according to the book of Esther,36 made their
scribes read out to them the registers in which were enrolled the
names of those of their subjects who had shown zeal in their ser-
vice, Mme de Guermantes consulted her list of the well disposed,
she had said to herself, on coming to my name: “A man we must
ask to dine someday.” But other thoughts had distracted her

(De soins tumultueux un prince environné

Vers de nouveaux objets est sans cesse entraîné)37

until the moment when she had caught sight of me sitting alone
like Mordecai38 at the palace gate;39 and, the sight of me having
refreshed her memory, she wished, like Ahasuerus,40 to lavish her
gifts upon me.

Chapter 2 417
 The Guermantes Way

I must at the same time add that a surprise of a totally different

sort was to follow the one I had had on hearing Mme de Guer-
mantes ask me to dine with her. Since I had decided that it would
show greater modesty on my part, and gratitude also, not to con-
ceal this initial surprise, but rather to exaggerate my expression of
the delight that it gave me, Mme de Guermantes, who was getting
ready to go on to another, final soirée, had said to me, almost as
a justification and for fear of my not being quite certain who she
was, since I appeared so astonished at being invited to dine with
her: “You know I’m the aunt of Robert de Saint-­L oup, who is very
fond of you, and besides we have met each other here before.” In
replying that I was aware of this I added that I also knew M. de
Charlus, “who had been very kind to me at Balbec and in Paris.”
Mme de Guermantes appeared surprised, and her eyes seemed to
turn, as though for a verification of this statement, to some much
earlier page of her internal register of events. “What, so you know
Palamède, do you?” This name assumed on the lips of Mme de
Guermantes a great charm, due to the instinctive simplicity with
which she spoke of a man who was socially so brilliant a figure, but
for her was no more than her brother-­in-­law and the cousin with
whom she had grown up. And on the hazy grayness that the life
of the Duchesse de Guermantes was for me this name, Palamède,
shed as it were the radiance of long summer days on which she had
played with him as a girl in the garden at Guermantes. Moreover,
in this long outgrown period in their lives, Oriane de Guermantes
and her cousin Palamède had been very different from what they
had since become; M. de Charlus in particular, entirely absorbed
in the artistic pursuits from which he had so effectively restrained
himself in later life that I was stupefied to learn that it was he who
had painted the huge fan with black and yellow irises that the
duchess was at this moment unfurling. She could also have shown
me a little sonatina that he had once composed for her. I was com-
pletely unaware that the baron possessed all these talents, of which
he never spoke. Let me remark in passing that M. de Charlus
did not at all relish being called “Palamède” by his family. That

418 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

the form “Mémé” might not please him one could easily under- 41. In French, Mémé means granny,
stand.41 These stupid abbreviations are a sign of the utter inability suggesting also the slangy use of tante
(aunt) for homosexual.
of the aristocracy to appreciate its own poetic beauty (in Jewry, 42. The second son of King Louis-­
too, we may see the same defect, since a nephew of Lady Israëls, Philippe and Queen Marie-­Amélie bore
whose name was Moses, was commonly known as Momo) con- the title Duc de Nemours. Their third
son was the Prince de Joinville. Their
current with its anxiety not to appear to attach any importance to eldest son, Ferdinand Philippe, Duc
what is aristocratic. Now M. de Charlus had, in this connection, d’Orléans, gave the title Comte de Paris
a greater wealth of poetic imagination and a more blatant pride. to his son Louis Philippe Albert and the
title Duc de Chartres to his second son
But the reason for his distaste for “Mémé” could not be this, since Robert Louis Eugène Ferdinand. À la
it extended also to the fine name Palamède. The truth was that, recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli-
considering himself, knowing himself to come of a princely stock, mard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 674,
n. 1.
he would have liked his brother and sister-­in-­law to refer to him as
“Charlus,” just as Queen Marie-­Amélie and Duc d’Orléans might
speak of their sons and grandsons, brothers and nephews as “Join-
ville, Nemours, Chartres, Paris.”42
“What a secretive person Mémé is!” she exclaimed. “We talked
to him about you for hours; he told us that he would be delighted
to make your acquaintance, just as if he had never set eyes on you.
You must admit he’s odd, and—though it’s not very nice of me to
say such a thing about a brother-­in-­law I’m devoted to, and really
do admire immensely—at times, a trifle mad.”
I was struck by the application of this last epithet to M. de
Charlus, and said to myself that this half-­madness might per-
haps account for certain things, such as his having appeared so
delighted by his own proposal that I should ask Bloch to beat his
mother. I decided that, by reason not only of the things he said
but of the way in which he said them, M. de Charlus must be a
little mad. The first time that one listens to a lawyer or an actor,
one is surprised by his tone, so different from the conversational.
But observing that everyone else seems to find this quite natural,
one says nothing about it to other people, one says nothing in fact
to oneself, one is content with appreciating the degree of talent
shown. At the most, one may think, of an actor at the Théâtre-­
Français: “Why, instead of letting his raised arm fall naturally, did
he make it drop in a series of little jerks broken by pauses for at

Chapter 2 419
 The Guermantes Way

43. Fernand Labori (1860–1917) was a least ten minutes?” or of a Labori:43 “Why, whenever he opened
lawyer who tried a number of famous his mouth, did he utter those tragic, unexpected sounds to express
cases. At the time of the Dreyfus Af-
fair, he defended Zola, Picquart, and the simplest things?” But as everybody accepts these a priori44 one
Dreyfus. On August 14, 1899, during is not shocked by them. So, on thinking it over, one said to oneself
the revision of the Dreyfus trial in that M. de Charlus spoke of himself with pomposity in a tone that
Rennes, an unknown person fired a
shot at Labori, wounding him slightly. was not in the least that of ordinary speech. It seemed as though
Proust sent him a telegram to wish one might have at any moment interrupted him with: “But why
him well. do you shout so? Why are you so offensive?” But everyone seemed
44. A priori is a Latin phrase meaning
“from what is before” that is used in to have tacitly agreed that it was all right. And one took one’s place
logic to denote what proceeds from in the circle that applauded his outbursts. But certainly, at certain
cause to effect and in philosophy to moments, a stranger might have thought that he was listening to
indicate prior experience and what is
presumptive. the ravings of a maniac.
45. This is one of the many fictitious “But,” went on the duchess, a trace of impertinence grafted
bonds of kinship that Proust estab- upon her natural simplicity “are you sure you’re not thinking of
lishes between the fictional House of
Guermantes and the leading aristo- someone else? Do you really mean my brother-­in-­law Palamède? I
cratic families of Europe. The Princes know he loves mysteries, but that’s going too far!”
de Ligne were from a family originating I replied that I was absolutely sure, and that M. de Charlus
in Ligne, near Tournai, Belgium.
must have failed to catch my name.
“Oh well! I will leave you now,” said Mme de Guermantes, as
though she regretted the parting. “I must look in for a moment at
the Princesse de Ligne’s. You aren’t going on there? No? You don’t
care for parties? You’re very wise, they are too boring for words.
If only I didn’t have to go. But she’s my cousin;45 it wouldn’t be
polite. I am sorry, selfishly, for my own sake, because I could have
taken you there, and brought you back afterward, too. So I will
say goodbye now and look forward to Friday.”
That M. de Charlus should have blushed to be seen with me by
M. d’Argencourt was all very well. But that to his own sister-­in-­
law, who had so high an opinion of him besides, he should deny
all knowledge of me, knowledge that was perfectly natural seeing
that I was a friend of both his aunt and his nephew, was a thing
that I could not understand.
I will end my account of this incident with the remark that from
one point of view there was in Mme de Guermantes a true gran-
deur that consisted in her entirely obliterating from her memory

420 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

what other people would have only partially forgotten. Had she
never seen me waylaying her, following her, tracking her down as
she took her morning walks, had she never responded to my daily
salute with an exasperated impatience, had she never sent Saint-­
Loup packing when he begged her to invite me to her house, she
could not have been more graciously and naturally amiable to me
now. Not only did she waste no time in retrospective explana-
tions, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there
in her present affability, without any harking back to the past,
without any reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her ma-
jestic stature, but any resentment that she might have felt against
anyone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, the ashes were
themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her
manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to
treat with the most exquisite simplification what in so many other
people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and
recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.
But if I was surprised by the modification that had occurred
in her opinion of me, how much more did it surprise me to find
an even greater change in my feelings for her! Had there not
been a time when I could regain life and strength only if—always
building new castles in the air!—I had found someone who would
obtain for me an invitation to her house and, after this initial
boon, would procure many others for my increasingly exacting
heart? It was the impossibility of finding any avenue there that
had made me leave Paris for Doncières to visit Robert de Saint-­
Loup. And now it was indeed by the consequence of a letter from
him that I was agitated, but on account this time of Mme de Ster-
maria, not of Mme de Guermantes.
Let me add further, to conclude my account of this soirée, that
there occurred at it an incident, contradicted a few days later, that
continued to puzzle me, interrupted for some time my friend-
ship with Bloch, and that constitutes in itself one of those curious
paradoxes the explanation of which will be found in the next part
of this work. At this soirée at Mme de Villeparisis’s, Bloch kept

Chapter 2 421
 The Guermantes Way

on boasting to me about the friendly attentions shown him by

M. de Charlus, who, when he passed him in the street, looked
him straight in the face as though he recognized him, was eager to
know him personally, knew quite well who he was. I smiled at first,
Bloch having expressed so vehemently at Balbec his contempt for
the said M. de Charlus. And I supposed merely that Bloch, like
his father in the case of Bergotte, knew the baron “without actu-
ally knowing him,” and that what he took for a friendly glance
was an absentminded stare. But finally Bloch gave so many details
and appeared so confident that on two or three occasions M. de
Charlus had wished to address him that, remembering that I had
spoken of my friend to the baron, who had, as we walked away
together from this very house, as it happened, asked me various
questions about him, I came to the conclusion that Bloch was not
lying, that M. de Charlus had heard his name, realized that he was
my friend, etc. And so, a little later, at the theater one evening, I
asked M. de Charlus whether I might introduce Bloch to him,
and, on his assenting, went in search of my friend. But as soon as
M. de Charlus caught sight of him an expression of astonishment,
instantly repressed, appeared on his face where it gave way to a
blazing fury. Not only did he not offer Bloch his hand but when-
ever Bloch spoke to him he replied in the most insolent manner,
in an angry and wounding tone. So that Bloch, who, according
to his version, had received nothing until then from the baron
but smiles, assumed that I had not indeed commended but dis-
paraged him in the short conversation in which, knowing M. de
Charlus’s liking for protocol, I had told him about my friend be-
fore bringing him up to be introduced. Bloch left us, exhausted
from his efforts, like a man who has been trying to mount a horse
that is always ready to take the bit in its teeth, or to swim against
waves that continually dash him back on the shingle, and did not
speak to me again for six months.
The days that preceded my dinner with Mme de Stermaria were
for me by no means delightful, in fact they were nearly unbear-
able. For as a general rule, the shorter the interval is that separates

422 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

us from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us, because

we apply to it a more minute scale of measurement, or simply be-
cause it occurs to us to measure it at all. The papacy, we are told,
reckons by centuries, and indeed may not think perhaps of reck-
oning time at all, since its goal is in eternity. Mine was no more
than three days off; I counted by seconds, I gave myself up to
those imaginings that are the first movements of caresses, of ca-
resses that it maddens us not to be able to make the woman herself
reciprocate and complete—precisely those caresses, to the exclu-
sion of all others. And, on the whole, if it is true that, generally
speaking, the difficulty of attaining the object of a desire enhances
that desire (the difficulty, not the impossibility, for that suppresses
it altogether), yet in the case of a desire that is wholly physical the
certainty that it will be realized, at a fixed and not distant point in
time, is scarcely less exciting than uncertainty; almost as much as
anxious doubt, the absence of doubt makes intolerable the period
of waiting for the pleasure that is bound to come, because it makes
of that suspense an innumerably rehearsed accomplishment and
by the frequency of our proleptic representations divides time into
sections as minute as could be carved by agony.
What I required was to possess Mme de Stermaria: for during
the past few days, with an incessant activity, my desires had been
preparing this pleasure, in my imagination, and this pleasure
alone, for any other kind (pleasure with another woman) would
not have been ready, pleasure being but the realization of a pre-
vious desire, and of one that is not always the same, but changes
according to the endless combinations of one’s reveries, the acci-
dents of one’s memory, the state of one’s temperament, the order
of the availability of one’s desires, the most recently granted of
which lie dormant until the disappointment of their satisfaction
has been to some extent forgotten; I had already turned from the
main road of general desires and had ventured along the path of
a particular desire; I would have had—in order to wish for a dif-
ferent rendezvous—to retrace my steps too far before rejoining the
main road and taking another path. To take possession of Mme de

Chapter 2 423
 The Guermantes Way

Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I had asked

her to dine with me, this was the pleasure that I pictured to my-
self at every moment. It would naturally have been destroyed if I
had dined on that island without Mme de Stermaria; but perhaps
as greatly diminished had I dined, even with her, somewhere else.
Besides, the attitudes according to which one imagines a pleasure
are prior to the woman, to the type of woman suitable for it. They
dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and on that account
bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy, this or that
woman, this or that site, this or that room, which in other weeks
we would have dismissed with contempt. Daughters of the atti-
tude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us
without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while
others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves
blown by the wind, water rippling in the night, that are as light
and fleeting as they are.
No doubt in the past, long before I received Saint-­L oup’s letter
and when there was as yet no question of Mme de Stermaria, the
island in the Bois had seemed to me to be specially designed for
pleasure, because I had found myself going there to taste the bit-
terness of having no pleasure to enjoy in its shelter. It is to the
shores of the lake from which one goes to that island, and along
which, in the last weeks of summer, those ladies of Paris who have
not yet left for the country take the air, that, not knowing where
to look for her, or whether indeed she has not already left Paris,
one wanders in the hope of seeing the girl go by with whom one
fell in love at the last ball of the season, whom one will not have a
chance of meeting again at any soirée until the following spring.
Sensing it to be at least the eve, if not the morrow, of the be-
loved’s departure, one follows along the brink of the shimmering
water those attractive paths by which already a first red leaf is
blooming like a last rose, one scans that horizon where, by a de-
vice the opposite of that employed in those panoramas beneath
whose rotundas the wax figures in the foreground impart to the
painted canvas beyond them the illusory appearance of depth and

424 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mass, our eyes, passing without any transition from the cultivated 46. Meudon is a community near Ver-
park to the natural heights of Meudon46 and the Mont Valérien,47 sailles whose heights can be seen from
the Bois de Boulogne.
do not know where to set the boundary, and make the natural 47. Mont Valérien is a hill to the west
country trespass upon the handiwork of the gardener, the artifi- of Paris whose heights can be seen
cial charm of which they project far beyond its own limits; like from the avenue leading to the Bois de
Boulogne. It became an important stra-
those rare birds reared in the open in a botanical garden that every tegic site in the war of 1870.
day in the liberty of their winged excursions sally forth to strike, 48. Adam Frans Van der Meulen (1632–
in the surrounding woods, an exotic note. Between the last fes- 90) was a French painter of Flemish
origin, who accompanied Louis XIV on
tivity of summer and one’s winter exile, one ranges anxiously that his campaigns and specialized in mili-
romantic realm of chance encounters and lover’s melancholy, and tary scenes with vast horizons. Many
one would be no more surprised to learn that it was situated out- of his canvases hung in the Grande
Galerie of the Louvre in Proust’s day.
side the mapped universe than if, at Versailles, looking down from 49. Fleurus, a commune in Belgium,
the terrace, an observatory around which the clouds gather against was the scene of a famous battle in
a blue sky in the manner of Van der Meulen,48 after having thus 1690 in which the French forces de-
feated a coalition of German, Spanish,
risen above the bounds of nature, one were informed that, there and English soldiers. Apparently, Van
where nature begins again at the end of the great canal, the villages der Meulen never painted Fleurus or
that one cannot make out, on a horizon as dazzling as the sea, are Nijmegen. Karpeles proposes Van der
Meulen’s painting Arrival of Louis XIV at
called Fleurus49 or Nimègue.50 the Camp before Maastricht during the
And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels Dutch War, June 1673, in which one sees
with a throb of pain that she will not come now, one goes to the kind of blue sky that Proust must
have had in mind. See Karpeles, Paint-
dine on the island; above the trembling poplars that endlessly ings in Proust, 167. The painting is in the
evoke the mysteries of evening more than they respond to them, Louvre.
a pink cloud paints a last touch of vivid color in the tranquil sky. 50. The city of Nijmegen, in the Nether-
lands, was taken by the French in 1672.
A few drops of rain fall silently on the water, ancient but still in its
divine infancy colored always by the weather and continually for-
getting the reflections of clouds and flowers. And after the gera-
niums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their
scarlet, to resist the gathering twilight, a mist rises to envelop the
now slumbering island; one walks in the moist darkness along the
water’s edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles
one like, in a bed, at night, the eyes, for a moment wide open, and
the swift smile of a child whom one did not suppose to be awake.
Then one would like all the more to have a lover by one’s side be-
cause one feels oneself to be alone and can believe oneself to be
far away.

Chapter 2 425
 The Guermantes Way

51. Literally, “Isle of the Swans.” The But to this island, where even in summer there was often a
Île des Cygnes is in the Grand Lac of mist, how much more gladly would I have brought Mme de Ster-
the Bois de Boulogne. A restaurant in
the form of a Swiss chalet was located maria now that the cold season, the end of autumn had come! If
there. the weather that had prevailed since Sunday had not by itself ren-
52. As we saw him do in Swann’s Way dered gray and maritime the scenes in which my imagination was
and In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower, the Narrator often identifies a living—as other seasons made them balmy, luminous, Italian—
desired woman with a particular land- the hope of, in a few days’ time, making Mme de Stermaria mine
scape. would have been quite enough to raise, twenty times in an hour, a
curtain of mist in my monotonously lovesick imagination. In any
event the fog that since yesterday had risen even in Paris not only
made me think incessantly of the native province of the young
woman whom I had invited to dine with me but, since it was
probable that, far more thickly than in the streets of the town, it
must after sunset invade the Bois, especially the shores of the lake,
I thought that it would make the Île des Cygnes,51 for me, some-
thing like that Breton island whose marine and misty atmosphere
had always enwrapped in my mind like a garment the pale silhou-
ette of Mme de Stermaria.52 Of course when we are young, at the
age I had reached at the period of my walks along the Méséglise
way, our desires, our belief confer on a woman’s clothing an indi-
vidual personality, an irreducible essence. We pursue reality. But
by dint of allowing it to escape, we end by noticing that, after all
those vain endeavors that have led to nothing, something solid
subsists, which is what we have been seeking. We begin to sepa-
rate, to recognize what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves,
be it only by a stratagem. Then, in the absence of our vanished
faith, costume fills the gap, by means of a deliberate illusion. I
knew quite well that within half an hour of home I should not
find myself in Brittany. But in walking arm in arm with Mme de
Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water’s edge, I would
be acting like other men who, unable to penetrate the walls of a
convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman, clothe her in the
habit of a nun.
I could even look forward to hearing with the young woman a
lapping of waves, for, on the day before our dinner, a storm broke

426 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

over Paris. I was beginning to shave myself before going to the 53. A toque is a woman’s small hat,
island to engage the room (albeit at this time of year the island without a brim, made in any of various
soft close-­fitting shapes.
was empty and the restaurant deserted) and order the food for our 54. The boulevard des Capucines takes
dinner next day when Françoise came in to announce the arrival its name from the convent of the same
of Albertine. I had her shown in at once, indifferent to her finding name that was completed in 1688 and
whose garden was on the south side of
me disfigured by a bristling chin, her for whom at Balbec I had the boulevard until the Revolution. It is
never felt handsome enough and who had cost me then as much one of the four “grands boulevards” of
agitation and distress as Mme de Stermaria was costing me now. Paris and runs from rue Louis-­le-­Grand
to rue Caumartin in the second and
The latter, I was determined, must go away with the best possible ninth arrondissements.
impression from our evening together. Accordingly I asked Alber- 55. The rue du Bac is in the seventh
tine to come with me there and then to the island to choose the arrondissement and runs from the quai
Anatole France to the rue de Sèvres. It
menu. She to whom one gives everything is so quickly replaced is named for the ferry (bac) used from
by another that one is surprised to find oneself giving all that one 1550 to 1564 to carry stones across the
has, again, at every moment, without any hope of future reward. Seine for the construction of the châ-
teau des Tuileries.
At my suggestion the smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat
toque,53 which came down very low, over her eyebrows, seemed
to hesitate. She probably had other plans; if so, she sacrificed them
willingly, to my great satisfaction, for I attached the utmost im-
portance to my having with me a young housekeeper who would
know a great deal more than myself about ordering dinner.
It is quite true that she had represented something utterly dif-
ferent for me at Balbec. But our intimacy, even when we do not
consider it close enough at the time, with a woman with whom we
are in love creates between her and us, in spite of the shortcomings
that pain us while our love lasts, social ties that outlast our love
and even the memory of our love. Then, in her who is now nothing
more to us than a means of approach, an avenue toward others, we
are just as astonished and amused to learn from our memory what
her name meant originally to that other person we then were as
if, after giving a coachman an address in the boulevard des Capu-
cines54 or the rue du Bac,55 thinking only of the person whom we
are going to see there, we remind ourselves that the names were
once those of the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood on the site
and of the ferry across the Seine.
At the same time, my Balbec desires had so generously ripened

Chapter 2 427
 The Guermantes Way

Albertine’s body, had gathered and stored in it savors so fresh and

sweet that, as we drove through the Bois, while the wind like a
careful gardener shook the trees, brought down the fruit, swept
up the fallen leaves, I said to myself that had there been any risk
of Saint-­L oup’s being mistaken, or of my having misunderstood
his letter, so that my dinner with Mme de Stermaria might lead
to no satisfactory result, I would have made an appointment for
later the same evening with Albertine, in order to forget, during
a purely voluptuous hour, as I held in my arms a body of which
my curiosity had long since computed, weighed up all the pos-
sible charms in which now it abounded, the emotions and per-
haps the regrets of this first phase of love for Mme de Stermaria.
And certainly, if I could have supposed that Mme de Stermaria
would not grant me any of her favors at our first meeting, I would
have formed a slightly depressing picture of my evening with her.
I knew only too well from experience how the two stages that
occur in us in the first phases of our love for a woman whom we
have desired without knowing her, loving in her the particular
kind of existence in which she is steeped rather than her still un-
familiar self—how bizarrely those two stages are reflected in the
domain of reality, that is to say no longer in ourselves any longer
but in our meetings with her. We have, without ever having talked
to her, hesitated, tempted as we were by the poetic charm that
she represented for us. Will it be this woman or another? And lo
and behold, our dreams become fixed around her, cease to have
any separate existence from her. The first rendezvous with her that
will shortly follow should reflect this dawning love. Nothing of
the sort. As if it were necessary that our material life should have
its first stage also, in love with her already, we talk to her in the
most trivial fashion: “I asked you to dine on this island because
I thought you would enjoy the surroundings. I’ve nothing par-
ticular to say to you. But it’s rather damp, I’m afraid, and you may
find it cold—” “Oh, no, not at all!” “You are just saying that out
of politeness. Very well, Madame, I will allow you to battle against
the cold for another quarter of an hour, as I don’t want to annoy

428 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

you, but in fifteen minutes I will take you away by force. I don’t 56. Saint-­Cloud, near Versailles, has a
want you to catch a cold.” And without another word said we take beautiful park that contains the ruins of
the sixteenth-­century château, formerly
her home, remembering nothing about her, at the most a certain the residence of French kings.
look in her eyes, but thinking only of seeing her again. Then at
our second meeting (when we do not find even that look, our sole
memory of her, but nevertheless still thinking only of seeing her
again), the first stage is complete. Nothing has happened in the
interval. And yet, instead of talking about the comfort or want of
comfort of the restaurant, we say, without our words appearing to
surprise the new person, who seems to us positively plain but to
whom we would like to think that people were talking about us
at every moment in her life: “We are going to have our work cut
out to overcome all the obstacles in our way. Do you think we will
be successful? Do you suppose that we can triumph over our ene-
mies—live happily ever after?” But these conversational openings,
trivial to begin with, then hinting at love, would not be required;
I could trust Saint-­L oup’s letter for that. Mme de Stermaria would
give herself to me on the very first evening, so I would have no
need therefore to engage Albertine to come to my house as a last
resort later in the evening. It would be unnecessary; Robert never
exaggerated and his letter was clear!
Albertine spoke hardly at all, conscious that my thoughts were
elsewhere. We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost
submarine grotto of a dense mass of trees, on the domed tops of
which we heard the wind sweep and the rain pelt. I trod underfoot
dead leaves that, like shells, were trampled into the soil, and poked
with my walking stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea urchins.
On the boughs the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind,
followed it only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes
these broke, and they fell to the ground, along which they coursed
to overtake it. I thought with joy how much more remote still, if
this weather lasted, the island would be on the next day, and in any
case quite deserted. We returned to our carriage and, as the squall
had subsided, Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-­Cloud.56
As on the ground the drifting leaves so up above the clouds were

Chapter 2 429
 The Guermantes Way

57. For the source of this memory of chasing the wind. And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a
the girls like statues, see In the Shadow sort of conic section cut through the sky made visible the succes-
of Young Girls in Flower, 403.
sive layers, pink, blue, and green, were gathered in readiness for
departure to warmer climes. To obtain a closer view of a marble
goddess who had been carved in the act of leaping from her ped-
estal and, alone in a great wood that seemed to be consecrated
to her, filled it with the mythological terror, half animal, half
divine, of her frenzied bounding, Albertine climbed a knoll while
I waited for her in the road. She herself, seen thus from below,
no longer coarse and plump as a few days earlier on my bed when
the grain of her neck became apparent in the magnifying glass of
my eyes as they approached her person, but chiseled and delicate,
seemed like a little statue on which our happy hours together at
Balbec had left their patina.57 When I found myself alone again
at home, and remembered that I had taken a drive that afternoon
with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme de
Guermantes, and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three
women I had once loved, I said to myself that our social existence,
like an artist’s studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which
we have thought for a moment that we could set down in perma-
nent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that
sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we
return to it and make of it a work wholly different, and possibly
more important than the one we had originally planned.
The next day was cold and fine; winter was in the air—indeed
the season was so far advanced that it had seemed miraculous that
we should find in the already pillaged Bois a few domes of gilded
green. When I awoke I saw, as from the window of the barracks at
Doncières, a uniform, dead white mist that hung gaily in the sun-
light, thick and soft as a web of spun sugar. Then the sun withdrew,
and the mist thickened still further in the afternoon. Night fell
early, I washed and dressed, but it was still too soon to start; I de-
cided to send a carriage for Mme de Stermaria. I did not like to go
for her in it myself, not wishing to force my company on her, but
I gave the driver a note for her in which I asked whether she would

430 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mind my coming to call for her. While I waited for her answer I
lay down on my bed, shut my eyes for a moment, then opened
them again. Over the top of the curtains there was nothing now
but a thin strip of daylight that grew steadily fainter. I recognized
that wasted hour, the large vestibule of pleasure, the dark, deli-
cious emptiness of which I had learned at Balbec to know and to
enjoy when, alone in my room as I was now, while all the rest were
at dinner, I saw without regret the daylight fade from above my
curtains, knowing that, presently, after a night of polar brevity, it
was to be resuscitated in a more dazzling brightness in the lighted
rooms at Rivebelle. I sprang from my bed, tied my black necktie,
passed a brush over my hair, final gestures of a belated tidying
up carried out at Balbec with my mind not on myself but on the
women whom I would see at Rivebelle while I smiled at them in
anticipation in the mirror that stood across a corner of my room,
gestures that, on that account, had remained the precursory signs
of an entertainment in which music and lights would be mingled.
Like magic signs they evoked it, nay rather presented this enter-
tainment already; thanks to them I had, of its intoxicating frivo-
lous charm as complete an enjoyment as I had had at Combray, in
the month of July, when I heard the packer’s hammer blows ring
on the packing cases and enjoyed, in the coolness of my darkened
room, a sense of warmth and sunshine.
And so it was no longer entirely Mme de Stermaria whom I
would have wished most to see. Forced now to spend my evening
with her, I would have preferred, as it was almost the last before
the return of my parents, that it should remain free and that I
might try to find some of the women from Rivebelle. I gave my
hands one more final wash and, my sense of pleasure keeping me
on the move, dried them as I walked through the shuttered dining
room. It appeared to be open on to the lighted hall, but what
I had taken for the bright chink of the door, which in fact was
closed, was only the gleaming reflection of my towel in a mirror
that had been laid against the wall in readiness to be fixed in its
place before Mamma’s return. I thought of all the other illusions

Chapter 2 431
 The Guermantes Way

58. Richard Wagner composed the of the sort that I had discovered in different parts of the house,
opera Tannhäuser in 1845. Proust is and which were not optical only, for when we first came there I
thinking of Wagner’s use of the “Pil-
grim’s Chorus” and the profane, volup- had supposed that our next-­door neighbor kept a dog on account
tuous Venusberg music as opposing of the prolonged, almost human yapping that came from a certain
themes that are resolved only at the pipe in the kitchen whenever the tap was turned on. And the door
end of the opera, when the sacred
music triumphs. on to the outer landing never closed by itself, very gently, caught
by a draught on the staircase, without rendering those broken,
voluptuous, plaintive passages that sound over the chant of the
pilgrims toward the end of the Overture to Tannhäuser.58 I had,
moreover, just as I had put my towel back on its rail, an opportu-
nity of hearing a fresh rendering of this dazzling symphonic frag-
ment, for at a peal of the bell I hurried out to open the door to the
driver who had come with Mme de Stermaria’s answer. I thought
that his message would be: “The lady is downstairs,” or “The lady
is waiting.” But he had a letter in his hand. I hesitated for a mo-
ment before looking to see what Mme de Stermaria had written,
who, while she held the pen in her hand, might have been any-
thing but was now, detached from herself, an engine of fate pur-
suing a course alone, which she was utterly powerless to alter. I
asked the driver to wait downstairs for a moment, although he
was grumbling about the fog. As soon as he had gone I opened
the envelope. On her card, inscribed Vicomtesse Alix de Ster-
maria, my guest had written: “Am so sorry—am unfortunately
prevented from dining with you this evening on the island in the
Bois. Had been so looking forward to it. Will write you a proper
letter from Stermaria. Very sorry. Kindest regards.” I stood mo-
tionless, stunned by the shock that I had received. At my feet lay
the card and envelope, fallen like the spent cartridge from a gun
when the shot has been fired. I picked them up, tried to analyze
her message. “She says that she cannot dine with me on the island
in the Bois. One might conclude from that that she would dine
with me somewhere else. I will not be so indiscreet as to go and
fetch her, but, after all, that is quite a reasonable interpretation.”
And from that island in the Bois, since for the last few days my
thoughts had been installed there beforehand with Mme de Ster-

432 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

maria, I could not succeed in bringing them back to where I was. 59. This is another example of Fran­
My desire responded automatically to the gravitational force that çoise’s at times peculiar speech. If, as
she says, it is the end of September, the
had been pulling it now for so many hours on end, and in spite winter seems to have arrived very early,
of this message, too recent to counteract that force, I went on in- as the text indicates. Is there a con-
stinctively getting ready to start, just as a student, who has just nection between sec meaning dry and
her pronunciation of the month, Sep-
been failed by the examiners, tries to answer one question more. tember being often the driest season?
At last I decided to tell Françoise to go down and pay the driver. 60. Proust uses the same image in In
I went along the corridor without finding her, passed through the the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 416.
Émile Gallé (1846–1904) was an artist
dining room, where suddenly my feet ceased to sound on the bare and glassmaker who experimented with
boards as they had been doing until then and were hushed to a opaque and semitranslucent glass and
silence that, even before I had realized the explanation of it, gave produced vases with superimposed
layers.
me a feeling of suffocation and confinement. It was the carpets
that, in view of my parents’ return, the servants had begun to tack
down again, those carpets that look so well on bright mornings
when amid their disorder the sun stays and waits for you like a
friend come to take you out to lunch in the country and casts over
them the dappled light and shade of the forest, but which now on
the contrary were the first installation of the wintry prison from
which, obliged as I would be to live, to take my meals at home, I
would no longer be free to escape when I chose.
“Take care you don’t slip, Monsieur; they’re not tacked yet,”
Françoise called to me. “I ought to have lighted up. Oh, dear, it’s
the end of Sectember59 already, the fine days are over.”
In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé
glass, a vein of crusted snow;60 and even in the Champs-­Élysées,
instead of the girls one waits to see, nothing but solitary sparrows.
What added to my despair at not seeing Mme de Stermaria was
that her answer led me to suppose that whereas, hour by hour,
since Sunday, I had been living for this dinner alone, she had pre-
sumably never given it a second thought. Later on I learned of an
absurd love match that she had made with a young man whom she
must already have been seeing at this time, and who had presum-
ably made her forget my invitation. For if she had remembered it
she would surely never have waited for the carriage, which I was
not, for that matter, supposed to be sending for her, to inform

Chapter 2 433
 The Guermantes Way

61. Among many Old Testament pas- me that she was otherwise engaged. My dreams of a young feudal
sages, see Esther 4:1: “When Mordecai maiden on a misty island had cleared the path to a still nonexis-
perceived all that was done, Mordecai
rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth tent love. Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate desire
with ashes . . .” to recapture her who had just refused me were able, by bringing
my sensibility into play, to make definite the possible love that
until then my imagination alone had—and that more halfheart-
edly—offered me.
How many there are in our memories, how many more have
we forgotten, of these faces of girls and young women, all dif-
ferent, to which we have added a certain charm and a frenzied
desire to see them again only because at the last moment they
eluded us! In the case of Mme de Stermaria there was a good deal
more than this, and it was enough now to make me love her for
me to see her again so that I might refresh those impressions, so
vivid but all too brief, that my memory would not, without such
refreshment, have the strength to keep alive when we were apart.
Circumstances decided against me; I did not see her again. It was
not she that I loved, but it might well have been. And one of the
things that made most painful, perhaps, the great love that was
presently to come to me was that when I thought of this evening I
used to say to myself that my love might, given a slight modifica-
tion of very ordinary circumstances, have been directed elsewhere,
to Mme de Stermaria; its application to her who inspired it in me
so soon afterward was not therefore—as I so longed, so needed to
believe—absolutely necessary and predestined.
Françoise had left me by myself in the dining room with the re-
mark that it was foolish of me to stay there before she had lighted
the fire. She went to get me some dinner, for even before the re-
turn of my parents, from this very evening, my seclusion was be-
ginning. I caught sight of a huge bundle of carpets, still rolled
up, and leaning against one end of the sideboard, and burying
my head in it, swallowing its dust with my own tears, as the Jews
used to cover their heads with ashes in times of mourning,61 I
began to sob. I shuddered not only because the room was cold
but because a distinct lowering of temperature (against the danger

434 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

and—I should add, perhaps—the by no means disagreeable sen- 62. Nietzsche devoted many pages
sation of which we make no attempt to react) is brought about by throughout his writings to examining
friendship. The Narrator seems here to
a certain kind of tears that fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a be critical of the philosopher’s treating
fine, penetrating, icy rain, and seem as though never would they it as a subject worthy of such intense
cease to flow. Suddenly I heard a voice: analysis.

“May I come in? Françoise told me you might be in the dining

room. I came to see whether you would care to come out and dine
somewhere, if it isn’t bad for your throat—there’s a fog outside
you could cut with a knife.”
It was—arrived in Paris that morning, when I imagined him to
be still in Morocco or on the sea—Robert de Saint-­L oup.
I have already said (and it was precisely Robert himself who, at
Balbec, had helped me, unintendedly, to arrive at this conclusion)
what I think about friendship: to wit, that it is so small a thing
that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to
genius—Nietzsche,62 for instance—can have been so naïve as to
ascribe to it a certain intellectual value, and consequently to deny
themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have
no part. Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find that a man
who carried sincerity with himself to the point of cutting himself
off, by a scruple of conscience, from Wagner’s music, could have
imagined that the truth can ever be attained by the mode of ex-
pression, naturally vague and inadequate, that actions in general
and acts of friendship in particular furnish, or that there could
be any kind of significance in the fact of one’s leaving one’s work
to go and see a friend and shed tears with him on hearing the
false report that the Louvre had burned down. I had come to the
point, at Balbec, of finding the pleasure of playing with a group
of girls less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at least it re-
mains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is directed
toward making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real
and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a super-
ficial self that does not find, as does the other, any joy in itself, but
rather a vague, sentimental tenderness in feeling itself supported
by external props, hospitalized in a strange individuality, where,

Chapter 2 435
 The Guermantes Way

happy in the protection that is given it there, it makes its own

well-­being radiate in warm approval, and marvels at qualities that
it would denounce as faults and seek to correct in itself. Moreover
the scorners of friendship can, without illusion and not without
remorse, be the finest friends in the world, just as an artist carrying
within him a masterpiece and feeling that his duty is rather to live
and carry on his work, nevertheless, in order not to be thought
or to run the risk of being selfish, gives his life for a futile cause,
and gives it all the more gallantly in that the reasons for which he
would have preferred not to give it were disinterested. But what-
ever might be my opinion of friendship, to mention only the plea-
sure that it procured me, of a quality so mediocre as to be like
something halfway between fatigue and boredom, there is no
brew so deadly that it cannot at certain moments become precious
and invigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was necessary,
the warmth that we cannot generate in ourselves.
The thought, of course, never entered my mind of asking
Saint-­L oup to take me to see some of the Rivebelle women, as I
had wanted to do an hour earlier; the scar left by my regret about
Mme de Stermaria was too recent to be so quickly healed, but
at the moment when I had ceased to feel in my heart any reason
for happiness, Saint-­L oup’s arrival was like a sudden apparition
of kindness, gaiety, life, which were external to me, no doubt,
but offered themselves to me, asked only to be made mine. He
did not himself understand my cry of gratitude, my tears of af-
fection. And yet is there anything more paradoxically affectionate
than one of those friends, be he diplomat, explorer, aviator, or sol-
dier like Saint-­L oup, who, setting off again the next day for the
country, and from there for God knows where, seem to form for
themselves, in the evening that they devote to us, an impression
that we are astonished to find, so rare and fleeting is it, so pleasant
to them, and, since it does so delight them, not to see them pro-
long further or repeat more often? A meal with us, an event so
natural in itself, affords these travelers the same strange and ex-
quisite pleasure as our boulevards give to an Asiatic. We set off

436 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

together to dine, and as I went downstairs I thought of Doncières,

where every evening I used to meet Robert at his restaurant, and
the little dining rooms there that I had forgotten. I remembered
one of these to which I had never given a thought, and which
was not in the hotel where Saint-­L oup dined but in another, far
humbler, a cross between an inn and a boardinghouse, where the
waiting was done by the landlady and one of her servants. I had
been forced to take shelter there once from a snowstorm. Besides,
Robert was not to be dining at the hotel that evening and I had
not cared to go any farther. My food was brought to me, upstairs,
in a little room with bare wooden walls. The lamp went out during
dinner and the maidservant lighted a couple of candles. I, pre-
tending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate, while
she helped me to potatoes, took her bare forearm in my hand, as
though to guide her. Seeing that she did not withdraw it, I began
to caress it, then, without saying a word, pulled her close to me,
blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some
money. For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to
require, to be properly enjoyed, not only this servant girl but the
timbered dining room, so remote and isolated. And yet it was to
the other where Saint-­L oup and his friends dined that I returned
every evening, from force of habit and in friendship for them,
until I left Doncières. But even of this hotel, where he boarded
with his friends, I had long ceased to think. We make little use of
our experience, we leave unfulfilled in the summer dusks or pre-
cocious nights of winter the hours in which it had seemed to us
that there might nevertheless be contained some element of peace
or pleasure. But those hours are not altogether wasted. When, in
their turn, come and sing to us new moments of pleasure, which
by themselves would pass by equally bare and linear, the others
recur, bringing with them the groundwork, the solid consistency
of a rich orchestration. They are in this way prolonged into one
of those types of happiness that we recapture only now and again
but that continue to exist; in the present instance it was the aban-
donment of everything else to dine in comfortable surroundings,

Chapter 2 437
 The Guermantes Way

63. At roughly the halfway point of his which by the help of memory embody in a scene from nature
novel, Proust is reminding the reader suggestions of the rewards of travel, with a friend who is going
of the nature of the Narrator’s search
or quest. “Invisible Vocation” is per- to stir our dormant life with all his energy, with all his affection,
haps a fitting subtitle for one of the to communicate to us an emotional pleasure, very different from
novel’s main themes: how can I be- anything that we could derive from our own efforts or from social
come a writer?
64. See Swann’s Way, 205–8. distractions; we are going to exist solely for him, to utter vows of
friendship that, born within the confines of the hour, remaining
imprisoned in it, will perhaps not be kept the following day but
that I need have no scruple in taking before Saint-­L oup since,
with a courage into which there entered a great deal of common
sense and the presentiment that friendship cannot explore its own
depths, the next day he would be gone.
If as I came downstairs I relived those evenings at Doncières,
when we reached the street, suddenly, the almost total darkness, in
which the fog seemed to have extinguished the lamps, which one
could make out, glimmering very faintly, only when close at hand,
took me back to I could not say what arrival by night at Com-
bray, when the streets there were still lighted only at distant inter-
vals and one groped one’s way through a darkness moist, warm,
sacred like that of a crèche, just visibly starred here and there by a
wick that burned no brighter than a candle. Between that year—
to which, for that matter, I could ascribe no precise date—of my
Combray life and the evenings at Rivebelle which had, an hour
earlier, been reflected above my drawn curtains, what a world of
differences! I felt on perceiving them an enthusiasm that might
have borne fruit had I been left alone and would then have saved
me the detour of many wasted years through which I was yet to
pass before there was revealed to me that invisible vocation of
which this work is the history.63 Had the revelation come to me
this evening, the carriage in which I sat would have deserved to
rank as more memorable for me than Dr. Percepied’s, on the box
seat of which I had composed that little sketch—on which, as it
happened, I had recently come across, altered it and sent it in vain
to Le Figaro—of the steeples of Martinville.64 Is it because we re-
live our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day,

438 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

but in a memory that fastens upon the coolness or sun-­parched

heat of some morning or afternoon, receives the shadow of some
solitary place, is enclosed, immovable, arrested and lost, remote
from all others, because, therefore, the changes gradually wrought
not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving
character (changes that have imperceptibly carried us through life
from one to another, wholly different time), are of necessity elimi-
nated, that, if we revive another memory taken from a different
year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches
of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the in-
compatibility of two divers qualities, that of the air we breathe
and the color of the scene before our eyes? But between one and
another of the memories that had now come to me in turn of
Combray, of Doncières, and of Rivebelle, I was conscious at the
moment of much more than a distance in time, of the distance
that there would be between two separate universes, the material
elements in which were not the same. If I had sought to repro-
duce in a work the material in which my most trivial memories of
Rivebelle appeared to me to be carved, I would have had to streak
with rosy veins, to render at once translucent, compact, cool,
and resonant, a substance hitherto analogous to the coarse dark
sandstone of Combray. But Robert, having finished giving his in-
structions to the driver, joined me now in the carriage. The ideas
that had appeared before me took flight. Ideas are goddesses who
deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at
a turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when
they, standing framed in the doorway, bring him their annuncia-
tion. But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the
society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. And I found
myself cast back upon friendship.
Robert on arriving had indeed warned me that there was a
good deal of fog outside, but while we were talking, it had grown
steadily thicker. It was no longer merely the light mist that I had
looked forward to seeing rise from the island and envelop Mme
de Stermaria and myself. A few feet away from us the streetlamps

Chapter 2 439
 The Guermantes Way

were blotted out and then it was night, as dark as in the open
fields, in a forest, or rather on a mild Breton island whither I
would have liked to go; I felt lost, as on the stark coast of some
northern sea where one risks one’s life twenty times over before
coming to the solitary inn; ceasing to be a mirage for which one
seeks, the fog became one of those dangers against which one has
to fight, so that we had, in finding our way and reaching a safe
haven, the difficulties, the anxiety, and finally the joy that safety,
so little perceived by him who is not threatened with the loss of
it, gives to the perplexed and disoriented traveler. One thing only
came near to destroying my pleasure during our adventurous ride,
owing to the angry astonishment into which it flung me for a mo-
ment, “You know, I told Bloch,” Saint-­L oup suddenly informed
me, “that you didn’t really like him all that much, that you found
him rather vulgar at times. I’m like that, you see, I prefer clear-­cut
situations,” he concluded with a self-­satisfied air and in a tone that
brooked no reply. I was astounded. Not only had I the most abso-
lute confidence in Saint-­L oup, in the loyalty of his friendship, and
he had betrayed it by what he had said to Bloch, but it seemed to
me that he of all men ought to have been restrained from doing so,
by his defects as well as by his good qualities, by that astonishing
veneer of breeding that was capable of carrying politeness to what
was positively a want of frankness. His triumphant air, was it
what we assume to cloak a certain embarrassment in admitting
a thing that we know we ought not to have done? Was it merely
thoughtlessness? Stupidity making a virtue out of a defect that I
had not associated with him? A passing fit of ill-humor toward
me prompting him to end our friendship, or the registering of a
passing fit of ill-humor vis-­à-­vis Bloch, to whom he had wanted
to say something disagreeable, even though I would be compro-
mised by it? However that might be, his face was seared, while he
uttered this vulgar speech, by a frightful sinuosity that I saw on it
once or twice only in all the time I knew him, and which, begin-
ning by running more or less down the middle of his face, when
it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous expression

440 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no doubt in- 65. “And the Lord went before them by
herited. There must have been at such moments, which recurred day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them
the way; and by night in a pillar of fire,
probably not more than once every other year, a partial eclipse of to give them light; to go by day and
his true self by the passage across it of the personality of some an- night.” Exodus 13:​21.
cestor whose shadow fell on him. Fully as much as his self-­satisfied
air, the words: “I prefer clear-­cut situations,” encouraged the same
doubt and should have incurred a similar condemnation. I felt in-
clined to say to him that if one prefers clear-­cut situations, one
ought to confine these outbursts of frankness to one’s own affairs
and not to acquire a too easy merit at the expense of others. But by
this time the carriage had stopped outside the restaurant, the huge
façade of which, glazed and streaming with light, alone succeeded
in piercing the darkness. The fog itself, beside the comfortable
brightness of the lighted interior, seemed to be waiting outside
on the sidewalk to show one the way in with the joy of servants
whose faces reflect the hospitable instincts of their master; irides-
cent with the most delicate shades of light, it pointed the way like
the pillar of fire that guided the Hebrews.65 Many of whom, as it
happened, were to be found inside. For it was in this restaurant
that Bloch and his friends, intoxicated by a hunger—as famishing
as the ritual fast, which at least occurs only once a year—for coffee
and the satisfaction of political curiosity, had long been in the
habit of meeting in the evenings. Every mental excitement cre-
ating a value that overrides others, a quality superior to the rest
of one’s habits, there is no taste at all keenly developed that does
not thus gather around it a society that it unites and in which the
esteem of his fellows is what each of its members seeks before any-
thing else from life. Here, in their café, be it in a little provincial
town, you will find people who are passionate about music; the
greater part of their time, all their spare cash is spent in chamber
concerts, in meetings for musical discussion, in cafés where one
finds oneself among music lovers and rubs shoulders with musi-
cians. Others, keen on flying, seek to be in good standing with
the old waiter in the glazed bar perched above the airfield; shel-
tered from the wind as in the glass cage of a lighthouse, they can

Chapter 2 441
 The Guermantes Way

66. Proust indicates this maneuver follow, in the company of an aviator who is not flying that day, the
with the single word “loopings” in evolutions of a pilot practicing looping the loop,66 while another,
English.
67. In The Arabian Nights, the Roc is an invisible a moment ago, comes suddenly swooping down to land
eagle of enormous size, able to carry with the great winged roar of an Arabian Roc.67 The little coterie
away an elephant in its talons. that met to try to perpetuate, to analyze in detail the fugitive emo-
68. Florence-­Georgina, Marquise de
Galliffet (1842?–­1901), was the wife of tions aroused by the Zola trial attached a similar importance to
Général Galliffet and daughter of the this particular café. But they were not viewed with favor by the
famous financier Jacques Lafitte. young nobles who composed part of the clientele and had taken
possession of a second room, separated from the other only by a
flimsy parapet topped with a row of plants. These looked upon
Dreyfus and his supporters as traitors, although twenty-­five years
later, ideas having had time to classify themselves and Dreyfusism
to acquire, in the light of history, a certain distinction, the Bol-
shevistic and dance-­mad sons of these same young nobles were to
declare to the “intellectuals” who questioned them that undoubt-
edly, had they been alive at the time, they would have been for
Dreyfus, without having any clearer idea of what the great Af-
fair had been about than did Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès or
the Marquise de Galliffet,68 other luminaries already extinct at the
date of their birth. For on the night of the fog the noblemen of
the café, who were in due course to become the fathers of these
young intellectuals, Dreyfusards in retrospect, were still bachelors.
Naturally the idea of a rich marriage was present in the minds of
all their families, but none of them had yet brought such a mar-
riage off. While still potential, the only effect of this rich marriage,
the simultaneous ambition of several of them (there were indeed
several “rich matches” in view, but after all the number of big
dowries was considerably below that of the aspirants to them),
was to create among these young men a certain amount of rivalry.
As ill luck would have it, Saint-­L oup remaining outside for a
minute to explain to the driver that he was to call for us again
after dinner, I had to enter alone. Now, to begin with, once I
had entered the spinning door, to which I was not accustomed, I
began to fear that I would never succeed in escaping from it. (Let
me note here for the benefit of lovers of verbal accuracy that the

442 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

contrivance in question, despite its peaceful appearance, is known 69. In French, a revolving door is called
as a revolver, from the English revolving door.)69 That evening the a porte tambour (drum door), because
of its shape.
proprietor, not venturing either to brave the elements outside or 70. Dignus est intrare is a Latin expres-
to desert his customers, nevertheless remained standing near the sion meaning “he is worthy of coming
entrance in order to have the pleasure of listening to the joyful in.” It is found at the end of act 3 of
Molière’s comedy Le Malade imagi-
complaints of the new arrivals, all aglow with the satisfaction of naire. It is used in fun when there is a
people who have had difficulty in reaching a place and have been question of someone’s being worthy
afraid of losing their way. The smiling cordiality of his welcome of admission into an organization or a
society.
was, however, dissipated by the sight of a stranger incapable of 71. In the original, écot, which means
disengaging himself from the rotating sheets of glass. This flagrant to pay one’s share in a meal taken
sign of ignorance made him frown like an examiner who has a together.
72. The Invalides is a complex of build-
good mind not to utter the formula: Dignus est intrare.70 As a ings in the seventh arrondissement
crowning error I went and sat down in the room reserved for the that was begun under Louis XIV as a
nobility, from which he at once expelled me, indicating to me, retirement home for war veterans. The
chapel of Saint Louis, added in 1680,
with a rudeness to which all the waiters at once conformed, a place was chosen in 1840 to receive the re-
in the other room. This was all the less to my liking because the mains of Napoléon.
seat was in the middle of a crowded banquette and I had oppo- 73. The Rond-Point is a circular
space on the Champs-­Élysées where
site me the door reserved for the Hebrews which, as it did not re- the avenue Montaigne, the avenue
volve, opening and shutting at every moment, kept me in a hor- Matignon, and the avenue Franklin D.
rible draught. But the proprietor declined to move me, saying: Roosevelt (then the avenue d’Antin)
converge. The gardens of the Champs-­
“No, Monsieur, I cannot disturb everyone just for you.” He soon Élysées extend as far as the eastern
forgot, however, this belated and troublesome guest, captivated side of the Rond-Point, which is not
as he was by the arrival of each newcomer who, before calling for far from the Petit Palais and the Grand
Palais.
his beer, his wing of cold chicken, or his hot grog (it was by now
long past dinnertime), must first, as in the old romances, pay his
scot71 by relating his adventure at the moment of his entry into
this asylum of warmth and security where the contrast with the
perils just escaped made the gaiety and sense of comradeship pre-
vail, thus creating a cheerful harmony around the campfire.
One reported that his carriage, thinking it had gotten to the
pont de la Concorde, had circled three times around the In-
valides;72 another that his, in trying to make its way down the
avenue des Champs-­Élysées, had driven into a clump of trees at
the Rond-­Point,73 from which it had taken him three-quarters of
an hour to get clear. Then followed lamentations about the fog,

Chapter 2 443
 The Guermantes Way

74. The Porte Saint-­Martin is a tri- the cold, the deathly stillness of the streets, uttered and received
umphal arch built in 1674 by the archi- with the same exceptionally jovial air, which was accounted for by
tect Pierre Bullet during the reign of
Louis XIV to celebrate the capture of the pleasant atmosphere of the room (which, except where I sat,
Besançon and the defeat of the Ger- was warm), the dazzling light that set blinking eyes already accus-
mans. tomed to not seeing, and the buzz of talk that restored their ac-
tivity to deafened ears.
It was all the newcomers could do to keep silence. The singu-
larity of the mishaps that each of them thought unique burned
their tongues, and their eyes roved in search of someone to en-
gage in conversation. The proprietor himself lost all sense of social
distinction. “M. le Prince de Foix lost his way three times coming
from the Porte Saint-­Martin,”74 he was not afraid to say with a
laugh, actually pointing out, as though introducing one to the
other, the illustrious nobleman to a Jewish lawyer, who, on any
evening but this, would have been divided from him by a bar-
rier far harder to surmount than the ledge topped with greenery.
“Three times—Imagine that!” said the lawyer, touching his hat.
This note of rapprochement was not at all to the prince’s liking.
He belonged to an aristocratic group for whom the practice of im-
pertinence, even at the expense of their fellow nobles when these
were not of the very highest rank, seemed the sole possible occu-
pation. Not to acknowledge a greeting, and, if the polite stranger
repeated the offense, to titter with sneering contempt or fling
back one’s head with a look of fury, to pretend not to recognize
some elderly man who had done them a service, to reserve their
handshakes and greetings for dukes and the really intimate friends
of dukes whom the latter introduced to them: such was the atti-
tude of these young men, and especially of the Prince de Foix.
Such an attitude was encouraged by the heedlessness of early man-
hood (a period in which, even in the middle class, one appears
ungrateful and behaves like a cad because, having forgotten for
months to write to a benefactor after he has lost his wife, one then
ceases to greet him in the street so as to simplify matters), but it
was inspired above all by an acute caste snobbishness. It is true
that, like certain nervous disorders the symptoms of which grow

444 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

less pronounced in later life, this snobbishness was on the whole

to cease to express itself in so offensive a form in these men who
had been so intolerable when young. Once youth is outgrown, it is
seldom that anyone remains hidebound by insolence. He had sup-
posed it to be the only thing in the world; suddenly he discovers,
prince though he is, that there also are such things as music, lit-
erature, even running for office. The scale of human values is cor-
respondingly altered and he joins in conversation with people at
whom he at one time would have looked daggers. Which is fortu-
nate for those of the latter who have had the patience to wait, and
whose character is sufficiently formed—if one may so put it—for
them to feel pleasure in receiving in their forties the civility and
welcome that had been coldly withheld from them at twenty!
Since I have mentioned the Prince de Foix, it may be appro-
priate here to add that he belonged to a set of twelve or fifteen
young men and to an inner group of four. The twelve or fifteen
shared this characteristic (which the prince lacked, I believe) that
each of them faced the world in a dual aspect. Up to their eyes in
debt, they were of no account in those of their tradesmen, not-
withstanding the pleasure these took in addressing them as “Mon-
sieur le Comte,” “Monsieur le Marquis,” “Monsieur le Duc.” They
hoped to retrieve their fortunes by means of the famous “rich
marriage” (“moneybags,” as the expression still was) and, as the fat
dowries that they coveted numbered at the most four or five, sev-
eral of these young men would be silently training their batteries
on the same damsel. And the secret would be so well kept that
when one of them, on arriving at the café, announced: “My dear
fellows, I am too fond of you all not to tell you of my engagement
to Mlle d’Ambresac,” there was a general outburst, more than one
of the others imagining that the marriage was as good as settled
already between Mlle d’Ambresac and himself, and not having
enough self-­control to stifle a spontaneous cry of stupefaction and
rage. “So you like the idea of marriage, do you Bibi?” the Prince
de Châtellerault could not help exclaiming, letting his fork drop
in his surprise and despair, for he had been fully expecting the en-

Chapter 2 445
 The Guermantes Way

gagement of this identical Mlle d’Ambresac to be announced, but

with himself, Châtellerault, as her bridegroom. And heaven only
knew all that his father had cunningly hinted to the Ambresacs
against Bibi’s mother. “So you think it’ll be fun, being married,
do you?” he was impelled to repeat his question to Bibi, who,
better prepared to meet it, for he had had plenty of time to decide
on the right attitude to adopt since the engagement had reached
the semiofficial stage, replied with a smile: “What pleases me is
not the idea of marriage, which never appealed much to me, but
marrying Daisy d’Ambresac, whom I think charming.” In the time
taken up by this response, M. de Châtellerault had recovered his
composure, but he was thinking that he must at the earliest pos-
sible moment execute an about-­face in the direction of Mlle de la
Canourque or Miss Foster, numbers two and three on the list of
heiresses, pacify somehow the creditors who were expecting the
Ambresac marriage, and finally explain to the people to whom
he too had declared that Mlle d’Ambresac was charming that this
marriage was all very well for Bibi, but that he himself would have
had all his family down on him like a ton of bricks if he had mar-
ried her. Mme Soléon (he decided to say) had actually gone so far
as to say that she would not have them in her house.
But if in the eyes of tradesmen, proprietors of restaurants, and
the like these young men seemed of little account, conversely,
being creatures of dual personality, the moment they appeared
in society they ceased to be judged by the depletion of their for-
tunes and the sordid occupations by which they sought to repair
them. They became once more M. le Prince this, M. le Duc that,
and were reckoned only in terms of their quarterings. A duke who
was practically a multimillionaire and seemed to combine in his
own person every possible distinction gave precedence to them
because, the heads of their various houses, they were by descent
sovereign princes of small countries in which they were entitled to
mint money and so forth. Often in this café one of them lowered
his eyes when another came in so as not to oblige the newcomer
to greet him. This was because in his imaginative pursuit of riches,

446 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

he had invited a banker to dine. Every time that a man about 75. That is, more platonic, given his
town enters into relations, on this footing, with a banker, the preference for same-­sex love.

latter leaves him the poorer by a hundred thousand francs, which

does not prevent the man about town from at once repeating the
process with another. We continue to burn candles in churches
and to consult doctors.
But the Prince de Foix, who was himself rich, belonged not
only to this fashionable set of fifteen or so young men, but to a
more exclusive and inseparable group of four that included Saint-­
Loup. These were never asked anywhere separately, they were
known as the four gigolos, they were always to be seen riding
together, in châteaux their hostesses gave them communicating
bedrooms, with the result that, especially as they were all four
extremely good-­looking, rumors were current as to the extent of
their intimacy. I was in a position to refute these categorically so
far as Saint-­L oup was concerned. But the curious thing is that if,
later on, one was to learn that these rumors were true of all four,
each of the quartet had been entirely in the dark as to the other
three. And yet each of them had done his utmost to find out about
the others, to gratify a desire or (more probably) a resentment, to
prevent a marriage or to secure a hold over the friend whose secret
he discovered. A fifth (for in these groups of four there are never
four only) had joined this platonic party who was more so75 than
any of the others. But religious scruples restrained him until long
after the group had broken up, and he himself was a married man,
the father of a family, fervently praying at Lourdes that the next
baby might be a boy or a girl, and in the meantime throwing him-
self upon soldiers.
Despite the prince’s code of manners, the fact that the law-
yer’s comment, though uttered in his hearing, had not been di-
rectly addressed to him made him less angry than he would other-
wise have been. Besides, this evening was somewhat exceptional.
Finally, the lawyer had no more prospect of coming to know the
Prince de Foix than the coachman who had driven that noble lord
to the restaurant. The prince felt, accordingly, that he might allow

Chapter 2 447
 The Guermantes Way

76. Agadir is a port city in Morocco, himself to reply, in an arrogant tone and as though to all present,
site of a conflict between France and to this stranger who, thanks to the fog, was in the position of a
Germany in 1913 that led to an accord
between the two countries granting traveling companion whom one meets at some seaside place at the
Germany access to the Congo and ends of the earth, scoured by all the winds of heaven or shrouded
leaving Morocco as a protectorate of in mist: “Losing your way’s nothing; the trouble is, you can’t find
France.
it again.” The wisdom of this aphorism impressed the proprietor,
for he had already heard it several times in the course of the eve-
ning.
He was, in fact, in the habit of always comparing what he heard
or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration
aroused if he could detect no difference. This state of mind is by
no means to be ignored, for, applied to political conversations, to
the reading of newspapers, it forms public opinion and thereby
makes possible the greatest events in history. A lot of German café
owners, simply by being impressed by a customer or a newspaper
when he or it said that France, England, and Russia were “out to
crush” Germany, made war, at the time of Agadir, possible, even
if no war occurred.76 Historians, if they have not been wrong to
abandon the practice of attributing the actions of peoples to the
will of kings, ought to substitute for the latter the psychology of
the individual, of the average individual.
In politics the proprietor of this particular café had for some
time now applied his recitation-­teacher’s mentality to certain par-
ticular details of the Dreyfus Affair. If he did not find the terms
that were familiar to him in the conversation of a customer or the
columns of a newspaper, he would pronounce the article boring
or the speaker insincere. The Prince de Foix, however, impressed
him so forcibly that he barely gave him time to finish his sentence.
“That’s right, Prince, that’s right,” (which meant neither more nor
less than “recited without a mistake”) “that’s exactly how it is!”
he exclaimed, “expanding,” like people in The Arabian Nights, “to
the limit of repletion.” But the prince had by this time vanished
into the smaller room. Then, as life resumes its normal course after
even the most sensational happenings, those who had emerged
from the sea of fog began to order whatever they wanted to eat or

448 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

drink; among them a party of young men from the Jockey Club 77. The story of Noah and the Ark is
who, in view of the abnormality of the situation, had no hesitation told in Genesis 6–9.

in taking their places at a couple of tables in the big room, and

were thus quite close to me. So the cataclysm had established even
between the smaller room and the bigger, among all these people
stimulated by the comfort of the restaurant after their long wan-
derings across the ocean of fog, a familiarity from which I alone
was excluded, not unlike the spirit that must have prevailed in
Noah’s Ark.77 Suddenly I saw the landlord’s body whipped into a
series of bows, the headwaiters hurrying to support him in a full
muster that drew every eye toward the door. “Quick, send Cyprien
here, lay a table for M. le Marquis de Saint-­L oup,” cried the pro-
prietor, for whom Robert was not merely a great nobleman who
enjoyed genuine prestige even in the eyes of the Prince de Foix,
but a client who lived lavishly and spent a great deal of money in
this restaurant. The customers in the big room looked on with
curiosity; those in the small room outdid each other in shouting
greetings to their friend as he finished wiping his shoes. But just
as he was about to make his way into the small room he caught
sight of me in the big one. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “what on
earth are you doing there? And with the door wide open too?” he
went on, with an angry glance at the proprietor, who ran to shut
it, throwing the blame on his staff: “I’m always telling them to
keep it shut.”
I had been obliged to shift my own table and to disturb others
that stood in the way in order to reach him. “Why did you move?
Would you sooner dine here than in the little room? Why, my
poor fellow, you’re freezing. You will oblige me by keeping that
door locked”; he turned to the proprietor. “This very instant,
M. le Marquis; the customers who arrive from now on will have to
go through the little room, that’s all.” And the better to show his
zeal, he detailed for this operation a headwaiter and several satel-
lites, vociferating the most terrible threats of punishment were it
not properly carried out. He began to show me exaggerated marks
of respect to make me forget that these had begun not upon my

Chapter 2 449
 The Guermantes Way

78. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in arrival but only after that of Saint-­L oup, while, for fear that I
Flower, 499. might believe them to have been prompted by the friendliness
shown me by his rich and aristocratic customer, he gave me now
and again a surreptitious little smile that seemed to indicate a re-
gard that was wholly personal.
Something said by one of the diners behind me made me turn
my head for a moment. I had caught, instead of the words: “Wing
of chicken, excellent; and a glass of champagne, only not too dry,”
the unexpected: “I would prefer glycerin. Yes, hot, excellent.” I
wanted to see who the ascetic was that was inflicting upon him-
self such a diet. I turned quickly back to Saint-­L oup so as not to
be recognized by the man with the strange appetite. It was simply
a doctor, whom I happened to know, and of whom another cus-
tomer, taking advantage of the fog to buttonhole him here in the
café, was asking his professional advice. Like stockbrokers, doc-
tors employ the first person singular.
Meanwhile I was studying Robert, and my thoughts took a line
of their own. There were in this café, and I had myself known at
other times in my life, plenty of foreigners, intellectuals, art stu-
dents of all sorts, resigned to the laughter excited by their preten-
tious capes, their 1830 neckties, and still more by their maladroit
movements, going so far as to provoke that laughter in order to
show that they paid no heed to it, who yet were men of real intel-
lectual and moral worth, of profound sensibility. They repelled—
the Jews among them principally, the unassimilated Jews, that
is to say, for with the other kind we are not concerned—those
who could not endure any oddity or eccentricity of appearance
(as Bloch repelled Albertine).78 Generally speaking, one realized
afterward that if they had going against them hair worn too long,
noses and eyes that were too big, abrupt theatrical gestures, it
was puerile to judge them by these only, they had plenty of wit
and good-­heartedness and were men to whom, in the long run,
one could become closely attached. Among the Jews especially
there were few whose parents and kinsfolk had not a warmth of
heart, a breadth of mind, a sincerity, in comparison with which

450 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Saint-­L oup’s mother and the Duc de Guermantes cut the poorest 79. Opus francigenum is Latin for
of moral figures by their aridness, their skin-­deep religiosity, “the work of the French.” The locu-
tion applies to all the works of ancient
which denounced only the most open scandals, their apology for French art whose creators or authors
a Christianity that led invariably (by the unexpected channels of a are unknown and especially to Gothic
purely calculating mind) to a colossal marriage for money. But in churches and cathedrals. This last
style was invented by the French at the
Saint-­L oup, when all was said, however the faults of his relatives Basilica of Saint-­Denis, near Paris, and
might be combined in a fresh creation of qualities, there reigned until the Renaissance was known as the
the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it style français.

must be frankly admitted, to the undying glory of France) these

qualities are found in a man who is purely French, be he noble or
plebeian, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word, for
a sense of proportion persists and also a certain restraint—with a
grace that the foreign visitor, however estimable he may be, does
not present to us. Of these intellectual and moral qualities others
undoubtedly have their share, and if we have first to overcome
what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less pre-
cious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one that is per-
haps exclusively French that what is fine from the standpoint of
equity, what is of value to the heart and mind should be first of all
attractive to the eyes, charmingly colored, consummately chiseled,
should express outwardly as well in substance as in form an inward
perfection. I studied Saint-­L oup’s features and said to myself that
it is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of physical grace to
prepare one for the graces within, and when the wings of the nose
are spread as delicately and with as perfect a design as the wings of
the little butterflies that hover over the fieldflowers around Com-
bray; and that the true opus francigenum,79 the secret of which was
not lost in the thirteenth century, the beauty of which would not
be lost with the destruction of our churches, consists not so much
in the stone angels of Saint-­André-­des-­Champs as in the young
sons of France, noble, citizen, or peasant, whose faces are carved
with that delicacy and boldness that have remained as traditional
there as on the famous porch, but are as well still creative.
After leaving us for a moment in order to supervise person-
ally the barring of the door and the ordering of our dinner (he

Chapter 2 451
 The Guermantes Way

80. The grand duke is the monarchial laid great stress on our choosing “butcher’s meat,” the fowls being
head of state of the Grand Duchy of presumably nothing to boast of ), the proprietor came back to
Luxembourg. Its promotion to the
status of grand duchy in 1815 coincided inform us that M. le Prince de Foix would esteem it a favor if
with its unification with the Nether- M. le Marquis would allow him to dine at a table next to his. “But
lands under the House of Orange-­ they are all taken,” objected Robert, casting an eye over the tables
Nassau.
that blocked the way to mine. “That doesn’t matter in the least, if
M. le Marquis would like it, I can easily ask these people to move
to another table. It is always a pleasure to do anything for M. le
Marquis!” “But you must decide,” said Saint-­L oup to me. “Foix
is a good fellow, he may bore you or he may not; anyhow he’s not
such a fool as most of them.” I told Robert that of course I would
like to meet his friend but that now that I was for once in a way
dining with him and was so entirely happy to do so, I would be
just as pleased to have him all to myself. “He’s got a very fine coat,
the prince has,” the proprietor broke in upon our deliberation.
“Yes, I know,” said Saint-­L oup. I wanted to tell Robert that M. de
Charlus had concealed from his sister-­in-­law the fact that he knew
me, and to ask him what could be the reason for this, but was pre-
vented by the arrival of M. de Foix. As he came to see whether
his request had been favorably received, we caught sight of him
standing a few feet away from our table. Robert introduced us,
but did not hide from his friend that since we had things to talk
about he would prefer that we not be disturbed. The prince with-
drew, adding to the farewell bow that he made me a smile that,
pointed at Saint-­L oup, seemed to transfer to him the responsi-
bility for the shortness of a meeting that the prince himself would
have liked to see prolonged. But at that moment, Robert, struck,
it appeared, by a sudden idea, dashed off after his friend, with
a “Stay where you are and start your dinner, I will be back in
a moment,” to me; and vanished into the smaller room. I was
pained to hear the chic young men sitting near me, whom I did
not know, tell the most absurd and malicious stories about the
young Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg (formerly Comte
de Nassau),80 whom I had met at Balbec and who had shown
me such delicate marks of sympathy at the time of my grand-

452 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mother’s illness. According to one of these young men, he had

said to the Duchesse de Guermantes: “I expect everyone to get up
when my wife passes,” to which the duchess had retorted (with as
little truth, had she said any such thing, as wit, the grandmother
of the young princess having always been a paragon of propriety):
“Get up when your wife passes, do they? Well, that’s a change
from her grandmother, because she expected the gentlemen to
lie down.” Then someone alleged that, having gone down to see
his aunt the Princesse de Luxembourg at Balbec, and put up at
the Grand Hôtel, he had complained to the manager there (my
friend) that the royal standard of Luxembourg was not flown over
the esplanade. And that this flag being less familiar and less gener-
ally in use than the British or Italian, it had taken him several days
to procure one, greatly to the young grand duke’s annoyance. I did
not believe a word of this story, but made up my mind, as soon as
I went to Balbec, to question the manager, so as to make certain
that it was a pure invention.
While waiting for Saint-­L oup to return I asked the propri-
etor for some bread. “Certainly, Monsieur le Baron!” “I am not a
baron,” I told him with a look of feigned sadness. “Oh, I beg your
pardon, Monsieur le Comte!” I had no time to lodge a second
protest that would certainly have promoted me to the rank of
marquis; faithful to his promise of an immediate return, Saint-­
Loup reappeared in the doorway carrying over his arm the thick
vicuña coat of the Prince de Foix, from whom I guessed that he
had borrowed it in order to keep me warm. He signed to me not
to get up, and came toward me, but either my table would have
to be moved again or I must change my seat if he was to get to
his. As soon as he entered the big room he sprang lightly on to
one of the red velvet banquettes that ran around its walls and on
which, apart from myself, there were sitting only three or four of
the young men from the Jockey Club, friends of his, who had not
managed to find places in the other room. Between the tables and
the wall electric wires were stretched at a certain height; without
the least hesitation Saint-­L oup jumped nimbly over them like a

Chapter 2 453
 The Guermantes Way

81. In an April 1921 letter to Robert horse in a steeplechase; embarrassed that it should be done wholly
de Montesquiou, Proust revealed the for my benefit and to save me the trouble of a slight movement,
autobiographical source of this epi-
sode. After saying that there were no I was at the same time amazed at the precision with which my
keys for the character of Saint-­Loup, friend performed this exercise in acrobatics; and in this I was not
he admits that there was at least one alone; for, although they would probably have had but little admi-
for this scene: “I had in mind the cir-
cumambulation of banquettes once ration for a similar display on the part of a less aristocratic and
performed in a café by my poor friend less generous customer, the proprietor and the waiters stood fasci-
Bertrand de Fénelon, who was killed in nated, like knowledgeable racegoers in the enclosure; one under-
1914.” Bertrand de Fénelon, Vicomte de
Salignac-­Fénelon (1878–1914), who was ling, apparently rooted to the ground, stood there gaping with a
a casualty of the early months of World dish in his hand for which a party close beside him were waiting;
War I, contributed other aspects of and when Saint-­L oup, having to pass behind his friends, climbed
Saint-­Loup. See Carter, Marcel Proust,
338, 588–90. on the narrow ledge behind them and ran along it, balancing
himself with his arms, discreet applause broke from the body of
the room. On coming to where I was sitting he stopped short in
his advance with the precision of a tributary chieftain before the
throne of a sovereign, and, stooping down, handed to me with
an air of courtesy and submission the vicuña coat, which, a mo-
ment later, having taken his place beside me, without my having
to make a single movement, he arranged as a light but warm shawl
about my shoulders.81
“By the way, while I think of it,” Robert said to me, “my Uncle
Charlus has something to say to you. I promised I’d send you
around to him tomorrow evening.”
“I was just going to speak to you about him. But tomorrow eve-
ning I am dining with your Aunt Guermantes.”
“Yes there’s a huge blowout tomorrow at Oriane’s. I’m not in-
vited. But my Uncle Palamède doesn’t want you to go there. You
can’t get out of it, I suppose? Well, anyhow, go on to my Uncle
Palamède’s afterward. I think he’s very eager to see you. You see,
you can easily manage to get there by eleven. Eleven o’clock; don’t
forget; I’ll let him know. He’s very touchy. If you don’t turn up
he’ll never forgive you. And Oriane’s parties are always over quite
early. If you are only going to dine there you can quite easily be at
my uncle’s by eleven. I ought really to go and see Oriane, about
getting a transfer from Morocco. She is so nice about all that sort

454 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

of thing, and she can get anything she likes out of Général de 82. Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) was
Saint-­Joseph, who runs that branch. But don’t say anything about the last German Emperor and King of
Prussia.
it to her. I’ve mentioned it to the Princesse de Parme, everything 83. Honoré Charles Grimaldi, Albert I
will be all right. Interesting place, Morocco. I could tell you all (1848–1922), Prince of Monaco, de-
sorts of things. Very fine men out there. One feels they’re on one’s voted much of his life to oceanography.
In 1906, he founded the Oceanographic
own level, intellectually.” Institute in Paris. His link to Wilhelm
“You don’t think the Germans are going to go to war over it?” II is not clear, but as a pacifist he may
“No, they’re annoyed with us, as after all they have every right have tried to dissuade the kaiser from
war. Perhaps this is why he might have
to be. But the emperor82 is out for peace. They are always making sought concessions from France on the
us think they want war, to force us to give in. Pure bluff, you kaiser’s behalf.
know, like poker. The Prince of Monaco, one of Wilhelm’s agents, 84. Le Déluge is an oratorio that
Camille Saint-­Saëns composed in 1875
comes and tells us in confidence that Germany will attack us if we on a biblical poem by Louis Gallet
don’t give in.83 Then we give way. But if we didn’t give way, there (1835–98). The oratorio was on the
wouldn’t be war in any shape or form. You have only to think what program of the Concerts Lamoureux
in 1905, the period of the controversy
a cosmic spectacle a war would be in these days. It’d be a bigger about Morocco.
catastrophe than The Flood 84 and the Götterdämmerung85 rolled 85. The fourth and last part of Wagner’s
into one. Only it wouldn’t last so long.” The Ring of the Nibelung, The Twilight
of the Gods, composed between 1869
He spoke to me of friendship, affection, regret, although like and 1874. At the conclusion, the heroic
all travelers of his sort he was going off the next morning for characters are dead, the hall of the Ghi-
some months, which he was to spend in the country, and would bichungs catches fire and collapses, the
Rhine overflows its banks, and the gods
be staying only a couple of nights in Paris on his way back to are consumed in the flames of Valhalla
Morocco (or elsewhere); but the words that he thus let fall into the as the curtain falls.
warm furnace that my heart was this evening kindled a pleasant
glow there. Our infrequent meetings, this one in particular, have
since formed a distinct episode in my memories. For him, as for
me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship that
I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (and felt there-
fore some remorse at the thought), what he would have liked to
inspire. Filled still with the pleasure that I had had in seeing him
come bounding toward me and gracefully pause on arriving at his
goal, I felt that this pleasure lay in my recognizing that each of
the series of movements that he had developed against the wall,
along the banquette, had its meaning, its cause in Saint-­L oup’s
own individual nature perhaps, but even more in the one that by
birth and upbringing he had inherited from his race.

Chapter 2 455
 The Guermantes Way

86. Proust is thinking of the friezes of A certainty of taste in the domain not of beauty but manners,
the Parthenon that depict the Panathe- which when he was faced by a novel combination of circum-
naic procession, which includes cavalry.
stances enabled the man of breeding to grasp at once—like a mu-
sician who has been asked to play a piece he has never seen—the
feeling, the motions that were required, and to apply the appro-
priate mechanism and technique; and then allowed this taste to
display itself without the constraint of any other consideration, by
which so many young men of the middle class would have been
paralyzed, from fear both of making themselves ridiculous in the
eyes of strangers by this disregard of propriety and of appearing
overzealous in the eyes of their friends, and which in Robert was
replaced by a lofty disdain that certainly he had never felt in his
heart but that he had received by inheritance in his body, and that
had molded the attitudes of his ancestors into a familiarity that,
they imagined, could only flatter and enchant those to whom it
was addressed; lastly, a noble liberality that, taking no account of
his boundless material advantages (lavish expenditure in this res-
taurant had succeeded in making him, here as elsewhere, the most
fashionable customer and the general favorite, a position under-
lined by the deference shown him not only by the waiters but by
all its most exclusive young patrons), led him to trample them
underfoot, just as he had, actually and symbolically trodden upon
those crimson banquettes, like a triumphal way that pleased my
friend only because it enabled him more gracefully and swiftly to
arrive at my side; such were the qualities, all essential to aristoc-
racy, that through the husk of this body, not opaque and vague
as mine would have been, but significant and limpid, transmitted
as through a work of art the industrious, energetic force that had
created it and rendered the movements of this light-­footed course
that Robert had pursued along the wall intelligible and charming
as those of horsemen on a marble frieze.86 “Alas!” Robert might
have thought, “was it worthwhile to have grown up despising
birth, honoring only justice and intellect, choosing, outside the
ranks of the friends provided for me, companions who were awk-
ward and ill-­dressed if they had the gift of eloquence, only to

456 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

discover that the sole personality apparent in me, which is to re- 87. The Prince de Foix is the descen-
main a treasured memory, is not the one that my will, with the dant of Catherine de Foix (1470–1517,
Queen of Navarre 1483–1517), wife of
most praiseworthy effort, has fashioned in my likeness, but one Jean d’Albret and granddaughter of
that is not of my making, that is not even myself, that I have Charles VII, King of France (1403–61,
always disliked and striven to overcome? Was it worthwhile to king 1422–61). Her mother, Madeleine,
was Charles VII’s daughter, who mar-
love my chosen friend as I have loved him, for the greatest plea- ried Gaston de Foix.
sure that he can find in me to be that of discovering something
far more general than myself, a pleasure that is not in the least (as
he says, though he cannot seriously believe it) one of the pleasures
of friendship, but an intellectual and detached pleasure, a sort of
artistic pleasure?” This is what I am now afraid that Saint-­L oup
may at times have thought. If so, he was mistaken. If he had not
(as he steadfastly had) cherished something more lofty than the
suppleness innate in his body, if he had not kept aloof for so long
from the pride that goes with noble birth, there would have been
something more studied, a certain heaviness in his very agility, a
self-­important vulgarity in his manners. As with Mme de Villepa-
risis a strong vein of seriousness had been necessary for her to give
in her conversation and in her Mémoires a sense of the frivolous,
which is intellectual, so, in order that Saint-­L oup’s body might be
indwelt by so much nobility, the latter had first to desert a mind
that was aiming at higher things, and, reabsorbed into his body, to
be fixed there in lines unconscious and noble. In this way his dis-
tinction of mind was not absent from a physical distinction that
otherwise would not have been complete. An artist has no need to
express his mind directly in his work for the latter to express the
quality of that mind; it has even been said that the highest praise
of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds cre-
ation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. And I was
quite well aware that it was not merely a work of art that I was ad-
miring in this young cavalier unfolding along the wall the frieze
of his flying course; the young prince (a descendant of Catherine
de Foix, Queen of Navarre and granddaughter of Charles VII)87
whom he had just left for my sake, the endowments, by birth and
fortune, that he was laying at my feet, the proud and shapely an-

Chapter 2 457
 The Guermantes Way

88. Charles-­Augustin Sainte-­Beuve cestors who survived in the assurance, the agility, the courtesy
(1804–69) was a poet, critic, and lit- with which he now arranged about my shivering body the vicuña
erary historian. See In the Shadow of
Young Girls in Flower, 51, n. 115. coat, were not all these like friends of longer standing than I in
89. Née Marie-­Thérèse Rodet (1699– his life, by whom I might have expected that we would be per-
1777), Mme Geoffrin held a salon in manently kept apart, and whom, on the contrary, he was sacri-
the rue Saint-­Honoré for many years.
In his Causeries du Lundi, Sainte-­Beuve ficing to me by a choice that one can make only in the loftiest
writes in 1850 that of all the eighteenth-­ places of the mind, with that sovereign liberty of which Robert’s
century salons, hers was the “most movements were the presentment and in which is realized perfect
complete.” This is presumably because
she invited writers, painters, and mem- friendship?
bers of the aristocracy. How much familiar intercourse with a Guermantes—in place
90. Jeanne-­Françoise-­Julie Bernard, of the distinction that it had in Robert, because hereditary disdain
called Juliette (1777–1849), was noted
for her wit and beauty, and for her in him was but the outer garment, become an unconscious grace,
salon at Abbaye-­aux-­Bois, which of a real moral humility—could disclose of vulgar arrogance I had
burned in 1907, on what is now the rue had an opportunity of seeing not in M. de Charlus, in whom cer-
Récamier in the seventh arrondisse-
ment. Sainte-­Beuve wrote in 1849 that tain defects of character, for which I had been unable, so far, to
no salon compared with hers. Her por- account, were superimposed on his aristocratic habits, but in the
trait (1800) by Jacques-­Louis David is Duc de Guermantes. And yet he too, in the general impression of
in the Louvre.
91. Charlotte-­Louise-­Adelaïde d’Os- commonness that had so strongly repelled my grandmother when
mond, Comtesse de Boigne (1781– she had met him years earlier at Mme de Villeparisis’s, offered
1866), was a member of the old aristoc- glimpses of ancient grandeur of which I became conscious when I
racy about whom Sainte-­Beuve wrote
an obituary article in Le Constitutionnel went to dine in his house, on the evening following the one I had
of May 18, 1866, in which he said: “She spent with Saint-­L oup.
enjoyed bringing together the most They had not been apparent to me either in himself or in the
distinguished statesmen.” During
the Monarchie de Juillet, she kept an duchess when I had met them first in their aunt’s drawing room,
impor­tant liberal salon. Her memoir, any more than I had discerned, on first seeing her, the differences
Récits d’une tante, was published in that set Berma apart from her colleagues, all the more that in her
1907.
the distinctive features were infinitely more striking than in any
social celebrity, such distinctions becoming more marked in pro-
portion as the objects are more real, more conceivable by the intel-
lect. And yet, however slight the shades of social distinction may
be (and so slight are they that when an accurate portrayer like
Sainte-­Beuve88 tries to indicate the shades of difference between
the salons of Mme Geoffrin,89 Mme Récamier,90 and Mme de
Boigne,91 they appear so much alike that the cardinal truth that,
unknown to the author, emerges from his investigations is the

458 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

vacuity of that form of life), nevertheless, and for the same reason
as with Berma, when the Guermantes had ceased to impress me
and the droplet of their originality was no longer vaporized by my
imagination, I was able to distil and analyze it, imponderable as
it was.
The duchess having made no reference to her husband when
she talked to me at her aunt’s party, I wondered whether, in view
of the rumors of a divorce that were current, he would be present
at the dinner. But my doubts were speedily set at rest, for through
the crowd of footmen who stood about in the hall and who (since
they must until then have regarded me much as they regarded
the children of the evicted cabinetmaker, that is to say with more
fellow feeling perhaps than their master but as a person incapable
of being admitted to his house) must have been asking themselves
to what this social revolution could be due, I saw slip toward me
M. de Guermantes, who had been watching for my arrival so as
to receive me on his threshold and take off my greatcoat with his
own hands.
“Mme de Guermantes will be as pleased as Punch,” he greeted
me in a glibly persuasive tone. “Let me help you off with your
duds.” (He felt it to be at once companionable and comic to use
popular expressions.) “My wife was just the least bit afraid you
might fail us, although you had fixed a date. We’ve been saying
to each other all day long: ‘Depend upon it, he’ll never turn up.’ I
am bound to say, Mme de Guermantes was a better prophet than
I was. You are not an easy man to get hold of, and I was quite sure
you were going to let us down.”
And the duke was so bad a husband, so brutal even (people
said), that one felt grateful to him, as one feels grateful to wicked
people for their occasional kindness of heart, for those words
“Mme de Guermantes” with which he appeared to be spreading
out over the duchess a protective wing so that she might be but
one flesh with him. Meanwhile, taking me familiarly by the hand,
he began to lead the way, to introduce me into his household. Just
as some common expression may delight us coming from the lips

Chapter 2 459
 The Guermantes Way

92. The matter of “Ossian’s works” is of a peasant if it points to the survival of a local tradition, shows
considered one of the greatest literary the trace of some historic event unknown, it may be, to the one
hoaxes of all time. Ossian, the Gaelic
warrior-­poet who allegedly lived in the who thus alludes to it; so this politeness on the part of M. de
third century a.d., is the narrator and Guermantes, which, moreover, he was to continue to show me
purported author of a cycle of epic throughout the evening, charmed me as a survival of habits of
poems published by the Scottish poet
James Macpherson (1736–96). Famous many centuries’ growth, habits of the seventeenth century in par-
writers who admired Ossian include ticular. The people of bygone ages seem to us infinitely remote.
Goethe, Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand, We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying in-
and Byron. The first translation of these
poems by Pierre Letourneur appeared tentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when
in France in 1777 and inspired Mme de we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we are feeling
Staël’s theories about the distinctions today in one of Homer’s heroes, or a skillful tactical feint in Han-
between the literatures of north and
south Europe. nibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven
back in order to take the enemy by surprise and surround him; it
would seem that we imagined the epic poet and the Punic gen-
eral as being as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo.
Even in certain personages of the court of Louis XIV, when we
find signs of courtesy in the letters written by them to some man
of inferior rank who could be of no service to them whatever, they
leave us astonished because they reveal to us suddenly, as existing
among these great seigneurs, a whole world of beliefs that they
never express directly but that govern their conduct, and in par-
ticular the belief that they are bound in politeness to feign certain
sentiments and to exercise with the most scrupulous care certain
obligations of cordiality.
This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the
things that enable us to understand how even great writers have
found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers, such
as Ossian.92 We are so astonished that bards long dead could have
modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an an-
cient Gaelic ode we come upon one that we would have thought,
at the most, ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent
has simply to add to an ancient writer whom he is reproducing
more or less faithfully some passages that, signed with a contem-
porary name and published separately, would seem merely enter-
taining; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who

460 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once. 93. Herodotus (c. 484–425 b.c.) was a
This translator was capable only of a mediocre book, if that book Greek historian whose works are pri-
marily about the mores of the inhabi-
had been published as his original work. Given out as a transla- tants of different countries in the Medi-
tion, it seems that of a masterpiece. Not only is the past not fugi- terranean basin.
tive, it remains present. It is not within a few months only after
the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effec-
tively influence its course, it is not only fifteen years after a crime
that has remained unsolved that a magistrate can still find the vital
evidence that will throw a light on it; after hundreds and thou-
sands of years the scholar who has been studying in a distant land
the place-­names, the customs of the inhabitants, may still extract
from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already un-
intelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus,93
which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, dwells sur-
rounded by the present, like an emanation of greater density, im-
memorial and stable. There was similarly an emanation, though
far less ancient, from the life of the court, if not in the manners of
M. de Guermantes, which were often vulgar, at least in the mind
that controlled them. I was to breathe this again, like an ancient
odor, when I joined him again a little later in the drawing room.
For I did not go there at once.
As we left the outer hall, I had mentioned to M. de Guer-
mantes that I was extremely eager to see his Elstirs. “I am at your
service. Is M. Elstir a friend of yours, then? If so, I am very sorry,
for I know him slightly; he is a pleasant fellow, what our fathers
used to call an ‘honnête homme’; I might have asked him to honor
us with his company, and to dine tonight. I am sure he would
have been highly flattered at being invited to spend the evening in
your company.” Very little suggestive of the Ancien Régime when
he tried thus to assume its manner, the duke then relapsed into
it unwittingly. After inquiring whether I wished him to show me
the paintings, he conducted me to them, gracefully standing aside
for me at each door, apologizing when, to show me the way, he
was obliged to precede me, a little scene that (since the days when
Saint-­Simon relates that an ancestor of the Guermantes did him

Chapter 2 461
 The Guermantes Way

94. In the days before electricity the the honors of the hotel with the same punctilious exactitude in
magic lantern (the forerunner of the performance of the frivolous duties of a gentleman) must, be-
today’s projector) had a boxlike shape
and was set atop a candle or oil lamp. fore coming gradually down to us, have been enacted by many
other Guermantes for many other visitors. And as I had said to the
duke that I would like very much to be left alone for a few minutes
with the paintings, he discreetly withdrew, telling me that when I
was ready I would find him in the drawing room.
But once I was face to face with the Elstirs, I completely forgot
about dinner and the time; here again as at Balbec I had before
me fragments of that world of new and unfamiliar colors that was
no more than the projection, the way of seeing things peculiar
to that great painter, which his speech in no way expressed. The
parts of the walls that were covered by paintings of his, all homo-
geneous with one another, were like the luminous images of a
magic lantern, which would have been in this instance the brain
of the artist, and the strangeness of which one could never have
suspected so long as one had known only the man, which was like
seeing the lantern boxing its lamp before any colored slide had
been slid into its groove.94 Among these pictures some of those
that seemed the most ridiculous to fashionable people interested
me more than the rest because they re-­created those optical illu-
sions that prove to us that we would never succeed in identifying
objects if we did not interpose some process of reasoning. How
often, when driving, do we not come upon a long, lighted street
that begins a few feet away from us, when what we have actually
before our eyes is nothing but a patch of wall brightly lit, which
has given us the mirage of depth. Therefore, is it not logical, not
by any artifice of symbolism but by a sincere return to the very
root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for
which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it? Surfaces and
volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects that
our memory imposes on them after we have recognized them. El-
stir attempted to wrest from what he had just felt what he already
knew; his effort had often been to break up that aggregate of im-
pressions that we call vision.

462 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

The people who detested these “horrors” were astonished to find 95. Jean-­Baptiste Siméon Chardin
that Elstir admired Chardin,95 Perroneau,96 and so many painters (1699–1779) was an artist who greatly
influenced Proust’s own ideas about es-
whom they, the ordinary men and women of society, liked. They thetics in painting. See In the Shadow of
did not take into account that Elstir had had to make, for his own Young Girls in Flower, 488, n. 328.
part, in striving to reproduce reality (with the particular index of 96. Jean-­Baptiste Perroneau (1715–83)
was a talented portrait painter of the
his taste for certain experiments), the same effort as a Chardin or bourgeoisie who was influenced by
a Perroneau and that consequently, when he ceased to work for Chardin.
himself, he admired in them attempts of the same sort, fragments 97. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
(1780–1867) was a staunch classicist
anticipatory so to speak of works of his own. Nor did these society and rival of Eugène Delacroix.
people include in their conception of Elstir’s work that perspec- 98. This painting by Édouard Manet
tive of Time that enabled them to like, or at least to look without (1832–83) scandalized those who at-
tended the Salon of 1865, where it was
discomfort at Chardin’s painting. And yet the older among them exhibited for the first time. In 1907,
might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives Olympia was hung in the Salle des
they had seen gradually, as the years bore them away from it, the États of the Louvre along with the Oda-
lisque by Ingres.
unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece 99. These paintings seem to have been
by Ingres97 and what, they had supposed, must remain forever inspired by those of Auguste Renoir.
a “horror” (Manet’s Olympia,98 for example) shrink until the two The “monsieur” whose presence in El-
stir’s paintings intrigues the Narrator is
canvases seemed like twins. But we do not benefit from any lesson no doubt inspired by Charles Ephrussi
for we lack the wisdom to work backward from the particular to (1849–1905), art collector, art historian,
the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an ex- and editor of La Gazette des Beaux-­
Arts. He posed in a jacket and top hat
perience that has no precedents in the past. for Renoir’s Le Déjeuner des canotiers
I was moved by the discovery in two of the paintings (more (1880–81), a painting that corresponds
realistic, these, and in an earlier manner) of the same monsieur, to Proust’s description.
100. Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460–
in one in evening dress in his own drawing room, in the other 1525/26) was a Venetian painter often
wearing a frock coat and top hat at some popular waterside fes- referred to by Proust. Carpaccio de-
tival where he had evidently no business to be, which proved that picted various members of the Loredan
family in his paintings The Legend of
for Elstir this man was not only a regular sitter but a friend,99 per- Saint Ursula (1490–96) and The Miracle
haps a patron, whom it pleased him (just as Carpaccio introduced of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto (1494).
prominent figures—and in perfect likenesses—from contempo- 101. Archduke Rudolph (1788–1831) was
Beethoven’s greatest patron. In grati-
rary life in Venice)100 to introduce into his pictures, just as Bee- tude, Beethoven dedicated far more
thoven, too, found pleasure in inscribing at the top of a favorite compositions to him than to anyone
work the beloved name of the Archduke Rudolph.101 There was else. The scores include the Fourth
and Fifth (Emperor) Piano Concertos,
something enchanting about this waterside carnival. The river, the the piano sonata Les Adieux, the violin
women’s dresses, the sails of the boats, the innumerable reflections sonata Opus 96, and the Archduke
of one thing and another came crowding into this little square of Piano Trio (named for Rudolph).

Chapter 2 463
 The Guermantes Way

102. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in painting that Elstir had cut out of a marvelous afternoon. What
Flower, 456–58. delighted one in the dress of a woman who had stopped dancing
103. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower, 450, 467. for a moment, because of the heat and being out of breath, was
that it shimmered too, and in the same way in the canvas of a
motionless sail, in the water of the little harbor, in the floating
wooden bridge, in the leaves of the trees and in the sky. As in one
of the pictures that I had seen at Balbec, the hospital, as beau-
tiful beneath its sky of lapis lazuli as the cathedral itself, seemed
(more bold than Elstir the theorist, than Elstir the man of taste,
the lover of things medieval)102 to be intoning: “There is no such
thing as Gothic, there is no such thing as a masterpiece; a hospital
with no style is just as good as the glorious porch,” so I now heard:
“The slightly vulgar lady at whom a man of discernment would re-
frain from looking at as he passed her by, would exclude from the
poetical composition that nature has set before him—that woman
is beautiful too, her dress is receiving the same light as the sail of
that boat, everything is equally precious; the commonplace dress
and the sail, beautiful in itself, are two mirrors of the same reflec-
tion. Their worth is all in the painter’s eye.” This eye had had the
skill to arrest for all time the motion of the hours at this luminous
instant when the lady had felt hot and had stopped dancing, when
the tree was encircled with a periphery of shadow, when the sails
seemed to be gliding over a golden glaze. But precisely because
that instant pressed on one with so much force, this so permanent
canvas gave the most fleeting impression, one felt that the lady
would soon go home, the boats drift away, the night draw on, that
pleasure comes to an end, that life passes and that instants illumi-
nated by the convergence, at once, of so many lights do not recur.
I recognized yet another aspect, quite different it is true, of what
the Instant means in a series of watercolors of mythological sub-
jects, dating from Elstir’s first period,103 which also adorned this
room. Society people who held “advanced” views on art went “as
far as” this earliest manner, but no farther. These were certainly
not the best work that he had done, but already the sincerity with
which the subject had been thought out took away its coldness.

464 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Thus the Muses, for example, were represented as though they 104. These watercolors with mytho-
were creatures belonging to a species now fossilized, but creatures logical subjects are inspired by the
paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826–
that it would not have been surprising in mythological times to 98). In some variants, Proust gives
see pass in the evening, in twos or threes, along some mountain more details about those that he had in
path.104 Here and there a poet, of a race that had also a particular mind: Hercule et l’Hydre de Lerne (1876)
or La Jeune Fille thrace portant la tête
interest for the zoologist (characterized by a certain sexlessness) d’Orphée (1865), and Le Retour des Argo-
strolled with a Muse, as one sees in nature creatures of different nautes (1897). But in the final version,
but of kindred species consort together. In one of these water- the painting that best fits Proust’s de-
scription is Les Muses quittant Apollon
colors one saw a poet wearied by long wanderings on the moun- leur père pour aller éclairer le monde. À la
tains, whom a Centaur, meeting him and moved to pity by his recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli­
weakness, has taken on his back and is carrying home.105 In more mard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 714,
n. 1.
than one other, the vast landscape (in which the mythical scene, 105. This is an allusion to two paintings
the fabulous heroes, occupy a minute place and seem almost lost) by Moreau: Hésiode et la Muse and Le
was rendered, from the mountain tops to the sea, with an exacti- Poète mort porté par un centaure. Cen-
taurs were legendary creatures who
tude that told one more than the hour, told one to the very minute were half-­man, half-­horse and lived in
what time of day it was, thanks to the precise angle of the setting the mountains of Thessaly. In Greek
sun, to the fleeting fidelity of the shadows. In this way the artist mythology, they are usually represented
as savage beasts, although Chiron was
gives, by making it instantaneous, a sort of historical reality, as of known for his kindness, wisdom, and
a thing actually lived, to the symbol of his fable, paints it and sets nurturing nature.
it at a definite point in the past. 106. In The Barber of Seville (1775) by
Beaumarchais, Count Almaviva, dis-
While I was examining Elstir’s paintings the bell rung by ar- guised as a music teacher, introduces
riving guests had been pealing uninterruptedly, and had lulled himself as Lindor and sings a love
me into a pleasing unawareness. But the silence that followed its song to Rosina. At the end of the song
the stage directions read: “L’absence
clangor and had already lasted for some time succeeded—less du bruit qui avait endormi Bartolo le
rapidly, it is true—in awakening me from my reverie as the silence réveille” (The absence of the sound
that follows Lindor’s music arouses Bartolo from his sleep.106 I which sent Bartolo to sleep, wakes
him; act 3, scene 4). Beaumarchais,
was afraid that I had been forgotten, that they had sat down to The Figaro Trilogy, trans. David Coward
dinner, and I hurried to the drawing room. At the door of the El- (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
stir gallery I found a servant waiting for me, white-­haired, though 2003), 52. Beaumarchais’s play was
made into an opera by Rossini.
whether with age or powder I cannot say, with the air of a Spanish
minister, but treating me with the same respect that he would
have shown to a king. I felt from his manner that he might have
waited for me for another hour, and I thought with alarm of the
delay I had caused in the service of dinner, especially as I had
promised to be at M. de Charlus’s by eleven.

Chapter 2 465
 The Guermantes Way

107. The Flower Maidens appear in The Spanish minister (though I also met on the way the footman
Wagner’s opera Parsifal (1882). Parsifal persecuted by the concierge, who, radiant with delight when I in-
is tempted by the enchantress Kundry
and by the Flower Maidens in his quest quired after his fiancée, told me that the very next day they were
for the Holy Grail. both to be off duty, so that he would be able to spend the whole
day with her, and extolled the kindness of Madame la Duchesse)
conducted me to the drawing room, where I was afraid of finding
M. de Guermantes in a bad mood. He welcomed me, on the con-
trary, with a joy that was evidently to a certain extent artificial and
dictated by politeness, but was also sincere, prompted both by his
stomach that so long a delay had begun to famish, and his aware-
ness of a similar impatience in all his other guests, who completely
filled the room. Indeed I learned afterward that I had kept them
waiting for nearly three-­quarters of an hour. The Duc de Guer-
mantes probably thought that to prolong the general torment
for two minutes more would not increase it and that, politeness
having driven him to postpone for so long the moment of moving
into the dining room, this politeness would be more complete if,
by not having dinner announced immediately, he could succeed
in persuading me that I was not late, and that they had not been
waiting for me. And so he asked me, as if we had still an hour
before dinner and some of the party had not yet arrived, what
I thought of his Elstirs. But at the same time, and without let-
ting the cravings of his stomach become apparent, in order not to
lose another moment, he, in concert with the duchess, proceeded
to the ceremony of introduction. Then only did I perceive that
there had occurred around about me—around me who until this
evening, except for my novitiate in Mme Swann’s drawing room,
had been accustomed, in my mother’s homes, at Combray and in
Paris, to the manners, either protecting or defensive, of the bour-
geois ladies who treated me like a child—a change of surround-
ings comparable to the one that introduces Parsifal suddenly into
the midst of the Flower Maidens.107 Those who surrounded me
now, entirely décolletées (the naked flesh appeared on either side
of a sinuous spray of mimosa or behind the broad petals of a rose)
could not murmur a word of greeting without at the same time

466 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

bathing me in long, caressing glances, as though shyness alone re-

strained them from kissing me. Many of them were nevertheless
highly respectable from the moral standpoint; many, not all, for
the most virtuous had not for those who were unchaste the same
repulsion that my mother would have felt. The caprices of one’s
conduct, denied by saintlier friends in the face of the evidence,
seemed in the Guermantes world to matter far less than the rela-
tions that one had been able to maintain. One pretended not to
know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers,
provided that her visiting list showed no gaps.
Since the duke paid little attention to his other guests (of whom
he had long known everything that there was to know, and they of
him) but a great deal to me, whose kind of superiority, being out-
side his experience, inspired in him something akin to the respect
that the great nobleman of the court of Louis XIV used to feel
for his bourgeois ministers, he evidently considered that the fact
of my not knowing his other guests mattered not at all—to me at
least, though it might to them—and while I was anxious, on his
account, as to the impression that I was going to make on them,
he was concerned only about the one they would make on me.
At the very outset, indeed, there was a small twofold imbro-
glio. No sooner had I entered the drawing room than M. de Guer-
mantes, without even allowing me time to shake hands with the
duchess, had led me, as though I were a delightful surprise to
the person in question to whom he seemed to be saying: “Here’s
your friend! You see, I’m bringing him to you by the scruff of his
neck,” toward a lady of rather small stature. Now, thrust forward
by the duke, well before I had reached her chair, the lady had
begun to flash at me continuously from her large, soft, dark eyes
the many knowing smiles that we address to an old friend who
perhaps has not recognized us. As this was precisely my case and I
could not remember who she was, I averted my eyes from her as I
approached in order not to have to respond until our introduction
released me from my predicament. Meanwhile the lady continued
to maintain in unstable equilibrium the smile intended for me.

Chapter 2 467
 The Guermantes Way

She looked as though she was in a hurry to be relieved of it and to

hear me say: “Ah, Madame, of course! but this is a pleasure! How
pleased Mamma will be when I tell her we’ve met again!” I was
as impatient to learn her name as she was to see that I did finally
greet her, fully aware of what I was doing, so that the smile that
she was holding on indefinitely, like the note of a tuning fork,
might at last be let go. But M. de Guermantes managed things so
badly (to my mind, at least) that I seemed to have heard only my
own name uttered and was given no clue to the identity of my un-
known friend, to whom it never occurred to tell me herself what
her name was, so obvious did the grounds of our intimacy, which
baffled me completely, seem to her. Indeed, as soon as I had come
within reach, she did not offer me her hand, but took mine in a
familiar clasp, and spoke to me exactly as though I had been as au
courant as she was of the pleasant memories to which her mind
reverted. She told me how sorry Albert (who, I gathered, was her
son) would be to have missed seeing me. I tried to remember who,
among the people I had known as boys, was called Albert, and
could think only of Bloch, but this could not be Bloch’s mother
that I saw before me since she had been dead for many years. In
vain I struggled to identify the past experience common to herself
and me to which her thoughts had been carried back. But I could
no more distinguish it through the translucent jet of her large, soft
pupils, which allowed only her smile to pierce their surface, than
one can distinguish a landscape that lies on the other side of a pane
of smoked glass, even when the sun is blazing on it. She asked me
whether my father was not working too hard, if I would like to
come to the theater some evening with Albert, if I was feeling
better now, and as my replies, stumbling through the mental dark-
ness in which I was plunged, became distinct only to explain that
I was not feeling well that evening, she pushed forward a chair for
me herself, going to all sorts of trouble that I was not accustomed
to see taken by my parents’ other friends. At length the clue to the
riddle was given to me by the duke: “She thinks you’re charming,”
he murmured in my ear, which felt somehow that it had heard

468 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

these words before. They were what Mme de Villeparisis had said 108. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
to my grandmother and me after we had made the acquaintance Flower, 304.
109. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
of the Princesse de Luxembourg.108 Everything became clear; the Flower, 303.
present lady had nothing in common with Mme de Luxembourg, 110. Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) was
but from the language of the man who thus served her up to me the author of historic plays and come-
dies. The implausibility of his historical
I could discern the nature of the beast. She was a Highness. She characters in his plays—Théodora, Fé-
had never before heard of either my family or myself, but, a scion dora, and Cléopâtre, which he wrote
of the noblest race and endowed with the greatest fortune in the for Sarah Bernhardt—was such that
the salon goers of the Belle Époque
world (for, a daughter of the Prince de Parme, she had married amused themselves by making paro-
an equally princely cousin), she sought always, in gratitude to dies of them.
her Creator, to testify to her neighbor, however poor or lowly he
might be, that she did not look down on him. Indeed, I ought to
have guessed this from her smile, for I had seen the Princesse de
Luxembourg buy rye bread on the beach at Balbec to give to my
grandmother, as though to a caged deer in the Jardin d’Acclimata-
tion.109 But this was only the second princess of the royal blood to
whom I had been presented, and I might be excused my failure to
discern in her the common traits of the friendliness of the great.
Besides, had not they themselves gone out of their way to warn
me not to count too much on this friendliness, since the Duchesse
de Guermantes, who had waved me so effusive a greeting with her
gloved hand at the Opéra, had appeared furious when I bowed to
her in the street, like people who, having once given somebody a
louis, feel that this has set them free from any further obligation
toward him. As for M. de Charlus, his ups and downs were even
more sharply contrasted. In time, as we will see, I was to know,
as the reader will learn, highnesses and majesties of another sort
altogether, queens who play the queen and do not speak after the
conventions of their kind but like the queens in Sardou’s plays.110
If M. de Guermantes had been in such haste to present me, it
was because the presence at a gathering of anyone not personally
known to a royal personage is an intolerable state of affairs that
must not be prolonged for a single instant. It was similar to the
haste that Saint-­L oup had shown in making me introduce him
to my grandmother. By the same token, by a fragmentary sur-

Chapter 2 469
 The Guermantes Way

111. Giorgione (c. 1477–1510), Italian vival of the old life of the court that is called social courtesy and
painter, chief master of the Venetian is not superficial, in which, rather, by a centripetal reversion, it
school of painting.
112. The European quarter in Paris was is the surface that becomes essential and profound, the Duc and
constructed behind the Gare Saint-­ Duchesse de Guermantes regarded as a duty more essential and
Lazare beginning in 1826. All its streets more inflexible than those (which one at least of the pair neglected
bear the names of European cities. The
rue de Parme, in the ninth arrondisse- often enough) of charity, that of scarcely ever addressing the Prin-
ment, is located between the rue d’Am- cesse de Parme except in the third person.
sterdam and the rue de Clichy. It was Having never yet in my life been to Parma (as I had been eager
named in 1849 for the ancient capital
of the Duchy of Parma. to do ever since certain Easter holidays long ago), to meet its prin-
cess, who, I knew, owned the finest palace in that unique city,
where, moreover, everything must be homogeneous, isolated as it
was from the rest of the world, within the polished walls, in the
atmosphere, stifling as an airless summer evening on the piazza
of a small Italian town, of its compact and almost cloying name,
would surely have substituted in a flash for what I had so often
tried to imagine all that did really exist at Parma in a sort of par-
tial arrival there, without my having to stir from Paris; it was in
the algebraic expression of a journey to the city of Giorgione111
a simple equation, so to speak, of that unknown quantity. But
if I had for many years past—as a perfumer does to a solid mass
of grease—made this name, Princesse de Parme, absorb the fra-
grance of thousands of violets, in return, when I set eyes on the
princess, who, until then I would have sworn, must be the San-
severina herself, a second process began that was not, I may say,
completed until several months had passed, and consisted in ex-
pelling, by means of fresh chemical combinations, all the essential
oil of violets and all the Stendhalian fragrance from the name of
the princess, and in implanting there, in their place, the image of
a little dark woman, taken up with good works, of an amiability so
humble that one felt at once in how exalted a pride that amiability
had its roots. Moreover, while, barring a few points of difference,
she was exactly like any other great lady, she was as little Stend-
halian as is, for example, in Paris, in the quartier de l’Europe, the
rue de Parme,112 which bears far less resemblance to the name of
Parma than to any or all of the neighboring streets, and reminds

470 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

one not nearly so much of the charterhouse in which Fabrice ends 113. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
his days as of the waiting room in the Gare Saint-­L azare.113 Flower, 242.
114. The Houses of Clèves and Juliers
Her amiability sprang from two causes. The first and more gen- are among the oldest in Europe. Ju-
eral was the upbringing that this daughter of kings had received. liers is a city in Prussia that, in ancient
Her mother (not merely allied by blood to all the royal families times, was known as Juliacum. Its his-
tory was closely linked to the Duchy of
of Europe but furthermore—in contrast to the Ducal House of Clèves.
Parma—richer than any reigning princess) had instilled into her 115. At the beginning of the century, the
from her earliest childhood the arrogantly humble precepts of an main shareholder of the Compagnie
universelle du canal maritime de Suez
evangelical snobbery; and today every line of the daughter’s face, was Queen Victoria’s government.
the curve of her shoulders, the movements of her arms seemed 116. Proust himself was a shareholder
to repeat the lesson: “Remember that if God has caused you to of this Dutch petroleum company.
117. Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934)
be born on the steps of a throne, you ought not to make that a was a financier and art lover. Proust
reason for looking down upon those to whom Divine Providence consulted him several times about
has willed (wherefore His Name be praised) that you should be stock shares.

superior by birth and fortune. On the contrary, be kind to those

of humble origin. Your ancestors were Princes of Clèves and Ju-
liers from the year 647:​114 God has decreed in His bounty that
you should hold practically all the shares in the Suez Canal115 and
three times as many Royal Dutch116 as Edmond de Rothschild;117
your pedigree in a direct line has been established by genealogists
from the year 63 of the Christian Era; you have as sisters-­in-­law
two empresses. Therefore never seem in your speech to be recalling
these great privileges, not that they are precarious (for nothing can
alter antiquity of race and the world will always need oil), but be-
cause it is useless to point out that you are better born than other
people or that your investments are all gilt-­edged, since everyone
knows these facts already. Be helpful to the needy. Furnish to
all those whom the bounty of heaven has done you the favor of
placing beneath you as much as you can give them without forfei-
ture of your rank, that is to say help in the form of money, even
your personal service by their sickbeds, but of course never invite
them to your soirées, which would do them no possible good and,
by diminishing your prestige, would decrease the efficacy of your
benevolent activities.”
And so even at the moments when she could not do good, the

Chapter 2 471
 The Guermantes Way

118. The Brancas family, of Sicilian princess endeavored to demonstrate, or rather to let it be thought,
origin, came to France in the sixteenth by all the external signs of dumb show, that she did not consider
century. Proust saw this name many
times in Saint-­Simon’s Mémoires. There herself superior to the people among whom she found herself.
was a Comtesse de Brancas still living She treated each of them with that charming courtesy with which
in Paris in Proust’s day. well-­bred people treat their inferiors and was continually, to make
119. François Mansart or Mansard
(1598–1666) and his great-­nephew herself useful, pushing back her chair so as to leave more room,
Jules Hardouin, called Hardouin-­ holding my gloves, offering me all those services that would de-
Mansart (1646–1708), were among the mean the proud spirit of a commoner but are very willingly ren-
first creators of the classical architec-
ture style in France. dered by sovereign ladies or, instinctively and by force of profes-
sional habit, by old servants.
The other reason for the amiability shown me by the Princesse
de Parme was more particular, but in no way dictated by a mys-
terious liking for me. But as for this second reason, I did not, at
that moment, have the time to get to the bottom of it. Because
already the duke, who seemed in a hurry to complete the round
of introductions, had led me off to another of the flower maidens.
On hearing her name I told her that I had passed by her château,
not far from Balbec. “Oh, I would have been so pleased to show
you around it,” she said, almost in a whisper, to enhance her mod-
esty, but in a tone of deep feeling, steeped in regret for the loss of
an opportunity to enjoy a quite exceptional pleasure; and went on,
with a meaning glance: “I do hope you will come again someday.
But I must say that what would interest you more still would be
my Aunt Brancas’s château.118 It was built by Mansard;119 it is the
jewel of the province.” It was not only she herself who would have
been glad to show me her château, but her Aunt Brancas would
have been no less delighted to do me the honors of hers, or so I
was assured by this lady who thought evidently that, especially at
a time when the land showed a tendency to pass into the hands of
financiers who did not know how to live, it was important that the
great should keep up the lofty traditions of lordly hospitality, by
speeches that committed them to nothing. It was also because she
sought, like everyone in her world, to say the things that would
give most pleasure to the person she was addressing, to give him
the highest idea of himself, to make him think that he flattered

472 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

people by writing to them, that he honored those who entertained 120. Cardinal and secretary of state for
him, that everyone was dying to know him. The desire to give the Papal States, Ercole Consalvi (1757–
1824) signed the Concordat of 1801. He
other people this comforting idea of themselves does, it is true, was one of the “black cardinals” hostile
sometimes exist even among the middle classes. We find there that to Napoléon and was papal plenipoten-
kindly disposition, in the form of an individual quality compen- tiary at the Congress of Vienna.
121. In architecture a groined arch is
sating for some other defect, not alas among the most trusty male the projecting curved line along which
friends but at any rate among the most agreeable female compan- two intersecting vaults meet. Proust
ions. But there, in any case, it flourishes only in isolation. In an sometimes uses architectural terms
to describe the appearance of a man’s
important section of the aristocracy, on the other hand, this char- head.
acteristic has ceased to be individual; cultivated by upbringing,
sustained by the idea of a personal grandeur that can fear no hu-
miliation, that knows no rival, is aware that by being amiable it
can make people happy and delights in doing so, it has become
the generic feature of a class. And even those whom personal de-
fects of too incompatible a kind prevent from keeping it in their
hearts bear the unconscious trace of it in their vocabulary or their
gesticulation.
“She’s a very good woman,” said the Duc de Guermantes of
the Princesse de Parme, “and she knows how to play the ‘grande
dame’ when she likes, better than anyone.”
While I was being introduced to the ladies, one of the
gentlemen of the party had been showing various signs of agi-
tation: this was Comte Hannibal de Bréauté-­Consalvi.120 Ar-
riving late, he had not had time to investigate the composition
of the party, and when I entered the drawing room, seeing in me
a guest who was not one of the duchess’s regular circle and must
therefore have some quite extraordinary claim to admission, in-
stalled his monocle beneath the groined arch121 of his eyebrow,
thinking that this would be a great help to him in discovering
what manner of man I was. He knew that Mme de Guermantes
had (the priceless appanage of truly superior women) what was
called a “salon,” that is to say added occasionally to the people
of her own world some celebrity who had recently come into
prominence by the discovery of a new cure for something or the
production of a masterpiece. The Faubourg Saint-­Germain had

Chapter 2 473
 The Guermantes Way

122. Édouard Detaille (1848–1912) not yet recovered from the shock of learning that, to the recep-
fought in the war of 1870 and then de- tion that she had given to meet the King and Queen of England,
voted himself to depicting historical
and military paintings, such as Sortie de the duchess had not been afraid to invite M. Detaille. The clever
la garnison de Huningue and Bonaparte women of the Faubourg were not easily consolable for not having
en Égypte. been invited, so deliciously thrilling would it have been to come
123. Mme de Courvoisier appears in
Mme de Boigne’s Récits d’une tante. into contact with that strange genius.122 Mme de Courvoisier123
124. Alexandre Ribot (1842–1923) was claimed that M. Ribot124 had been there as well, but this was
minister of foreign affairs from 1890 to a pure invention, designed to make people believe that Oriane
1893 and one of the chiefs of the liberal
Republican Party. He was elected to the was aiming at an embassy for her husband. Finally, a last straw
Académie Française in 1906. of scandal, M. de Guermantes, with a gallantry that would have
125. Hermann-­Maurice, Comte de Saxe, done credit to Maréchal de Saxe,125 had repaired to the stage door
Maréchal de France (1696–1750), was
famous for his prowess as a soldier and of the Comédie-­Française and had begged Mlle Reichenberg126
seducer. Among his many mistresses to come and recite before the king, which having come to pass
was the celebrated actress Adrienne Le- constituted an event without precedent in the annals of fashion-
couvreur (1692–1730).
126. Suzanne Angélique Charlotte, Ba- able gatherings. Remembering all these surprises, which, more-
ronne de Bourgoing, née Reichenberg over, had his entire approval, his own presence being not merely
(1853–1924), made her debut in L’École an ornament but, in the same way as that of the Duchesse de
des femmes and, until her marriage to
the Baron de Bourgoing in 1898, played Guermantes, but in the masculine gender, a consecration to any
the ingénue at the Comédie-­Française, drawing room, M. de Bréauté, when he asked himself who I could
where she was a favorite. be, felt that the field was very wide for his investigations. For a
127. Charles-­Marie Widor (1844–1937)
was organist at Saint-­Sulpice from moment the name of M. Widor127 flashed before his mind, but
1896 to 1905 and professor of organ he decided that I was very young to be an organist, and M. Widor
and composition at the Conservatoire not striking enough to be “received.” It seemed on the whole more
National de Musique et de Déclama-
tion from 1891 to 1905. plausible to regard me simply as the new attaché at the Swedish
Legation of whom he had heard, and he was preparing to ask me
for the latest news of King Oscar, by whom he had several times
been very hospitably received; but when the duke, in introducing
me, had mentioned my name to M. de Bréauté, the latter, finding
that name to be completely unknown to him had no longer any
doubt that, since I was there, I must be a celebrity of some sort.
Oriane would certainly never invite anyone who was not, and had
the art of attracting men who were in the public eye to her salon,
in a ratio that of course never exceeded one percent, otherwise
she would have lowered its tone. M. de Bréauté began, therefore,
to lick his chops and to sniff the air greedily, his appetite whetted

474 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

not only by the good dinner on which he could count, but by the 128. Prince Robert Philippe Louis
character of the gathering, which my presence could not fail to Eugène Ferdinand of Orléans, Duc de
Chartres (1840–1910), was the son of
make interesting and which would furnish him with a topic for Prince Ferdinand Philippe, Duc d’Or-
brilliant conversation the next day during lunch at the Duc de léans and thus grandson of King Louis-­
Chartres’s.128 He had not yet settled in his own mind whether I Philippe of France.

was the man who had just been making those experiments with
a serum to cure cancer, or the author of the new “curtain-­raiser”
then in rehearsal at the Théâtre-­Français, but, a great intellec-
tual, a great collector of “travelers’ tales,” he continued an ever-­
increasing display of reverences, signs of mutual understanding,
smiles filtered through the glass of his monocle; either in the mis-
taken idea that a man of my standing would esteem him more
highly if he could manage to instill into me the illusion that for
him, the Comte de Bréauté-­Consalvi, the privileges of the mind
were no less deserving of respect than those of birth; or simply
from the need to express and the difficulty of expressing his sat-
isfaction, in his ignorance of the language in which he ought to
address me, just as if, in fact, he had found himself face to face
with one of the “natives” of an undiscovered country on which
his raft had landed, natives from whom, in the hope of ultimate
profit, he would endeavor, observing with interest all the while
their quaint customs and without interrupting his demonstrations
of friendship or, like them, uttering loud cries of benevolence, to
obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for glass beads. Having
responded as best I could to his joy, I shook hands next with the
Duc de Châtellerault, whom I had already met at Mme de Ville-
parisis’s, who, he informed me, was “a sharp customer.” He was
typically Guermantes with his blond hair, his aquiline profile, the
points where the skin of his cheeks was blemished, all of which
may be seen in the portraits of the family that have come down to
us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But since I was
no longer in love with the duchess, her reincarnation in the person
of a young man offered me no attraction. I interpreted the hook
made by the Duc de Châtellerault’s nose as if it had been the sig-
nature of a painter whose work I had long studied but who no

Chapter 2 475
 The Guermantes Way

129. The prince’s name is von longer interested me in the least. Next, I said good evening also to
Faffenheim-­Munsterburg-­Weinigen. the Prince de Foix, and to the detriment of my knuckles, which
130. Ventre affamé n’a pas d’oreilles lit-
erally means “a starving person has no emerged crushed and mangled, let them be caught in a vice that
ears,” so there’s no point in wasting was the German handshake, accompanied by an ironical or good-­
your words on such a person. natured smile, from the Prince von Faffenheim, M. de Norpois’s
friend, who, by virtue of the mania for nicknames that prevailed
in this set, was known so universally as Prince Von that he him-
self used to sign his letters “Prince Von,” or, when he wrote to his
intimates, “Von.” At least this abbreviation was understandable,
in view of his triple-­barreled name.129 It was less easy to grasp the
reasons that caused “Elizabeth” to be replaced, now by “Lili,” now
by “Bebeth,” just as another world swarmed with “Kikis.” One
can understand how people, although in most respects idle and
frivolous enough, might have come to adopt “Quiou” in order not
to waste the precious time that it would have taken them to pro-
nounce “Montesquiou.” But it is less easy to see what they gained
by nicknaming one of their cousins “Dinand” instead of “Ferdi-
nand.” It must not be thought, however, that in the invention of
nicknames the Guermantes invariably proceeded to curtail or re-
duplicate syllables. Thus two sisters, the Comtesse de Montpey-
roux and the Vicomtesse de Vélude, who were both of them enor-
mously stout, invariably heard themselves addressed, without the
least trace of annoyance on their part or of amusement on other
people’s, so long established was the custom, as “Petite” and “Mi-
gnonne.” Mme de Guermantes, who adored Mme de Montpey-
roux, would, if the latter had been seriously ill, have flown to the
sister with tears in her eyes and exclaimed: “I hear Petite is very
sick!” Mme de l’Éclin, who wore her hair in bands that entirely
hid her ears, was never called anything but “Starving Belly.”130 In
some cases people simply added an “a” to the last or first name of
the husband to indicate the wife. The most miserly, most sordid,
most inhuman man in the Faubourg having as his given name
Raphael, his charmer, his flower springing also from the rock
always signed herself “Raphaela”—but these are merely a few

476 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

specimens taken from innumerable rules to which we can always 131. Located near the coast in south-
return later on, if the occasion arises, and explain some of them. west Sicily, the city of Agrigente is
built around the ruins of the ancient
I then asked the duke to present me to the Prince d’Agrigente. Akragas, where one finds the temples
“What! Do you mean to say you don’t know our excellent Gri-­ dedicated to various gods and demi-
gri!” cried M. de Guermantes, and gave M. d’Agrigente my name. gods.
132. These are stock shares whose art-
His own, so often quoted by Françoise, had always appeared to work evokes the title of Walter Scott’s
me like a transparent sheet of colored glass through which I be- novel as well as the 1911 comedy Prime-
held, struck, on the shore of the violet sea, by the slanting rays of rose, by two of Proust’s friends: Robert
de Flers and Gaston de Caillavet.
a golden sun, the rosy marble cubes of an ancient city of which I
had not the least doubt that the prince—happening for a miracu-
lous moment to be passing through Paris—was himself, as lumi-
nously Sicilian and gloriously mellowed, the absolute sover-
eign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was introduced, and who
wheeled around to bid me good evening with a ponderous ease
that he considered elegant, was as independent of his name as of
any work of art that he might have owned without bearing upon
his person any trace of its beauty, without, perhaps, ever having
stopped to examine it. The Prince d’Agrigente was so entirely de-
void of anything princely, anything that might make one think of
Agrigente,131 that one was led to suppose that his name, entirely
distinct from himself, bound by no ties to his person, had had the
power of attracting to itself the whole of whatever vague poetical
element there might have been in this man as in any other, and
isolating it, after the operation, in the enchanted syllables. If any
such operation had been performed, it had certainly been done
most efficiently, for there remained not an atom of charm to be
drawn from this kinsman of Guermantes. With the result that he
found himself at one and the same time the only man in the world
who was Prince d’Agrigente and the man who, of all the men in
the world was, perhaps, least so. He was, for all that, very glad to
be what he was, but as a banker is glad to hold a number of shares
in a mine without caring whether the said mine answers to the
charming name of Ivanhoe or Primrose, or is called merely the
Premier.132 Meanwhile, as these introductions, which it has taken

Chapter 2 477
 The Guermantes Way

133. Emmanuel, Marquis de Grouchy me so long to recount but which, beginning as I entered the room,
(1766–1847), Maréchal de France, had lasted only a few seconds, were coming to an end, and Mme
commanded the reserve cavalry of the
Army of the North during the Hundred de Guermantes, in an almost suppliant tone, was saying to me: “I
Days. He was charged with following am sure Basin is tiring you, dragging you around like that; we are
Blücher’s Prussians, beaten at Ligny on anxious for you to know our friends, but we are a great deal more
June 16, 1815, and with preventing them
from rejoining Wellington’s troops. anxious not to tire you, so that you may come again often,” the
He failed his mission and was partly duke, with a somewhat awkward and timid wave of the hand, gave
to blame for Napoléon’s defeat at (as he would gladly have given it at any time during the last hour,
Waterloo on June 18.
134. This is a quotation from one of filled for me by the contemplation of his Elstirs) the signal that
the most eloquent sermons given by dinner might now be served.
Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704). I should add that one of the guests was still missing, M. de
The occasion was the funeral of Henri-
ette d’Angleterre, Duchesse d’Orléans, Grouchy, whose wife, a Guermantes by birth, had arrived by her-
who died suddenly in the flower of self, her husband being due to come straight from the country,
youth. The passage in question is this: where he had been shooting all day. This M. de Grouchy, a de-
“Ô nuit désastreuse! ô nuit effroy-
able où retentit tout à coup, comme scendant of his namesake of the First Empire, of whom it has been
un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante said, quite wrongly, that his absence at the start of the Battle of
nouvelle: Madame se meurt! Madame Waterloo was the principal cause of Napoléon’s defeat,133 came of
est morte!” (O disastrous night!
O dreadful night when rang out sud- an excellent family which, however, was not good enough in the
denly this astonishing news: Madame eyes of certain fanatics for blue blood. Thus the Prince de Guer-
is dying! Madame is dead!). mantes, whose own tastes, in later life, were to prove more easily
135. Robinson, in the southwestern sec-
tion of Paris, was a favorite place for satisfied, had been in the habit of saying to his nieces: “What
Parisians to stroll and have fun. They a misfortune for that poor Mme de Guermantes” (the Vicom-
could wine and dine in chestnut tree tesse de Guermantes, Mme de Grouchy’s mother) “that she has
houses or in one of the many garden
cafés and celebrate fine weather like never succeeded in marrying any of her children.” “But, uncle, the
Robinson Crusoe. eldest girl married M. de Grouchy.” “I do not call that a husband!
However, they say that your Uncle François has proposed for the
youngest one, so perhaps they won’t all die old maids.”
No sooner was the order to serve dinner given than with a vast
gyratory whirr, multiple and simultaneous, the double doors of
the dining room swung apart; a chamberlain with the air of a
Lord Chamberlain bowed before the Princesse de Parme and an-
nounced the tidings “Madame is served,” in a tone such as he
would have employed to say “Madame is dead,”134 which, how-
ever, cast no gloom over the assembly for it was with an air of un-
restrained gaiety and as, in summer, at “Robinson,”135 that the

478 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

couples moved forward one behind another to the dining room, 136. Pupazzi is Roman dialect for pup-
separating when they had reached their places, where footmen pets.
137. Proust’s metaphor emphasizes
thrust their chairs in behind them; last of all, Mme de Guermantes what was called the mécanique of Ver-
advanced upon me, that I might lead her to the table, and without sailles, as described by Saint-­Simon.
my feeling the least shadow of the timidity that I might have See Swann’s Way, 135.

feared, for, like a huntress to whom her great muscular prowess

has made graceful motion an easy thing, observing no doubt that I
had placed myself on the wrong side of her, she pivoted with such
accuracy around me that I found her arm resting on mine and
attuned in the most natural way to a rhythm of precise and noble
movements. I yielded to these with all the more readiness in that
the Guermantes attached no more importance to them than does
a truly learned man, in whose company one is less alarmed than in
that of a dunce, attaches to learning; other doors opened through
which there entered the steaming soup, as though the dinner were
being held in a pupazzi136 theater of skillful mechanism where the
belated arrival of the young guest set, on a signal from the puppet
master, all the machinery in motion.
Timid and not majestically sovereign had been this signal from
the duke, to which had responded the unlocking of that vast, in-
genious, subservient, and sumptuous clockwork, mechanical and
human.137 The indecision of his gesture did not spoil for me the
effect of the spectacle that was attendant upon it. For I could feel
that what had made it hesitating and embarrassed was the fear
of letting me see that they were waiting only for myself to begin
dinner and that they had been waiting for some time, just as Mme
de Guermantes was afraid that after looking at so many paintings
I would find it tiring and would be hindered from taking my ease
among them if her husband engaged me in a continuous flow of
introductions. So that it was the absence of grandeur in this ges-
ture that disclosed its true grandeur. As, also, did that indifference
shown by the duke to the splendor of his surroundings, in contrast
to his deference toward a guest, however insignificant, whom he
desired to honor. Not that M. de Guermantes was not in certain
respects thoroughly commonplace, showing indeed some of the

Chapter 2 479
 The Guermantes Way

138. In his Mémoires, Saint-­Simon de- absurd weaknesses of a man with too much money, the arrogance
scribes, in the chapter “The Character of an upstart, which he certainly was not. But just as a public offi-
of Louis XIV,” how the Sun King lis-
tened to petitioners. cial or a priest sees his own humble talents multiplied to infinity
139. Philippe de Valois (1293–1350) (as a wave is by the whole mass of the sea that presses behind it)
was King of France under the name of by those forces on which they can rely, the Government of France
Philippe VI (1328–50).
140. Charles V (1337–80) became King and the Catholic Church, so M. de Guermantes was borne on by
of France in 1364. that other force, aristocratic courtesy in its truest form. This cour-
141. Saint-­Simon recounts two inci- tesy drew the line at any number of people. Mme de Guermantes
dents to illustrate the king’s ignorance
in matters of genealogy: the births of would not have asked to her house Mme de Cambremer, or M. de
the Chevalier de Chevery and the Mar- Forcheville. But the moment that anyone (as was the case with
quis de Saint-­Hérem. me) appeared eligible for admission into the Guermantes world,
142. In the original, laisser la main,
which means to allow someone to this courtesy revealed treasures of hospitable simplicity more
go to the right either when sitting or splendid still, were that possible, than those historic rooms, or the
walking next to him. marvelous furniture that had remained in them.
When he wished to give pleasure to anyone, M. de Guermantes
possessed, in this way, for making his guest for the moment the
principal person present, an art that made the most of the circum-
stances and the place. No doubt at Guermantes his “distinctions”
and “favors” would have assumed another form. He would have
ordered his carriage to take me for a drive, alone with himself, be-
fore dinner. Such as they were, one could not help feeling touched
by his manners as one is in reading memoirs of the period by those
of Louis XIV when he replies good-­naturedly, smiling and almost
with a bow, to someone who has come to solicit his favor. It must
however in both instances be borne in mind that this “politeness”
did not go beyond the strict meaning of the word.138
Louis XIV (with whom the sticklers for pure nobility of his day
find fault, nevertheless, for his scant regard for etiquette, so much
so that, according to Saint-­Simon, he was only a very minor king,
as kings go, when compared with such monarchs as Philippe de
Valois139 or Charles V,140 etc.),141 has the most minute instruc-
tions drawn up so that princes of the blood and ambassadors may
know to what sovereigns they ought to give precedence.142 In cer-
tain cases, in view of the impossibility of arriving at a decision, a
compromise is arranged by which the son of Louis XIV, Mon-

480 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

seigneur,143 shall entertain certain foreign sovereigns only out of 143. Monseigneur was the title of Louis,
doors, in the open air, so that it may not be said that in entering Dauphin de France (1661–1711), son of
Louis XIV.
the house one has preceded the other;144 and the Elector Pala- 144. The sovereign in question, the
tine,145 entertaining the Duc de Chevreuse at dinner, pretends, so Elector of Bavaria, Maximilien Marie
as not to have to make way for his guest, to be taken ill, and dines Emmanuel (1662–1726), during his
stay in France in 1709, was invited to
with him indeed, but dines lying down, thus avoiding the diffi- Meudon by the Dauphin Louis.
culty. M. le Duc evading opportunities of paying his duty146 to 145. Charles-­Louis I of Bavaria (1617–
Monsieur the latter, on the advice of the king, his brother, who is 80) entertained Charles-­Honoré d’Al-
bert, Duc de Chevreuse (1646–1712),
moreover extremely attached to him, seizes an excuse for making at Heidelberg.
his cousin attend his levée147 and forcing him to pass him his 146. In the original, rendre le service,
shirt.148 But as soon as the feeling is deep, when the heart is in- which means to assist members of the
royal family as they prepare to go to
volved, this rule of duty, so inflexible when politeness only is at bed or to rise in the morning.
stake, changes entirely. A few hours after the death of his brother, 147. A levée is a reception held by a
one of the people whom he most dearly loved, when Monsieur, in king on rising from bed.
148. Louis III de Bourbon-­Condé, Mon-
the words of the Duc de Montfort,149 is “still warm,” we find Louis sieur le Duc (1668–1710), was grandson
XIV singing snatches from operas, astonished that the Duch- of the Grand Condé, who was the
esse de Bourgogne,150 who has difficulty in concealing her grief, cousin of Louis XIV and of his brother
Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans, known as
should be looking so melancholy, and, desiring that the gaiety of Monsieur (1640–1701).
the court be at once resumed, so that his courtiers may be encour- 149. Charles-­Honoré de Luynes, Duc de
aged to sit down to the tables, ordering the Duc de Bourgogne to Montfort (1669–1704).
150. Marie-­Adélaïde de Savoie, Duch-
start a game of brelan.151 Well, not only in his social and concen- esse de Bourgogne (1685–1712).
trated activities, but in the most spontaneous utterances, the ordi- 151. Brelan is a card game in which the
nary preoccupations of M. de Guermantes, the use he made of his player tries to have three of a kind. The
goal in brelan de rois is to have three
time, one found a similar contrast; the Guermantes were no more kings.
susceptible than other mortals to grief; one might indeed say that 152. Le Gaulois, the leading monarchist
their actual sensibility was lower; on the other hand one saw their daily during the Third Republic, was the
most important newspaper for social
names every day in the social columns of Le Gaulois152 on account events.
of the prodigious number of funerals at which they would have 153. Xenophon, c. 431–­c. 352 b.c., was
felt it a neglect of duty not to have their presence recorded. As a Greek philosopher and historian. In
401, he went to Asia Minor and partici-
the traveler discovers, almost unaltered, the houses roofed with pated in the war as a volunteer.
turf, the terraces that may have met the eyes of Xenophon153 or 154. Saint Paul, 5–67 a.d., was one
Saint Paul,154 so in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who of the most important figures of the
Apostolic Age. His work as a mis-
melted one’s heart by his courtesy and revolted it by his harshness, sionary to spread Christianity took him
I found still intact after the lapse of more than two centuries that to Cyprus, a large part of Asia Minor,
deviation typical of court life under Louis XIV that transfers all and finally to Rome.

Chapter 2 481
 The Guermantes Way

scruples of conscience from matters of the affections and morality

and applies them to purely formal questions.
The other reason for the friendliness shown me by the Princesse
de Parme was of a more personal kind. It was that she was con-
vinced beforehand that everything that she saw at the Duchesse de
Guermantes’s, people and things alike, was of a quality superior
to that of anything that she had at home. It is true that in all the
other houses of her acquaintance she behaved as if this had been
the case; over the simplest dish, the most ordinary flowers, she was
not satisfied with going into ecstasies, she would ask leave to send
around next morning, to copy the recipe or to examine the variety
of blossom, her head cook or head gardener, gentlemen with large
salaries who kept their own carriages and were deeply humiliated
at having to come to inquire after a dish they despised or to take
notes of a kind of carnation that was not half so fine, had not
such ornamental streaks, did not produce so large a blossom as
those that they had long been growing for her at home. But if in
the princess, wherever she went, this astonishment at the sight
of the most commonplace things was assumed, and intended to
show that she did not derive from the superiority of her rank and
riches a pride forbidden by her early instructors, habitually dis-
sembled by her mother and intolerable in the sight of her Cre-
ator, it was, on the other hand, in all sincerity that she regarded
the drawing room of the Duchesse de Guermantes as a privileged
place in which she could pass only from surprise to delight. To
a certain extent, for that matter, though not nearly enough to
justify this state of mind, the Guermantes were different from
the rest of noble society, they were rarer and more refined. They
had given me at first sight the opposite impression; I had found
them vulgar, similar to all other men and women, but because be-
fore meeting them I had seen in them, as in Balbec, in Florence,
in Parma, only names. Evidently, in this drawing room, all the
women whom I had imagined as being like porcelain figures were
even more like the great majority of women. But in the same way
as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after first disappointing

482 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

the imagination because they resembled their fellow creatures 155. Proust regretted that Saint-­
rather than their name, could subsequently, though to a lesser de- Simon gave no examples of the wit
of the Mortemarts. One of the most
gree, appeal to the intellect by certain distinctive characteristics. prominent members of the family
Their bodily structure, the color—a peculiar pink that merged at was Françoise Athénaïs, Marquise de
times into violet—of their skins, a certain almost flashing fairness Montespan (1640–1707), who became
the most celebrated mistress of Louis
of the finely spun hair, even in the men, on whom it was massed XIV. In a letter to critic Paul Souday,
in soft golden tufts, half a wall-­growing lichen, half a catlike fur Proust writes about the source of the
(a luminous sparkle to which corresponded a certain brilliance of duchess’s wit: “Society people are
such imbeciles that I was faced with
intellect, for if people spoke of the Guermantes complexion, the this: fed up with Saint-­Simon’s end-
Guermantes hair, they spoke also of the wit of the Guermantes, as less talk of the Mortemarts’ ‘unique
of the wit of the Mortemarts—a certain social quality whose su- turn of phrase’ while never telling us in
what it consists, I was determined to
perior fineness was famed even before the days of Louis XIV and try and create a ‘Guermantes wit.’ Yet,
all the more universally recognized since they published the fame for a model, the only woman I could
of it themselves),155 all this meant that in the material itself, pre- find was not somebody ‘well-­born,’ but
Mme Straus, Bizet’s widow. Not only
cious as that might be, in which one found them embedded here are the witticisms quoted in the book
and there, the Guermantes remained recognizable, easy to de- hers (she didn’t wish to be named),
tect and to follow, like the veins whose blondness streaks a block I even parodied her conversation.”
Proust, Selected Letters 4: 161.
of jasper or onyx, or, better still, like the pliant waving of those
tresses of light whose loosened hairs run like flexible rays along
the sides of a moss agate.
The Guermantes—those at least who were worthy of the
name—not only were of a quality of flesh, of hair, of transparency
of gaze that was exquisite, but had a way of holding themselves,
of walking, of bowing, of looking at one before they shook one’s
hand, of shaking hands, which made them as different in all these
respects from an ordinary person in society as he in turn was from
a peasant in a smock. And despite their friendliness one asked
oneself: “Have they not indeed the right, though they waive it,
when they see us walk, bow, leave a room, do any of those things
that when performed by them become as graceful as the flight of
a swallow or the bending of a rose on its stem, to think: ‘These
people are of another race than ours, and we are, we, the true
lords of creation’?” Later on, I realized that the Guermantes did
indeed regard me as being of another race, but one that aroused
their envy because I possessed merits of which I knew nothing and

Chapter 2 483
 The Guermantes Way

156. In Roman mythology, Jupiter trans- which they professed to regard as alone important. Later still I
formed himself into a swan in order to came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere and
seduce Leda.
that in them scorn or surprise could be coexistent with admira-
tion and envy. The physical flexibility essential to the Guermantes
was twofold; thanks to one of its forms, constantly in action, at
any moment and if, for example, a male Guermantes were about
to salute a lady, he produced a silhouette of himself made from
the unstable equilibrium of a series of asymmetrical movements
with nervous compensations, one leg dragging a little either on
purpose or because, having been broken so often in the hunting
field, it imparted to his trunk in its effort to keep pace with the
other a deviation to which the upward thrust of one shoulder gave
a counterpoise, while the monocle settled itself before his eye,
raising an eyebrow just as the tuft of hair on the forehead was
lowered in the formal bow; the other flexibility, like the form of
the wave, the wind, or the ocean track which is preserved on the
shell or the vessel, was so to speak stereotyped in a sort of fixed
mobility, curving the arched nose which, beneath the blue, pro-
truding eyes, above the overthin lips, from which, in the women,
there emerged a raucous voice, recalled the fabulous origin attrib-
uted in the sixteenth century by the complaisance of parasitic and
Hellenizing genealogists to his race, ancient beyond dispute, but
not to the degree of antiquity that they claimed when they gave as
its source the mythological impregnation of a nymph by a divine
Bird.156
The Guermantes were just as idiomatic from the intellectual
as from the physical point of view. With the exception of Prince
Gilbert (the husband with antiquated ideas of “Marie-­Gilbert,”
who made his wife sit on his left when they drove out together
because her blood, though royal, was inferior to his own)—but
he was an exception and furnished, behind his back, a perpetual
laughingstock to the rest of the family, who had always fresh anec-
dotes to tell of him—the Guermantes, while living in the pure
cream of aristocracy, affected to take no account of nobility. The
theories of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, to tell the truth,

484 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

by dint of being a Guermantes, became to a certain extent some-

thing different and more attractive, subordinated everything else
so completely to intellect, and were in politics so socialistic that
one asked oneself where in her hotel could be hiding the familiar
spirit whose duty it was to ensure the maintenance of the aristo-
cratic standard of living, and which, always invisible but evidently
crouching at one moment in the entrance hall, at another in the
drawing room, at a third in her dressing room, reminded the ser-
vants of this woman who did not believe in titles to address her
as “Madame la Duchesse,” and reminded also this person who
cared only for reading and had no respect for persons, to go out
to dinner with her sister-­in-­law when eight o’clock struck, and to
put on a low-­cut gown for the evening.
The same family genie reminded Mme de Guermantes of the
social duties of duchesses, at least of the foremost among them
who, like herself, were multimillionaires: the sacrifice to boring
teas, dinner parties, and routs—all at hours when she might have
read interesting books—as unpleasant necessities like rain, which
Mme de Guermantes accepted, letting play on them her biting
humor, but without going so far as to seek the reasons for her ac-
ceptance of them. The curious accident by which the butler of
Mme de Guermantes invariably said “Madame la Duchesse” to
this woman who believed only in the intellect did not however
appear to shock her. Never had it entered her head to request him
to address her simply as “Madame.” Giving her the utmost benefit
of the doubt one might have supposed that, thinking of some-
thing else at the time, she had heard only the word “Madame”
and that the suffix appended to it had not caught her attention.
Only, though she might feign deafness, she was not dumb. In fact,
whenever she had a message to give to her husband she would say
to the butler: “Remind Monsieur le Duc . . .”
The family genie had other occupations as well, one of which
was to inspire them to talk morality. It is true that there were
Guermantes who went in for intellect and Guermantes who went
in for morals, and that these two sets did not as a rule coincide.

Chapter 2 485
 The Guermantes Way

157. The ancient Barca family was But the former—including a Guermantes who had forged checks,
known for its wealth and power, espe- who cheated at cards and was the most delightful of them all, with
cially at the time of the Punic Wars
(264–146 b.c.). Hannibal was among a mind open to every new and sound idea—spoke even more elo-
its illustrious members. Gustave Flau- quently about morals than the others, and in the same strain as
bert’s novel Salammbô (1862) is Mme de Villeparisis, at the moments in which the family genie
based on this story. Salammbô is the
daughter of Hamilcar Barca; she be- expressed itself through the lips of the old lady. At corresponding
comes concerned about the fate of moments one saw the Guermantes adopt suddenly a tone almost
the family when the black python lan- as old-­ladylike, as full of bonhomie, and (since they themselves
guishes.
had more charm) more touching than that of the marquise, to say
of a servant: “One feels that she has a thoroughly sound nature,
she’s not at all a common girl, she must come of decent parents,
she is certainly a girl who has never gone astray.” At such moments
the family genie took the form of an intonation. But at times it
could be in the bearing also, the expression on a face, the same in
the duchess as in her grandfather the maréchal, a sort of unfath-
omable convulsion (like that of the Serpent, the genius of the Car-
thaginian family of Barca)157 by which my heart had more than
once been set throbbing, on my morning walks, when before I
had recognized Mme de Guermantes I felt her eyes fastened upon
me from the inside of a little dairy shop. This family genie had
intervened in a situation that was far from immaterial not merely
to the Guermantes but to the Courvoisiers, the rival faction of the
family and, though of as noble blood as the Guermantes, their
opposite in every respect (it was, indeed, through his Courvoisier
grandmother that the Guermantes explained the obsession that
led the Prince de Guermantes always to speak of birth and titles
as though those were the only things that mattered). Not only did
the Courvoisiers not assign to intelligence the same importance
as the Guermantes, but they also had a different conception of it.
For a Guermantes (even if he were stupid) to be intelligent meant
to have a sharp tongue, to be capable of saying cutting things, to
“get away with it,” but it meant also the capacity to hold one’s
own equally in painting, music, architecture, to speak English.
The Courvoisiers had formed a less favorable impression of intel-
ligence, and unless one were actually of their world being intelli-

486 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

gent was almost tantamount to “having probably murdered one’s 158. La Trémoïlle, an illustrious family
father and mother.” For them intelligence was the sort of burglar’s whose dukedom was one of the oldest
in France and whose estates formed
jimmy by means of which people one did not know from Adam one of the greatest territories of ancient
forced the doors of the most reputable drawing rooms, and it was France.
common knowledge among the Courvoisiers that you always had
to pay in the long run for having “those sort” of people in your
house. To the most trivial statements made by intelligent people
who were not “in society” the Courvoisiers opposed a systematic
distrust. Someone having once remarked: “But Swann is younger
than Palamède,” Mme de Gallardon had retorted: “He says so, at
any rate, and if he says it you may be sure it’s because he thinks it is
to his interest!” Better still, when someone said of two highly dis-
tinguished foreign ladies whom the Guermantes had entertained
that one of them had been sent in first because she was the elder:
“But is she really the elder?” Mme de Gallardon had inquired, not
positively as though that sort of person did not have any age but
as if presumably devoid of civil or religious status, of definite tra-
ditions, they were both more or less young, like two kittens of the
same litter between which only a veterinarian was competent to
decide. The Courvoisiers, more than the Guermantes, maintained
also in a certain sense the integrity of the titled class thanks at
once to the narrowness of their minds and the maliciousness of
their hearts. Just as the Guermantes (for whom, below the royal
families and a few others like the Lignes, the La Trémoïlles,158
and so forth, all the rest were lost in a vague hodgepodge of small
fry) were insolent toward various people of long descent who
lived around Guermantes, simply because they paid no attention
to those secondary distinctions by which the Courvoisiers were
enormously impressed, so the absence of such distinctions af-
fected them little. Certain women who did not hold any especially
exalted rank in their native provinces but, brilliantly married,
rich, pretty, beloved of duchesses, were for Paris, where people
are never very well up on who one’s “father and mother” were, an
excellent and elegant piece of imported goods. It might happen,
though rarely, that such women were, through the channel of the

Chapter 2 487
 The Guermantes Way

159. Perche is a former province in Princesse de Parme or by virtue of their own attractions, received
northwestern France. by certain Guermantes. But with regard to these the indignation
160. In the first drafts of the novel,
the Guermantes way was called the of the Courvoisiers knew no bounds. Having to meet, between
Villebon way. five and six in the afternoon, at their cousin’s, people with whose
161. “And if but one is left, I will be relatives their own relatives did not care to be seen mixing down
that one.” This is the last line of Victor
Hugo’s poem, “Ultima verba,” in the in the Perche159 became for them an ever-­increasing source of rage
collection Les Châtiments (1853). and an inexhaustible fount of rhetoric. The moment, for example,
162. “Thanks to the gods! My mis- when the charming Comtesse G entered the Guermantes drawing
fortune surpasses my hope.” This is
from Racine’s play Andromaque, act 5, room, the face of Mme de Villebon160 assumed exactly the expres-
scene 5. Oreste is speaking. He has just sion that would have befitted it had she been called to recite the
learned that Hermione has committed line:
suicide on Pyrrhus’s body.

Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-­là,161

a line that for that matter was unknown to her. This Courvoisier
had consumed, almost every Monday, éclairs stuffed with cream
within a few feet of the Comtesse G, but to no consequence. And
Mme de Villebon confessed in secret that she could not conceive
how her cousin Guermantes could allow a woman into her house
who was not even in the second-­best society of Châteaudun. “I
really fail to see why my cousin should make such a fuss about
whom she knows; it’s making a perfect farce of society!” con-
cluded Mme de Villebon with a change of facial expression, this
time a sly smile of despair, which, in a charade, would have been
interpreted rather as indicating another line of poetry, though one
with which she was no more familiar than with the first:

Grâce aux dieux! Mon malheur passe mon espérance.162

We may here anticipate events to explain that the persévérance

(which rhymes, in the following line, with espérance) shown by
Mme de Villebon in snubbing Mme G was not entirely wasted. In
the eyes of Mme G it invested Mme de Villebon with a distinction
so supreme, though purely imaginary, that when the time came
for Mme G’s daughter, who was the prettiest girl and the greatest

488 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

heiress in the ballrooms of that season, to marry, people were as- 163. The rue de Grenelle, in the sixth
tonished to see her refuse all the dukes in succession. The fact was and seventh arrondissements, is a
street of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain,
that her mother, remembering the weekly snubs she had had to lined with private hotels.
endure in the rue de Grenelle163 on account of Châteaudun could
think of only one possible husband for her daughter: a Villebon
son.
A single point at which Guermantes and Courvoisiers con-
verged was the art (one, for that matter, of infinite variety) of
marking distances. The Guermantes manners were not absolutely
uniform in all of them. And yet, to take an example, all the Guer-
mantes, all those who really were Guermantes, when you were
introduced to them proceeded to perform a sort of ceremony al-
most as though the fact that they held out their hands to you had
been as important as conferring upon you a knighthood. At the
moment when a Guermantes, were he no more than twenty, but
treading already in the footsteps of his ancestors, heard your name
uttered by the person who introduced you, he let fall on you, as
though he had by no means made up his mind to say hello to you,
a gaze generally blue, always of the coldness of a steel blade that
he seemed ready to plunge into the deepest recesses of your heart.
Which was as a matter of fact what the Guermantes imagined
themselves to be doing, each of them regarding himself as a psy-
chologist of the highest order. They thought moreover that they
increased by this inspection the affability of the salute that was to
follow it and would not be rendered you without full knowledge
of your deserts. All this occurred at a distance from yourself that,
little enough had it been a question of a passage of arms, seemed
immense for a handshake, and had as chilling an effect in this con-
nection as in the other, so that when the Guermantes, after a rapid
twisting thrust that explored the most intimate secrets of your
soul and laid bare your title to honor, had deemed you worthy
to associate with him thereafter, his hand, directed toward you at
the end of an arm stretched out to its fullest extent, appeared to
be presenting a rapier at you for a single combat, and that hand
was in fact placed so far in advance of the Guermantes himself at

Chapter 2 489
 The Guermantes Way

that moment that when he afterward bowed his head it was diffi-
cult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand that he
was saluting. Certain Guermantes, lacking any sense of modera-
tion, or being incapable of refraining from repeating themselves
incessantly, went further and repeated this ceremony every time
that they met you. Seeing that they had no longer any need to
conduct the preliminary psychological investigation for which the
“family genie” had delegated its powers to them and the result
of which they had presumably kept in mind, the insistence of
the penetrating gaze preceding the handshake could be explained
only by the automatism that their gaze had acquired or by some
power of fascination that they believed themselves to possess. The
Courvoisiers whose physique was different, had tried in vain to
assimilate that searching gaze and had had to fall back upon a
haughty stiffness or a rapid indifference. On the other hand, it
was from the Courvoisiers that certain very rare Guermantes of
the gentler sex seemed to have borrowed the feminine form of
greeting. At the moment when you were presented to one of these
she made you a sweeping bow in which she carried toward you,
almost to an angle of forty-­five degrees, her head and bust, the rest
of her body (which came very high) up to the belt that formed a
pivot, remaining immobile. But no sooner had she projected thus
toward you the upper part of her body than she flung it back-
ward beyond the vertical by a brusque withdrawal of nearly equal
length. This subsequent withdrawal neutralized what appeared to
have been conceded to you; the ground that you believed your-
self to have gained did not even remain a conquest as in a duel;
the original positions were retained. This same annulment of affa-
bility by the resumption of distance (which was Courvoisier in
origin and intended to show that the advances made in the first
movement were no more than a momentary feint) displayed itself
equally clearly, in the Courvoisier ladies as in the Guermantes,
in the letters that you received from them, at any rate in the first
period of your acquaintance. The “body” of the letter might con-
tain sentences such as one writes only (you would suppose) to a

490 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

friend, but in vain might you have thought yourself entitled to 164. The closing of a formal letter in
boast of being in that relation to the lady, since the letter began French is more florid than the cus-
tomary “sincerely” in English.
with “Monsieur,” and ended with “Croyez, Monsieur, à mes senti- 165. The letters of the Latin writer Pliny
ments distingués.”164 After which, between this cold opening and the Younger (a.d. 62–­c. 114) constitute
frigid conclusion, which altered the meaning of all the rest, there the essential part of his work. They are
important for the knowledge of ancient
might come in succession (were it a reply to a letter of condolence customs contained therein.
from yourself ) the most touching pictures of the grief that the 166. Pauline Adhémar de Monteil de
Guermantes lady had felt on losing her sister, of the intimacy that Grignan, Marquise de Simiane (1674–
1737), was the granddaughter of Mme
had existed between them, of the beauty of the place in which de Sévigné. It was she who authorized
she was staying, of the consolation that she found in the charm the publication of her grandmother’s
of her grandchildren, all this amounted to no more than a letter letters in 1695. Her own letters were
published in 1773: Lettres nouvelles ou
such as one finds in printed collections, the intimate character of nouvellement recouvrées de la marquise
which implied, however, no more intimacy between yourself and de Sévigné et de la marquise de Simiane,
the writer than if she had been Pliny the Younger165 or Mme de sa petite-­fille, pour servir aux différentes
éditions des lettres de la marquise de
Simiane.166 Sévigné.
It is true that certain Guermantes ladies wrote to you from the
first as “My dear friend,” or “My friend”; these were not always
the most simplehearted among them, but rather those who, living
only in the society of kings and being at the same time “loose,”
assumed in their pride the certainty that everything that came
from themselves gave pleasure and in their corruption the habit of
setting no price on any of the satisfactions that they had to offer.
However, since to have had a great-­great-­grandmother in the
reign of Louis XIII was enough to make a young Guermantes say,
in speaking of the Marquise de Guermantes, “My Aunt Adam,”
the Guermantes were so numerous a clan that, even among these
simple rites, that, for example, of the bow upon introduction to
a stranger, there existed a wide divergence. Each subgroup of any
refinement had its own, which was handed down from parents
to children like the prescription for a liniment or a special way of
making jam. Thus we have seen Saint-­L oup’s handshake thrust
out as though involuntarily at the moment of his hearing one’s
name, without any participation by his eyes, without the addi-
tion of a bow. Any unfortunate commoner who for a particular
reason—which, for that matter, very rarely occurred—was pre-

Chapter 2 491
 The Guermantes Way

167. Sui generis is Latin for unique or sented to anyone of the Saint-­L oup subgroup racked his brains
peculiar. over this abrupt minimum of a greeting, which deliberately as-
168. This may be one of the six sons of
Tsar Alexander II, or an invented char- sumed the appearance of nonrecognition, to discover what in the
acter inspired by Alexander III, who world the Guermantes—male or female—could have against him.
signed a military treaty with France in And he was highly surprised to learn that the said Guermantes
1892, an act commemorated in Paris by
the bridge that bears his name. had thought fit to write specially to the introducer to tell him how
delighted he or she had been with the stranger, whom he or she
looked forward to meeting again. As specialized as the mechanical
gestures of Saint-­L oup were the complicated and rapid capers
(which M. de Charlus condemned as ridiculous) of the Marquis
de Fierbois, and the grave and measured paces of the Prince de
Guermantes. But it is impossible to describe here the richness of
this choreography of the Guermantes ballet owing to the sheer ex-
tent of the corps de ballet.
To return to the antipathy that animated the Courvoisiers
against the Duchesse de Guermantes, they might have had the
consolation of feeling sorry for her so long as she was still un-
married, for she was then comparatively poor. Unfortunately, at
all times and seasons, a sort of fuliginous emanation, quite sui
generis,167 enveloped, hid from view the wealth of the Courvoi-
siers, which, however great it might be, remained obscure. In vain
might a young Courvoisier with a huge dowry find a most eligible
bridegroom; it invariably happened that the young couple had no
house of their own in Paris, would “descend on” their parents-­in-­
law for the season, and for the rest of the year lived down in the
country in the thick of a society that may have been unadulter-
ated but was also quite undistinguished. Whereas a Saint-­L oup
who was up to his eyes in debt dazzled Doncières with his car-
riage horses, a Courvoisier who was extremely rich always took
the streetcar. Similarly (though of course many years earlier), Mlle
de Guermantes (Oriane), who had scarcely a sou to her name,
created more stir with her clothes than all the Courvoisiers put
together. The really scandalous things she said gave a sort of ad-
vertisement to her style of dressing and doing her hair. She had
had the audacity to say to the Russian Grand Duke:168 “Well,

492 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Monsieur, it appears that you would like to have Tolstoy assassi- 169. Tolstoy, who condemned the state
nated?”169 at a dinner party to which none of the Courvoisiers, and money, was in disfavor with the
Russian imperial family. In 1905–6, he
not that any of them knew very much about Tolstoy, had been addressed letters to Tsar Nicholas II
asked. They knew little more about Greek writers, if we may judge advocating universal suffrage and other
by the Dowager Duchesse de Gallardon (mother-­in-­law of the reforms.
170. Aristophanes (c. 445–­c. 386 b.c.)
Princesse de Gallardon, who at that time was still a girl), who, not was the most famous of the Greek
having been honored by Oriane with a single visit in five years, re- comic poets, author of The Frogs, Lysi­
plied to someone who asked her the reason for this abstention: “It strata, and The Clouds. He was also a
disciple of Plato and tutor of Alexander
seems she recites Aristotle” (meaning Aristophanes)170 “in society. the Great.
I cannot allow that sort of thing in my house!” 171. The duchess is therefore related
One can imagine how greatly this “sally” by Mlle de Guer- to two royal families: Antoine Marie
Philippe Louis d’Orléans, Duc de Mont-
mantes concerning Tolstoy, if it enraged the Courvoisiers, de- pensier (1824–90), the fifth son of King
lighted the Guermantes, and beyond them everyone who was not Louis-­Philippe, who, in 1846, married
merely closely but even remotely attached to them. The Dowager the sister of Queen Isabella of Spain.
The other noble family is the fictitious
Comtesse d’Argencourt (née Seineport) who entertained a little of Guermantes.
everything, because she was a bluestocking and in spite of her son’s 172. The beauty of this princess from
being a terrible snob, related the remark to her literary friends The Arabian Nights was such that her
father, the sultan, forbade anyone to
with the comment: “Oriane de Guermantes, you know; she’s as look at her when she passed through
sharp as a needle, as mischievous as a monkey, gifted at every- the streets on the way to her bath.
thing, her watercolors are worthy of a great painter and she writes Aladdin disobeyed and, on seeing her
great beauty, was consumed with pas-
better verses than most of the great poets, and you know as for sion for her.
family, you couldn’t imagine anything better, her grandmother
was Mlle de Montpensier,171 and she is the eighteenth Oriane de
Guermantes in succession, without a single misalliance; it’s the
purest blood, the oldest in the whole of France.” And so the sham
men of letters, those demi-­intellectuals whom Mme d’Argencourt
entertained, picturing Oriane de Guermantes, whom they would
never have an opportunity to know personally, as something more
wonderful and more extraordinary than Princess Badroul Bou-
dour,172 not only felt themselves ready to die for her on learning
that so noble a person glorified Tolstoy above all others, but felt
also quickening with a fresh strength in their minds their own
love of Tolstoy, their longing to fight against tsarism. These liberal
ideas might have grown weak in them, they might have begun to
doubt their importance, no longer daring to confess to holding

Chapter 2 493
 The Guermantes Way

173. Richard Strauss (1864–1949), them, when suddenly from Mlle de Guermantes herself, that is
German composer who wrote the to say from a girl so indisputably cultured and qualified to speak,
music of an operatic version of Oscar
Wilde’s play Salomé. It was performed who wore her hair flat on her brow (a thing that no Courvoisier
in Paris in 1907. Strauss also composed would ever have consented to do), came this vehement support. A
the music for the ballet La Légende de certain number of realities, good or bad in themselves, gain enor-
Joseph, first produced by the Ballets
Russes in Paris in 1914. mously in this way by receiving the adhesion of people who are
174. Daniel Auber (1782–1871) was a in authority over us. For instance, among the Courvoisiers the
composer of light music and comic rites of affability in a public thoroughfare consisted in a certain
operas.
175. The opera Salomé was based on way of greeting, very ugly and far from affable in itself, but which
the play, written in French, by Oscar people knew to be the distinguished way of bidding a person good
Wilde, set to music by Strauss and day, with the result that everyone else, suppressing the instinctive
given in Paris on May 8, 1907, at the
Théâtre du Châtelet. smile of welcome, endeavored to imitate these frigid gymnastics.
But the Guermantes in general and Oriane in particular, while
more conversant than anyone with these rites, did not hesitate,
if they caught sight of you from a carriage, to greet you with a
friendly wave of the hand, and in a drawing room, leaving the
Courvoisiers to make their stiff and imitative salutes, sketched
charming reverences, held out their hands as though to a comrade
with a smile from their blue eyes, so that suddenly, thanks to the
Guermantes, there entered into the substance of chic, until then
a little hollow and dry, everything that you would naturally have
liked and had compelled yourself to forgo, a genuine welcome,
the effusion of a true friendliness, spontaneity. It is in a similar
fashion (but by a rehabilitation that this time is scarcely justi-
fied) that people who carry in themselves an instinctive taste for
bad music and for melodies, however commonplace, that have in
them something facile and caressing, succeed, by dint of educa-
tion in symphonic culture, in mortifying that appetite. But once
they have arrived at this point, when, dazzled—and rightly so—
by the brilliant orchestral coloring of Richard Strauss,173 they see
that musician adopt with a self-­indulgence worthy of Auber the
most vulgar motifs,174 what those people originally admired finds
suddenly in so high an authority a justification that delights them,
and they let themselves be enchanted without scruple and with a
twofold gratitude, when they listen to Salomé,175 by what it would

494 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

have been impossible for them to admire in Les Diamants de la 176. Les Diamants de la Couronne (1841)
couronne.176 is a comic opera with music by Daniel
Auber and a libretto by Eugène Scribe
Authentic or not, the retort made by Mlle de Guermantes to (1791–1861).
the grand duke, retailed from house to house, furnished an oppor-
tunity to relate the excessive elegance with which Oriane had been
turned out at the dinner party in question. But if such splendor
(and this is precisely what rendered it unattainable by the Cour-
voisiers) springs not from wealth but from prodigality, the latter
does nevertheless last longer if it enjoys the constant support of
the former, which allows it to spend all its fire. Now, given the
principles openly displayed not only by Oriane but by Mlle de
Villeparisis, namely that nobility does not count, that it is ridicu-
lous to bother one’s head about rank, that money does not nec-
essarily bring happiness, that intellect, heart, and talent are alone
of importance, the Courvoisiers were justified in hoping that, as a
result of the training she had received from the marquise, Oriane
would marry someone who was not in society, an artist, an ex-­
convict, a tramp, a freethinker, that she would enter once and
for all into the category of what the Courvoisiers called “detri-
mentals.” They were all the more justified in this hope since, in-
asmuch as Mme de Villeparisis was at this very moment, from
the social point of view, passing through an awkward crisis (none
of the few bright stars whom I was to meet in her drawing room
had as yet reappeared there), she professed an intense horror of
the society that was thus excluding her. Even when she spoke of
her nephew the Prince de Guermantes, whom she did still see, she
could never stop mocking him because he was so infatuated about
his pedigree. But the moment it became a question of finding a
husband for Oriane, it had been no longer the principles pub-
licly displayed by aunt and niece that had managed the opera-
tion; it had been the mysterious “family genie.” As unerringly as
if Mme de Villeparisis and Oriane had never spoken of anything
but annuities and pedigrees in place of literary merit and depth of
character, and as if the marquise, for the space of a few days, had
been—as she would ultimately be—dead and on her bier, in the

Chapter 2 495
 The Guermantes Way

177. Scott Moncrieff translated couper church of Combray, where each member of the family would be
le câble literally; it means to sever re- reduced to a mere Guermantes, with a forfeiture of individuality
lations.
and baptismal names attested on the voluminous black drapery of
the pall the single “G” in purple surmounted by the ducal coronet,
it was on the wealthiest man and the most nobly born, on the
most eligible bachelor of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, on the
eldest son of the Duc de Guermantes, the Prince des Laumes,
that the family genie had let fall the choice of the intellectual, the
rebellious, the evangelical Mme de Villeparisis. And for a couple
of hours, on the day of the wedding, Mme de Villeparisis received
in her drawing room all the noble persons whom she had been
in the habit of mocking, whom she indeed mocked still with the
various bourgeois intimates whom she had invited and on whom
the Prince des Laumes promptly left cards, preparatory to “cut-
ting the cable”177 in the following year. And then, making the
Courvoisiers’ cup of bitterness overflow, the same old maxims,
which made out intellect and talent to be the sole claims to social
preeminence, resumed their doctrinal force in the household of
the Princesse des Laumes immediately after her marriage. And
in this respect, be it said in passing, the point of view that Saint-­
Loup upheld when he lived with Rachel, frequented the friends
of Rachel, would have liked to marry Rachel, implied—­whatever
the horror that it inspired in the family—less falsehood than that
of the Guermantes demoiselles in general, extolling the intel-
lect, barely admitting the possibility of anyone’s questioning the
equality of mankind, all of which ended at a given point in the
same result as if they had professed the opposite principles, that is
to say in marriage to an extremely wealthy duke. Saint-­L oup did,
on the contrary, act in conformity with his theories, which led
people to say that he was treading in evil ways. Certainly from the
moral standpoint Rachel was not altogether satisfactory. But it is
by no means certain that, if she had been some person no better
than she was but a duchess or the heiress to many millions, Mme
de Marsantes would not have been in favor of the match.
However, to return to Mme des Laumes (shortly afterward

496 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Duchesse de Guermantes, on the death of her father-­in-­law), it 178. Évariste-­Désiré de Forges, Vicomte
was the last agonizing straw for the Courvoisiers that the theo- de Parny (1753–1814), wrote Poésies
érotiques, a collection that celebrated
ries of the young princess, remaining thus lodged in her speech, feminine beauty.
should not in any sense have guided her conduct; with the result
that this philosophy (if one may so call it) in no way impaired the
aristocratic elegance of the Guermantes drawing room. No doubt
all the people whom Mme de Guermantes did not invite imagined
that it was because they were not clever enough, and some rich
American lady who had never had any book in her possession ex-
cept a little old copy, never opened, of Parny’s poems,178 arranged
because it was “of the period” on one of the tables in her small
drawing room, showed how much importance she attached to the
things of the mind by the devouring gaze that she fastened on the
Duchesse de Guermantes when that lady made her appearance
at the Opéra. No doubt, also, Mme de Guermantes was sincere
when she selected a person on account of his or her intelligence.
When she said of a woman: “It appears, she’s quite charming!” or
of a man that he was the “cleverest person in the world,” she imag-
ined herself to have no other reason for consenting to receive them
than this charm or cleverness, the Guermantes genie not inter-
vening at this last moment; more deeply rooted, stationed at the
obscure entrance to the region in which the Guermantes exercised
their judgment, this vigilant genie precluded the Guermantes
from finding the man clever or the woman charming if they had
no social value, actual or potential. The man was pronounced
learned, but like a dictionary, or, on the contrary, common, with
the mind of a traveling salesman, the woman pretty, but with a
terribly bad style, or too talkative. As for the people who had no
definite position, they were simply dreadful—such snobs! M. de
Bréauté, whose château was quite close to Guermantes, mixed
with no one below the rank of Highness. But he laughed at them
in his heart and longed only to spend his days in museums. Ac-
cordingly Mme de Guermantes was indignant when anyone spoke
of M. de Bréauté as a snob. “A snob! Babal! But, my dear man, you
must be mad, it’s just the opposite. He loathes smart people; he

Chapter 2 497
 The Guermantes Way

179. Jean Eugène Gaston Lemaire won’t let himself be introduced to anyone. Even in my house! If I
(1854–1928) composed light music, in- ask him to meet someone he doesn’t know, he comes, but he never
cluding the operettas Les Maris de Jua-
nite, Le Supplice de Jeannot, and Le Rêve stops grumbling at me.”
de Manette. This is not to say that, even in practice, the Guermantes did
180. Charles Grandmougin (1850– not adopt an entirely different attitude toward intelligence than
1930), patriotic poet and playwright,
enjoyed a solid social reputation. His the Courvoisiers. In a positive sense, this difference between the
plays include Orphée (1882) and Jeanne Guermantes and the Courvoisiers had already begun to bear very
d’Arc (1911). promising fruit. Thus the Duchesse de Guermantes, enveloped
181. Marie-­Christine de Habsbourg-­
Lorraine (1858–1929) was the daughter moreover in a mystery that had set so many poets dreaming of
of Archduke Ferdinand-­Charles of Aus- her from afar, had given that ball to which I have already referred,
tria; in 1879, she married Alphonse XII, where the King of England had enjoyed himself more thoroughly
King of Spain.
than anywhere else, for she had had the idea, which would never
have occurred to the Courvoisier mind, of inviting, and the au-
dacity, from which the Courvoisier courage would have recoiled,
to invite, apart from the personages already mentioned, the musi-
cian Gaston Lemaire179 and the dramatist Grandmougin.180 But
it was preeminently from the negative point of view that intel-
lectuality made itself felt. If the necessary coefficient of clever-
ness and charm declined steadily as the rank of the person who
sought an invitation from the Duchesse de Guermantes became
more exalted, vanishing to zero when it came to the principal
crowned heads of Europe, conversely the farther they fell below
this royal level the higher the coefficient rose. For example, at the
Princesse de Parme’s parties there were a number of people whom
her Highness invited because she had known them as children,
or because they were related to some duchess, or attached to the
person of some sovereign, they themselves being quite possibly
ugly, boring, or stupid; however, with a Courvoisier any of the
reasons: “a favorite of the Princesse de Parme,” “a half-­sister on the
mother’s side of the Duchesse d’Arpajon,” “spends three months
every year with the Queen of Spain,”181 would have been sufficient
to make her invite such people to her house, but Mme de Guer-
mantes, who had politely acknowledged their greetings for ten
years at the Princesse de Parme’s, had never once allowed them
to cross her threshold, considering that the same rule applied to

498 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

a drawing room in a social as in a material sense, where it needed

only a few pieces of furniture that had no particular beauty but
were left there to fill the room and as a sign of the owner’s wealth
to render it hideous. Such a drawing room resembled a book in
which the author cannot refrain from the use of language adver-
tising his own learning, brilliance, fluency. Like a book, like a
house, the quality of a “salon,” thought Mme de Guermantes—
and rightly—is based on the cornerstone of sacrifice.
Many of the friends of the Princesse de Parme, with whom the
Duchesse de Guermantes had confined herself for years past to the
same conventional greeting, or to returning their cards, without
ever inviting them to her parties or going to theirs, complained
discreetly of these omissions to her Highness, who, on days when
M. de Guermantes came by himself to see her, passed on a hint
to him. But the wily nobleman, a bad husband to the duchess in-
sofar as he kept mistresses, but her most tried and trusty friend in
everything that concerned the good functioning of her salon (and
her own wit, which formed its chief attraction), replied: “But does
my wife know her? Indeed! Oh, well, I daresay she does. But the
truth is, Madame, that Oriane does not care for women’s conver-
sation. She lives surrounded by a court of superior minds—I am
not her husband, I am only the first footman. Except for quite a
small number, who are all of them very witty indeed, women bore
her. Surely, Madame, your Highness with all her fine judgment is
not going to tell me that the Marquise de Souvré has any wit. Yes,
I quite understand, your Highness receives her out of kindness.
Besides, your Highness knows her. You tell me that Oriane has
met her; it’s quite possible, but once or twice at the most, I assure
you. And then, I must explain to your Highness, it’s really a little
my fault as well. My wife is very easily tired, and she is so eager to
be friendly always that if I allowed her she would never stop going
to see people. Only yesterday evening, she had a fever, she was
afraid of hurting the Duchesse de Bourbon’s feelings by not going
to see her. I had to show my teeth, I assure you; I positively for-
bade them to bring the carriage around. Do you know, Madame,

Chapter 2 499
 The Guermantes Way

182. Some of these details about how I would really prefer not to mention to Oriane that you’ve spoken
the Princesse de Parme entertains are to me about Mme de Souvré. My wife is so devoted to your High-
those found in Proust’s article about
the salon of the Princesse Mathilde, ness that she will go around at once to invite Mme de Souvré to
published in Le Figaro on February 25, the house; that will mean another call to be paid, it will oblige us
1903, under the title “Un Salon histo- to make friends with the sister, whose husband I know quite well.
rique: Le Salon de S. A. I. La Princesse
Mathilde.” See Marcel Proust, Contre I think I will say nothing at all about it to Oriane, if your High-
Sainte-­Beuve (1971), 445–55. ness has no objection. That will save her a great deal of strain and
excitement. And I assure you that it will be no loss to Mme de
Souvré. She goes everywhere, moves in the most brilliant circles.
You know, we don’t entertain at all, really, just a few little friendly
dinners. Mme de Souvré would be bored to death.” The Princesse
de Parme, innocently convinced that the Duc de Guermantes
would not transmit her request to the duchess, and dismayed by
her failure to procure the invitation that Mme de Souvré sought,
was all the more flattered to think that she herself was one of the
regular frequenters of so exclusive a salon. No doubt this satisfac-
tion had its drawbacks also. Thus whenever the Princesse de Parme
invited Mme de Guermantes to her own parties, she had to rack
her brains to be sure that there was no one else on her list whose
presence might offend the duchess and make her refuse to come
again.
On ordinary evenings (after dinner, at which she always enter-
tained just a few guests at a very early hour,182 for she clung to
old customs), the drawing room of the Princesse de Parme was
thrown open to her regular guests, and, generally speaking, to all
the higher ranks of the aristocracy, French and foreign. The order
of her receptions was as follows: on issuing from the dining room
the princess sat down on a sofa in front of a large round table
and chatted with the two most important of the ladies who had
dined with her, or else cast her eyes over a magazine, or sometimes
played cards (or pretended to play, adopting a German court
custom), either a game of solitaire or selecting as her real or pre-
tended partner some prominent personage. By nine o’clock the
double doors of the big drawing room were in a state of perpetual
agitation, opening and shutting and opening again to admit the

500 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

visitors who had dined hurriedly at home (or if they had dined 183. Proust opposed laws establishing
out, skipped coffee, promising to return later, since they intended the separation of church and state
and all anticlerical politics. See Carter,
only to “go in at one door and out at the other”) in order to con- Marcel Proust, 345–46.
form to the princess’s timetable. She, meanwhile, attentive to her
game or conversation, made a show of not seeing the women as
they arrived, and it was not until they were actually within reach
of her that she rose graciously from her seat, with a friendly smile
for the women. The latter thereupon sank before the standing
Highness in a courtesy that was tantamount to a genuflection, so
as to bring their lips down to the level of the beautiful hand that
hung very low, and to kiss it. But at that moment the princess, just
as if she had been every time surprised by a protocol with which
nevertheless she was perfectly familiar, raised the kneeling figure
as though by main force, and with incomparable grace and sweet-
ness, and kissed her on both cheeks. A grace and sweetness that
were conditional, you may say, upon the meekness with which
the arriving guest bent her knee. Very likely; and it seems that in
an egalitarian society politesse would vanish, not, as is generally
supposed, from want of breeding, but because from some would
vanish the deference due to a prestige that must be imaginary to
be effective, and, more completely still, from others the affability
that one lavishes and refines so long as one knows it to be, to the
recipient, of an untold value which, in a world based on equality,
would at once fall to nothing like everything that has only a fidu-
ciary value. But this disappearance of politeness in a reconstructed
society is by no means certain, and we are at times too ready to
believe that the present conditions are the only possible ones for
a certain state of things. People of first-­rate intelligence believed
that a republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances,
and, more recently, that the peasant class would not tolerate the
separation of Church and State.183 After all, the survival of polite-
ness in an egalitarian society would be no more miraculous than
the practical success of the railways or the use of the airplane in
war. Besides, even if politeness were to vanish, there is nothing
to show that this would be a misfortune. Finally, would not so-

Chapter 2 501
 The Guermantes Way

184. The House of Bourbon-­Parme’s ciety become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly
reign ended in 1859. more democratic? This seems highly probable. The political power
of the popes has grown enormously since they ceased to possess
either states or an army; our cathedrals meant far less to a devout
Catholic of the seventeenth century than they mean to an atheist
of the twentieth, and if the Princesse de Parme had been the sover-
eign ruler of a state,184 no doubt I would have felt myself impelled
to speak of her almost as I would speak of a president of the Re-
public, that is to say not at all.
As soon as the postulant had been raised from the ground and
embraced by the princess, the latter resumed her seat and returned
to her game of solitaire, but first of all, if the newcomer was of any
importance, chatted with her for a moment, making her sit down
in an armchair.
When the room became too crowded, the lady-­ in-­
waiting
who had to control the traffic cleared some space by leading the
regular guests into an immense hall on to which the drawing
room opened, a hall filled with portraits and minor trophies of
the House of Bourbon. The intimate friends of the princess would
then volunteer for the part of cicerone and would repeat inter-
esting anecdotes, to which the young people did not have the
patience to listen, being more interested in the spectacle of living
royalties (with the possibility of having themselves presented to
them by the lady-­in-­waiting and the maids of honor) than in ex-
amining the relics of dead sovereigns. Too much occupied with
the acquaintances that they would be able to make and the invi-
tations it might perhaps be possible to secure, they knew abso-
lutely nothing, even after years, of what there was in this priceless
museum of the archives of the monarchy, and could only recall
vaguely that it was decorated with cacti and giant palms, which
gave this center of social elegance a look of the palmarium in the
Jardin d’Acclimatation.
Naturally the Duchesse de Guermantes, by way of self-­
mortification, did occasionally appear on these evenings to pay
an “after dinner” call on the princess, who kept her all the time

502 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

by her side, while bantering with the duke. But on evenings when
the duchess came to dine, the princess took care not to invite her
regular party, and closed her doors to the world on rising from
table, for fear that a too-­liberal selection of guests might offend
the exacting duchess. On such evenings, if any of the faithful,
who had not received warning, arrived at the royal doorstep, they
would be informed by the concierge: “Her Royal Highness is not
at home this evening,” and would turn away. But many of the
princess’s friends knew in advance that, on the day in question,
they would not be asked to her house. These were a special set of
parties, a series barred to many who must have longed for admis-
sion. The excluded could, with a practical certainty, enumerate
the roll of the elect, and would say irritably among themselves:
“You know, of course, that Oriane de Guermantes never goes any-
where without her entire staff.” With the help of this body the
Princesse de Parme sought to surround the duchess as with a pro-
tecting rampart against those persons the chance of whose making
a good impression on her was at all doubtful. But with several
of the duchess’s favorites, with several members of this glittering
“staff,” the Princesse de Parme resented having to go out of her
way to show them attentions, seeing that they paid little or no
attention to herself. No doubt the princess was fully prepared to
admit that one might derive more enjoyment in the company of
the Duchesse de Guermantes than in her own. She could not deny
that there was always a “crush” on the duchess’s “at-­home” days,
or that she herself often met there three or four royal personages
who thought it sufficient to leave their cards upon her. And in
vain might she commit to memory Oriane’s witty sayings, copy
her gowns, serve at her own tea parties the same strawberry tarts;
there were occasions on which she was left by herself all afternoon
with a lady-­in-­waiting and some councilor from a foreign lega-
tion. And so whenever (as had been the case with Swann, for ex-
ample, at an earlier period) there was anyone who never let a day
pass without going to spend an hour or two at the duchess’s and
paid a call every two years on the Princesse de Parme, the latter

Chapter 2 503
 The Guermantes Way

185. The rillettes de Tours, a specialty of felt no great desire, even for the sake of amusing Oriane, to make
the province of Touraine, is a pâté-like to this Swann or whoever he was the “advances” of inviting him
spread of pork cooked in seasoned fat.
186. Reims is a city in the département to dinner. In a word, having the duchess in her house was for the
of Marne, known for its champagne princess a source of endless perplexity, so tormented was she by
and biscuits roses, a type of cookie. the fear that Oriane would find fault with everything. But in re-
turn, and for the same reason, when the Princesse de Parme came
to dine with Mme de Guermantes she could be certain before-
hand that everything would be perfect, delightful; she had only
one fear, which was that of her own inability to understand, re-
member, give satisfaction, her inability to assimilate new ideas and
people. On this account my presence aroused her attention and
excited her cupidity, just as might a new way of decorating the
dinner table with garlands of fruit, uncertain as she was which of
the two it might be—the table decorations or my presence—that
was more distinctively one of those charms, the secret of the suc-
cess of Oriane’s parties, and in her uncertainty firmly resolved to
try at her own next dinner party to introduce them both. What for
that matter fully justified the enraptured curiosity that the Prin-
cesse de Parme brought to the duchess’s house was that unique
element—dangerous, exciting—into which the princess used to
plunge with a combination of anxiety, shock, and delight (as at
the seaside on a day of “big waves” of the danger of which the life-
guards warn us, simply and solely because none of them knows
how to swim), from which she used to emerge fortified, happy,
rejuvenated, and which was known as the wit of the Guermantes.
The wit of the Guermantes—a thing as nonexistent as the squared
circle, according to the duchess who regarded herself as the sole
Guermantes to possess it—was a family reputation like that of the
rillettes of Tours185 or the biscuits of Reims.186 No doubt (since
an intellectual peculiarity does not employ for its perpetuation the
same channels as a shade of hair or complexion) certain intimate
friends of the duchess who were not of her blood were neverthe-
less endowed with this wit, which on the other hand had failed to
permeate the minds of various Guermantes, too refractory to as-
similate wit of any kind. The holders, not related to the duchess,

504 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

of this Guermantes wit had generally the characteristic feature of

having been brilliant men, fitted for a career to which, whether in
the arts, diplomacy, parliamentary eloquence, or the army, they
had preferred the life of a coterie. Possibly this preference could
be explained by a certain lack of originality, of initiative, of will-
power, of health, or of luck, or possibly by snobbishness.
With certain people (though these, it must be admitted, were
the exception) if the Guermantes drawing room had been the
stumbling block in their careers, it had been against their will.
Thus a doctor, a painter, and a diplomat of great promise had
failed to achieve success in the careers for which they were never-
theless more brilliantly endowed than most of their competitors
because their friendship with the Guermantes had the result that
the two former were regarded as men of fashion and the third as
a reactionary, which had prevented each of the three from win-
ning the recognition of his peers. The medieval gown and red
cap that are still donned by the electoral colleges of the Faculties
are (or were, at least, not so long since) something more than a
purely outward survival from a narrow-­minded past, from a rigid
sectarianism. Under the cap with its golden tassels, like the high
priests in the conical miter of the Jews, the “professors” were still,
in the years that preceded the Dreyfus Affair, fast rooted in rig-
orously pharisaical ideas. Du Boulbon was at heart an artist, but
was safe because he did not care for society. Cottard was always
at the Verdurins’. But Mme Verdurin was a patient; besides, he
was protected by his vulgarity; finally, at his own house he enter-
tained no one outside the Faculty, at banquets over which there
floated an aroma of carbolic acid. But in powerful corporations,
where moreover the rigidity of their prejudices is but the price
that must be paid for the noblest integrity, the most lofty con-
ceptions of morality, which weaken in an atmosphere that, more
tolerant, freer at first, becomes very soon dissolute, a professor
in his gown of scarlet satin faced with ermine, like that of a doge
(which is to say a duke) of Venice enclosed in the ducal palace,
was as virtuous, as deeply attached to noble principles, but as un-

Chapter 2 505
 The Guermantes Way

187. The council created in Venice in sparing of any alien element as that other duke, excellent but ter-
1310 to limit the power of the doges. rible, whom we know as M. de Saint-­Simon. The alien, here, was
188. Molière suffered a convulsion and
began spitting blood during the fourth the worldly doctor, with other manners, other social relations. To
performance of Le Malade imaginaire make good, the unfortunate of whom we are now speaking, so as
(1673) and died a few hours later. The not to be accused by his colleagues of looking down on them (the
third interlude, written in pig Latin, that
ends the play is a parody of the status strange ideas of a man of fashion!) if he concealed from them his
of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. Duchesse de Guermantes, hoped to disarm them by giving mixed
To a question, asked by the character dinner parties in which the medical element was merged in the
Praeses, Molière, who was playing the
role of Bachelierus, was to answer: Juro fashionable. He was unaware that in so doing he signed his own
(I swear). death warrant, or rather he discovered this later, when the Council
of Ten187 (a little larger in number) had to fill a vacant chair, and
it was invariably the name of another doctor, more normal and
perhaps more mediocre, that leaped from the fatal urn, when the
“Veto” thundered in the ancient Faculty, as solemn, as absurd,
and as terrible as the “Juro” that spelled the death of Molière.188
So too with the painter permanently labeled man of fashion, when
fashionable people who dabbled in art had succeeded in making
themselves be labeled artists; so with the diplomat who had too
many reactionary associations.
But this case was the rarest of all. The type of distinguished
men who formed the main substance of the Guermantes salon
was that of people who had voluntarily (or so at least they sup-
posed) renounced all else, everything that was incompatible with
the wit of the Guermantes, with the courtesy of the Guermantes,
with that indefinable charm odious to any “corporation” however
little centralized.
And the people who were aware that in days gone by one of
these habitués of the duchess’s drawing room had been awarded
the gold medal of the Salon, that another, secretary to the Bar
Council, had made a brilliant debut in the Chamber, that a third
had ably served France as chargé d’affaires might have been led to
regard as “failures” people who had done nothing more now for
twenty years. But there were few who were thus “well informed,”
and those concerned would themselves have been the last to re-
mind people, finding these old distinctions to be now valueless,

506 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

by the very virtue of the Guermantes wit: for did not this con-
demn respectively as a bore or an usher, and as a counter-jumper a
pair of eminent ministers, one a trifle solemn, the other addicted
to puns, whose praises the newspapers were always singing but
in whose company Mme de Guermantes would begin to yawn
and show signs of impatience if the imprudence of a hostess had
placed either of them next to her at the dinner table? Since being
a statesman of the first rank was in no sense a recommendation to
the duchess’s favor, those of her friends who had definitely aban-
doned the “career” or the “army,” who had never stood for the
Chamber, felt, as they came day after day to have lunch and talk
with their great friend, or when they met her in the houses of
royal personages, of whom for that matter they thought very little
(or at least they said so), that they had chosen the better part,
although their melancholy air, even in the midst of the gaiety,
seemed somehow to challenge the soundness of this opinion.
It must be recognized also that the refinement of social life, the
subtlety of conversation at the Guermantes’ did also contain, exi-
guous as it may have been, an element of reality. No official title
was equivalent to the approval of Mme de Guermantes’s favor-
ites, whom the most powerful ministers would have been unable
to attract to their houses. If in this drawing room so many intel-
lectual ambitions and noble efforts even had been forever buried,
still at least from their dust the rarest flowering of civilized society
had come to life. Certainly men of wit, Swann for example, re-
garded themselves as superior to men of genuine worth, whom
they despised, but that was because what the Duchesse de Guer-
mantes valued above everything else was not intelligence; it was,
according to her, that superior, rarer, more exquisite form of intel-
ligence exalted to a verbal variety of talent—wit. And long ago at
the Verdurins’, when Swann condemned Brichot and Elstir, one as
a pedant and the other as a clown, despite all the learning of one
and the other’s genius, it was the infiltration of the Guermantes
spirit that had led him to classify them so. Never would he have
dared to introduce either of them to the duchess, conscious in-

Chapter 2 507
 The Guermantes Way

stinctively of the air with which she would have listened to Bri-
chot’s monologues and Elstir’s “nonsense,” the Guermantes spirit
regarding pretentious and prolix speech, whether in a serious or a
farcical vein, as alike of the most intolerable imbecility.
As for the Guermantes of the true flesh and blood, if the Guer-
mantes spirit had not absorbed them as completely as we see occur
in, for example, those literary circles in which everyone has the
same way of pronouncing his words, of expressing his thoughts,
and consequently of thinking, it was certainly not because origi-
nality is stronger in purely social groups or presents any obstacle
there to imitation. But imitation depends not merely upon the ab-
sence of any invincible originality but also demands a relative fine-
ness of ear that enables one first of all to discern what one is after-
ward to imitate. Now, there were several Guermantes in whom
this musical sense was as entirely lacking as in the Courvoisiers.
To take as an example what is called, in another sense of the
word imitation, “doing imitations” (or among the Guermantes
was called “taking off ”), for all that Mme de Guermantes might
succeed in this to perfection, the Courvoisiers were as incapable
of appreciating her as if they had been a tribe of rabbits instead
of men and women, because they had never managed to observe
the particular defect or accent that the duchess was endeavoring
to copy. When she “gave an imitation” of the Duc de Limoges,
the Courvoisiers would protest: “Oh, no, he doesn’t really speak
like that! I dined with him again yesterday at Bebeth’s; he talked
to me all evening and he didn’t speak like that at all!” whereas
the Guermantes who was to any degree cultivated would exclaim:
“God, how droll Oriane is! The odd part of it is that when she
is imitating him she looks exactly like him! I feel I’m listening
to him. Oriane, do give us a little more Limoges!” Now these
Guermantes (and not necessarily the few really outstanding
members of the clan who when the duchess imitated the Duc de
Limoges, would say admiringly’ “Oh, you really have got him,”
or “You do get him”) might indeed be devoid of wit according to
Mme de Guermantes (in this respect she was right), yet by dint

508 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

of hearing and repeating her sayings they had come to imitate 189. This use of the word rédiger is one
more or less her way of expressing herself, of criticizing people of the peculiarities of Mme de Boigne’s
speech in Récits d’une tante when she
for what Swann, like the duchess herself, would have called her describes the conversation of a par-
way of “phrasing”189 things so that they presented in their con- ticular character.
versation something that to the Courvoisiers appeared dreadfully
similar to Oriane’s wit and was treated by them collectively as
the wit of the Guermantes. As these Guermantes were to her not
merely kinsfolk but admirers, Oriane (who kept the rest of the
family rigorously at arm’s length and now avenged by her disdain
the indignities that they had heaped upon her in her girlhood)
went to call on them now and then, generally in company with
the duke, in the summer months, when she drove out with him.
These visits were an event. The Princesse d’Épinay, who was “at
home” in her big drawing room on the ground floor, felt her heart
began to beat more rapidly when she saw in the distance, like
the first glow of an innocuous fire, or the “reconnaissances” of
an unexpected invasion, making her way slowly across the court-
yard in a diagonal course, the duchess wearing a ravishing hat and
holding atilt a sunshade from which there rained down a summer
fragrance. “Why, here comes Oriane,” she would say, like an “En
garde!” intended to convey a prudent warning to her visitors, so
that they would have time to beat an orderly retreat, to evacuate
the drawing rooms without panic. Half of those present dared not
remain, and rose at once to go. “But no, why? Sit down again, I
insist on keeping you a little longer,” said the princess in a careless
tone and seemingly at her ease (to show herself the great lady) but
in a voice that suddenly rang false. “But you may want to talk to
each other.” “Really, you’re in a hurry? Oh, very well, I will come
and see you,” replied the lady of the house to those whom she
was just as well pleased to see depart. The duke and duchess gave
a very civil greeting to people whom they had seen there regu-
larly for years, without for that reason coming to know them any
better, while these in return barely said hello to them, thinking
this more discreet. Scarcely had they left the room before the duke
began asking good-­naturedly who they were, so as to appear to be

Chapter 2 509
 The Guermantes Way

190. Gustave-­Louis-­Édouard de Lamar- taking an interest in the intrinsic quality of people whom he him-
zelle (1852–1929) was a conservative self never saw in his own house, owing to the cruelty of fate or the
Catholic who served as a député and
senator from Morbihan. state of Oriane’s nerves:
“Tell me, who was that little woman in the pink hat?”
“Why, my dear cousin, you’ve seen her hundreds of times, she’s
the Vicomtesse de Tours, who was a Lamarzelle.”
“But, do you know, she’s very pretty; she looks witty too; if it
weren’t for a little flaw in her upper lip she’d be a regular charmer.
If there’s a Vicomte de Tours, he can’t have any too bad a time.
Oriane, do you know what her eyebrows and the way her hair
grows reminded me of? Your cousin Hedwige de Ligne.”
The Duchesse de Guermantes, who languished whenever
people spoke of the beauty of any woman other than herself, let
the conversation drop. She had reckoned without her husband’s
penchant for letting it be seen that he knew all about the people
who did not come to his house, whereby he believed that he
showed himself to be more “serious” than his wife.
“But,” he resumed suddenly with emphasis, “you mentioned
the name Lamarzelle.190 I remember, when I was in the Chamber,
hearing a really remarkable speech made . . .”
“That was the uncle of the young woman you saw just now.”
“Indeed! What talent! No, my dear girl,” he assured the Vicom-
tesse d’Égremont, whom Mme de Guermantes could not endure,
but who, refusing to stir from the Princesse d’Épinay’s drawing
room, where she willingly humbled herself to the role of parlor
maid (and was ready to slap her own parlor maid on returning
home), stayed there, confused, tearful, but stayed when the ducal
couple were in the room, took their cloaks, tried to make herself
useful, offered discreetly to withdraw into the next room, “you are
not to make tea for us, let us just sit and talk quietly, we are simple
souls, no fuss, honestly. Besides,” he went on, turning to the Prin-
cesse d’Épinay (leaving the Égremont lady blushing, humble, am-
bitious, and full of zeal), “we can only give you a quarter of an
hour.”
This quarter of an hour was entirely taken up with a sort of ex-

510 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

hibition of the witty things that the duchess had said during the
previous week, and to which she herself would certainly not have
referred had not her husband, with great adroitness, by appearing
to be rebuking her with reference to the incidents that had pro-
voked them, obliged her as though against her will to repeat them.
The Princesse d’Épinay, who was fond of her cousin and knew
that she had a weakness for compliments, went into ecstasies over
her hat, her sunshade, her wit. “Talk to her as much as you like
about her clothes,” said the duke in the sullen tone that he had
adopted and now tempered with a mocking smile so that his dis-
pleasure would not be taken seriously, “but for heaven’s sake don’t
speak of her wit, I would be only too glad not to have so witty
a wife. You’re probably alluding to the shocking pun she made
about my brother Palamède,” he went on, knowing quite well that
the princess and the rest of the family had not yet heard this pun,
and delighted to have an opportunity of showing off his wife. “In
the first place I consider it unworthy of a person who has occa-
sionally, I must admit, said some quite good things, to make bad
puns, but especially about my brother, who is very touchy, and if
it’s going to lead to his quarreling with me, that would really be
too much of a good thing.”
“But we never heard a word about it! One of Oriane’s puns! It’s
sure to be delicious. Oh, do tell us!”
“No, no,” the duke went on, still sulking though with a broader
smile, “I’m so glad you haven’t heard it. Seriously, I’m very fond
of my brother.”
“Listen, Basin,” broke in the duchess, the moment having come
for her to take up her husband’s cue, “I can’t think why you would
say that it might annoy Palamède, you know quite well it would
do nothing of the sort. He is far too intelligent to be offended by
a stupid joke that has nothing offensive about it. You’re going to
make them think I said something nasty; I simply made a remark
that was not in the least funny, it’s you who make it seem impor-
tant by your indignation. I don’t understand you.”
“You’re being extremely intriguing. What’s it all about?”

Chapter 2 511
 The Guermantes Way

191. The château de Brézé is located “Oh, obviously nothing serious!” cried M. de Guermantes.
in Anjou, not far from Saumur. It was “You may have heard that my brother offered to give Brézé,191 the
built in the sixteenth century on the
ruins of another building. In the Middle château he got from his wife, to his sister Marsantes.”
Ages, it belonged to one of the most “Yes, but we were told that she didn’t want it, that she didn’t
illustrious families of France. care for that part of the country, the climate didn’t suit her.”
192. In the original, it’s Taquin le Su-
perbe, which is very close to the ruler’s “Well, exactly, someone had been telling my wife all that and
real name, as is Scott Moncrieff ’s saying that if my brother was giving this château to our sister it
Teaser Augustus. The word taquin was not so much to please her as to tease her. ‘He’s such a teaser,
means someone who is a teaser. Tar-
quinius Superbus, the seventh and last Charlus,’ was what they actually said. Well, you know Brézé, it’s a
king of Rome, reigned 534–510 b.c. and royal domain, I would say it’s worth millions, it used to be part of
died in 495. the crown lands, it includes one of the finest forests in the whole
of France. There are plenty of people who would be only too de-
lighted to be teased to that tune. And so when she heard the word
‘teaser’ applied to Charlus because he was giving away such a
magnificent château, Oriane could not help exclaiming, involun-
tarily, I must admit, there wasn’t a trace of malice in it, for it came
quickly, like a flash of lightning: ‘Teaser, teaser? Then he must be
Teaser Augustus.’192 You understand,” he went on, resuming his
sulky tone, having first cast a sweeping glance around the room
in order to judge the effect of his wife’s witticism—and in some
doubt as to the extent of Mme d’Épinay’s acquaintance with an-
cient history, “you understand, it’s an allusion to Augustus Caesar,
the Roman emperor; it’s too stupid, a bad play on words, quite
unworthy of Oriane. And then, you see, I am more circumspect
than my wife, if I haven’t her wit, I think of the consequences;
if anyone should be so ill-­advised as to repeat the remark to my
brother there’ll be the devil to pay. All the more,” he went on, “be-
cause as you know Palamède is very high and mighty, and very
fussy also, given to gossip and all that sort of thing, so that quite
apart from the question of his giving away Brézé you must admit
that ‘Teaser Augustus’ suits him down to the ground. That is what
justifies my wife’s bons mots; even when she is inclined to stoop to
what is almost vulgar, she is always witty and does describe people
rather well.”
And so, thanks on one occasion to “Teaser Augustus,” on an-

512 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

other to another witticism, the visits paid by the duke and duchess 193. Françoise de La Rochefoucauld
to their kinsfolk replenished the stock of anecdotes, and the ex- (née in 1844) married the Prince de
Sarsina (1845–85) in 1865. At the end
citement that these visits caused lasted long after the departure of of the nineteenth century she lived in
the sparkling lady and her impresario. Her hostess would begin Rome at the Aldobrandini Palace or in
by going over again with the privileged persons who had been Paris at 102, rue de l’Université.
194. Marie-­Caroline-­Félix-­Miolan (1827–
at the entertainment (those who had remained) the clever things 95), cantatrice, wife of Léon Carvalho,
that Oriane had said. “You hadn’t heard ‘Teaser Augustus’?” asked made her debut at the Opéra-­Comique
the Princesse d’Épinay. “Yes,” replied the Marquise de Baveno, in 1850. She created, among others,
several of Gounod’s characters: Mar-
blushing as she spoke, “the Princesse de Sarsina-­L a Rochefou- guerite in Faust (1859); Mireille (1864);
cauld193 mentioned it to me, not quite in the same words. But of and Juliette in Roméo et Juliette (1867).
course it must have been far more interesting to hear it repeated She retired in 1885. Carvalho was the
director of the Opéra-­Comique.
like that with my cousin in the room,” she went on, as though
speaking of a song that had been accompanied by the composer
himself. “We were speaking of Oriane’s latest—she was here just
now,” her hostess greeted a visitor who would be plunged in de-
spair at not having arrived an hour earlier.
“What! Oriane was here?”
“Yes, if you’d come a little sooner . . .” the Princesse d’Épinay
replied, not in reproach but letting her understand all that her
carelessness had made her miss. It was her fault alone if she had
not been present at the creation of the world or at Mme Car-
valho’s last performance.194 “What do you think of Oriane’s latest
bon mot? I must say, I do like ‘Teaser Augustus,’” and the “mot”
would be served up again cold next day at lunch before a few
intimate friends who were invited for that purpose, and would
reappear under various sauces throughout the week. Indeed the
princess happening in the course of that week to pay her annual
visit to the Princesse de Parme seized the opportunity to ask
whether Her Royal Highness had heard the pun, and repeated
it to her. “Ah! Teaser Augustus,” said the Princesse de Parme, her
eyes wide with an a priori admiration, which begged however for
a complementary elucidation that Mme d’Épinay was not loath
to furnish. “I must say, ‘Teaser Augustus’ pleases me enormously
as a piece of ‘phrasing,’” she concluded. As a matter of fact the
word “phrasing” was not in the least applicable to this pun, but

Chapter 2 513
 The Guermantes Way

195. This is Mme d’Épinay’s given the Princesse d’Épinay, who claimed to have assimilated her share
name. of the Guermantes wit, had borrowed from Oriane the expres-
sions “phrased” and “phrasing” and employed them without
much discrimination. Now the Princesse de Parme, who was not
at all fond of Mme d’Épinay, whom she considered plain, knew
to be miserly, and believed, on the authority of the Courvoisiers,
to be malicious, recognized this word “phrasing” that she had
heard used by Mme de Guermantes but would not by herself have
known how or when to apply. She had the impression that it was
in fact its “phrasing” that formed the charm of “Teaser Augustus”
and, without altogether forgetting her antipathy toward the plain
and miserly lady, could not repress a burst of admiration for a
person endowed to such a degree with the Guermantes wit, so
strong that she was on the point of inviting the Princesse d’Épinay
to the Opéra. She was held in check only by the reflection that
it would be wiser perhaps to consult Mme de Guermantes first.
As for Mme d’Épinay, who, unlike the Courvoisiers, paid end-
less attentions to Oriane and was genuinely fond of her but was
jealous of her exalted friends and slightly irritated by the fun that
the duchess used to make of her before everyone on account of her
avarice, she reported on her return home what an effort it had re-
quired to make the Princesse de Parme grasp the point of “Teaser
Augustus,” and declared what a snob Oriane must be to number
such a goose among her friends. “I would never have been able to
see much of the Princesse de Parme even if I had cared to,” she in-
formed the friends who were dining with her. “M. d’Épinay would
not have allowed it for a moment, because of her immorality,” she
explained, alluding to certain purely imaginary excesses on the
part of Mme de Parme. “But even if I had had a husband less strict
in his views, I must say I could never have made friends with her. I
don’t know how Oriane can bear to see her every other day, as she
does. I go there once a year, and it’s all I can do to sit out my call.”
As for those of the Courvoisiers who happened to be at Victur-
nienne’s195 on the day of Mme de Guermantes’s visit, the arrival of

514 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

the duchess generally put them to flight owing to the exasperation 196. This is an allusion to the plain in
they felt at the “ridiculous salaams” that were made to her there. Picardy where François I met Henry
VIII of England in June 1520. François
One alone remained on the day of “Teaser Augustus.” He did not sought English support against Holy
entirely see the point, but even so he did half-­understand it, being Roman Emperor Charles V. François
an educated man. And the Courvoisiers went about repeating that had a temporary palace erected with a
tent of gold cloth; lavish, spectacular
Oriane had called Uncle Palamède “Caesar Augustus,” which was, arrangements were made for jousting,
according to them, a good enough description of him, but why dancing, and banqueting.
all this endless talk about Oriane, they went on. People couldn’t
make more fuss about a queen. “After all, what is Oriane? I don’t
say that the Guermantes aren’t an old family, but the Courvoi-
siers are every bit as good in illustriousness, antiquity, alliances.
We mustn’t forget that on the Field of the Cloth of Gold,196 when
the King of England asked François I who was the noblest of the
lords there present, ‘Sire,’ said the King of France, ‘Courvoisier.’”
But even if all the Courvoisiers had stayed in the room to hear
them, Oriane’s witticisms would have fallen on deaf ears, since
the incidents that usually gave occasion for them would have been
regarded by them from a totally different point of view. If, for
example, a Courvoisier found herself running short of chairs, in
the middle of a reception she was giving, or if she used the wrong
name in greeting a guest whose face she did not remember, or if
one of her servants said something stupid, the Courvoisier, ex-
tremely annoyed, flushed, quivering with agitation, would de-
plore such a contretemps. And when she had a visitor in the room
and Oriane was expected, she would say in a tone anxiously and
imperiously questioning: “Do you know her?” fearing that if the
visitor did not know her his presence might make a bad impres-
sion on Oriane. But Mme de Guermantes on the contrary ex-
tracted from such incidents opportunities for stories that made
the Guermantes laugh until the tears streamed down their cheeks,
so that one was obliged to envy her for having run short of chairs,
having herself made or having allowed her servant to make such a
gaffe, for having had at her party someone whom nobody knew, as
one is obliged to be thankful that great writers have been kept at a

Chapter 2 515
 The Guermantes Way

197. Louis de Clermont d’Amboise distance by men and betrayed by women when their humiliations
(1549–79), governor of Anjou, whose and their sufferings have been, if not the direct stimulus of their
duels and amorous conquests gave
him the reputation of an adventurer. genius, at any rate the subject matter of their works.
He was killed by the Comte de Mont- The Courvoisiers were incapable of rising to the level of the
soreau, whose wife he had seduced. spirit of innovation that the Duchesse de Guermantes introduced
He inspired the Dumas père novel
La Dame de Montsoreau (1845). into the life of society and, by adapting it, following an unerring
instinct, to the necessities of the moment, made into something
artistic where the purely rational application of cut and dried rules
would have given as unfortunate results as would greet a man
who, eager to succeed in love or in politics, was to reproduce to
the letter in his own life the exploits of Bussy d’Amboise.197 If
the Courvoisiers gave a family dinner or a dinner to meet some
prince, the addition of a recognized wit, of some friend of their
son seemed to them an anomaly capable of producing the direst
consequences. A Courvoisier lady whose father had been a min-
ister during the Empire having to give an afternoon party in
honor of the Princesse Mathilde deduced by a geometrical for-
mula that she could invite no one but Bonapartists. Of whom
she knew practically none. All the fashionable women of her ac-
quaintance, all the amusing men were ruthlessly barred because,
from their Legitimist views or connections, they might easily, ac-
cording to Courvoisier logic, give offense to the Imperial High-
ness. The latter, who in her own house entertained the flower of
the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, was quite surprised when she found
at Mme de Courvoisier’s only a notorious old sponger whose hus-
band had been an imperial prefect, the widow of the director of
posts, and sundry others known for their loyalty to Napoléon III,
their stupidity, and their dullness. Princesse Mathilde, however,
in no way stinted the generous and refreshing shower of her sov-
ereign grace over these miserable scarecrows whom the Duchesse
de Guermantes, for her part, took good care not to invite when
it was her turn to entertain the princess, but substituted for them
without any a priori reasoning about Bonapartism the most opu-
lent bouquet of all the beauties, all the talents, all the celebrities,
who, the exercise of some subtle sixth sense made her feel, would

516 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

be acceptable to the niece of the emperor even when they be- 198. Proust may be thinking of an entry
longed actually to the Royal House. Even the Duc d’Aumale was from the Goncourt Journal of May 3,
1873, in which Flaubert is described as
present, and when, on withdrawing, the princess, raising Mme de having a mind that strongly resembles
Guermantes from the ground where she had sunk in a curtsy and that of the bourgeoisie. Edmond de
was trying to kiss the august hand, embraced her on both cheeks, Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt,
Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire
it was from the bottom of her heart that she was able to assure (Paris: Robert Laffont [Bouquins],
the duchess that never had she spent a happier afternoon nor at- 1989), 2: 541.
tended so delightful a party. The Princesse de Parme was Courvoi-
sier in her incapacity for innovation in social matters, but unlike
the Courvoisiers the surprise that was perpetually caused her by
the Duchesse de Guermantes engendered in her not, as in them,
antipathy but admiration. This astonishment was still further en-
hanced by the infinitely backward state of the princess’s educa-
tion. Mme de Guermantes was herself a great deal less advanced
than she supposed. But it was enough for her to have gone a little
beyond Mme de Parme to stupefy that lady, and, as the critics
of each generation confine themselves to maintaining the direct
opposite of the truths admitted by their predecessors, she had
only to say that Flaubert, that archenemy of the bourgeois, had
been bourgeois through and through,198 or that there was a great
deal of Italian music in Wagner, to open before the princess, at the
cost of a nervous exhaustion that recurred every time, as before
the eyes of a swimmer in a stormy sea, horizons that seemed to her
unimaginable and remained forever vague. A stupefaction caused
also by the paradoxes uttered with relation not only to works of art
but to persons of their acquaintance and to current social events.
No doubt the incapacity that prevented Mme de Parme from dis-
tinguishing the true wit of the Guermantes from certain rudimen-
tarily acquired forms of that wit (which made her believe in the
high intellectual worth of certain, especially certain female Guer-
mantes, of whom she was bewildered on hearing the duchess con-
fide to her with a smile that they were mere blockheads) was one
of the causes of the astonishment that the princess always felt on
hearing Mme de Guermantes criticize other people. But there was
another cause also, one that I, who knew at this time more books

Chapter 2 517
 The Guermantes Way

199. The two operas were inspired by than people and literature better than life, explained to myself by
the same subject and have the same thinking that the duchess, living this worldly life the idleness and
title: Iphigénie en Tauride. Christoph Wil-
libald Gluck (1714–87) used a libretto sterility of which are to a true social activity what criticism, in art,
by Nicolas-­François Guillard. Their is to creation, extended to the persons who surrounded her the
opera was performed in 1779; Niccolo instability of point of view, the unhealthy thirst of the reasoner
Piccini (1728–1800) worked with libret-
tist A. Du Congé Dubreuil. Their opera who to quench a mind that has grown too dry goes in search of
premiered in 1781. Gluck’s version en- no matter what paradox that is still fairly fresh, and will make no
joyed a great success while Piccini’s bones about upholding the refreshing opinion that the really great
was a failure.
200. Racine’s Phèdre was first per- Iphigénie is Piccini’s and not Gluck’s,199 at a pinch the true Phèdre
formed on January 1, 1677, two days that of Pradon.200
before the première of Phèdre et Hip- When a woman who was intelligent, educated, witty had mar-
polyte by “Nicolas” Jacques Pradon
(1644–98). Pradon’s powerful friends ried a shy bumpkin whom one saw but seldom and never heard,
had wanted to ensure the failure of Mme de Guermantes one fine day would find a rare intellectual
Racine’s play. But Pradon’s triumph pleasure not only in decrying the wife but in “discovering” the
was short-­lived.
201. Hugo’s play Hernani, written husband. In the Cambremer household for example, if she had
in verse, premiered at the Comédie-­ lived in that section of society at the time, she would have decreed
Française on February 25, 1830, and that Mme de Cambremer was stupid, and that the really inter-
caused a riot between the young
Romantics and the partisans of the esting person, misunderstood, delightful, condemned to silence
French classical tradition. The Roman- by a chattering wife but himself worth a thousand of her, was the
tics eventually triumphed. The play was marquis, and the duchess would have felt on declaring this the
later adapted to opera by Verdi.
202. This is the third example of a same kind of refreshment as the critic who, after people have for
famous literary quarrel. Thanks in part seventy years been admiring Hernani,201 confesses to a preference
to the triumph of Lucrèce (1843) by for Le Lion amoureux.202 And from this same morbid need of ar-
François Ponsard (1814–67) and the
failure that same year of Hugo’s Les bitrary novelties, if from her girlhood everyone had been pitying
Burgraves, Ponsard became the leader a model wife, a true saint, for being married to a scoundrel, one
of the anti-­Romantic and anti-­Hugo fine day Mme de Guermantes would assert that this scoundrel was
reaction. His position seemed to be
confirmed by the success in 1866 of perhaps a frivolous man but one with a heart of gold, whom the
his play Le Lion amoureux, a historical implacable harshness of his wife had driven to do the most incon-
comedy that was popular in the latter sistent things. I knew that it is not only over different works, in
half of the nineteenth century.
203. In the fifteenth century, there were the long course of centuries, but over different parts of the same
three painters in the Bellini family of work that criticism plays, thrusting back into the shadow what
Venice. We do not know which one for too long has been thought brilliant, and making emerge what
Proust has in mind here.
204. Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805– has seemed to be doomed to permanent obscurity. I had not only
73) was a German painter who came to seen Bellini,203 Winterhalter,204 the Jesuit architects, a Restora-
Paris in 1834 and became a fashionable tion cabinetmaker come to take the place of men of genius who

518 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

were called “worn out,” simply because they had worn out the lazy portraitist during the Second Empire.
minds of the intellectuals, as neurasthenics are always worn out One of his most famous models was
the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoléon
and always changing; I had seen preferred in Sainte-­Beuve alter- III, whose portraits hang in the Louvre
nately the critic and the poet, Musset rejected so far as his poetry and at Compiègne.
went save for a few quite unimportant little pieces. No doubt cer- 205. Le Cid and Polyeucte are clas-
sical tragedies by Pierre Corneille that
tain essayists are mistaken when they set above the most famous became part of the repertory of the
scenes in Le Cid or Polyeucte some speech from Le Menteur 205 Comédie-Française. Corneille also
that, like an old map, furnishes information about the Paris of wrote Le Menteur, a comedy where in
act 2, scene 5, the character Dorante
the day, but their predilection, justified if not by considerations expresses his astonishment over the
of beauty at least by a documentary interest, is still too rational rapidity with which Paris is changing.
for our criticism run mad. It will barter the whole of Molière for 206. L’Étourdi ou les Contretemps (1655)
is an early comedy by Molière, who was
a line from L’Étourdi,206 and even when it pronounces Wagner’s inspired by the Italian literary comedy
Tristan a bore will except a “charming note on the horns” at the known as commedia sostenuta.
point where the hunt goes by.207 This depravation of taste helped 207. The “charming note on the horns”
is heard at the beginning of act 2
me to understand that of which Mme de Guermantes gave proof of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde
when she decided that a man of their world, recognized as a good (1865). Brangäne and Isolde hear, in the
fellow but a fool, was a monster of egoism, sharper than people distance, the horns of the retreating
hunt.
thought—that another widely known for his generosity might be
the personification of avarice, that a good mother paid no atten-
tion to her children, and that a woman generally supposed to be
vicious was really actuated by the noblest feelings. As though cor-
rupted by the nullity of life in society, the intelligence and sensi-
bility of Mme de Guermantes were too vacillating for disgust not
to follow pretty swiftly in the wake of infatuation (leaving her
still ready to feel herself attracted afresh by the kind of clever-
ness that she had in turn sought out and abandoned) and for the
charm that she had felt in some warmhearted man not to change,
if he came too often to see her, sought too freely from her direc-
tions that she was incapable of giving him, into an irritation that
she believed to be produced by her admirer but that was in fact
due to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one is con-
tent to do nothing else than seek it. The variations of the duchess’s
judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never
loved her, in him she had always felt an iron character, indifferent
to her caprices, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that

Chapter 2 519
 The Guermantes Way

would never bend, the sort under whose rule alone high-­strung
people can find tranquility. M. de Guermantes on the other hand,
pursuing a single type of feminine beauty but seeking it in mis-
tresses whom he constantly replaced, had, once he had left them,
and to express derision of them, only one associate, permanent
and identical, who irritated him often by her chatter but whom
he knew that everyone regarded as the most beautiful, the most
virtuous, the cleverest, the best-­read member of the aristocracy,
as a wife whom he, M. de Guermantes, was only too fortunate
to have found, who covered up all his irregularities, entertained
like no one else in the world, and upheld for their salon its posi-
tion as the premier in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain. This common
opinion he himself shared; often moved to ill-­humor against her,
he was proud of her. If, being as avaricious as he was ostentatious,
he refused her the most trifling sums for her charities or for the
servants, yet he insisted upon her wearing the most sumptuous
clothes and driving behind the best equipages in Paris. Finally,
he relished showing off his wife’s wit. Now, whenever Mme de
Guermantes had just invented, with reference to the merits and
defects, which she suddenly transposed, of one of their friends,
a new and succulent paradox, she burned to try it out on people
capable of appreciating it, to have them savor its psychological
originality and to set sparkling its epigrammatic malice. No doubt
these new opinions contained as a rule no more truth than the
old, often less; but this very element, arbitrary and unexpected, of
novelty that they contained conferred on them something intel-
lectual that made the communication of them exciting. However,
the patient on whom the duchess was exercising her psychological
skill was generally an intimate friend as to whom those people to
whom she longed to communicate her discovery were entirely un-
aware that he was not still at the apex of her favor; thus the repu-
tation that Mme de Guermantes had of being an incomparable
friend, sentimental, tender, and devoted, made it difficult for her
to launch the attack herself; she could at the most intervene later

520 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

on, as though under constraint, by uttering a response to appease,

to contradict in appearance but actually to support a partner who
had taken it on himself to provoke her; this was precisely the role
in which M. de Guermantes excelled.
As for social activities, it was yet another form of pleasure, ar-
bitrary and theatrical, that Mme de Guermantes felt in uttering,
with regard to them, those unexpected judgments that pricked
with an incessant and exquisite feeling of surprise the Princesse de
Parme. But regarding this pleasure of the duchess’s, it was not so
much with the help of literary criticism as by following political
life and the reports of parliamentary debates that I tried to under-
stand 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 behavior, in which she accounted for her own most
trivial decisions on points of fashion, to savor those artificial emo-
tions, to fulfill those factitious duties that stimulate the sensi-
bility of parliaments and gain hold of 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
that does, as a matter of fact, appear quite straightforward to the
commonsense person who reads the report of the session the next
morning in his newspaper, this commonsense reader does never-
theless feel 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 with the accompaniment of a
lively agitation and punctuated with expressions of condemna-
tion such as: “It’s most serious!” pronounced by a deputy whose
name and titles are so long, and followed in the report by move-
ments so emphatic that in the whole interruption the words “It’s
most serious!” occupy less room than a hemistich does in an alex-
andrine. For example in the days when M. de Guermantes, Prince
des Laumes, sat in the Chamber, one used to read now and then

Chapter 2 521
 The Guermantes Way

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 center and some of the right
benches, 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 palpi-
tation by the first words of the speaker who rises to reply: “The
astonishment, it is not too much to say the stupor” (keen sensa-
tion 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—”
(Thunder of applause; several deputies rush toward the minis-
ters’ bench. The undersecretary of state for posts and telegraphs,
without rising from his seat, gives an affirmative nod.)
This “thunder of applause” carries away the last shred of re-
sistance in the mind of the commonsense reader; he discovers
to be an insult to the Chamber, monstrous in fact, a course of
procedure which in itself is of no importance; it may be some
normal action such as arranging for the rich to pay more than the
poor, bringing to light some piece of injustice, preferring peace to
war; he will find it scandalous and will see in it an offense to cer-
tain principles to which as a matter of fact he had never given a
thought, which are not engraved on the human heart, but which
move him forcibly by reason of the acclamations that they pro-
voke and the compact majorities that they assemble.
It must at the same time be recognized that this subtlety of the
politician that served to explain to me the Guermantes circle, and
other groups in society later on, is nothing more than the per-
version of a certain fineness of interpretation often described as
“reading between the lines.” If in representative assemblies there is
absurdity owing to perversion of this quality, there is equally stu-
pidity, 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

522 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

been dismissed, since it was he who asked leave to retire,” or a de-

feat when, faced with a Japanese advance, the Russians, by a stra-
tegic movement, fall back to stronger positions that had been pre-
pared beforehand, or a refusal when a province having demanded
its independence from the German emperor, he grants it religious
autonomy. It is possible, moreover (to return to these sessions of
the Chamber), that when they begin, 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 one another 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 mounts the tri-
bune in a solemn silence that has already brought artificial emo-
tions into play. The first words of the minister: “There is no need
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 cognizance,”
produce a coup de théâtre, for this was the one hypothesis that the
commonsense of the deputies had not imagined. But precisely be-
cause it is a coup de théâtre, it is greeted with such applause that
it is only after several minutes have passed that the minister can
succeed in making himself heard, the minister who will receive
on returning to his place on the bench the congratulations of his
colleagues. We are as deeply moved as on the day when the same
minister failed to invite to a big official reception the president of
the municipal council who was supporting the opposition, and
declare that on this occasion as on the other he has acted with true
statesmanship.
M. de Guermantes at this period in 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 have
heard it said that even at a time when he was playing a fairly im-
portant part in the Chamber and was being thought of in con-
nection with a ministerial office or an embassy, he was, when a
friend came to ask a favor of him, infinitely more simple, behaved

Chapter 2 523
 The Guermantes Way

208. Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie (1685– politically a great deal less an important personage than anyone
1712) was the wife of the Duc de Bour- else who did not happen to be Duc de Guermantes. For if he said
gogne, elder son of the Grand Dauphin
Louis. Pierre Gobert painted her por- that nobility counted for little, that he regarded his colleagues as
trait when she was fifteen. Saint-­Simon equals, he did not believe it for a moment. He sought, pretended
mentions her often. to value, but really despised political position, and as he remained
209. The beautiful daughter of the King
of Deryabar in The Arabian Nights. in his own eyes M. de Guermantes, it did not envelop his person
210. In mythology, Psyche is a girl of in that starchiness of high office that makes others unapproach-
extraordinary beauty, beloved by Cupid, able. And in this way his pride protected against every assault not
the son of Venus. She gained immor-
tality after having passed a number only his manners, which were of an ostentatious familiarity, but
of tests set by Venus. Her beauty and also such true simplicity as he might actually have.
legend has inspired many painters and To return to those artificial and dramatic decisions such as are
sculptors.
made by politicians, Mme de Guermantes was no less discon-
certing to the Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in gen-
eral, and, more than anyone, the Princesse de Parme by her habit
of issuing unaccountable decrees behind which one sensed latent
principles that impressed one all the more, the less one expected
them. If the new Greek minister gave a masked ball, everyone
chose a costume and wondered what the duchess would wear. One
thought that she would appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne,208
another suggested as probable the guise of Princess of Deryabar,209
a third Psyche.210 Finally, a Courvoisier having asked her: “What
are you going to wear, 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 atti-
tude to adopt toward him, that is to say the opinion that ought to
have been foreseen, namely that a duchess “was not obliged” to
attend the masked ball given by this new minister: “I do not see
that there is any necessity to go to the Greek minister’s, whom I
do not know; I am not Greek; why would 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 fire-
side,” replied Mme de Guermantes.

524 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

The Courvoisiers could not get over this, but the Guermantes, 211. Général Auguste Mercier (1833–
without copying their cousin’s attitude, approved. “Naturally, 1921) was minister of war from 1893 to
1895. He was responsible for the pre-
everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all the con- mature arrest of Dreyfus in 1894.
ventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she was
actually wrong in wishing to show that we are going rather far
in flinging ourselves at the feet of all these foreigners who appear
from heaven knows where.”
Naturally, knowing the stream of comment that 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 theater with her husband on the night of a party
to which “everybody was going,” or, again, when people imag-
ined 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 retaining her belief in the innocence of Dreyfus, just as
she spent her life in the social world 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 after all the ladies had risen
to their feet as Général Mercier211 entered the room, and then
by getting up and in a loud voice asking for her carriage when
a nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby
showing that she did not consider that society was meant for
talking politics; all heads were turned toward her at a Good Friday
concert at which, although a Voltairean, she had not remained
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 form of mania, and also from a lack of aware-
ness, 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 makes it perhaps sadder still

Chapter 2 525
 The Guermantes Way

212. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), is that it should come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed
German philosopher and metaphysi- with cards!” Well, at this point in the social year, when people in-
cian, whose writings examine the ques-
tion of freedom and necessity in the vited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, hurrying in order to
moral order. make sure that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the
213. “Season” is in English in the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought:
original.
214. A popular science fiction novel she was just about to leave on a cruise among the Norwegian
by Jules Verne (1828–1905) that was fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied,
published in installments beginning in and, without any thought of following the duchess’s example,
1869. The hero, Captain Nemo, aban-
dons a life of luxury to go and live derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief that one
aboard his submarine, the Nautilus. has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration
215. There was no Bishop of Mâcon in of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there
Proust’s day. Mâcon is a community
in the département of Saône-­et-­Loire, is the world of freedom.212 Every invention of which no one has
the seat of a bishopric until it was sup- ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can
pressed in 1790 and united with Autun. derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small
The duke, however, is pronouncing the
“s” that would have been present in the thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that
old French spelling (Mascon) before its sedentary time of year called the season.213 The idea that anyone
omission was indicated by the modern could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice
circumflex.
as many afternoon teas, three times as many soirées, the most bril-
liant Mondays at the Opéra and Tuesdays at the Français to visit
the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more expli-
cable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,214
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 bon
mot?” but “You know Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest”
as on “Oriane’s latest bon mot” would follow the comment:
“How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure Oriane?” Oriane’s latest
might be, for example, that, having to write on behalf of a pa-
triotic society to Cardinal X, Bishop of Mâcon215 (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

526 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Cardinal,” following an old academic form, or: “My cousin,” this

term being in use among the Princes of the Church, the Guer-
mantes 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, count-
less other ladies who had invited her, they discovered her sitting
by herself, in black, with a tiny hat on her head, in an orchestra
seat 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 dis-
covered 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 that
of arriving for the last act after a big dinner party and putting in
an appearance at a soirée first. Such were the various kinds of sur-
prise for which the Princesse de Parme knew that she ought to be
prepared if she put a literary or social question to Mme de Guer-
mantes, one result of which was that 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 that, absent from the three or four other
more or less equivalent salons that set the fashion for the Faubourg
Saint-­Germain, differentiated from them that of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while re-
flecting the entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one
of the least attractive was regularly furnished by one or two ex-
tremely good-­looking women who had no title to be there apart
from 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,

Chapter 2 527
 The Guermantes Way

216. The statue of Venus, the goddess that in this household the husband was an ardent appreciator of
of love, was found on the island of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for the duke had
Milo in 1820 and sold to the French
government. She remains one of the a taste for large women, at once statuesque and loose-­limbed, of
popular attractions of the Louvre. a type halfway between the Venus of Milo216 and the Victory of
217. Also known as Winged Victory Samothrace;217 often blonde, rarely brunette, sometimes auburn,
(due to its commemoration of a naval
battle), the Greek statue was found on like the most recent, who was at this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Ar-
the island of Samothrace in 1863. It pajon whom he had loved so well that for a long time he had
stands at the top of the Daru staircase obliged her to send him as many as ten telegrams daily (which
in the Louvre.
slightly annoyed the duchess), 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 that he had had to spend at Parma, he traveled back regu-
larly every week to Paris, spending two days in the train, in order
to see her.
As a rule these beautiful “supers” had been his mistresses but
were no longer (as was Mme d’Arpajon’s case) or were on the point
of ceasing to be so. It may well have been that the prestige that the
duchess enjoyed in their sight and the hope of being invited to her
house, though they themselves came of thoroughly aristocratic
but still not quite first-­class stock, had prompted them, even more
than the good looks and generosity of the duke, to yield to his de-
sires. Not that the duchess would have placed any insuperable ob-
stacle in the way of their crossing her threshold: she was aware that
in more than one of them she had found an ally, thanks to whom
she had obtained a thousand things that she wanted but that
M. de Guermantes pitilessly denied his wife so long as he was not
in love with someone else. And so the reason why they were not
invited by the duchess until their liaison with the duke was already
far advanced lay principally in the fact that he, every time that he
had embarked on a love affair, had imagined nothing more than
a brief fling, as a reward for which he considered an invitation
from his wife to be more than adequate. And yet he found himself
offering this as the price of far less, for a first kiss in fact, because
a resistance on which he had never reckoned had been brought
into play or because there had been no resistance. In love it often

528 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, make us gen-

erous beyond the limits of what hope and self-­interest could have
anticipated. But then the realization of this offer was hindered
by conflicting circumstances. In the first place, all the women
who had responded to M. de Guermantes’s love, and sometimes
even when they had not yet surrendered themselves to him, had
been, one after another, sequestered by him. He no longer allowed
them to see anyone, spent almost all his time in their company,
looked after the education of their children, to whom now and
again, if one was to judge by certain striking resemblances later
on, he had occasion to present a little brother or sister. And so if,
at the start of the connection, the prospect of an introduction to
Mme de Guermantes, which had never crossed the duke’s mind,
had entered considerably into the thoughts of his mistress, their
liaison had by itself altered the whole of the lady’s point of view;
the duke was no longer for her merely the husband of the most
fashionable woman in Paris, but a man with whom his new mis-
tress was in love, a man moreover who had given her the means
and the inclination for a more luxurious style of living and had
transposed the relative importance in her mind of questions of
snobbery and of material advantage; while now and then a com-
posite jealousy, into which all these factors entered, of Mme de
Guermantes animated the duke’s mistresses. But this case was the
rarest of all; besides, when the day appointed for the introduction
at length arrived (at a point when as a rule it had become a matter
of indifference to the duke, whose actions, like everyone else’s,
being generally dictated by previous actions the prime motive of
which had already ceased to exist), it frequently happened that it
was Mme de Guermantes who had sought the acquaintance of
the mistress in whom she hoped, and so greatly needed, to dis-
cover, against her dread husband, a valuable ally. This is not to say
that, except at rare moments, in their own house, where, when the
duchess talked too much, he let fall a few words or, more dreadful
still, preserved a silence that rendered her speechless, M. de Guer-
mantes failed in his outward relations with his wife to observe

Chapter 2 529
 The Guermantes Way

218. Deauville is a fashionable seaside what are called “the forms.” People who did not know them might
resort on the English Channel in the easily misunderstand. Sometimes in autumn, between the racing
département de Calvados. At the end of
the nineteenth century the races at its at Deauville,218 taking the waters, and the return to Guermantes
Hippodrome began in early August. for the shooting, in the few weeks that people spend in Paris, since
219. The English term “smoking” or the duchess had a liking for café-­concerts, the duke would go with
“smoking jacket” for dinner jacket or
tuxedo was introduced in France in her to spend the evening at one of these. The audience noticed at
1888. It designated a man’s comfort- once, in one of those little open boxes in which there is just room
able jacket, typically made of velvet, for- for two, this Hercules in his “smoking” (for in France we give to
merly worn while smoking after dinner.
everything that is more or less British the one name that it hap-
pens not to bear in England),219 his monocle screwed in his eye,
in his plump but finely shaped hand, on the ring finger of which
there glowed a sapphire, a fat cigar from which now and then he
drew a puff of smoke, keeping his eyes for the most part on the
stage but, when he did let them fall upon the audience in which
there was absolutely no one whom he knew, softening them with
an air of gentleness, reserve, courtesy, and consideration. When
a verse struck him as amusing and not too indecent, the duke
would turn around with a smile to his wife, letting her share, by a
twinkle of good-­natured understanding, the innocent merriment
that the new song had aroused in him. And the spectators might
believe that there was no better husband in the world than he,
nor anyone more enviable than the duchess—that woman out-
side whom every interest in the duke’s life lay, that woman whom
he did not love, to whom he had never ceased to be unfaithful;
when the duchess felt tired, they saw M. de Guermantes rise, put
on her cloak with his own hands, arranging her necklaces so that
they did not catch in the lining, and clear a path for her to the
street with an assiduous and respectful attention that she received
with the coldness of the woman of the world who sees in such
behavior simply conventional politeness, at times even with the
slightly ironical bitterness of the disabused spouse who has no illu-
sion left to shatter. But despite these externals (another element
of that politeness that has made duty evolve from the depths of
our being to the surface, at a period already remote but still con-
tinuing for its survivors) the life of the duchess was by no means

530 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

easy. M. de Guermantes never became generous or human ex-

cept for a new mistress who would take, as it generally happened,
the duchess’s part; the latter saw becoming possible for her once
again generosities toward inferiors, charities to the poor, even for
herself, later on, a new and sumptuous automobile. But from the
irritation that developed as a rule pretty rapidly in Mme de Guer-
mantes at people whom she found too submissive the duke’s mis-
tresses were not exempt. Presently the duchess grew tired of them.
Now, at this moment, the duke’s liaison with Mme d’Arpajon was
drawing to an end. Another mistress dawned on the horizon.
No doubt the love that M. de Guermantes had had for each of
them in succession would begin one day to make itself felt afresh:
in the first place, this love, in dying, bequeathed them, like beau-
tiful marble statues—statues beautiful to the duke, become thus
in part an artist, because he had loved them and was sensitive
now to lines that he would not have appreciated without love—
which brought into juxtaposition in the duchess’s drawing room
their forms long inimical, devoured by jealousies and quarrels,
and finally reconciled in the peace of friendship; besides, then this
friendship itself was an effect of the love that had made M. de
Guermantes observe in those who had been his mistresses virtues
that exist in every human being but are perceptible only to the
sensual eye, so much so that the ex-­mistress become “the best of
comrades” who would do anything in the world for one has be-
come a cliché, like the doctor or father who is not a doctor or a
father but a friend. But during a period of transition the woman
whom M. de Guermantes was preparing to abandon bewailed her
lot, made scenes, showed herself exacting, appeared indiscreet,
became a nuisance. The duke began to take a dislike to her. Then
Mme de Guermantes had an opportunity to bring to light the
real or imagined defects of a person who annoyed her. Known to
be kind, Mme de Guermantes received the telephone messages,
the confidences, the tears of the abandoned mistress and made
no complaint. She laughed at them, first with her husband, then
with a few chosen friends. And imagining that the pity that she

Chapter 2 531
 The Guermantes Way

220. Proust uses an idiomatic expres- showed for the wretched woman gave her the right to make fun
sion, pour des prunes (for plums), that of her, even to her face, whatever the lady might say, provided it
means “for nothing.”
221. The Restoration of the Bourbons, could be included among the attributes of the ridiculous character
the ancient Royal House of France, that the duke and duchess had recently fabricated for her, Mme de
refers to the two periods following the Guermantes had no hesitation in exchanging with her husband a
abdication of Napoléon I when the
Bourbons were returned to the throne. glance of ironical connivance.
The first period was from April 1814 to Meanwhile, as she sat down to table, the Princesse de Parme re-
March 1815; the second from July 1815 membered that she had thought of inviting Mme d’Heudicourt to
until the July Revolution of 1830.
222. Nimrod was the King of Babel the Opéra, and, wishing to be assured that this would not in any
and founder of Nineveh. See Genesis way offend Mme de Guermantes, was preparing to sound her out.
10:8–12: “He was a mighty hunter be- At this moment there entered M. de Grouchy, whose train, owing
fore the Lord.”
to a derailment, had been held up for an hour. He made what ex-
cuses he could. His wife, had she been a Courvoisier, would have
died of shame. But Mme de Grouchy was not a Guermantes for
nothing.220 As her husband was apologizing for being late:
“I see,” she broke in, “that even in little things arriving late is a
tradition in your family.”
“Sit down, Grouchy, and don’t let them pull your leg,” said
the duke. Although I move with the times, I must admit that the
Battle of Waterloo had its points, since it brought about the Res-
toration of the Bourbons,221 and better still in a way that made
them unpopular. But you seem to be a regular Nimrod!”222
“Well, as a matter of fact, I have had quite a good bag. I will take
the liberty of sending the duchess a dozen pheasants tomorrow.”
An idea seemed to flicker in the eyes of Mme de Guermantes.
She insisted that M. de Grouchy must not give himself the trouble
of sending the pheasants. And making a sign to the betrothed
footman with whom I had exchanged a few words on my way
from the Elstir room:
“Poullein,” she told him, “you will go tomorrow and fetch
M. le Comte’s pheasants and bring them straight back—you
won’t mind, will you, Grouchy, if I make a few little presents.
Basin and I can’t eat a dozen pheasants by ourselves.”
“But the day after tomorrow will be soon enough,” said M. de
Grouchy.

532 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“No, tomorrow suits me better,” the duchess insisted.

Poullein had turned pale; he would miss his rendezvous with
his sweetheart. This was quite enough for the diversion of the
duchess, who liked to appear to be taking a human interest in
everyone.
“I know it’s your day out,” she went on to Poullein, “all you’ve
got to do is to change with Georges; he can take tomorrow off and
stay in the day after.”
But the day after, Poullein’s sweetheart would not be free.
Having a day off then was of no interest to him. As soon as he
was out of the room, everyone complimented the duchess on her
kindness toward her servants.
“But I only behave toward them as I’d like people to behave to
me.”
“That’s just it. They can say they’ve found a good place with
you.”
“Oh, nothing so very wonderful. But I think they all like me.
That one is a little annoying because he’s in love. He thinks it in-
cumbent on him to go about with a long face.”
At this point Poullein reappeared.
“You’re quite right,” said M. de Grouchy, “he doesn’t look
much like smiling. With those fellows one has to be kind but not
too kind.”
“I admit I’m not a very dreadful mistress. He’ll have nothing
to do all day but call for your pheasants, sit in the house doing
nothing, and eat his share of them.”
“There are plenty of people who would be glad to be in his
place,” said M. de Grouchy, for envy makes men blind.
“Oriane,” began the Princesse de Parme, “I had a visit the other
day from your cousin Heudicourt; of course she’s a highly intelli-
gent woman—she’s a Guermantes—that says it all—but they tell
me she has a spiteful tongue.”
The duke fastened on his wife a slow gaze of deliberate stupe-
faction. Mme de Guermantes began to laugh. Gradually the prin-
cess became aware of their pantomime.

Chapter 2 533
 The Guermantes Way

223. L’Arlésienne (the girl from Arles) is “But . . . do you mean to say you don’t agree with me?” she
Alphonse Daudet’s novella that was set stammered with growing uneasiness.
to music by Georges Bizet in 1872. Its
first performance was not successful, “Really, Madame, it’s too good of you to pay any attention
but the revival on May 5, 1885, at the to Basin’s faces. Now, Basin, you’re not to insinuate nasty things
Odéon was well received. Jan, a young about our cousins.”
peasant, falls madly in love with the girl
he met in Arles. They are to be mar- “He thinks her too malicious?” inquired the princess briskly.
ried when a man arrives and claims to “Oh, dear me, no!” replied the duchess. “I don’t know who
have been her lover. Jan decides not told your Highness that she was malicious. On the contrary, she’s
to marry her but cannot forget her.
He commits suicide by jumping off a an excellent creature who has never spoken ill of anyone, or done
bridge. harm to anyone.”
“Ah!” sighed Mme de Parme, greatly relieved. “I must say I
never noticed anything myself. But I know it’s often difficult not
to be a bit malicious when one is so full of wit . . .”
“Ah! Now that is a quality of which she has even less.”
“Less wit?” asked the stupefied princess.
“Come now, Oriane,” broke in the duke in a plaintive tone,
casting to the right and left of him a glance of amusement, “you
heard the princess tell you that she’s a superior woman.”
“But isn’t she?”
“Superior in chest measurement, at any rate.”
“Don’t listen to him, Madame, he’s not sincere; she’s as stupid
as a (hmm) goose,” came in a loud and rasping voice from Mme
de Guermantes, who, a great deal more “old France” even than the
duke when he was not trying, did often deliberately seek to be,
but in a manner the opposite of the lace jabot, deliquescent style
of her husband and in reality far more subtle, by a sort of almost
peasant pronunciation, which had a harsh and delicious flavor of
the soil. “But she’s the best woman in the world. Besides, I don’t
really know that one can call it stupidity when it’s carried to such
a point as that. I don’t believe I ever met anyone quite like her;
she’s a case for a specialist, there’s something pathological about
her, she’s a sort of ‘innocent’ or ‘cretin’ or an ‘arrested develop-
ment,’ like the people you see in melodramas, or in L’Arlésienne.223
I always ask myself, when she comes to see me, whether the mo-

534 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ment may not have arrived at which her intelligence is going to

dawn, which always makes me a little fearful.”
The princess marveled at these expressions but remained stu-
pefied by the preceding verdict. “She repeated to me—and so did
Mme d’Épinay—what you said about ‘Teaser Augustus.’ It’s deli-
cious,” she put in.
M. de Guermantes explained the bon mot to me. I wanted to
tell him that his brother, who pretended not to know me, was
expecting me that same evening at eleven o’clock. But I had not
asked Robert whether I might mention this engagement, and since
the fact that M. de Charlus had practically fixed it with me him-
self directly contradicted what he had told the duchess, I judged it
more tactful to say nothing.
“‘Teaser Augustus’ isn’t bad,” said M. de Guermantes, “but
Mme d’Heudicourt probably did not tell you a far wittier remark
that Oriane said to her the other day in reply to an invitation to
a luncheon.”
“No, indeed! Do tell me!”
“Now Basin, you keep quiet; in the first place, it was a stupid
remark, and it will make the princess think me inferior even to my
fool of a cousin. Though I don’t know why I should call her my
cousin. She’s one of Basin’s cousins. Still, I believe she is related to
me in some sort of way.”
“Oh!” cried the Princesse de Parme, at the idea that she could
possibly think Mme de Guermantes stupid, and protesting help-
lessly that nothing could ever make the duchess fall from the place
she held in her estimation.
“Besides we have already removed from her the qualities of the
mind; as what I said to her tends to deny her certain other good
qualities also, it seems to me inopportune to repeat it.”
“‘Deny her!’ ‘Inopportune!’ How well she expresses herself!”
said the duke with a pretense of irony, to win admiration for the
duchess.
“Now, then, Basin, you’re not to make fun of your wife.”

Chapter 2 535
 The Guermantes Way

224. The duke’s word is chère, whose “I should explain to Your Royal Highness,” went on the duke,
archaic meaning is the same as that of “that Oriane’s cousin may be superior, good, stout, anything you
the now archaic use of cheer: food and
drink for a feast, fare. like to mention, but she is not exactly—what shall I say—lavish.”
“No, I know, she’s terribly tightfisted,” broke in the princess.
“I would not have ventured to use the expression, but you have
hit on exactly the right word. You can see it in her housekeeping,
and especially in the cooking, which is excellent, but strictly ra-
tioned.”
“Which leads to some quite amusing scenes,” M. de Bréauté
interrupted him. “For example, my dear Basin, I was down at
Heudicourt one day when you were expected, Oriane and your-
self. They had made the most sumptuous preparations when,
during the afternoon, a footman brought in a telegram to say that
you weren’t coming.”
“That doesn’t surprise me!” said the duchess, who not only was
difficult to secure, but liked people to know as much.
“Your cousin read the telegram, was duly distressed, then im-
mediately, without losing her head, telling herself that there was
no point in going to unnecessary expense for so unimportant a
gentleman as myself, called the footman back. ‘Tell the cook not
to put on the chicken!’ she shouted after him. And that evening I
heard her asking the butler: ‘Well? What about the beef that was
left over yesterday? Aren’t you going to let us have that?’”
“All the same, one must admit that the cheer224 you get there
is of the very best,” said the duke, who fancied that in using this
language he showed himself to be Ancien Régime. “I don’t know
any house where one gets better food.”
“Or less,” put in the duchess.
“It is quite wholesome and quite enough for what you would
call a vulgar yokel like myself,” went on the duke; “you still have
an appetite.”
“Oh, if it’s to be taken as a cure, it’s certainly more hygienic
than sumptuous. Not that it’s as good as all that,” added Mme
de Guermantes, who was not at all pleased that the title of “best
table in Paris” should be awarded to any but her own. “With my

536 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

cousin it’s just the same as with those costive authors who hatch 225. A bouchée à la reine is a kind of
out every fifteen years a one-­act play or a sonnet. The sort of thing vol-­au-­vent (a baked pastry shell filled
with meat, fowl, game, or seafood).
people call a little masterpiece, trifles that are perfect gems, in Literally, it means a mouthful fit for a
fact the one thing I loathe most in the world. The cooking at Zé- queen and enables Oriane to pun on
naïde’s is not bad, but you would think it more ordinary if she the word bouchée.

was less parsimonious. There are some things her cook does quite
well, and others that he spoils. I have had some thoroughly bad
dinners there, as in most houses, only they’ve done me less harm
there because the stomach is, after all, more sensitive to quantity
than to quality.”
“Well, to get on with the story,” the duke concluded, “Zénaïde
insisted that Oriane should go to a luncheon there, and as my
wife is not very fond of going out anywhere she resisted, wanted
to be sure that under the pretense of a quiet meal she was not
being trapped into some great banquet, and tried in vain to find
out what other guests would be at the luncheon. ‘You must come,’
Zénaïde insisted, boasting of all the good things there would be
to eat. ‘You are going to have a purée of chestnuts, I need say no
more than that, and there will be seven little bouchées à la reine.’
‘Seven little bouchées! ’ cried Oriane, ‘that means that we will be at
least eight!’”225
After a brief silence, the princess having seen the point let her
laughter explode like a peal of thunder. “Ah! ‘Then we will be
eight,’—it’s exquisite. How very well phrased!” she said, having by
a supreme effort recaptured the expression she had heard used by
Mme d’Épinay, which this time was more appropriate.
“Oriane, that was very charming of the princess, she said your
remark was well phrased.”
“But, my dear, you’re telling me nothing new. I know how clever
the princess is,” replied Mme de Guermantes, who readily assimi-
lated a remark when it was uttered at once by a royal personage and
in praise of her own wit. “I am very proud that Madame should
appreciate my humble phrasings. I don’t remember, though, that
I ever did say such a thing, and if I did it must have been to flatter
my cousin, for if she had ordered seven ‘mouthfuls,’ the mouths,

Chapter 2 537
 The Guermantes Way

226. The Côte d’Or is a département if I may so express myself, would have been a round dozen if not
in Bourgogne of which Dijon is the more.”
capital.
227. Henri, Vicomte de Bornier (1825– During this time the Comtesse d’Arpajon, who, before dinner,
1901), dramatic poet, is the author of had told me that her aunt would have been so happy to show
La Fille de Roland, a historical drama in me her château in Normandy, was saying to me over the Prince
verse created at the Comédie-­Française
in 1875. It features characters from d’Agrigente’s head that where she would especially like to enter-
La Chanson de Roland (The song of tain me was on the Côte d’Or,226 because there at Pont-­le-­Duc,
Roland): the Emperor Charlemagne, she was truly at home.
the traitor Ganelon, and his son Gé-
rald, who marries Berthe, daughter of “The archives of the château would interest you. There are
the paladin Roland. This poetic, patri- some extremely amusing correspondences between all the most
otic play was very popular in its day. prominent people of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries. I spend many marvelous hours there, living in the past,”
declared the countess whom M. de Guermantes had informed me
was unusually well read.
“She has all M. de Bornier’s manuscripts,”227 the princess went
on, still speaking of Mme d’Heudicourt, and eager to make the
most of the good reasons she might have for associating with that
lady.
“She must have dreamed it, I don’t believe she ever even knew
him,” said the duchess.
“What is really interesting about him is that he kept up a corre-
spondence with people of different nationalities at the same time,”
continued the Comtesse d’Arpajon, who, allied to the principal
ducal and even reigning families of Europe, was always glad to re-
mind people of the fact.
“Surely, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, with ulterior pur-
pose, “you can’t have forgotten that dinner party where you had
M. de Bornier sitting next to you!”
“But Basin,” the duchess interrupted him, “if you mean to in-
form me that I knew M. de Bornier, why of course I did, he even
called upon me several times, but I could never bring myself to in-
vite him to the house because I would always have been obliged to
have it disinfected afterward with formalin. As for the dinner you
mean, I remember it only too well, but it was certainly not at Zé-
naïde’s, who never set eyes on Bornier in her life, and would prob-

538 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ably think if you spoke to her of La Fille de Roland that you meant 228. Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962),
a Bonaparte princess who was said at one time to be engaged to daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte
(1858–1924), married Prince George
the son of the King of Greece;228 no, it was at the Austrian em- of Greece (1869–1957), the second
bassy. Dear Hoyos229 imagined he was giving me a great treat by son of King George I (1845–1913), on
planting on the chair next to mine that pestiferous academician. I December 12, 1907.
229. Comte Hoyos-­Sprinzenstein
quite thought I had a squadron of mounted gendarmes sitting be- (1834–95) was the Austrian ambas-
side me. I was obliged to stop my nose as best I could, all through sador to France from 1883 to 1894.
dinner; I didn’t dare to breathe until they served the gruyère.” He was a close friend of Archduke
Rudolph, son of the Austrian emperor.
M. de Guermantes, who had achieved his secret goal, made a 230. Paul Bert (1833–86), a physiologist
furtive examination of his guests’ faces to judge the effect of the and anticlerical political figure, sought
duchess’s pleasantry. legislation to establish free and obliga-
tory primary education.
“I find moreover a particular charm in letters,” continued the 231. There are two known Fulberts;
lady, who was so knowledgeable about literature and who had the first Fulbert (960–1028, Bishop of
such interesting letters in her château, despite the interposition of Chartres 1006–28), had the cathedral
rebuilt after a fire. He was the author
the Prince d’Agrigente’s head. of poems and hymns and Lettres sur la
“Have you noticed that often a writer’s letters are superior to société féodale. The second Fulbert was
the rest of his work? What’s the name of that author who wrote a canon of Notre-­Dame de Paris in the
eleventh century and the uncle and
Salammbô?” tutor of Héloïse. He was responsible
I would have liked very much not to answer in order not to for the castration of Abélard, who was
prolong this conversation, but I felt that it would be disobliging passionately in love with Héloïse.
232. Léon-­Michel Gambetta (1838–82),
the Prince d’Agrigente, who had pretended to know perfectly lawyer and political figure, was one of
well who had written Salammbô and, out of pure politeness, was the founders of the Third Republic. A
leaving to me the pleasure of saying it, but who was now in an selection of his letters was published
in 1909 by Ollendorff: Gambetta par
awkward situation. Gambetta, lettres intimes et souvenirs
“Flaubert,” I finally said, but the nod of assent that the prince de famille.
made smothered the sound of my reply, so that my interlocutress
was not exactly sure whether I had said Paul Bert230 or Fulbert,231
names that she did not find entirely satisfactory.
“In any case,” she went on, “how interesting his correspondence
is and how superior to his books! Moreover, it explains him, be-
cause one sees from everything that he’s said how difficult it was
for him to write a book, that he wasn’t a real writer, a talented
man.”
“You were speaking of correspondence; I must say, I find Gam-
betta’s admirable,”232 said the duchess, to show that she was not

Chapter 2 539
 The Guermantes Way

233. From Lucretius, De natura rerum afraid to be found taking an interest in a proletarian and a radical.
2: 1–2. Suave, mari magno turbantibus M. de Bréauté, who fully appreciated the brilliance of this feat of
aequora ventis / E terra magnum alterius
spectare laborem (Sweet it is, when on daring, looked around him with an eye at once sparkling and af-
the great sea the winds are buffeting fectionate, after which he wiped his monocle.
the waters / to gaze from the land on “Good Lord, it’s infernally dull, that Fille de Roland,” said
another’s great struggles). The phrase
is used to express one’s joy at being M. de Guermantes, with the satisfaction that he derived from the
exempt from dangers experienced by sense of his own superiority to a work that had bored him so,
others. Maxine Arnold Vogely, A Proust perhaps also from the suave mari magno233 feeling one has in the
Dictionary (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1981),
675. middle of a good dinner, when one recalls so terrible an evening in
234. François Boieldieu (1775–1834) the past. “Still, there were some quite good lines in it, and a patri-
composed a number of operas, in- otic sentiment.”
cluding Le Calif de Bagdad (1800), Jean
de Paris (1812), and La Dame blanche I let it be understood that I had no admiration for M. de Bor-
(1825). nier.
“Indeed! You have some fault to find with him?” the duke asked
with a note of curiosity, for he always imagined when anyone
spoke ill of a man that it must be on account of a personal resent-
ment, just as to speak well of a woman marked the beginning of a
love affair. “I see you’ve got your knife into him. What did he do
to you? You must tell us. Why yes, there must be some skeleton
in the cupboard or you wouldn’t run him down. It’s long-­winded,
the Fille de Roland, but it’s quite strong in parts.”
“Strong is just the right word for an odorous author,” Mme de
Guermantes broke in sarcastically. “If this poor boy ever found
himself in his company, I can quite understand that he carried
away an impression in his nostrils!”
“I must confess, though, to Madame,” the duke went on, ad-
dressing the Princesse de Parme, “that quite apart from La Fille de
Roland, in literature and even in music I am terribly old-­fashioned;
no old worn-­out tune can be too stale for my taste. You won’t be-
lieve me, perhaps, but in the evenings, if my wife sits down to the
piano, I find myself calling for some old tune by Auber or Boiel-
dieu,234 or even Beethoven! That’s the sort of thing that appeals to
me. As for Wagner, he sends me to sleep immediately.”
“You are wrong there,” said Mme de Guermantes, “in spite of

540 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

his insufferable long-­windedness, Wagner was a genius. Lohengrin 235. This passage, one of the most
is a masterpiece. Even in Tristan there are some amusing passages famous in Wagner’s 1843 opera Der
fliegende Holländer, is at the beginning
scattered about. And the Spinning Chorus in the Flying Dutchman of act 2. The Spinning Chorus refers to
is a perfect marvel.”235 the scene in which Senta, the heroine,
“Don’t you agree, Babal,” said M. de Guermantes, turning to is thinking of the legendary Dutchman
while she spins threads and sings with
M. de Bréauté, “what we like is: the maidens.
236. “The rendezvous of noble com-
“Les rendez-­vous de noble compagnie panions / Are all held in this charming
place.” Thus begins the duet sung by
Se donnent tous en ce charmant séjour.236 Girot and Nicette in act 1 of Le Pré aux
clercs (1832), a comic opera by Louis
“It’s delightful. And Fra Diavolo, and The Magic Flute, and Le Joseph Ferdinand Hérold (1791–1833),
libretto by François Antoine Eugène de
Chalet, and Le Mariage de Figaro, and Les Diamants de la Cou- Planard (1784–1853).
ronne—there’s music for you!237 It’s the same thing in literature. 237. The duke’s rather pell-­mell list
For instance, I adore Balzac, Le Bal de Sceaux,238 Les Mohicans de places masterpieces such as Mozart’s
operas (The Magic Flute, 1791, libretto
Paris.”239 by Schikaneder; The Marriage of Figaro,
“Oh, my dear, if you are going to begin about Balzac, we will 1786, libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte,
never hear the end of it; do wait, keep it for some evening when based on Beaumarchais’s play) along-
side inferior works, such as Fra Diavolo
Mémé’s here. He’s even better, he knows it all by heart.” (1830) and Les Diamants de la Cou-
Irritated by his wife’s interruption, the duke held her for some ronne (1841), which are comic operas
seconds under the fire of a menacing silence. Meanwhile Mme by Daniel Auber. Le Chalet (1834) is a
comic opera composed by Adolphe
d’Arpajon had been exchanging with the Princesse de Parme, Adam.
upon tragic and other kinds of poetry, a series of remarks that did 238. Le Bal de Sceaux (1830) is a novella
not reach me distinctly until I caught the following from Mme by Balzac in the group Scènes de la vie
privée.
d’Arpajon: “Oh, Madame is sure to be right; I admit he makes the 239. Les Mohicans de Paris (1854) is
world seem ugly, because he’s unable to distinguish between ugli- not by Balzac but by Alexandre Dumas
ness and beauty, or rather because his insufferable vanity makes père. The duke’s error reveals his poor
knowledge of literature.
him believe that everything he says is beautiful; I agree with your
Highness that in the piece we are speaking of there are some
ridiculous things, quite unintelligible, errors of taste, that it is dif-
ficult to understand, that it’s as much trouble to read as if it were
written in Russian or Chinese, for of course it’s anything in the
world but French, still when one has taken the trouble, how richly
one is rewarded, it’s so full of imagination!” Of this little lecture I
had missed the opening sentences. I gathered in the end not only

Chapter 2 541
 The Guermantes Way

240. “When the child appears, the that the poet incapable of distinguishing between beauty and ugli-
family circle / Applauds with loud ness was Victor Hugo, but furthermore that the poem that was as
cries . . .” These lines are from a poem
in Victor Hugo’s collection Les Feuilles difficult to understand as Chinese or Russian was
d’automne that he dated May 28, 1830.
He was only twenty-­eight and still Lorsque l’enfant paraît, le cercle de famille
writing in a tone that was lyrical and
idyllic. Applaudit à grands cris . . .240
241. Antoinette de Ligier de la Garde,
Mme Deshoulières (1637–94), was a a piece dating from the poet’s earliest period, and perhaps even
poet and woman of letters. In the fight
between the Ancients and the Mod- nearer to Mme Deshoulières241 than to the Victor Hugo of La
erns, she favored the Moderns and was Légende des siècles.242 Far from finding Mme d’Arpajon ridicu-
thus closer to the early Hugo. lous, I saw her (the only one, at that table so real, so ordinary, at
242. This is a collection of epic poems
by Hugo in three series (1859, 1877, which I had sat down with such keen disappointment), I saw her
1883). The poet uses great historical fig- in my mind’s eye crowned with that lace cap with the long spiral
ures and myths to create a vast fresco ringlets falling from it on either side, which was worn by Mme
of history.
243. Claire Élisabeth Gravier de Ver- de Rémusat,243 Mme de Broglie,244 Mme de Saint-­Aulaire,245 all
gennes, Comtesse de Rémusat (1780– those distinguished women who in their fascinating letters quote
1821), was lady-­in-­waiting to the Em- with so much learning and so aptly passages from Sophocles,246
press Joséphine. Rémusat wrote two
novels and an essay on the education Schiller,247 and L’Imitation,248 but in whom the earliest poetry of
of women: Essai sur l’éducation des the Romantics induced the alarm and exhaustion inseparable for
femmes (1824). Her Mémoires were my grandmother from the latest verses of Stéphane Mallarmé.249
published in 1879.
244. The Duchesse de Broglie (1797– “Mme d’Arpajon is very fond of poetry,” said the Princesse de
1838), née Albertine de Staël, was the Parme to her hostess, impressed by the ardent tone in which the
daughter of the writer Mme de Staël. speech had been delivered.
245. Louise Charlotte Victorine de Gri-
moard de Beauvoir du Roure-­Brison “No; she knows absolutely nothing about it,” replied Mme de
married, in 1806, Louis-­Clair de Beau- Guermantes in an undertone, taking advantage of the fact that
poil, Comte de Saint-­Aulaire (1778– Mme d’Arpajon, who was dealing with an objection raised by
1854), chamberlain to Napoléon and
member of the Académie Française Général de Beautreillis, was too intent upon what she herself was
(1841). Her memoirs (Souvenirs) were saying to hear what was being murmured by the duchess. “She has
published in 1875. become literary since she’s been forsaken. I can tell your Highness
246. Sophocles (497?–­405 b.c.) was a
playwright who brought to the classic that it is I who have to bear the whole burden of it because it is to
Greek tragedy an unprecedented em- me that she comes to whine whenever Basin hasn’t been to see her,
phasis on the human will as a moti- which is practically every day. And yet it isn’t my fault, after all, if
vating force in the action, an increased
naturalness in the language of the she bores him, and I can’t force him to go to her, although I would
drama, and a diminished role for the rather he were a little more faithful to her, because then I wouldn’t
see quite so much of her myself. But she drives him crazy, and

542 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

there’s nothing unusual about that. She isn’t a bad sort, but she’s choir. Among his masterpieces is
boring to a degree you can’t imagine. She gives me such a head- Oedipus the King.
247. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805)
ache every day that I am obliged each time to take a pyramidon was a German writer and dramatist.
tablet.250 And all this because Basin took it into his head for a year 248. L’Imitation de Jésus-­Christ is attrib-
or so to play me false with her. And to have in addition a footman uted to Thomas à Kempis (1379–1471),
a German mystic. This work was trans-
who has fallen in love with a little tart and goes about with a long lated into French several times during
face if I don’t request the young person to leave her profitable the seventeenth century.
pavement for half an hour and come to tea with me! Oh! Life 249. Proust admired Stéphane Mal-
larmé (1842–98) and knew a number
really is too tedious!” the duchess languorously concluded. Mme of his poems by heart. In 1896, Proust
d’Arpajon bored M. de Guermantes principally because he had wrote an article in which he reproached
recently fallen in love with another, whom I discovered to be the Mallarmé’s disciples for writing poems
that were too obscure. See “Contre
Marquise de Surgis-­le-­Duc. l’obscurité,” in Marcel Proust, Contre
At this moment the footman who had been deprived of his day Sainte-­Beuve (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade
off was waiting at table. And it struck me that, still disconsolate, edition], 1971), 390–95.
250. Pyramidon is an analgesic that
he was doing it with a good deal of difficulty, for I noticed that, was introduced in France by Filhelme
in handing the dish to M. de Châtellerault, he performed his task and Spio in 1893.
so awkwardly that the duke’s elbow came in contact several times 251. Mme de Guermantes prefers
Hugo’s poems that were written before
with the servant’s. The young duke was not in the least annoyed his exile, which began in December
with the blushing footman, but looked up at him rather with a 1851. Les Feuilles d’automne (1831), Les
smile in his clear blue eyes. This good humor seemed to me on the Chants du crépuscule (1835), and Les
Contemplations (1856) were all written
guest’s part to betoken a kindness of heart. But the insistence of between 1830 and 1843 and consist of
his smile led me to think that, aware of the servant’s discomfiture, poems that are elegiac and visionary.
what he felt was perhaps really a malicious joy. À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris:
Gallimard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 783,
“But, my dear, you know you’re not revealing any new dis- n. 2.
covery when you tell us about Victor Hugo,” the duchess con-
tinued, this time addressing Mme d’Arpajon, whom she had just
seen turn around with a troubled look. “You mustn’t expect to
launch that young genius. Everybody knows that he has talent.
What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage,
La Légende des siècles, I forget all their names. But in Les Feuilles
d’automne, Les Chants du crépuscule, there’s a great deal that’s the
work of a poet, a true poet! Even in Les Contemplations,” went on
the duchess, whom none of her listeners dared to contradict, and
with good reason, “there are still some quite pretty things. But I
confess that I prefer not to venture further than Le Crepuscule! 251

Chapter 2 543
 The Guermantes Way

252. “Sorrow is a fruit, God does not And then in the finer poems of Victor Hugo, and there really are
cause it to grow / On a branch that is some, one frequently comes across an idea, even a profound idea.”
still too feeble to bear it.” These are the
last lines of Hugo’s poem “L’Enfance” And with the right shade of sentiment, bringing out the sor-
(January 1835) from Les Contemplations, rowful thought with the full force of her intonation, planting it
book 1, poem 23. somewhere beyond the sound of her voice, and fixing straight in
253. “The dead last so brief a
time / Alas, in the coffin they turn to front of her a charming, dreamy gaze, the duchess said slowly:
dust / Less quickly than in our hearts!” “Take this:
These lines are from Hugo’s poem
“À un voyageur,” July 6, 1829, in Les
Feuilles d’automne. “La douleur est un fruit, Dieu ne le fait pas croître
Sur la branche trop faible encor pour le porter,252

“Or, yet again:

“Les morts durent bien peu . . .

Hélas! dans le cercueil ils tombent en poussière,
Moins vite qu’en nos cœurs! ”253

And, while a smile of disillusionment contracted with a graceful

undulation her sorrowing lips, the duchess fastened on Mme d’Ar-
pajon the dreaming gaze of her charming, clear blue eyes. I was
beginning to know them, as well as her voice, with its heavy drawl,
its harsh savor. In those eyes and in that voice, I recognized much
of the life of nature around Combray. Certainly, in the affecta-
tion with which that voice brought into prominence at times a
rudeness of the soil, there was more than one element: the wholly
provincial origin of one branch of the Guermantes family, which
had for long remained more localized, more hardy, wilder, more
provoking than the rest; and also the habit of really distinguished
people, and of intelligent people who know that distinction does
not consist in mincing words, and the habit of nobles who frat-
ernize more readily with their peasants than with the middle
classes; peculiarities all of which the regal position of Mme de
Guermantes enabled her to display more easily to bring out with
every sail spread. It appears that the same voice existed also in cer-
tain of her sisters whom she detested, and who, less intelligent

544 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

than herself and almost plebeianly married, if one may use this 254. Gabrielle Réju, called Réjane
adverb to speak of unions with obscure noblemen, entrenched on (1856–1920), was an actress who
performed as well in comedy roles
their provincial estates, or, in Paris, in a Faubourg Saint-­Germain (Madame Sans-­Gêne, by Victor Sardou)
of no brilliance, possessed this voice also but had bridled it, cor- as in dramatic ones (Germinie La-
rected it, softened it so far as lay in their power, just as it is very certeux, by the Goncourt brothers).
Proust knew her well and once rented
rarely that any of us presumes on his own originality and does not an apartment from her when he was
apply himself diligently to copying the most vaunted models. But forced to leave 102, boulevard Hauss-
Oriane was so much more intelligent, so much richer, above all, so mann in 1919.
255. Jeanne Granier (1852–1939) was
much more in fashion than her sisters, she had so effectively, when an actress who made her debut in 1874
Princesse des Laumes, behaved just as she pleased in the company at the Théâtre de la Renaissance and
of the Prince of Wales, that she had realized that this discordant went on to become one of the leading
actresses in Paris and a favorite of the
voice was an attraction, and had made of it, in the social sphere, Prince of Wales.
with the courage of originality rewarded by success, what in the
theatrical sphere a Réjane,254 a Jeanne Granier255 (which implies
no comparison, naturally, between the respective merits and tal-
ents of those two actresses) had made of theirs, something admi-
rable and distinctive, which possibly certain Réjane and Granier
sisters, whom no one has ever known, strove to conceal as a defect.
To all these reasons for displaying her local originality, the
favorite writers of Mme de Guermantes—Mérimée, Meilhac, and
Halévy—had brought in addition, with the respect for what was
“natural,” a desire for the prosaic by which she attained to poetry
and a spirit purely of society that called up distant landscapes be-
fore my eyes. Besides, the duchess was fully capable, adding to
these influences an artistic research of her own, of having chosen
for most of her words the pronunciation that seemed to her most
Île-­de-­France, most Champenoise, since, if not quite to the same
extent as her sister-­in-­law Marsantes, she rarely used anything but
the pure vocabulary that might have been employed by an old
French writer. And when one was tired of the composite patch-
work of modern speech, it was, albeit one was aware that she ex-
pressed far fewer ideas, a thorough relaxation to listen to the talk
of Mme de Guermantes—almost the same feeling, if one was
alone with her and she restrained and clarified still further her
flow of words, as one has on hearing an old song. Then, as I looked

Chapter 2 545
 The Guermantes Way

256. This is an allusion to Édouard at, as I listened to Mme de Guermantes, I could see—a prisoner
Jules Henri Pailleron (1834–99), who in the perpetual and quiet afternoon of her eyes—a sky of the Île-­
was the author of witty comedies, such
as L’Étincelle (1879), Le Monde où l’on de-­France or of Champagne spread itself, gray-­blue, oblique, with
s’ennuie (1881), and Cabotins! (1894). the same angle of incline as in the eyes of Saint-­L oup.
His plays often satirize a society where Thus, by these diverse formations, Mme de Guermantes ex-
culture is a diversion. He was elected
to the Académie Française in 1882. pressed at once the most ancient aristocratic France, then, from
257. “These relics of the heart also have a far later source, the manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie
their dust.” This line is from Alfred de might have enjoyed and found fault with Victor Hugo under the
Musset’s poem “La Nuit d’octobre”
(1837). July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen taste for the literature that
sprang from Mérimée and Meilhac. The first of these formations
attracted me more than the second, did more to console me for
the disappointments of my pilgrimage to and arrival in the Fau-
bourg Saint-­Germain, so different from what I had imagined it
to be; but even the second I preferred to the last. For, so long as
Mme de Guermantes was being, almost spontaneously, a Guer-
mantes and nothing more, her Pailleronism,256 her taste for the
younger Dumas were thoughtful and deliberate. As this taste was
the opposite of my own, she was productive, to my mind, of lit-
erature when she talked to me of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain,
and never seemed to me so stupidly Faubourg Saint-­Germain as
when she was talking literature.
Moved by this last quotation, Mme d’Arpajon exclaimed:

“Ces reliques du cœur ont aussi leur poussière! 257

“Monsieur, you must write that down for me on my fan,” she

said to M. de Guermantes.
“Poor woman, I feel sorry for her!” said the Princesse de Parme
to Mme de Guermantes.
“No, really, Madame, you must not be soft-­hearted, she has
only gotten what she deserves.”
“But—you’ll forgive me for saying this to you—she does really
love him all the same!”
“Oh, not at all; she isn’t capable of it; she thinks she loves him
just as she thought just now she was quoting Victor Hugo, when

546 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

she repeated a line from Musset. Listen,” the duchess went on in

a tone of melancholy, “nobody would be more touched than my-
self by any true sentiment. But let me give you an example. Only
yesterday, she made a terrible scene with Basin. Your Highness
thinks perhaps that it was because he’s in love with other women,
because he no longer loves her; not in the least, it was because he
won’t put her sons down for the Jockey. Does Madame call that
the behavior of a woman in love? No; I will go farther;” Mme de
Guermantes added with precision, “she is a person of rare insen-
sitivity.”
Meanwhile, it was with an eye-­sparkling with satisfaction that
M. de Guermantes had listened to his wife talking about Victor
Hugo “point-­blank” and quoting several lines of his poetry. The
duchess might frequently annoy him; at moments like this he was
proud of her. “Oriane is really extraordinary. She can talk about
anything, she has read everything. She could not possibly have
guessed that the conversation this evening would turn on Victor
Hugo. Whatever subject you take up, she is ready for you, she can
hold her own with the most learned scholars. This young man
must be quite captivated.”
“Do let us change the subject,” Mme de Guermantes added,
“because she’s dreadfully susceptible. You will think me quite old-­
fashioned,” she went on, turning to me. “I know that nowadays
it’s considered a weakness to admire ideas in poetry, poetry with
some thought in it.”
“Old-­fashioned?” asked the Princesse de Parme, quivering with
the slight thrill sent through her by this new wave that she had not
expected, although she knew that the conversation of the Duch-
esse de Guermantes always held in store for her these continuous
and delightful shocks, that breath-­catching panic, that whole-
some exhaustion after which her thoughts instinctively turned to
the necessity of taking a footbath in a dressing cabin and a brisk
walk to “restore her circulation.”
“For my part, no, Oriane,” said Mme de Brissac, “I don’t in the
least object to Victor Hugo’s having ideas, quite the contrary, but

Chapter 2 547
 The Guermantes Way

258. Jean Baptiste Edmond Jurien de I do object to his seeking for them in monstrosities. After all, it
la Gravière (1812–92) was an admiral was he who accustomed us to ugliness in literature. There are quite
who contributed articles to La Revue
des Deux Mondes and wrote works enough ugly things already in real life. Why can’t we be allowed at
about the history of the French navy. least to forget them while we are reading? A distressing spectacle,
He protected the Empress Eugénie in from which we should turn away in real life, that is what attracts
her flight at the end of the Second Em-
pire. He was elected to the Académie Victor Hugo.”
Française in 1888. “Victor Hugo is not as realistic as Zola though, surely?” asked
the Princesse de Parme.
The name of Zola did not stir a muscle on the face of M. de
Beautreillis. The general’s anti-­Dreyfusism was too deep-­rooted
for him to seek to give expression to it. And his benevolent silence
when anyone broached these topics moved the layperson as a
proof of the same delicacy that a priest shows in avoiding any ref-
erence to your religious duties, a financier when he takes care not
to recommend your investing in the companies that he himself
controls, a strong man when he behaves with lamblike gentleness
and does not hit you on the jaw.
“I know you’re related to Admiral Jurien de la Gravière,”258 was
murmured to me with a knowing look by Mme de Varambon,
the lady-­in-­waiting to the Princesse de Parme, an excellent but
limited woman, procured for the princess long ago by the duke’s
mother. She had not previously uttered a word to me, and I could
never afterward, despite the admonitions of the princess and my
own protestations, get out of her mind the idea that I was in some
way connected with the admiral-­academician, who was a com-
plete stranger to me. The obstinate persistence of the Princesse de
Parme’s lady-­in-­waiting in seeing in me a nephew of Admiral Ju-
rien de la Gravière was in itself quite an ordinary form of silliness.
But the mistake she made was only an extreme and desiccated ex-
ample of so many mistakes, more frivolous, better nuanced, un-
witting or deliberate, that accompany one’s name on the “label”
that society attaches to one. I remember that a friend of the Guer-
mantes who had expressed a keen desire to meet me gave me as
the reason that I was a great friend of his cousin, Mme de Chaus-
segros. “She is a charming person, she’s so fond of you.” I scrupu-

548 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

lously, though quite vainly, insisted on the fact that there must be 259. Bacchus is the Roman god of
some mistake, as I did not know Mme de Chaussegros. “Then it’s wine.

her sister you know; it comes to the same thing. She met you in
Scotland.” I had never been in Scotland, and took the futile pre-
caution, in my honesty, of letting my interlocutor know this. It
was Mme de Chaussegros herself who had said that she knew me,
and no doubt sincerely believed it, as a result of some initial con-
fusion, for from that time on she never failed to hold out her hand
to me whenever she saw me. And as, after all, the world in which
I moved was precisely that in which Mme de Chaussegros moved,
my humility had neither rhyme nor reason. To say that I was an
intimate friend of the Chaussegros family was, literally, a mistake,
but from the social point of view was to state an equivalent of my
position, if one can speak of the social position of so young a man
as I then was. It therefore mattered not in the least that this friend
of the Guermantes should tell me only things that were false about
myself, he neither lowered nor exalted me (from the social point
of view) in the idea that he continued to hold of me. And when all
is said, for those of us who are not professional actors, the tedium
of living always in the same character is removed for a moment, as
if we were to go on the stage, when another person forms a false
idea of us, imagines that we are friends with a lady whom we do
not know and are reported to have met in the course of a delightful
voyage that we never made. Errors that multiply themselves and
are harmless when they do not have the inflexible rigidity of the
one that had been committed, and continued for the rest of her
life to be committed, in spite of my denials, by the imbecile lady-­
in-­waiting to Mme de Parme, rooted for all time in the belief that
I was related to the tiresome Admiral Jurien de la Gravière. “She
is not very strong in her head,” the duke confided to me, “and be-
sides, she ought not to indulge in too many libations. I believe
she’s slightly under the influence of Bacchus.”259 As a matter of
fact, Mme de Varambon had drunk nothing but water, but the
duke liked to find a place for his favorite figures of speech.
“But Zola is not a realist, Madame, he’s a poet!” said Mme de

Chapter 2 549
 The Guermantes Way

260. The mot de Cambronne is a eu- Guermantes, drawing inspiration from the critical essays that she
phemism for the word used by Général had read in recent years and adapting them to her own personal
Pierre Cambronne, who, when the
enemy demanded that he surrender genius. Agreeably buffeted hitherto, in the course of this bath
at the battle of Waterloo, is said to of wit, a bath stirred up for her, which she was taking this eve-
have replied: Merde! This explains the ning and which, she considered, must be particularly good for her
following suggestion by the duchess
that the word should be written with a health, letting herself be swept along by the waves of paradox that
capital M. curled and broke one after another, before this, the most enor-
261. The castle of Schönbrunn, not far mous of them all, the Princesse de Parme jumped for fear of being
from Vienna, was the summer resi-
dence of the Hapsburgs. It was here knocked over. And it was in a broken voice, as though she were
that the Duc de Reichstadt, son of quite out of breath, that she now gasped:
Napoléon I, died in 1832. “Zola a poet!”
“Why, yes,” answered the duchess with a laugh, entranced by
this display of suffocation. “Your Highness must have noticed
how he magnifies everything he touches. You will tell me that he
touches just what—brings luck! But he makes it into something
colossal. His is the epic dung heap. He is the Homer of the sewers!
He hasn’t enough capitals to write the mot de Cambronne.”260
Despite the extreme exhaustion which she was beginning to
feel, the princess was enchanted; never had she felt better. She
would not have exchanged for an invitation to Schönbrunn,261 al-
though that was the one thing that really flattered her, these divine
dinner parties at Mme de Guermantes’s, made invigorating by so
liberal a dose of Attic salt.
“He writes it with a big C,” cried Mme d’Arpajon.
“Surely with a big M, I think, my dear,” replied Mme de Guer-
mantes, exchanging first with her husband a merry glance that im-
plied: “Did you ever hear such an idiot?” “Wait a minute, now.”
Mme de Guermantes turned to me, fixing on me a tender, smiling
gaze, because, as an accomplished hostess, she was eager to display
her own knowledge of the artist who interested me particularly,
to give me, if need be, an opportunity to exhibit mine. “Wait,”
she urged me, gently waving her feather fan, so conscious was she
at this moment that she was performing in full the duties of hos-
pitality, and, that she might be found wanting in none of them,
making a sign also to the servants to help me to more of the as-

550 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

paragus and mousseline sauce: “Wait, now, I do believe that Zola 262. Zola published a book on Manet,
has actually written an essay on Elstir,262 the painter whose things Édouard Manet, in 1867.
263. See page 463, note 99.
you were looking at just now—the only ones of his, really, that 264. Caius Clinius Maecenas (69–
I care for,” she concluded. As a matter of fact she hated Elstir’s 8 b.c.), a favorite of Augustus and
work, but found a unique quality in anything that was in her own friend of Virgil and Horace, supported
arts and letters.
house. I asked M. de Guermantes whether he knew the name of 265. Jean-­Auguste Dominique In-
the gentleman in the top hat263 who figured in the picture of the gres (1780–1867) painted La Source in
crowd and whom I recognized as the same person whose formal 1856. Throughout his life Ingres was
a staunch classicist and the rival of
portrait the Guermantes also had and had hung beside the other, Eugène Delacroix, who led the new
both dating more or less from the same early period in which El- Romantic movement. La Source shows
stir’s personality was not yet completely established and he drew a the nude figure of a young woman
holding a Greek vase on her left
certain inspiration from Manet. “Good Lord, yes,” he replied, “I shoulder. In Proust’s day it hung in the
know it’s a fellow who is quite well known and no fool either in Louvre’s Salle Duchâtel. It is now in the
his own line, but I have no head for names. I have it on the tip of Musée d’Orsay.
266. Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), aca-
my tongue, Monsieur . . . Monsieur . . . oh, well, it doesn’t matter, demic painter, specialist of historical
I can’t remember it. Swann would be able to tell you, it was he subjects, exhibited his painting Les En-
who made Mme de Guermantes buy all that stuff; she is always fants d’Édouard, ou Le roi Édouard V et
le duc d’York à la Tour de Londres in the
too good-­natured, afraid of hurting people’s feelings if she refuses Salon of 1831. In Proust’s day, it hung in
to do things; between ourselves, I believe he’s left us stuck with a the Salle des États at the Louvre.
lot of daubs. What I can tell you is that the gentleman you mean
has been a sort of Maecenas264 to M. Elstir, he launched him and
has often helped him out of tight places by ordering pictures from
him. As a compliment to this man—if you can call that sort of
thing a compliment, it’s a matter of taste—he has painted him
standing about among that crowd, where with his Sunday-­best
look he creates a distinctly odd effect. He may be a very savvy
pundit in his own way but he is evidently not aware of the proper
time and place for a top hat. With that thing on his head, among
all those bareheaded girls, he looks like a little country lawyer on
a spree. But tell me, you seem quite taken with his pictures. If I
had only known, I would have brushed up on the subject properly
in order to answer your questions. Not that there’s much need
to rack one’s brains to dig into the meaning of M. Elstir’s work,
as one would for Ingres’s Source265 or the Princes in the Tower by
Paul Delaroche.266 What one appreciates in his work is that it’s

Chapter 2 551
 The Guermantes Way

267. Botte d’asperges is the title of an shrewdly observed, amusing, Parisian, and then one passes on to
1880 painting by Édouard Manet. the next thing. One doesn’t need to be an expert to look at that
268. Jean Vibert (1840–1902), painter
and playwright, was one of the sort of thing. I know of course that they’re merely sketches, still, I
founders of the Society of French don’t feel myself that he puts enough work into them. Swann had
Watercolorists. His series of paintings the nerve to try and make us buy a Bundle of Asparagus.267 In fact
of priests and monks was much ad-
mired. The duke’s description partly it was in the house for several days. There was nothing else in the
matches Vibert’s 1883 canvas Le Récit picture, a bundle of asparagus exactly like what you’re eating now.
du missionnaire (The missionary’s ad- But I must say I refused to swallow M. Elstir’s asparagus. He asked
ventures, Metropolitan Museum of
Art). This is another indication of the three hundred francs for them. Three hundred francs for a bundle
duke’s poor taste in paintings. Karpeles of asparagus. A louis, that’s as much as they’re worth, even early in
proposes another that shows a prelate the season. I thought it a bit stiff. When he puts real people into
training a little dog: A Tasty Treat (L’Édu-
cation d’Azor). Karpeles, Paintings in his pictures as well, there’s something coarse, something cynical
Proust, 177. about him that I do not like. I am surprised to see a refined mind,
a superior mind like you, admiring that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know why you should say that, Basin,” interrupted the
duchess, who did not like to hear people run down anything that
her rooms contained. “I am by no means prepared to admit that
there’s nothing distinguished in Elstir’s pictures. You have to take
it or leave it. But it’s not always lacking in talent. And you must
admit that the ones I bought are exceptionally beautiful.”
“Well, Oriane, in that style of thing I’d a thousand times rather
have the little study by M. Vibert268 we saw at the Watercolor Ex-
hibition. There’s nothing much in it, if you like, you could take
it in the palm of your hand, but you can see the man’s clever to
the tips of his fingers: that unwashed scarecrow of a missionary
standing before the sleek prelate who is making his little dog do
tricks, it’s a perfect little poem of subtlety, and in fact goes really
deep.”
“I believe you know M. Elstir,” the duchess said to me. “As a
man, he’s quite pleasant.”
“He is intelligent,” said the duke; “one is surprised, when one
talks to him, that his painting should be so vulgar.”
“He is more than intelligent, he is really quite clever,” said the
duchess in the confidently critical tone of a person who knows
what she is talking about.

552 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“Didn’t he once start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Prin- 269. Pampille is the pen name of
cesse de Parme. Marthe Allard, a cousin of Léon
Daudet, whose second wife she be-
“Yes, in shrimp pink,” replied Mme de Guermantes, “but that’s came in August 1903. She wrote
not going to hand his name down to posterity. It’s a ghastly thing; articles on food and fashion in L’Action
Basin wanted to have it destroyed.” française and published a cookbook:
Les Bons Plats de France: cuisine régio-
This last statement was one that Mme de Guermantes often nale (Paris: A. Fayard, 1913).
made. But at other times her appreciation of the picture was dif-
ferent: “I don’t care for his painting, but he did once do a good
portrait of me.” The former of these judgments was addressed as a
rule to people who spoke to the duchess of her portrait, the other
to those who did not refer to it and whom therefore she was eager
to inform of its existence. The former was inspired in her by co-
quetry, the latter by vanity.
“Make a portrait of you look ghastly! Why, then it can’t be a
portrait, it’s a lie; I don’t know one end of a brush from the other,
but I’m sure if I were to paint you, merely putting you down as
I see you, I would produce a masterpiece,” said the Princesse de
Parme naïvely.
“He sees me probably as I see myself, without any allurements,”
said the Duchesse de Guermantes, with the look, melancholy,
modest, and calm, that seemed to her best calculated to make her
appear different from what Elstir had portrayed.
“That portrait ought to appeal to Mme de Gallardon,” said the
duke.
“Because she knows nothing about pictures?” asked the Prin-
cesse de Parme, who knew that Mme de Guermantes had an infi-
nite contempt for her cousin. “But she’s a very good woman, isn’t
she?” The duke assumed an air of profound astonishment.
“Why, Basin, don’t you see the princess is making fun of you?”
(The princess had never dreamed of doing such a thing.) “She
knows as well as you do that Gallardonette is an old poisonous
hag,” went on Mme de Guermantes, whose vocabulary, limited
as a rule to all these old expressions, was as savory as those dishes
that it is possible to come across in the delicious books of Pam-
pille,269 but which have in real life become so rare, dishes where

Chapter 2 553
 The Guermantes Way

270. Pampille’s cookbook recom- the jellies, the butter, the gravy, the quenelles are all authentic and
mended the salt from the salt marshes genuine, permit of no alloy, where even the salt is brought spe-
of Brittany.
271. Charles Baudelaire’s collection Les cially from the salt marshes of Brittany;270 from her accent, her
Fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil, 1857) choice of words, one felt that the basis of the duchess’s conver-
is generally considered one of the great sation came directly from Guermantes. In this way the duchess
works of French literature. A number
of his poems express his longing for differed profoundly from her nephew Saint-­L oup, the prey of so
a better place outside of this world. many new ideas and expressions; it is difficult, when one’s mind
See, for example, his prose poem with is troubled by the ideas of Kant and the longings of Baudelaire,271
the English title “Anywhere out of this
world.” to write the exquisite French of Henri IV,272 which meant that the
272. Henri IV (1553–1610, King of very purity of the duchess’s language was a sign of limitation, and
France, 1589–1610) was the first king that, in her, both her intelligence and her sensibility had remained
of the Bourbon dynasty. His letters
are those of a cultivated and refined closed to all innovation. Here again, Mme de Guermantes’s mind
humanist. attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was exactly
the content of my own thoughts) and by everything that by virtue
of that exclusion, it had been able to preserve, that seductive vigor
of supple bodies that no exhausting reflection, no moral anxiety
or nervous disorder has altered. Her mind, of a formation so an-
terior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been
offered me by the gait of the little band of girls along the sea-
shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and held in
subjection by her amiability, by respect for intellectual values, all
the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of the aristocracy from
around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses,
tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, although she
had remained a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been,
a good few years ago now, so much did she have the same ele-
gance, the most brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan. Only
she was incapable of understanding what I had sought for in her,
the charm of the name Guermantes, and the tiny quantity of it
that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes. Our
relations were founded upon a misunderstanding that could not
fail to become manifest as soon as my homage, instead of being
addressed to the relatively superior woman that she believed her-
self to be, was diverted to some other woman of equal mediocrity

554 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

who exuded the same unconscious charm. A misunderstanding so 273. This is a preparation of chicken
entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young in a rich sauce featuring truffles and
madeira.
dreamer and a society woman, one however that profoundly dis- 274. Élisabeth de Gramont, Duchesse
turbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature of his de Clermont-­Tonnerre (1875–1954), was
imaginative faculties and has not acquired his share of the inevi- a friend of Proust’s. She wrote several
volumes, including the one alluded
table disappointments that he is destined to find in people, as in to here: L’Almanach des bonnes choses
the theater, in his travels, and indeed in love. de France (1920). In the dedication of
M. de Guermantes having declared (following Elstir’s aspara­ the copy of The Guermantes Way that
Proust sent to her, he indicated the
gus and those that were brought around after the chicken finan- page on which she would find an allu-
cière)273 that green asparagus grown in the open air, which, as has sion to her description of asparagus.
been so quaintly said by the charming writer who signs herself Proust, Correspondance 20: 239. She
also published her memoirs and a book
É. de Clermont-­Tonnerre,274 “have not the impressive rigidity of on Proust, Marcel Proust (Paris: Flam-
their sisters,” ought to be eaten with eggs. “One man’s meat is an- mairon, 1948).
other man’s poison and vice versa,” replied M. de Bréauté. “In the
province of Canton, in China, the greatest delicacy that can be
set before one is a dish of ortolan’s eggs completely rotten.” M. de
Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons which had ap-
peared in La Revue des Deux Mondes, moved in none but the most
aristocratic circles, but among these visited only such as had a cer-
tain reputation for intellect, with the result that from his presence,
if it was at all regular, in a woman’s house one could tell that she
had a “salon.” He claimed to loathe society, and assured each of
his duchesses in turn that it was for the sake of her wit and beauty
that he came to see her. They all believed him. Whenever, with a
heavy heart, he resigned himself to attending a big party at the
Princesse de Parme’s, he summoned them all to accompany him,
to keep up his courage, and thus appeared only to be moving in
the midst of an intimate group. So that his reputation as an intel-
lectual might survive his worldly success, applying certain maxims
of the Guermantes spirit, he would set out with ladies of fashion
on long scientific expeditions at the height of the dancing season,
and when a snobbish person, and consequently still without any
definite social position, began to go everywhere, he would be fero-
ciously obstinate in his refusal to know her, to allow himself to be

Chapter 2 555
 The Guermantes Way

275. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627– introduced to that man or woman. His hatred of snobs derived
1704) was a bishop renowned for his from his own snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other
eloquence as a preacher. Proust is
only partly right here. According to words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness.
seventeenth-­century usage, a bishop’s “Babal always knows everything,” exclaimed the Duchesse de
title should come before the particle Guermantes. “I think it must be charming, a country where you
and the name of the diocese after,
which would give Bossuet: Mon- can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you with really
seigneur de Meaux. rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet. I can see myself dipping
my bread and butter in them. I must say that the same thing hap-
pens at Aunt Madeleine’s” (Mme de Villeparisis’s) “where every-
thing’s served in a state of putrefaction, eggs included.” Then, as
Mme d’Arpajon protested, “But my dear Phili, you know it as well
as I do. You can see the chicken in the egg. What I can’t understand
is how they manage not to fall out. It’s not an omelette you get
there, it’s a poultry yard, but at least it isn’t indicated on the menu.
You were so wise not to come to dinner there yesterday, there was a
brill cooked in carbolic acid! I assure you, it wasn’t a dinner table, it
was far more like an operating table. Really, Norpois carries loyalty
to the pitch of heroism. He actually asked for more!”
“I believe I saw you at dinner there the time she lashed out at
M. Bloch” (M. de Guermantes, perhaps to give to a Jewish name a
more foreign sound, pronounced the “ch” in Bloch not like a “k”
but as in the German “hoch”) “when he said about some poit”
(poet) “or other that he was sublime. Châtellerault did his best to
break M. Bloch’s shins, the fellow didn’t understand in the least
and thought my nephew’s kicks were aimed at a young woman sit-
ting right next to him.” (At this point, M. de Guermantes blushed
slightly.) “He did not realize that he was annoying our aunt by
his ‘sublimes’ chucked about all over the place like that. In short,
Aunt Madeleine, who’s never at a loss for words, turned on him
with: ‘Indeed, Monsieur, and what epithet do you keep for M. de
Bossuet?’”275 (M. de Guermantes thought that, when one men-
tioned a famous name, the use of “Monsieur” and a particle was
eminently Ancien Régime.) “That put him in his place, all right.”
“And what answer did this M. Bloch make?” came in a careless
tone from Mme de Guermantes, who, running short for the mo-

556 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ment of original ideas, felt that she must copy her husband’s Teu- 276. François Coppée (1842–1908) was
tonic pronunciation. a poet and playwright and member of
the Académie Française whom Proust
“Ah! I can assure you, M. Bloch did not wait for any more, he’s admired little. During the Dreyfus Affair
still running.” he was honorary president of the anti-­
“Yes, I remember quite well seeing you there that day,” said Semitic Ligue de la Patrie Française.

Mme de Guermantes with emphasis as though, coming from her,

there must be something in this reminiscence highly flattering to
myself. “It is always so interesting at my aunt’s. At the last party
she gave, which was, of course, when I met you, I meant to ask
you whether that old gentleman who went past us wasn’t François
Coppée.276 You must know who everyone is,” she went on, sin-
cerely envious of my relations with poets and poetry, and also to
be amiable to me, wishing to establish in a better position in the
eyes of her other guests a young man so well versed in literature.
I assured the duchess that I had not observed any celebrities at
Mme de Villeparisis’s party. “What!” she said to me with a bewil-
derment that revealed that her respect for men of letters and her
contempt for society were more superficial than she said, perhaps
even than she thought, “What! There were no famous authors
there! You astonish me! Why, I saw all sorts of quite impossible
people!”
I remembered that evening distinctly due to an entirely trivial
incident. Mme de Villeparisis had introduced Bloch to Mme
Alphonse de Rothschild, but my friend had not caught the name
and, thinking he was talking to an old English lady who was a
trifle mad had replied only in monosyllables to the garrulous con-
versation of the historic beauty, when Mme de Villeparisis, intro-
ducing her to someone else, had pronounced, quite distinctly this
time: “The Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild.” Thereupon there
had coursed suddenly and simultaneously through Bloch’s ar-
teries so many ideas of millions and of social importance, which
it would have been more prudent to subdivide and separate, that
he had undergone, so to speak, a momentary failure of heart and
brain alike, and cried aloud in the dear old lady’s presence: “If I’d
only known!” an exclamation the silliness of which kept him from

Chapter 2 557
 The Guermantes Way

sleeping for a week afterward. This remark of Bloch’s was of no

great interest, but I remembered it as a proof that sometimes in
this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say
what they think.
“I believe Mme de Villeparisis is not absolutely . . . moral,” said
the Princesse de Parme, who knew that the best people did not
visit the duchess’s aunt, and, from what the duchess herself had
just been saying, that one might speak freely about her. But Mme
de Guermantes not seeming to approve of this criticism, she has-
tened to add: “Though, of course, intellect carried to that degree
excuses everything.”
“But you take the same view of my aunt that everyone else
does,” replied the duchess, “which is, on the whole, quite mis-
taken. It’s just what Mémé was saying to me only yesterday.”
She blushed; a reminiscence unknown to me clouded her eyes.
I formed the supposition that M. de Charlus had asked her to
cancel my invitation, as he had sent Robert to ask me not to go
to her house. I had the impression that the blush—equally in-
comprehensible to me—that had tinged the duke’s cheek when he
made some reference to his brother could not be attributed to the
same cause. “My poor aunt—she will always have the reputation
of being a person of the Ancien Régime, of sparkling wit and un-
controlled passions. And really there’s no more bourgeois, serious,
commonplace mind in Paris. She will go down as a patron of the
arts, which means to say that she was once the mistress of a great
painter, though he was never able to make her understand what
a picture was; and as for her private life, so far from being a de-
praved woman, she was so much made for marriage, so conjugal
from her cradle that, not having succeeded in keeping a husband,
who incidentally was a cad, she has never had a liaison that she
hasn’t taken just as seriously as if it were holy matrimony, with the
same susceptibilities, the same quarrels, the same fidelity. Mind
you, those relationships are often the most sincere; on the whole
there are more inconsolable lovers than husbands.”
“Yet, Oriane, if you take the case of your brother-­in-­law Pala-

558 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mède whom you were speaking about just now; no mistress in the
world could ever dream of being mourned as has been that poor
Mme de Charlus.”
“Ah!” replied the duchess, “Your Highness must permit me
to be not altogether of her opinion. People don’t all like to be
mourned in the same way, each of us has his preferences.”
“Still, he has made a regular cult of her since her death. It is true
that people sometimes do for the dead what they would not have
done for the living.”
“For one thing,” retorted Mme de Guermantes in a dreamy
tone that belied her teasing intent, “we go to their funerals, which
we never do for the living!” M. de Guermantes gave a sly glance
at M. de Bréauté as though to provoke him into laughter at the
duchess’s wit. “At the same time I frankly admit,” went on Mme
de Guermantes, “that the manner in which I would like to be
mourned by a man I loved would not be that adopted by my
brother-­in-­law.”
The duke’s face darkened. He did not like to hear his wife utter
rash judgments, especially about M. de Charlus. “You are very
particular. His grief set an edifying example to everyone,” he re-
proved her stiffly. But the duchess had in dealing with her hus-
band the sort of boldness that animal tamers show, or people who
live with a madman and are not afraid of making him angry.
“Oh, very well, just as you like—it is edifying, I never said it
wasn’t, he goes every day to the cemetery to tell her how many
people he has had to lunch, he misses her enormously, but—as
he’d mourn for a cousin, a grandmother, a sister. It is not the
grief of a husband. It is true that they were a pair of saints, which
makes it all rather exceptional.” M. de Guermantes, infuriated by
his wife’s chatter, fixed on her with a terrible immobility a pair
of eyes already loaded. “I don’t wish to say anything against poor
Mémé, who, by the way, could not come this evening,” went on
the duchess, “I quite admit there’s no one as good as he, he’s de-
lightful; he has a delicacy, a warmth of heart that you don’t as a
rule find in men. He has a woman’s heart, Mémé has!”

Chapter 2 559
 The Guermantes Way

“What you say is absurd,” M. de Guermantes broke in sharply.

“There’s nothing effeminate about Mémé, I know nobody so
manly as he is.”
“But I am not suggesting that he’s the least bit in the world
effeminate. Do at least take the trouble to understand what I say,”
retorted the duchess. “He’s always like that the moment anyone
mentions his brother,” she added, turning to the Princesse de
Parme.
“It’s very charming, it’s a pleasure to hear him. There’s nothing
so nice as two brothers who are fond of each other,” replied the
princess, as many a humbler person might have replied, for it is
possible to belong to a princely family by birth and at the same
time to a thoroughly plebeian family intellectually.
“Since we’re discussing your family, Oriane,” said the princess,
“I saw your nephew Saint-­L oup yesterday; I believe he wants to
ask you a favor.” The Duc de Guermantes knitted his Olympian
brow. When he did not himself care to do someone a favor, he pre-
ferred that his wife not undertake to do so, knowing that it would
come to the same thing in the end and that the people to whom
the duchess would be obliged to apply would put it down to the
common account of the household, just as much as if it had been
asked of them by the husband alone.
“Why didn’t he tell me himself?” said the duchess. “He was
here yesterday and stayed a couple of hours, and heaven only
knows what a bore he managed to make himself. He would be
no stupider than anyone else if he had only the sense, like many
people we know, to be content with being a fool. It’s his veneer of
knowledge that’s so terrible. He wants to have an open mind—
open to all the things he doesn’t understand. He talks to you end-
lessly about Morocco. It’s dreadful.”
“He can’t bear to go back there, because of Rachel,” said the
Prince de Foix.
“Surely, now that they’ve broken it off,” interrupted M. de
Bréauté.
“So far from breaking it off, I found her a couple of days ago

560 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

in Robert’s rooms; they didn’t look at all like people who’d quar- 277. A dégrafée in colloquial language is
reled, I can assure you,” replied the Prince de Foix, who loved to a woman of loose morals.
278. La Dame aux camélias is an 1848
spread abroad every rumor that could damage Robert’s chances novel by Alexandre Dumas fils in which
of marrying, and might for that matter have been misled by one the heroine, Violette, is a demimon-
of the intermittent resumptions of a liaison that was practically at daine. Dumas later made the novel
into a play that became the basis for
an end. Verdi’s opera La Traviata. Prince Von is
“That Rachel was speaking to me about you, I see her some- not exactly au courant regarding French
times in the mornings, on the way to the Champs-­Élysées; she’s literature; he is at least a couple of de-
cades behind.
what you call ‘unlaced,’277 a sort of ‘Dame aux Camélias,’278 figu- 279. Sic transit gloria mundi is Latin for
ratively speaking, of course.” This speech was addressed to me by “Thus passes the glory of the world,”
Prince Von, who liked always to appear conversant with French taken from the Imitation de Jésus-­Christ.

literature and Parisian refinements.

“Why, that’s just what it was—Morocco!” exclaimed the prin-
cess, flinging herself into this opening.
“What on earth can he want in Morocco?” asked M. de Guer-
mantes sternly; “Oriane can do absolutely nothing for him there,
as he knows perfectly well.”
“He thinks he invented strategy,” Mme de Guermantes pursued
the theme, “and then he uses impossible words for the most trivial
things, which doesn’t prevent him from making blots all over his
letters. The other day he announced that he’d had some sublime
potatoes, and that he’d taken a sublime box at the theater.”
“He speaks Latin,” the duke went one better.
“What! Latin?” the princess gasped.
“On my word of honor he does! Madame can ask Oriane if I’m
not telling the truth.”
“Why, of course, Madame; the other day he said to us straight
out, without stopping to think: ‘I know of no more touching ex-
ample of sic transit gloria mundi.’279 I can repeat the phrase now
to your Highness because, after endless inquiries and by appealing
to linguists, we succeeded in reconstructing it, but Robert flung it
out without pausing for breath, one could hardly make out that
there was Latin in it, he was just like a character in Le Malade
imaginaire. And all this referred simply to the death of the Em-
press of Austria!”

Chapter 2 561
 The Guermantes Way

280. Marie Sophie Amélie de Wittels- “Poor woman!” cried the princess, “what a delicious creature
bach, Duchess of Bavaria (1841–1925), she was.”
whose sisters were the Empress Eliza-
beth of Austria and Sophie the Duch- “Yes,” replied the duchess, “a trifle mad, a trifle headstrong, but
esse d’Alençon. Marie had married, she was a thoroughly good woman, a nice, kindhearted lunatic;
in 1859, François II (1836–94), who the only thing I could never make out about her was why she had
reigned briefly (1859–61) as the last
King of Sicily and Naples before Italian never managed to get a set of false teeth that fit her; they always
unification in 1861, after which the came loose halfway through a sentence and she was obliged to
couple lived in Rome and in Paris. stop short or she’d have swallowed them.”
“That Rachel spoke to me about you, she told me that young
Saint-­L oup worshiped you, that he was fonder of you than he was
of her,” said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as
he spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin.
“But in that case she must be jealous of me and hate me,” I said.
“Not at all, she told me all sorts of nice things about you. The
Prince de Foix’s mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred
you to her. You don’t understand? Come home with me, and I’ll
explain it all to you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, I’m going on to M. de Charlus at eleven.”
“Why, he sent around to me yesterday to ask me to dine with
him this evening, but told me not to come after a quarter to
eleven. But if you insist on going, at least come with me as far
as the Théâtre-­Français, you will be in the periphery,” said the
prince, who thought doubtless that this last word meant “prox-
imity” or possibly “center.”
But the bulging eyes in his coarse though handsome red face
frightened me and I declined, saying that a friend was coming
to call for me. This reply seemed to me in no way offensive. The
prince, however, apparently formed a different impression of it for
he did not say another word to me.
“I really must go and see the Queen of Naples;280 what a grief
it must be to her,” said, or at least appeared to me to have said,
the Princesse de Parme. For her words had come to me only in-
distinctly through the intervening screen of those addressed to
me, albeit in an undertone, by Prince Von, who had doubtless

562 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

been afraid, if he spoke louder, of being overheard by the Prince 281. Sophie Charlotte Augustine de
de Foix. Wittelsbach (1847–97), sister of the
Empress of Austria and of the Queen
“Oh, dear, no!” replied the duchess, “I don’t believe it has been of Naples, married Ferdinand, Prince
any grief at all.” d’Orléans, Duc d’Alençon (1844–1910),
“None at all! You do always fly to extremes so, Oriane,” said in 1868. She had first been the fiancée
of Louis II of Bavaria. She died on
M. de Guermantes, resuming his part of the cliff which by May 4, 1897, in the fire at the Bazar
standing up to the wave forces it to fling higher its crest of foam. de la Charité that claimed the lives of
“Basin knows even better than I that I’m telling the truth,” re- many prominent Parisian women.

plied the duchess, “but he thinks he’s obliged to look severe be-
cause you are present, Madame, and he’s afraid of my shocking
you.”
“Oh, please, no, I beg of you,” cried the Princesse de Parme,
dreading the slightest alteration on her account of these delicious
Wednesdays at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, this forbidden
fruit that the Queen of Sweden herself had not yet acquired the
right to taste.
“Why, it was Basin himself whom she told, when he said to her
with a duly sorrowful expression: ‘But the queen is in mourning;
for whom, pray, is it a great grief to your Majesty?’ ‘No, it’s not a
deep mourning, it’s a light mourning, quite a light mourning, it’s
my sister.’ The truth is, she’s delighted about it, as Basin knows
perfectly well, she invited us to a party that very evening, and
gave me two pearls. I wish she could lose a sister every day! So
far from weeping for her sister’s death, she was in fits of laughter
over it. She probably says to herself, like Robert, ‘sic transit—’ I
forget how it goes on,” she added modestly, knowing how it went
on perfectly well.
In saying all this Mme de Guermantes was only being witty,
and with complete insincerity, for the Queen of Naples, like
the Duchesse d’Alençon,281 also doomed to a tragic fate, had the
warmest heart in the world and mourned quite sincerely for her
kinsfolk. Mme de Guermantes knew those noble Bavarian sisters,
her cousins, too well not to be aware of this.
“He would like not to go back to Morocco,” said the Princesse

Chapter 2 563
 The Guermantes Way

de Parme, alighting hurriedly again upon the perch of Robert’s

name, which had been held out to her, quite unintentionally, by
Mme de Guermantes. “I believe you know Général de Monser-
feuil.”
“Very slightly,” replied the duchess, who was an intimate friend
of the officer in question. The princess explained what it was that
Saint-­L oup wanted.
“Good heavens, yes, if I see him—it is possible that I may run
into him,” the duchess replied, so as not to appear to be refusing,
her relationship with Général de Monserfeuil seeming to have
rapidly become more distant as soon as it became a question of
her asking him for anything. This uncertainty did not, however,
satisfy the duke, who interrupted his wife:
“You know perfectly well you won’t be seeing him, Oriane, and
besides you have already asked him for two things that he hasn’t
done. My wife has a passion for doing good turns to people,” he
went on, growing more and more furious, in order to force the
princess to withdraw her request, without there being any ques-
tion made of his wife’s amiability and so that Mme de Parme
should throw the blame back upon his own character, which was
essentially grouchy. “Robert could get anything he wanted out of
Monserfeuil. Only, as he happens not to know himself what he
wants, he gets us to ask for it because he knows there’s no better
way of making the whole thing fall through. Oriane has asked too
many favors of Monserfeuil. A request from her now would be a
reason for him to refuse.”
“Oh, in that case, it would be better if the duchess did nothing,”
said Mme de Parme.
“Obviously!” the duke closed the discussion.
“That poor general, he’s been defeated again at the elections,”
said the Princesse de Parme, in order to change the subject.
“Oh, it’s nothing serious, it’s only the seventh time,” said the
duke, who, having been obliged himself to retire from politics,
quite enjoyed hearing of other people’s failures at the polls. “He
has consoled himself by giving his wife another baby.”

564 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“What! Is that poor Mme de Monserfeuil pregnant again?” 282. It’s the duke here rather than the
cried the princess. duchess who is being witty through
wordplay: C’est le seul arrondissement
“Why, of course,” replied the duke, “that’s the one arrondisse- où le pauvre général n’a jamais échoué
ment where the poor general has never failed to get in.”282 (the emphasis is the duke’s). The ety-
In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, mological source of arrondissement is
arrondir, which means to make some-
were it with a small party only, to these repasts at which I had at thing round, in this case, his wife’s
one time imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the belly. Therefore, in literal French, a
Sainte-­Chapelle. They did assemble there indeed, like the early voting “district” and a “rounding” are
synonymous.
Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, 283. Yquems (Sauternes) from the Sau-
which incidentally was exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; ternais region of the Graves section in
so that in the course of a few dinner parties I assimilated the ac- Bordeaux are some of France’s most fa-
mous and most expensive white wines.
quaintance of all the friends of my hosts, friends to whom they 284. To invite people “with the tooth-
introduced me with a nuance of benevolent patronage so marked picks” (en cure-­dents) is to have them
(as a person for whom they had always had a sort of parental af- come after the dinner but in time for
whatever refreshments and entertain-
fection) that there was not one among them who would not have ment follow the repast.
felt himself to be failing in his duty to the duke and duchess if
he had given a ball without including my name on his list, and
at the same time, while I sipped one of those Yquems283 that lay
concealed in the Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed ac-
cording to a variety of the recipes that the duke himself used to
elaborate and modified prudently. However, for one who had al-
ready sat down more than once at the mystic board, the consump-
tion of the latter was not indispensable. Old friends of M. and
Mme de Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, “with the
toothpicks,”284 as Mme Swann would have said, without being
expected, and took in winter a cup of lime-­blossom tea in the
lighted warmth of the great drawing room, in summer a glass of
orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden
outside. There was no record of anything else, among the Guer-
mantes, of these evenings in the garden, but orangeade. It had a
sort of ritual meaning. To have added other refreshments would
have seemed to be falsifying the tradition, just as a big at-­home in
the Faubourg Saint-­Germain ceases to be an at-­home if there is a
play also, or music. You must be supposed to have come simply—
even if there were five hundred of you—to pay a call on, let us say,

Chapter 2 565
 The Guermantes Way

285. Alphonse XIII (1886–1941) was the Princesse de Guermantes. People marveled at my influence
King of Spain from 1886 to 1931. He because I was able to procure the addition to this orangeade of a
visited Paris several times between
1905 and 1910. jug containing the juice of stewed cherries or stewed pears. I took
a dislike on this account to the Prince d’Agrigente, who was like
all the people who, lacking in imagination but not in covetous-
ness, take a keen interest in what one is drinking and ask if they
may taste a little of it themselves. Which meant that, every time,
M. d’Agrigente, by diminishing my ration, spoiled my pleasure.
For this fruit juice can never be provided in sufficient quantities
to quench one’s thirst. Nothing is less cloying than these trans-
positions into flavor of the color of a fruit that, when cooked,
seems to have traveled backward to the past season of its blos-
soming. Blushing like an orchard in spring, or, it may be, color-
less and cool like the zephyr beneath the fruit trees, the juice can
be sniffed and observed drop by drop, and M. d’Agrigente pre-
vented me, regularly, from taking my fill of it. Despite these dis-
tillations the traditional orangeade persisted like the lime-­blossom
tea. In these humble kinds, the social communion was nonethe-
less celebrated. In this respect, doubtless, the friends of M. and
Mme de Guermantes had, after all, as I had originally imagined
them, remained more different from the rest of humanity than
their disappointing outward appearance might have led me to be-
lieve. Numbers of elderly men came to receive from the duchess,
together with the invariable drink, a welcome that was often far
from cordial. Now this could not have been due to snobbishness,
they themselves being of a rank to which there was none superior;
nor to love of luxury; they did love it perhaps, but on less strin-
gent social conditions might have been enjoying a glittering ex-
ample of it, for on these same evenings the charming wife of a
colossally rich financier would have given anything in the world to
have them among the brilliant shooting party she was giving for
a couple of days for the King of Spain.285 They had nevertheless
declined her invitation, and had come around without fail to in-
quire whether by chance Mme de Guermantes was at home. They
were not even certain of finding there opinions that conformed

566 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

entirely with their own, or sentiments of any great warmth; Mme 286. That is, those laws establishing
de Guermantes let fall now and then, on the Dreyfus Affair, on the separation of church and state.

the Republic, the antireligious laws,286 or even in an undertone

on themselves, their weaknesses, the dullness of their conversa-
tion, comments that they had to appear not to notice. No doubt,
if they kept up their habit of coming there, it was owing to their
superfine training as epicures in things worldly, to their clear con-
sciousness of the prime and perfect quality of the social dish, with
its familiar, reassuring, sappy savor, free from blend or taint, with
the origin and history of which they were as well acquainted as she
who served them with it, remaining more “noble” in this respect
than they themselves imagined. Now on this occasion, among the
visitors to whom I was introduced after dinner, it so happened
that there was that Général de Monserfeuil of whom the Prin-
cesse de Parme had been speaking, while Mme de Guermantes, of
whose drawing room he was one of the habitués, had not known
that he was going to be there that evening. He bowed before me,
on hearing my name, as though I had been the president of the
Supreme War Council. I had supposed it to be simply from some
deep-­rooted unwillingness to oblige, in which the duke, as in wit
if not in love, was his wife’s accomplice, that the duchess had
practically refused to recommend her nephew to M. de Monser-
feuil. And I saw in this an indifference all the more blameworthy
in that I seemed to have gathered from a few words let fall by the
princess that Robert was in a post of danger from which it would
be prudent to have him removed. But it was by the genuine malice
of Mme de Guermantes that I was revolted when, the Princesse
de Parme having timidly suggested that she might say something
herself and on her own responsibility to the general, the duchess
did everything in her power to dissuade her.
“But Madame,” she cried, “Monserfeuil has no sort of standing
or influence whatever with the new government. You would be
wasting your breath.”
“I think he can hear us,” murmured the princess, as a hint to
the duchess not to speak so loud.

Chapter 2 567
 The Guermantes Way

287. Proust’s source here is a book by “Your Highness need not be afraid, he’s as deaf as a post,” said
Maurice Maeterlinck, L’Intelligence des the duchess, without lowering her voice, even though the general
fleurs (Paris: Charpentier, 1907). “. . . the
lizard orchid (Loroglossum hircinum) . . . heard her distinctly.
conjures up an impression of the worst “The thing is, I believe M. de Saint-­L oup is in a place that is
illnesses . . . and gives off an awful not very safe,” said the princess.
stink.” The Intelligence of Flowers, trans.
John Mosley (Albany: SUNY Press, “What is one to do?” replied the duchess. “He’s in the same
2008), 39. boat as everybody else, the only difference being that it was he
who asked to be sent there. Besides, no, it’s not really dangerous;
if it was, you can imagine how anxious I would be to help. I would
have spoken to Saint-­Joseph about it during dinner. He has far
more influence, and he’s a real worker! But, as you see, he’s gone
now. Still, asking him would be less awkward than going to this
one, who has three of his sons in Morocco just now and has re-
fused to apply for them to be transferred; he might raise that as
an objection. Since your Highness insists on it, I will speak to
Saint-­Joseph—if I see him again, or to Beautreillis. But if I don’t
see either of them, you mustn’t waste your pity on Robert. It was
explained to us the other day exactly where he is. I don’t think he
could be in a better place.”
“What a pretty flower, I’ve never seen one like it; there’s no one
like you, Oriane, for having such marvelous things in your house,”
said the Princesse de Parme, who, fearing that Général de Mon-
serfeuil might have overheard the duchess, sought now to change
the subject. I looked and recognized a plant of the sort that I had
watched Elstir painting.
“I am so glad you like them; they are charming, do look at their
little mauve velvet collars; the only thing against them is—as may
happen with people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed—
they have a hideous name and a horrid smell.287 In spite of which
I am very fond of them. But what is rather sad is that they are
going to die.”
“But they’re growing in a pot, they aren’t cut flowers,” said the
princess.
“No,” answered the duchess with a smile, “but it comes to the
same thing, as they’re all ladies. It’s a kind of plant where the

568 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ladies and the gentlemen don’t both grow on the same stalk. I’m 288. In L’Intelligence des fleurs, Maeter-
like people who keep a lady dog. I have to find a husband for my linck describes the fecundation of an
orchid by an insect. “[In the] Orchis
flowers. Otherwise I won’t have any young ones!” maculata or latifolia . . . the nectar horn
“How very strange. Do you mean to say that in nature . . . ?” [is] placed in such a way that, when
“Yes! There are certain insects whose duty it is to bring about the insect laden with pollen enters it,
the mass arrives exactly at the level
the marriage, as they do with sovereigns, by proxy, without the of the stigma to be impregnated.” The
bride and bridegroom ever having set eyes on one another. And Intelligence of Flowers, 39–40. For other
so, I assure you, I always tell my man to put my plant out in the examples, see 35, 43, 47, 53. Proust also
consulted Professor Coutance’s preface
window as often as possible, on the courtyard side and the garden to the translation of Charles Darwin’s
side in turn, in the hope that the necessary insect will arrive.288 work The Different Forms of Flowers on
But the odds are too great. Just think, he has first to have been Plants of the Same Species: Des diffé-
rentes formes de fleurs dans les plantes de
seen by a person of the same species and the opposite sex, and la même espèce. À la recherche du temps
he must then have taken it into his head to come and leave cards perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade edi-
at the house. He hasn’t appeared so far, I believe my plant still tion], 1988), 2: 805, nn. 2, 3. It seems
likely that Proust also knew Darwin’s
merits the name of virgin, but I must say a little licentiousness book The Fertilisation of Orchids pub-
would please me better. It’s just the same with that fine tree we lished in 1862 under the full explana-
have in the courtyard; it will die childless because he belongs to tory title On the various contrivances by
which British and foreign orchids are fer-
a kind that’s very rare in these latitudes. In its case, it’s the wind tilised by insects, and on the good effects
that’s responsible for consummating the marriage, but the wall is of intercrossing.
a trifle high.” 289. The vanilla tree, native of Mexico,
belongs to the orchid family. In 1841,
“Indeed, yes,” said M. de Bréauté, “you ought to take just a on the Île de la Réunion a black slave
couple of inches off the top, that would be quite enough. There are named Edmond Albius (1829–80)
certain operations one should know how to perform. The flavor of found a new way to fecundate vanilla.

vanilla we tasted in the excellent ice cream you gave us this eve-
ning, Duchess, comes from a plant called the vanilla tree. This
plant produces flowers that are both male and female, but a sort
of solid partition set up between them prevents any communica-
tion. And so we could never get any fruit from them until a young
Negro, a native of Réunion, by the name of Albius, which by the
way is rather an odd name for a black man since it means ‘white,’
had the happy thought of using the point of a needle to bring the
separate organs into contact.”289
“Babal, you’re divine, you know everything,” cried the duchess.
“But you yourself, Oriane, have told me things I had no idea
of,” the Princesse de Parme assured her.

Chapter 2 569
 The Guermantes Way

290. “Lunch” is in English in the “I must explain to your Highness that it is Swann who has
original. always talked to me all about botany. Sometimes when we found
291. See Swann’s Way, 385–87, where
the duchess derides the Style Empire. it too boring to go to a tea party or an afternoon party we would
set off for the country, and he would show me extraordinary mar-
riages between flowers, which was far more amusing than going
to human marriages—no wedding lunch290 and no crowd in the
sacristy. We never had time to go very far. Now that we have auto-
mobiles, it would be delightful. Unfortunately, in the meantime
he himself has made an even more astonishing marriage, which
makes everything very difficult. Ah, Madame, life is a dreadful
business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and
when by mere chance we come across somebody with whom we
could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make
a marriage like Swann’s. Faced with the alternatives of giving up
my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a de-
grading person, I chose the former calamity. Besides, when it
comes to that, there was no need to go quite so far. It seems that
even here, in my own little bit of garden, more improper things
happen in broad daylight than at midnight—in the Bois de Bou-
logne! Only they attract no attention, because between flowers it’s
all done quite simply, you see a little orange mist, or else a very
dusty fly coming to wipe its feet or take a bath before crawling
into a flower. And that does the trick!”
“The cabinet the plant is standing on is splendid, too; it’s Em-
pire, I think,” said the princess, who, not being familiar with the
works of Darwin and his successors, was unable to grasp the point
of the duchess’s pleasantries.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it? I’m so glad Madame likes it,” replied
the duchess, “it’s a magnificent piece. I must tell you that I’ve
always adored the Empire style, even when it wasn’t in fashion.
I remember at Guermantes I got into terrible disgrace with my
mother-­in-­law because I told them to bring down from the attics
all the splendid Empire furniture Basin had inherited from the
Montesquious, and used it to furnish the wing we lived in.”291
M. de Guermantes smiled. He must nevertheless have remem-

570 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

bered that the course of events had been totally different. But 292. Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) was
the witticisms of the Princesse des Laumes at the expense of her an English potter who founded the
highly successful Wedgwood Company.
mother-­in-­law’s bad taste having been a tradition during the short He invented a new type of faience with
time in which the prince was in love with his wife, his love for the a distinctive color that bears his name.
latter had been outlasted by a certain contempt for the intellectual He was Charles Darwin’s grandfather.
293. In 1806, Napoléon conferred the
inferiority of the former, a contempt that, however, went hand in title of Duchesse de Guastalla on his
hand with a considerable attachment and respect. sister Pauline, Princesse Borghèse
“The Iénas have the same armchair with Wedgwood medal- (1780–1825).
294. In his article on Princesse
lions.292 It’s a lovely thing, but I prefer my own,” said the duchess, Mathilde’s salon, Proust evokes the
with the same air of impartiality as if she had been the possessor relationship between the Bonapartes
of either of the two pieces of furniture. “I know, of course, that and the family of Louis-­Philippe. This
sentence is not in the Duc d’Aumale’s
they’ve some marvelous things that I don’t have.” book Lettre sur l’histoire de France,
The Princesse de Parme remained silent. March 15, 1861. It was apparently first
“But it’s quite true; your Highness hasn’t seen their collection. used by a former attorney general
by the name of Dufaure in a speech
Oh, you ought really to come there one day with me. It’s one of defending the honor of the Orléans
the most magnificent things in Paris. You’d say it was a museum family. See Intermédiaire des chercheurs
come to life.” et curieux . . . lettres et documents inédits,
volume 56, July 10, 1907, 123–24.
And since this suggestion was one of the most “Guermantes”
of the duchess’s audacities, inasmuch as the Iénas were for the
Princesse de Parme rank usurpers, their son bearing like her own
the title of Duc de Guastalla,293 Mme de Guermantes in thus
launching it could not refrain (so far did the love that she bore for
her own originality prevail over the deference due to the Princesse
de Parme) from casting at her other guests a smiling glance of
amusement. They too made an effort to smile, at once frightened,
amazed, and above all delighted to think that they were witnessing
one of Oriane’s very “latest” and would be able to tell it “hot off
the press.” They were only half shocked, knowing that the duchess
practiced the art of completely ignoring all the Courvoisier preju-
dices to achieve a vital success more thrilling and more enjoyable.
Had she not, within the last few years, brought together Princesse
Mathilde and that Duc d’Aumale who had written to the prin-
cess’s own brother the famous letter: “In my family all the men are
brave and the women chaste”?294 And inasmuch as princes remain
princely even at those moments when they appear eager to forget

Chapter 2 571
 The Guermantes Way

295. In 1792, Joseph Fouché (1759– that they are, the Duc d’Aumale and Princesse Mathilde had en-
1820) voted for the death of King Louis joyed themselves so greatly at Mme de Guermantes’s that they had
XVI. During the Bourbon Restoration,
Louis XVIII named him minister of thereafter exchanged visits, with that faculty for forgetting the past
police, a post that he had held during that Louis XVIII showed when he took as his minister Fouché,
the Empire. who had voted the death of his brother.295 Mme de Guermantes
296. Princesse Murat also claimed the
title of Queen of Naples. Napoléon was now nourishing a similar project of arranging a rapproche-
had given the kingdom of Naples to ment between Princesse Murat and the Queen of Naples.296 In
Joachim Murat in 1808. the meantime, the Princesse de Parme appeared as embarrassed as
297. In 1914, the Marquis de Mailly-­
Nesle, Prince d’Orange, lived at 3, rue might have been the heirs-­apparent to the thrones of the Nether-
de Boccador, in the eighth arrondisse- lands and Belgium, styled respectively Prince of Orange and Duke
ment. Prince Léopold (1901–83), eldest of Brabant, had one offered to present to them M. de Mailly-­
son of Albert I (1875–1934), King of the
Belgians, was the Duc de Brabant until Nesle, Prince d’Orange, and M. de Charlus, Duc de Brabant.297
his ascension to the throne in 1934. But before anything further could happen, the duchess, whom
298. After Napoléon’s expedition in Swann and M. de Charlus between them (although the latter was
1798, Egyptian motifs became the
fashion in decoration and architecture. resolute in ignoring the Iénas’ existence) had with great difficulty
succeeded in making admire the Empire style, exclaimed:
“Honestly, Madame, I can’t tell you how beautiful you will
think it! I must confess that the Empire style has always had a fasci-
nation for me. But at the Iénas’ it is really like a hallucination. That
sort of—what shall I say—reflux from the Expedition to Egypt,298
and also the sweep forward into our own times from Antiquity,
all those things that invade our houses, the Sphinxes that come
to crouch at the feet of the armchairs, the serpents coiled around
candelabra, a huge Muse who holds out a little torch for you to
play at bouillotte, or has quietly climbed on to the mantelpiece and
is leaning against your clock; and then all the Pompeian lamps, the
little boat-­shaped beds that look as if they had been found floating
on the Nile so that you expect to see Moses climb out of them, the
classical chariots galloping along the bedside tables . . .”
“They’re not very comfortable to sit in, those Empire chairs,”
the princess ventured.
“No,” the duchess agreed, “but,” she at once added, insisting
on the point with a smile, “I like being uncomfortable on those
mahogany seats covered with ruby velvet or green silk. I like that
discomfort of warriors who understand nothing but the curule

572 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

chair299 and in the middle of his main drawing room crosses his 299. This was a chair or seat reserved
fasces300 and stacks his laurels. I can assure you that at the Iénas’ for Romans of high rank that resembles
a backless stool with curved legs.
one doesn’t stop to think for a moment of how comfortable one 300. This was a bundle of rods and
is, when one sees in front of one a great strapping wench of a Vic- among them an axe with projecting
tory painted in fresco on the wall. My husband is going to say that blade borne before ancient Roman
magistrates as a badge of authority.
I’m a very bad royalist, but I’m terribly disaffected, as you know, 301. During the Empire, the bee re-
I can assure you that in those people’s house one comes to love all placed the fleur-­de-­lis as the symbol
the big N’s and all the bees.301 Good heavens, after all, for a good of France.
302. Proust particularly admired this
many years under our kings we weren’t exactly surfeited with painting, which Moreau completed in
glory, and so these warriors who brought home so many crowns 1865 and exhibited in the Salon of that
that they stuck them even on the arms of the chairs, I must say I year. He had intended the work to be a
tribute to the painter Théodore Chassé-
think it’s all rather chic! Your Highness must really.” riau, who had died in 1856 at the age of
“Why, my dear, if you think so,” said the princess, “but it seems thirty-­seven.
to me that it won’t be easy.”
“But Madame will find that it will all go quite smoothly. They
are very good people, and no fools. We took Mme de Chevreuse
there,” added the duchess, knowing the force of this example, “she
was enchanted. The son is really very pleasant. I’m going to say
something that’s not quite proper,” she went on, “but he has a
bedroom, and more especially a bed in it, in which I would love
to sleep—without him! What is even less proper is that I went to
see him once when he was ill and lying in it. By his side on the
frame of the bed was sculpted a long Siren, stretched out at full
length, a ravishing thing with a mother-­of-­pearl tail and some
sort of lotus flowers in her hand. I assure you,” went on Mme de
Guermantes, reducing the speed of her delivery to bring into even
bolder relief the words that she seemed to be modeling with the
pout of her fine lips, drawing them out with her long expressive
hands, directing on the princess as she spoke a gentle, steady, and
searching gaze, “that with the palms and the golden crown at the
side, it was most moving, it was precisely the composition of Gus-
tave Moreau’s The Young Man and Death302 (your Highness must
know that masterpiece, of course).”
The Princesse de Parme, who did not know so much as the
painter’s name, nodded her head vigorously and smiled ardently,

Chapter 2 573
 The Guermantes Way

303. Hortense de Beauharnais (1783– in order to manifest her admiration for his picture. But the in-
1837), married against her will to Louis tensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light that is
Bonaparte in 1802, was Queen of Hol-
land from 1806 to 1810. Her third son, absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what people
Charles Louis, became Napoléon III. are talking to us about.
304. A Mameluke was a member of a “A good-­looking boy, I believe?” she asked.
politically powerful Egyptian military
class occupying the sultanate from “No, because he’s just like a tapir. The eyes are a little like those
1250 to 1517. of a Queen Hortense303 on a screen. But he has probably come
to the conclusion that it would be rather absurd for a man to
develop such a resemblance, and it is lost in the encaustic sur-
face of his cheeks, which give him really rather a Mameluke ap-
pearance.304 You feel that the polisher must call around every
morning. Swann,” she went on, reverting to the bed of the young
duke, “was struck by the resemblance between this Siren and Gus-
tave Moreau’s Death. But apart from that,” she added, her speech
becoming more rapid though still serious, so as to provoke more
laughter, “there was nothing really that could strike us, for it was
only a cold in the head, and the young man is as fit as a fiddle.”
“They say he’s a snob?” put in M. de Bréauté, with a mali-
cious twinkle, expecting to be answered with the same precision
as though he had said: “They tell me that he has only four fingers
on his right hand; is that so?”
“G—ood g—racious, n—o,” replied Mme de Guermantes with
a smile of benign indulgence. “Perhaps just the least little bit of a
snob in appearance, because he’s extremely young, but I would be
surprised to hear that he was really, for he’s intelligent,” she added,
as though there were to her mind some absolute incompatibility
between snobbishness and intelligence. “He has wit, too, I’ve
known him to be quite amusing,” she said again, laughing with
the air of an epicure and expert, as though the act of declaring
that a person could be amusing demanded a certain expression of
merriment from the speaker, or as though the Duc de Guastalla’s
sallies were recurring to her mind as she spoke. “Anyway, as he is
never invited anywhere, he can’t have much field for his snobbish-
ness,” she wound up, forgetting that this was hardly encouraging
the Princesse de Parme to make overtures.

574 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“I cannot help wondering what the Prince de Guermantes, who 305. Anna Murat (1841–1924), daughter
calls her Mme Iéna, will say if he hears that I’ve been to see her.” of Napoléon Lucien Charles, Prince
Murat, and the American Caroline-­
“What!” cried the duchess with extraordinary vivacity. “Don’t Georgine Fraser, married, in 1865,
you know that it was we who yielded to Gilbert” (she bitterly Antoine de Noailles, the Duc de
regretted that surrender now) “a complete game room done in Mouchy.
306. Romain-­Joseph, Baron de Brigode
the Empire style that came to us from Quiou-­Quiou, and is an (1775–1854), was a legislator and an
absolute marvel! There was no room for it here, though I think officer in the Légion d’Honneur. His
it would look better here than it does in his house. It’s a thing of mother, née Catherine Derecq, married
Pierre Jacques de Brigode.
sheer beauty, half Etruscan, half Egyptian . . .” 307. This is one of the three string
“Egyptian?” queried the princess, to whom the word Etruscan quartets that Count Andrey Kirillovich
conveyed little. Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador
to Vienna, commissioned from Bee-
“Well, really, you know, a little of both. Swann told us that, thoven. These are the String Quartets
he explained it all to me, only you know I’m such a dunce. But Nos. 7–9, Opus 59. He asked Bee-
then, Madame, what one has to bear in mind is that the Egypt of thoven to include a Russian theme
in each quartet, and the composer
the Empire cabinetmakers has nothing to do with the historical obliged by using a characteristically
Egypt, nor their Romans with the Romans nor their Etruria . . .” Russian theme from a folk song in the
“Indeed,” said the princess. first two quartets.
308. Maurice Paléologue (1859–1944),
“No, it’s like what they used to call a Louis XV costume under in his book L’Art chinois, gives an ex-
the Second Empire, when Anna de Mouchy305 and dear Bri- ample of a Chinese painter who took
gode’s306 mother were girls. Basin was talking to you just now lessons from an English artist and then
opened a studio and attempted to imi-
about Beethoven. We heard a thing of his played the other day tate European paintings and produced
that was really very beautiful, though a little stiff, with a Russian only works that were no longer Chinese
theme in it. It’s pathetic to think that he believed it to be Rus- and lacked all originality. À la recherche
du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard
sian.307 In the same way as the Chinese painters believed they were [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 811, n. 4.
copying Bellini.308 Besides, even in the same country, whenever 309. The Narrator expressed a similar
anybody begins to look at things in a way that is slightly new, nine idea in In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower, 114–15.
hundred and ninety-­nine people out of a thousand are totally in-
capable of seeing what he puts before them. It takes at least forty
years before they can manage to make it out.”
“Forty years!” the princess cried in alarm.
“Why, yes,” went on the duchess, adding more and more to
her words (which were practically my own, for I had just been ex-
pressing a similar idea to her),309 thanks to her way of pronouncing
them, the equivalent of what on the printed page is called italics:
“It’s like a sort of first isolated individual of a species that does not

Chapter 2 575
 The Guermantes Way

310. In Proust’s day, Manet’s painting yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an individual en-
hung in the Louvre next to La Source dowed with a kind of sense that the human race of his generation
by Ingres.
311. Marie Paulowna de Mecklembourg does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance because
(1854–1920) had married, in 1874, the I, on the contrary, have always loved any artistic productions from
Grand Duke Wladimir Alexandrovitch, the very start, however novel they might be. But really, the other
uncle of Nicholas II.
312. Philippe III le Hardi (1245–85, king day I was with the grand duchess in the Louvre and we happened
1270–85) and Louis VI le Gros (1081– to pass before Manet’s Olympia. Nowadays nobody is in the least
1137, king 1108–37). surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres!310 And yet, heaven only
knows how many lances I’ve had to break for that picture, which
I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of
somebody. Perhaps the Louvre is not exactly the place for it.”
“And is the grand duchess well?” inquired the Princesse de
Parme, to whom the tsar’s aunt311 was infinitely more familiar
than Manet’s model.
“Yes; we talked about you. After all,” the duchess resumed,
clinging to her idea, “the fact of the matter is, as my brother-­in-­
law Palamède always says, that one has between oneself and the
rest of the world the barrier of a strange language. Though I admit
that there’s no one it’s quite so true of as Gilbert. If it amuses you
to go to the Iénas’, you have far too much sense to let your actions
be governed by the opinion of that poor fellow, who is a dear,
innocent creature, but really lives in another world. I feel my-
self nearer, more akin to my coachman, my horses even, than to
that man who keeps on harking back to what people would have
thought under Philip the Bold or Louis the Fat.312 Just imagine,
when he goes for a walk in the country, he takes a stick to drive the
peasants out of his way, quite in a friendly spirit, saying: ‘Get on,
churls!’ Really, I’m just as much surprised when he speaks to me
as if I heard myself addressed by one of the recumbent figures on
the old Gothic tombs. It’s all very well that animated gravestone’s
being my cousin; he frightens me, and the only idea that comes
into my head is to let him stay in his Middle Ages. Apart from
that, I quite admit that he’s never murdered anyone.”
“I’ve just seen him at dinner at Mme de Villeparisis’s,” said the

576 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

general, but without either smiling at or endorsing the duchess’s 313. Franz Hals (1580–1666) painted
pleasantries. this canvas in 1664.
314. Proust visited Holland in October
“Was M. de Norpois there?” asked Prince Von, whose mind 1902. He went to Amsterdam, Vol-
still ran on the Académie des Sciences Morales. lendam, to The Hague, Delft, and
“Why, yes;” said the general. “In fact, he was talking about Haarlem to see the works of Hals in
the Franz Hals Museum.
your emperor.” 315. Proust saw this painting by Jan
“It seems the Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he does Vermeer (1632–75) at the Mauritshuis
not care for Elstir’s painting. Not that I’m saying this against him,” Museum in The Hague on October 18,
1902. In a letter written to Vaudoyer
said the duchess, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir two weeks later, Proust says that “Ver-
has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the meer has been my favorite painter
least like me, but it’s a remarkable piece of work. He is interesting since I was twenty.” Correspondance 20:
263–64.
while one’s sitting to him. He has made me like a little old woman.
It’s similar in style to the Women Regents of the Old Men’s Hospice
by Hals.313 I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow my
nephew’s favorite expressions,” the duchess turned to me, gently
flapping her fan of black feathers. More than erect on her chair,
she flung her head nobly backward, for, while always a great lady,
she was a trifle inclined to play the great lady also. I said that I had
been once to Amsterdam and The Hague, but that to avoid mixing
everything up, as my time was limited, I had left out Haarlem.314
“Ah! The Hague! What a museum!” cried M. de Guermantes.
I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s View of
Delft.315 But the duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly
he contented himself with replying in a self-­satisfied tone, as was
his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a museum,
or in the Salon, that he did not remember having seen. “If it’s to
be seen, I saw it!”
“What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haar­
lem!” cried the duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of
an hour to spend in the place, they’re an extraordinary thing to
have seen, those Halses. I don’t mind saying that a person who
only caught a passing glimpse of them from the top of a streetcar
without stopping, supposing they were hung out to view in the
street, would open his eyes pretty wide.” This remark shocked me

Chapter 2 577
 The Guermantes Way

316. Don Juan of Austria (1547–78) was as indicating a misconception of the way in which artistic impres-
the illegitimate son of Charles V, the sions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to imply
Holy Roman Emperor, and a burgher’s
daughter. As a military commander, that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine that takes
he won a victory over the Turks in the snapshots.
naval battle of Lepanto. In 1576, he was M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me
appointed governor of the Netherlands.
He inspired a comedy by Casimir Dela- with so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me,
vigne: Don Juan d’Autriche (1835). gazed at the illustrious bearing of his wife, listened to what she
317. Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), wife was saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She’s well-­informed
of François de Gonzaque, Marquis of
Mantua, was an important figure and about everything! Our young friend can go home and say that he’s
patroness of the arts for whom Man- had before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense
tegna painted several works. of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere else
today.” Thus I beheld the pair of them, withdrawn from that name
Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an
unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women, lin-
gering, only, behind their contemporaries a little way, and that not
evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg, where the wife
has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband the mis-
fortune to come down to the arid age of the past, she remaining
still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-­Philippe. That
Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been for
me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction
and with all these good wines to help, almost a miracle. A Don
Juan of Austria,316 an Isabella d’Este,317 situated for us in the world
of names, have as little communication with the great pages of
history as the Méséglise way had with the Guermantes. Isabella
d’Este was no doubt in reality a very minor princess, similar to
those who under Louis XIV obtained no special rank at court.
But believing her to be of a unique and therefore incomparable
essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less in greatness
than he, so that a supper party with Louis XIV would appear to
us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este we
would find ourselves, were we to meet her, gazing with our own
eyes on a supernatural heroine of romance. Then, after we have, in
studying Isabella d’Este, in transplanting her patiently from this
fairyland world into that of history, established the fact that her

578 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

life, her thought, contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness 318. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) was
that had been suggested to us by her name, once this disappoint- an Italian painter who belonged to the
school of Padua.
ment is complete we feel a boundless gratitude to this princess for 319. Georges Édouard Lafenestre
having had, of Mantegna’s paintings,318 a knowledge almost equal (1837–1919), poet, novelist, and art
to that, hitherto despised by us and put, as Françoise would have critic, was also a professor at the École
du Louvre. He wrote a book about
said, “lower than the dirt,” of M. Lafenestre.319 After having scaled Italian painting, La Peinture italienne
the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending (1885).
the inner slope of the life of the duchess, I felt on finding there the 320. A manchineel is a poisonous
tropical American tree.
names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Franz Hals, and, alas, 321. Mérope (1743) and Alzire (1736) are
Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken tragedies by Voltaire. The first is based
into account, in order to imagine the singularity of the native cus- on the Greek legend of Merope, queen
of Messenia. The latter takes place in
toms in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, Lima, Peru.
its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of the denominations 322. “To enfeoff ” is to invest with a fief
of its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through or fee.

a hedge of giant aloes or manchineels,320 inhabitants who (some-

times indeed among the ruins of a Roman theater and beneath a
column dedicated to Venus) are engaged in reading Mérope or Al-
zire.321 And similarly, so remote, so distinct from, so far superior to
the educated women of the middle classes whom I had known, the
similar culture by which Mme de Guermantes had made herself,
with no ulterior motive, to gratify no ambition, descend to the
level of people whom she would never know, had the character—
meritorious, almost touching by virtue of being wholly useless—of
an erudition in Phoenician antiquities in a politician or a doctor.
“I might have been able to show you a very fine one,” said Mme
de Guermantes, still speaking of Hals, “the finest in existence,
some people say, which was left to me by a German cousin. Un-
fortunately, it turned out to be ‘enfeoffed’322 in the château—you
don’t know the expression, nor do I,” she added, with her fondness
for making jokes (which made her, she thought, seem modern) at
the expense of the old customs to which nevertheless she was un-
consciously but fiercely attached. “I am happy that you have seen
my Elstirs, but, I must admit, I would have been even happier
if I could have done you the honors of my Hals, this ‘enfeoffed’
painting.”

Chapter 2 579
 The Guermantes Way

323. Radziwill was a noble House of “I know the one,” said Prince Von, “it’s the Grand Duke of
Lithuania whose ancestors can be Hesse’s Hals.”
traced to 1412. There were a number
of Radziwills living in Proust’s day, in- “Quite so; his brother married my sister,” said M. de Guer-
cluding his friend Prince Léon. mantes, “and his mother and Oriane’s were first cousins as well.”
324. Arshéologue in the original. Proust, “But so far as M. Elstir is concerned,” the prince went on, “I
who studied German, no doubt knew
that Arsch means arse. will take the liberty of saying, without having any opinion of his
work, which I do not know, that the hatred with which the kaiser
pursues him ought not, it seems to me, to be counted against him.
The kaiser is a man of marvelous intelligence.”
“Yes, I’ve met him at dinner twice, once at my Aunt Sagan’s
and once at my Aunt Radziwill’s,323 and I must say I found him
quite unusual. I didn’t find him at all simple! But there is some-
thing amusing about him, something ‘forced,’” she detached the
word, “like a green carnation, that is to say a thing that surprises
me and does not please me enormously, a thing it’s surprising that
anyone should have been able to create but that I feel would have
been just as well uncreated. I trust I’m not shocking you.”
“The kaiser is a man of astounding intelligence,” Prince Von
continued, “he is passionately fond of the arts; he has for works of
art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake:
if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he
detests anything there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is
excellent.” (Everyone smiled.)
“You set my mind at rest,” said the duchess.
“I would be inclined to compare the kaiser,” went on the
prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word “archae-
ologist” (that is to say, as though it were spelled “arkeologist”),
never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist”
(but the prince said “arsheologist”)324 “we have in Berlin. If you
put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, the old arsheolo-
gist weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it’s not really old, he does
not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheolo-
gical piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he
weeps, they buy the piece for the museum. If his eyes remain dry,

580 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, 325. In the original, Prince Von pro-
every time I dine at Potsdam, if the emperor says to me of a play: nounces bête (stupid) pête.
326. General Louis Botha (1862–1919)
‘Prince, you must see that, it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not commanded the Boer forces from 1900
to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, until his defeat and the signing of the
I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity.” peace treaty in 1902. The Boers were
Dutch settlers in Africa who resisted
“Norpois is in favor of an Anglo-­French rapprochement, isn’t the colonial aspirations of the British.
he?” said M. de Guermantes. 327. Scott Moncrieff gives a rather lit-
“What use would that be to you?” asked Prince Von, who could eral translation of Proust’s épiderme,
which is the outer surface of the skin.
not endure the English, in a tone at once irritated and cunning. Proust uses the word to indicate that
“The English are so schtubid.325 I know, of course, that it would when in society the Narrator is living
not be as soldiers that they would help you. But one can judge on the surface of his being, his superfi-
cial self, rather than delving into more
them, all the same, by the schtubidity of their generals. A friend profound matters.
of mine was talking the other day to Botha, you know, the Boer
leader.326 He said to my friend: ‘It’s terrible, an army like that. I
rather like the English, as a matter of fact, but just imagine that
I, who am only a peasant, have thrashed them in every battle.
And in the last, when I gave way before a force twenty times the
strength of my own, even while I myself surrendered, because I
had to, I managed to take two thousand prisoners! That was all
right, because I was only commanding an army of peasants, but
if those poor fools ever have to stand up against a real European
army, one trembles to think what may happen to them!’ Besides,
you have only to see how their king, whom you know as well as I
do, passes for a great man in England.”
I barely listened to these stories, stories of the kind that M. de
Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my
favorite trains of thought; and besides, even had they possessed
the elements that they lacked, they would have had to be of a very
exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those mundane
hours in which I dwelt in my skin,327 my well-­brushed hair, my
starched shirtfront, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of
what constituted for me the pleasure of life.
“Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme de Guermantes,
who felt that the German prince was wanting in tact. “I find King

Chapter 2 581
 The Guermantes Way

328. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people
Flower, 55. think. And the queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve
ever seen in the world.”
“But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the prince, who was losing
his temper and did not see that he was giving offense, “you must
admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person,
there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody
would have been willing to shake hands with him. The queen is
ravishing, exceedingly sweet, and limited. But after all, there is
something shocking about a royal couple who are literally kept by
their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills
they ought to pay themselves, and name them baronets in return.
It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria . . .”
“He’s our cousin,” put in the duchess. “He’s a clever fellow.”
“He’s mine, too,” said the prince, “but we don’t think he’s a
good fellow on that account. No, it is with us that you should
form a rapprochement, it’s the kaiser’s dearest wish, but he insists
on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a
hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air!’ With that, you
would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-­
French rapprochement that M. de Norpois preaches.”
“You know him, of course,” the duchess said, turning to me,
so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that
M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted
to kiss his hand,328 thinking that he had no doubt repeated this
story to Mme de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken
of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship
with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridicu-
lous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He
would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him
see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appear-
ance of being the deliberate cause of the ambassador’s slanders,
which would then have been no more than lying and calculated
reprisals. I said, on the other hand, that, to my great regret, I was

582 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me. “You are quite mis- 329. “How long it’s been since the
taken,” replied the duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You woman with whom I slept / Oh, Lord,
left my bed for yours!” These lines are
can ask Basin; for if people give me the reputation of only saying from Victor Hugo’s poem “Booz en-
nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we have dormi” in La Légende des siècles. This
never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke poem, inspired by the book of Ruth,
was one of Proust’s favorites; he quotes
to us of you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you from it several times over the course of
a fine post at the ministry. Since he knew that you were not very the novel.
strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of
his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded
admiration.” M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I
would have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was
that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious man,
those who had let themselves be taken in as I had by his outward
appearance of a Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak tree,
by the sounds, easily modulated to pity, that emerged from his
somewhat too tuneful lips, believed in a deliberate betrayal when
they learned of a slander uttered at their expense by a man who
had always seemed to put his whole heart into his words. These
slanders were frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent
him from liking people, from praising those he liked and taking
pleasure in showing that he could be of use to them.
“Not that I’m in the least surprised at his appreciating you,”
said Mme de Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can
quite understand,” she added, for the benefit of the rest of the
party, alluding to a planned marriage of which I knew nothing,
“that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old mis-
tress, may not seem of very much use to him as a young wife.
Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she has ceased
for years now to serve any practical purpose. Her only relations, if
I may say so, are with God. She is more bigoted than you might
think and Boaz-­Norpois can say, in the words of Victor Hugo:

“Voilà longtemps que celle avec qui j’ai dormi,

Ô Seigneur, a quitté ma couche pour la vôtre! 329

Chapter 2 583
 The Guermantes Way

330. In fact, Mme de Villeparisis is the “Really, my poor aunt is like those avant-­garde artists who have
daughter of Cyrus de Bouillon. See In stood out all their lives against the Académie, and in the end start a
the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 328.
little academy of their own, or the unfrocked priests who fabricate
a religion of their own. They should either keep their frocks, or not
stick to their profession. And who knows,” went on the duchess
with a meditative air, “it may be in anticipation of widowhood,
there’s nothing sadder than the weeds one’s not entitled to wear.”
“Ah! If Mme de Villeparisis were to become Mme de Norpois,
I really believe our cousin Gilbert would take to his bed,” said
Général de Monserfeuil.
“The Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he is,
really, very much taken up with questions of birth and etiquette,”
said the Princesse de Parme. “I went down to spend a few days
with them in the country, when the princess, unfortunately, was
ill in bed. I was accompanied by Petite.” (This was a nickname
that was given to Mme d’Hunolstein because she was enormously
stout.) “The prince came to meet me at the foot of the steps and
pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the first floor, to the
entrance to the reception rooms, and then, stepping back to make
way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how do you do, Mme d’Hunolstein?’ (he
always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have
caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to show her that he
did not have to come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,”
said the duke, who regarded himself as extremely modern, more
contemptuous than anyone in the world of mere birth, and in
fact a republican, “that I don’t have many ideas in common with
my cousin. Madame can imagine that we are just about as much
agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if
my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I would be of Gilbert’s
opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise330 and then
to make a marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to
make a cat laugh; what more can I say?” These last words, which
the duke uttered as a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here
quite superfluous. But he felt a perpetual need to say them, which

584 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

made him postpone them to the end of a speech if he had found 331. Jean Poton (c. 1400–1461), Seig-
no place for them elsewhere. They were for him, among other neur de Xaintrailles or Saintrailles,
fought beside Jeanne d’Arc and became
things, almost a question of prosody. “Remember, though,” he Maréchal de France in 1451.
added, “that the Norpois are gallant gentlemen with a good place,
of a good stock.”
“Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke
fun at Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he
does,” said Mme de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a
family, no less than that of a wine, consisted precisely, as it did
for the prince and for the Duc de Guermantes, in its age. But,
less frank than her cousin and more subtle than her husband,
she made a point of never in her conversation playing false to the
Guermantes spirit and despised rank in her speech while ready to
honor it by her actions.
“But aren’t you even some sort of cousins?” asked Général de
Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La
Rochefoucauld.”
“Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs
de La Rochefoucauld; my grandmother comes from the Ducs
de Doudeauville. She was the grandmother of Édouard Coco,
the wisest man in the family,” replied the duke, whose views of
wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t
intermarried since Louis XIV’s time; the connection would be
rather distant.”
“Really, that’s interesting; I never knew that,” said the general.
“However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe,
was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally
been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But since those Mont-
morencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Au-
vergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it
gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be
more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles,331 and
since we ourselves are in a direct line of descent . . .”
There was at Combray a rue de Saintrailles, to which I had
never given another thought. It led from the rue de la Bretonnerie

Chapter 2 585
 The Guermantes Way

to the rue de l’Oiseau. And since Saintrailles, the companion of

Joan of Arc, had, by marrying a Guermantes, brought into that
family the county of Combray, his arms were quartered with those
of Guermantes at the base of one of the windows in Saint-­Hilaire.
I saw again a vision of dark sandstone steps, while a modulation
of sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the for-
gotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from
that in which it was used to designate the genial hosts with whom
I was dining this evening. If the name Duchesse de Guermantes
was for me a collective name, it was so not merely in history, by
the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne
it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already
seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different
women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as
the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change
their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space
of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough
to be able to remain faithful. We do not have room enough, in our
current mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living.
We are obliged to build over what has gone before and is brought
to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles
had just wrought in my mind. I felt that it would be useless to ex-
plain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had lied by implica-
tion in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me: “You
don’t know our little village?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that
I did know it, and it was only from good breeding that he did
not press the question. Mme de Guermantes drew me out of my
meditation.
“Really, I find all that sort of thing too deadly. Listen, it’s not
always as boring as this at my house. I hope that you will soon
come and dine again as a compensation, with no genealogies next
time,” she murmured to me, incapable both of appreciating the
kind of charm that I could find in her house and of having suf-
ficient humility to be content to appeal to me simply as a her-
barium, filled with plants of another day.

586 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

What Mme de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my 332. Most of the action in Shake-
expectations was on the contrary what in the end—for the duke speare’s most famous play takes place
in the castle of Elsinore in Denmark. In
and the general went on to discuss genealogies now without stop- the second questionnaire, now known
ping—saved my evening from becoming a complete disappoint- as the Proust Questionnaire, the author
ment. How could I have felt otherwise until now? Each of my answered the question: “Your hero
in fiction?” “Hamlet.” Marcel Proust,
fellow guests at dinner, rigging out the mysterious name under Contre Sainte-­Beuve (1971), 337.
which I had only at a distance known and dreamed of them in a 333. Catherine de Clèves, the widowed
body and with a mind similar or inferior to those of all the people Princesse de Porcien, married, around
1570, Henri I de Lorraine, Prince de
I knew, had given me the impression of flat vulgarity that the view Joinville and Duc de Guise.
on entering the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any pas-
sionate admirer of Hamlet.332 No doubt those geographical regions
and the ancient past that put forest glades and Gothic belfries
into their names had in a certain measure formed their faces, their
minds, and their prejudices, but survived in them only as does the
cause in the effect, that is to say as a thing possible for the intelli-
gence to extract but in no way perceptible to the imagination.
And these old-­time prejudices restored in a flash to the friends
of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry. Assuredly, the
notions in the possession of nobles, which make of them the
scholars, the etymologists of the language not of words but of
names (and this, moreover, only relatively to the ignorant mass of
the middle classes, for if at the same level of mediocrity a devout
Catholic would be better able to stand questioning on the de-
tails of the liturgy than a freethinker, on the other hand an anti-
clerical archaeologist can often give points to his parish priest on
everything connected even with the latter’s own church), those
notions, if we are going to confine ourselves to the truth, that is
to say to the spirit, did not even have for these great seigneurs the
charm that they would have had for a bourgeois. They knew per-
haps better than myself that the Duchesse de Guise was Princess
of Clèves, of Orléans, and of Porcien,333 and all the rest, but they
had known, long before they knew all these names, the face of the
Duchesse de Guise, which thenceforth that name reflected back
to them. I had begun with the fairy, even if she was fated soon to
perish, they with the woman.

Chapter 2 587
 The Guermantes Way

334. Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux In middle-­class families one sometimes sees jealousies spring
(1619–92) is the author of Historiettes up if the younger sister is married before the elder. So the aris-
(1657–75), a chronicle of the times of
Louis XIII and the regency of Anne tocratic world, Courvoisiers especially but Guermantes also, re-
d’Autriche. The first quotation cited duced its ennobled greatness to simple domestic superiorities, by
by Proust is attributed to Louis VII de virtue of childish behavior that I had met originally (and this was
Rohan, Prince de Guéménée and Duc
de Montbazon. for me its sole charm) in books. Is it not just as though Talle-
335. This anecdote concerns one of the mant des Réaux334 were speaking of the Guermantes, and not of
sons of the Prince de Guéménée. The the Rohans, when he relates with evident satisfaction how M. de
Chevalier de Rohan’s father was in fact
Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons, Guéménée cried to his brother: “You can come in here; this is
and not, as Proust maintains, the Duc not the Louvre!” and said of the Chevalier de Rohan (because he
de Clermont. À la recherche du temps was a natural son of the Duc de Clermont): “He, at any rate, is a
perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade edi-
tion], 1988), 2: 822, n. 2. Prince!”335 The only thing that distressed me in all this talk was
336. Proust uses both the masculine to find that the absurd stories that were being circulated about
(cousin) and feminine (cousine) form the charming Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg found as
of the word.
much credence in this drawing room as they had among Saint-­
Loup’s friends. Plainly it was an epidemic that would not last
longer than perhaps a year or two but had meanwhile infected
everyone. People repeated the same old stories, or enriched them
with others equally untrue. I gathered that the Princesse de Lux-
embourg herself, while apparently defending her nephew, sup-
plied weapons for the assault. “You are wrong to stand up for
him,” M. de Guermantes told me, as Saint-­L oup had told me be-
fore. “Why, without taking into consideration the opinion of our
family, who are unanimous about him, you have only to talk to
his servants, and they, after all, are the people who know him best.
M. de Luxembourg gave his little Negro page to his nephew. The
Negro came back in tears: ‘Grand Duke beaten me; me no bad
boy; Grand Duke naughty man, it’s really too much.’ And I can
speak with some knowledge, he’s Oriane’s cousin.”
I cannot, by the way, say how many times in the course of
this evening I heard the word “cousin” used.336 On the one hand,
M. de Guermantes, almost at every name that was mentioned, ex-
claimed: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin!” with the sudden joy of a man
who, lost in a forest, reads at the ends of a pair of arrows pointing
in opposite directions on a guidepost, and followed by quite a

588 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

low number of miles, the words: “Belvédère Casimir-­Perier” and 337. There are in the forest of Fontaine-
“Croix du Grand-­Veneur,”337 and gathers from them that he is on bleau a cross of the Grand-­Veneur and
a Casimir-­Perier highway that are about
the right road. On the other hand the word “cousin” was employed five miles apart.
in a wholly different connection (which was here the exception to 338. In The Anabasis, Xenophon relates
the prevailing rule) by the Turkish ambassadress, who had come the story of how he directed the retreat
across Asia of the ten thousand Greek
in after dinner. Devoured by social ambition and endowed with mercenaries engaged by Cyrus the
a real power of assimilating knowledge, she would pick up with Younger, who had attempted to con-
equal facility the story of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand338 or quer the Persian Empire ruled by his
brother Artaxerxes. After the defeat of
the details of sexual perversion among birds. It would have been Cunaxa, the Greeks returned to their
impossible to catch her out on any of the most recent German country.
publications, whether they dealt with political economy, mental 339. Epicurus (341–270 b.c.) was a
Greek philosopher who did not believe
aberrations, the various forms of onanism, or the philosophy of in the existence of any hereafter and
Epicurus.339 She was, incidentally, a dangerous woman to listen taught that one should seek to achieve
to, for, perpetually in error, she would point out to you as being happiness by a responsible and natural
use of pleasure. He is the founder of
of the loosest morals women of irreproachable virtue, would put the epicurean school.
you on your guard against a gentleman whose intentions were per- 340. The rue Vaneau is in the seventh
fectly honorable, and would tell you anecdotes of the sort that arrondissement.
341. This is an allusion to the verse line
seem always to have come out of a book, not so much because (“L’autre exemple est tiré d’animaux
they are serious as because they are so wildly improbable. plus petits”) that serves as a transition
She was at this period little received in society. She had been between fables 11 (“The Lion and the
Rat”) and 12 (“The Dove and the Ant”)
going for some weeks now to the houses of women of real social of book II of La Fontaine’s Fables.
brilliance, such as the Duchesse de Guermantes, but as a general
rule had confined herself, of necessity, in the noblest families, to
obscure scions whom the Guermantes had ceased to know. She
hoped to give herself a really fashionable air by quoting the most
historic names of the little-­known people who were her friends. At
once M. de Guermantes, thinking that she was referring to people
who frequently dined at his table, quivered with joy at finding
himself once more in sight of a landmark and shouted the rallying
cry: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin! I know him as well as I know my
own name. He lives in the rue Vaneau.340 His mother was Mlle
d’Uzès.”
The ambassadress was obliged to admit that her specimen had
been drawn from smaller game.341 She tried to connect her friends
with those of M. de Guermantes by cutting across his track: “I

Chapter 2 589
 The Guermantes Way

342. French aristocrats frequently mar- know quite well who it is you mean. No, it’s not those ones,
ried rich American women during the they’re cousins.” But this crosscurrent launched by the unfortu-
Belle Époque. In 1893, Prince Edmond
de Polignac (1834–1901) married Win- nate ambassadress ran but a little way. For M. de Guermantes, dis-
naretta Singer (1865–1943), heiress to appointed, answered: “Oh, then I don’t know who you’re talking
the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. about.” The ambassadress offered no reply, for if she never knew
See Le Salon de la Princesse Edmond
de Polignac in Marcel Proust, Contre anyone nearer than the “cousins” of those whom she ought to
Sainte-­Beuve (1971), 464–69. Proust have known in person, very often these cousins were not even re-
published the piece in Le Figaro, Sep- lated at all. Then from the lips of M. de Guermantes, would flow
tember 6, 1903, under a pseudonym.
In 1895, Boniface de Castellane married a fresh wave of “But she’s Oriane’s cousin,” words that seemed to
Anna Gould, daughter of “the king of have for M. de Guermantes the same practical value in each of
American railways.” She later divorced his sentences as certain epithets, convenient to the Roman poets
him and in 1908 married the Prince de
Sagan. Proust was well acquainted with because they provided them with dactyls or spondees for their
the Polignacs and with the Castellanes. hexameters. At least the explosion of: “But she’s Oriane’s cousin,”
343. François Le Tellier, Marquis de appeared to me quite natural when applied to the Princesse de
Louvois (1641–91), was minister of war
under Louis XIV. Guermantes, who was indeed very closely related to the duchess.
The ambassadress did not seem to care for this princess. She said
to me in an undertone: “She is stupid. No, she is not so beautiful
as all that. That reputation is usurped. Anyhow,” she went on, with
an air at once reflective, rejecting, and decisive, “I find her ex-
ceedingly antipathetic.” But often the cousinship extended a great
deal farther than this, Mme de Guermantes making it a point of
honor to address as “Aunt” ladies with whom it would have been
impossible to find her an ancestress in common without going
back at least to Louis XV; just as, whenever the “hardness” of the
times brought it about that an American multimillionairess mar-
ried a prince342 whose great-­great-­grandfather had married, as
had Oriane’s also, a daughter of Louvois,343 one of the chief joys
of the American was to be able, after a first visit to the Hôtel de
Guermantes, where she was, incidentally, more or less coldly re-
ceived and more or less dissected, to say “Aunt” to Mme de Guer-
mantes, who allowed her to do so with a maternal smile. But little
did it matter to me what “birth” meant for M. de Guermantes and
M. de Monserfeuil; in the conversations that they held on the sub-
ject, I sought only a poetic pleasure. Without being conscious of
it themselves, they procured me this pleasure as might a couple of

590 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

farm laborers or sailors speaking of the soil or the tides, realities 344. Proust is alluding to two mur-
too little detached from their own lives for them to be capable of ders that he read about in the memoirs
of Mme de Boigne. Charles de Choi-
enjoying the beauty that personally I proceeded to extract from seul, Duc de Praslin murdered his wife
them. in 1847 and then poisoned himself.
Sometimes rather than of a race it was of a particular fact, of a Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon, Duc
de Berry (1778–1820), was stabbed by
date that a name reminded me. Hearing M. de Guermantes recall a workingman named Louvel in 1820.
that M. de Bréauté’s mother had been a Choiseul and his grand- Later, his wife had erected a tomb to
mother a Lucinge, I imagined I could see beneath the common- contain her husband’s heart.
345. Maria Juana Iñigo Teresa de Ca-
place shirt with its plain pearl studs, bleeding still in two globes barrus (1773–1835), called Mme Tallien,
of crystal, those august relics, the hearts of Mme de Praslin and of was the daughter of the Spanish ambas-
the Duc de Berry.344 Others were more voluptuous: the fine and sador to France before the Revolution.
She married the Marquis de Fontenay,
flowing hair of Mme de Tallien345 or Mme de Sabran.346 was imprisoned during the Terror, and
Sometimes it was not a simple relic that I saw. Better informed was liberated by Jean-­Lambert Tallien,
than his wife as to what their ancestors had been, M. de Guer- whom she later married.
346. Madeleine Louise Charlotte de
mantes possessed memories that gave to his conversation a fine Poix, Comtesse de Sabran (1693–1768),
air of an ancient dwelling stripped of its real treasures but still full was one of the mistresses of the regent
of paintings, authentic, indifferent, and majestic, which taken as Philippe d’Orléans.
347. Marie-­Christine d’Orléans (1813–
a whole are quite impressive. The Prince d’Agrigente having asked 39), daughter of Louis-­Philippe and the
why Prince Von had said, in speaking of the Duc d’Aumale, “my sister of the Duc d’Aumale, had mar-
uncle,” M. de Guermantes had replied: “Because his mother’s ried Duc Alexandre de Wurtemberg
(1804–85) in 1837.
brother, the Duke of Wurtemberg, married a daughter of Louis-­ 348. Vittore Carpaccio painted The
Philippe.”347 At once I was lost in contemplation of a shrine, such Legend of Saint Ursula between 1490
as Carpaccio348 or Memling349 used to paint, from its first panel and 1496. Proust must have seen the
painting at the Accademia during his
in which the princess, at the wedding festivities of her brother two stays in Venice in 1900.
the Duc d’Orléans, appeared wearing a plain garden dress to in- 349. Hans Memling (1430–94) painted
dicate her resentment at having seen the return, empty-­handed, The Reliquary of Saint Ursula in 1489. It
is in the Memling Museum in Bruges.
of the ambassadors who had been sent to sue on her behalf for 350. Such a castle is located in Würt-
the hand of the Prince of Syracuse, down to the last, in which temberg, Germany.
she had just given birth to a son, the Duke of Wurtemberg (the 351. Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709–58),
sister of Frederick the Great, mar-
uncle of the prince with whom I had just dined), in that château ried, in 1731, Frederick, the Margrave
called Fantaisie,350 one of those places that are as aristocratic as of Brandenburg-­Bayreuth. She wrote
certain families. Such places, moreover, outlasting a single genera- her Mémoires in French; they cover the
period 1706–42 and were published
tion of men, see attached to themselves more than one historical in 1810.
personage. In this one, especially, survive side by side memories of
the Margravine of Bayreuth,351 of that other somewhat fantastic

Chapter 2 591
 The Guermantes Way

352. Louis II de Wittelsbach (1845–86), princess (the Duc d’Orléans’s sister), to whom it was said that the
King of Bavaria from 1864 to 1886, was name of her husband’s château made a distinct appeal, of the King
the protector of Richard Wagner, whom
he aided financially to build the new of Bavaria,352 and finally of Prince Von, to whom it was simply
theater in Bayreuth in 1876. He com- his own address, at which he had just asked the Duc de Guer-
mitted suicide by drowning himself in mantes to write to him, for he had inherited it and rented it only
the lake of Starnberg.
353. Edmond-­Melchior-­Jean-­Marie, during the Wagner festivals, to the Prince de Polignac, another de-
Prince de Polignac was an accom- lightful “fantasist.”353 When M. de Guermantes, to explain how
plished musician, as was his wife, Win- he was related to Mme d’Arpajon, was obliged, going so far and
naretta. He is among those portrayed
in James Tissot’s 1868 painting Le so simply, to climb the chain formed by the joined hands of three
Cercle de la rue Royale. or five ancestresses back to Marie-­L ouise354 or Colbert,355 it was
354. Marie-­Louise (1791–1847) was the still the same thing in each case, a great historical event appeared
daughter of François II of Austria and
Napoléon’s second wife. only in passing, masked, unnatural, reduced, in the name of a
355. Jean-­Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), property, in the given names of a woman, so selected because she
the son of a cloth merchant in Reims, was the granddaughter of Louis-­Philippe and Marie-­Amélie, con-
became minister of finances during the
reign of Louis XIV. He is regarded as sidered no longer as king and queen of the French, but only to
one of France’s greatest ministers and the extent that in their capacity as grandparents they bequeathed
was the first to place in operation a real a heritage. (We see for other reasons in a dictionary of the works
financial policy.
356. In Balzac’s novel Une Ténébreuse of Balzac, where the most illustrious personages figure only ac-
Affaire (1841), the Marquise de Cinq-­ cording to their connection with La Comédie Humaine, Napo-
Cygne seeks out Napoléon on the léon occupying a space considerably less than that allotted to Ras-
battlefield of Iéna to plead with him to
pardon her cousins. tignac, and occupying that space solely because he once spoke to
357. We have seen that Proust often the young ladies of Cinq-­Cygne.)356 Similarly the aristocracy, in
compares members of the aristocracy its heavy structure, pierced with rare windows, admitting a scanty
to the architecture of the era in which
they wielded great power. The profound daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar but also the same
connections of these families with the massive and blind force as Romanesque architecture, embodies all
history of France is a topic that greatly our history, immures it, frowns upon it.357
interested Proust and his Narrator.
358. This paragraph summarizes Thus the empty spaces of my memory were covered by degrees
Proust’s ideal of artistic and literary with names that in taking order, in composing themselves with re-
construction. lation to one another, in linking themselves to one another by in-
creasingly numerous connections, resembled those finished works
of art in which there is not one touch that is isolated, in which
every part in turn receives from the rest a justification that it con-
fers on them.358
M. de Luxembourg’s name having come up again in the course
of the conversation, the Turkish ambassadress told us how, when

592 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

the young bride’s grandfather (he who had made that immense 359. This is an allusion to La Fontaine’s
fortune out of flour and pasta) had invited M. de Luxembourg to fable “Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne”
(The miller, his son, and the donkey),
lunch, the latter had written to decline, putting on the envelope: Fables, book III, fable 1.
“M. de So-­and-­So, miller,” to which the grandfather had replied:
“I am all the more disappointed that you were not able to come,
my dear friend, because I would have been able to enjoy your so-
ciety quite intimately, for we were a small party, just ourselves, and
there would have been only the miller, his son, and you.”359 This
story was not merely utterly distasteful to me, who knew the im-
possibility of my dear M. de Nassau’s writing to his wife’s grand-
father (whose fortune, moreover, he was expecting to inherit) and
addressing him as “miller”; but furthermore its stupidity became
glaring from the start, the word “miller” having obviously been
dragged in only to lead up to the title of La Fontaine’s fable. But
there is in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain a silliness so great, when
it is aggravated by malice, that everyone agreed that the letter had
been “well said” and that the grandfather, as to whom at once
everyone confidently declared that he was a remarkable man, had
shown a prettier wit than his grandson-­in-­law. The Duc de Châ-
tellerault tried to take advantage of this story to tell the one that I
had heard in the café: “Everyone had to lie down!”—but scarcely
had he begun, or reported M. de Luxembourg’s pretension that in
his wife’s presence M. de Guermantes ought to stand up, when the
duchess stopped him with the protest: “No, he is very absurd, but
not as bad as that.” I was privately convinced that all these stories
at the expense of M. de Luxembourg were equally untrue, and
that whenever I found myself face to face with any of the reputed
actors or spectators I would hear the same denial. I asked myself,
nevertheless, whether the denial just uttered by Mme de Guer-
mantes had been inspired by regard for truth or by self-­esteem. In
either event the latter quality succumbed to malice, for she went
on, with a laugh: “Not that I haven’t had my little snub too, for
he invited me to lunch, wishing to introduce me to the Grand
Duchess of Luxembourg, which is how he has the good taste to
describe his wife when he’s writing to his aunt. I sent a reply ex-

Chapter 2 593
 The Guermantes Way

pressing my regret, and adding: As for the ‘Grand Duchess of

Luxembourg’ (in quotation marks), tell her that if she is coming
to see me, I am at home every Thursday after five. I have even had
another little snub. Happening to be at Luxembourg, I telephoned
and asked to speak to him. His Highness was going to lunch, had
just risen from lunch, two hours went by and nothing happened;
so then I employed another method: ‘Will you tell the Comte de
Nassau to come and speak to me?’ Cut to the quick, he was at the
apparatus that very minute.” Everyone laughed at the duchess’s
story, and at other analogous, that is to say (I am convinced of
it) equally untrue stories, for a man more intelligent, better, more
refined, in a word more exquisite than this Luxembourg-­Nassau I
have never met. The sequel will show that it was I who was in the
right. I must admit that, in the midst of her onslaught, Mme de
Guermantes had still a kind word for him.
“He was not always like that,” she informed us. “Before he went
off his head, like the man in the storybooks who thinks he’s be-
come king, he was no fool, and indeed in the early days of his en-
gagement he used to speak of it in really quite a nice way, as some-
thing he could never have dreamed of: ‘It’s just like a fairy tale; I
will have to make my entry into Luxembourg in a fairy coach,’ he
said to his Uncle d’Ornessan, who answered—for you know it’s
not a very big place, Luxembourg: ‘A fairy coach! I’m afraid, my
dear fellow, you’d never get it in. I would suggest that you take a
goat cart.’ Not only did this not annoy Nassau, but he was the first
to tell us the story, and to laugh at it.”
“Ornessan is a witty fellow, and he’s every reason to be; his
mother was a Montjeu. He’s in a very bad way now, poor Or-
nessan.”
This name had the magic virtue of interrupting the flow of stale
witticisms that otherwise would have gone on forever. In fact,
M. de Guermantes had to explain that M. d’Ornessan’s great-­
grandmother had been the sister of Marie de Castille Montjeu, the
wife of Timoléon de Lorraine, and consequently Oriane’s aunt,
with the result that the conversation drifted back to genealogies,

594 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

while the imbecile Turkish ambassadress breathed in my ear: “You

appear to be very much in the duke’s good books; en garde!” and,
on my demanding an explanation: “I mean to say, you understand
what I mean, he’s a man to whom one could safely entrust one’s
daughter, but not one’s son.” Now if ever, on the contrary, a man
existed who was passionately and exclusively a lover of women, it
was certainly the Duc de Guermantes. The state of error, the false-
hood fatuously believed to be the truth, were for the ambassadress
like a vital element out of which she could not move. “His brother
Mémé, who is, as it happens, for other reasons altogether” (he
did not bow to her) “profoundly uncongenial to me, is genuinely
distressed by the duke’s morals. So is their Aunt Villeparisis. Ah,
now, her I adore! There is a saint of a woman for you, the true type
of the great ladies of the past. It’s not only her actual virtue that’s
so wonderful but her restraint. She still says ‘Monsieur’ to Ambas-
sador Norpois, whom she sees every day, and who, by the way, left
an excellent impression behind him in Turkey.”
I did not even reply to the ambassadress, in order to listen to
the genealogies. They were not all of them important. There came
up indeed in the course of the conversation one of those unex-
pected alliances, which, M. de Guermantes informed me, was a
misalliance, but not without charm, for, uniting under the July
Monarchy the Duc de Guermantes and the Duc de Fezensac with
the two irresistible daughters of an eminent navigator, it gave the
two duchesses the exciting novelty of a grace exotically middle
class, “Louisphilippically” Indian. Or else, under Louis XIV,
a Norpois had married the daughter of the Duc de Mortemart,
whose illustrious title struck, in the remoteness of that epoch, the
name—which I had found lackluster and might have supposed
to be recent—of Norpois, carving deeply upon it the beauty of
an old medal. And in these cases, moreover, it was not only the
less well-­known name that benefited by the association; the other,
grown commonplace by the fact of its luster, struck me more
forcibly in this novel and more obscure aspect, just as among the
portraits painted by a brilliant colorist the most striking is some-

Chapter 2 595
 The Guermantes Way

360. The Duchy of Reggio, which be- times one that is all in black. The sudden mobility with which all
longed from 1290 to the famous family these names seemed to me to have been endowed, as they sprang
d’Este, was given in 1809 by Napoléon
to Nicolas-­Charles Oudinot, Maréchal to take their places by the side of others from which I would have
de France, for his bravery at the battle supposed them to be remote, was due not to my ignorance alone;
of Wagram. the toing-­and-­froing that they were performing in my mind they
361. A Chouan was any member of
a band of peasants in Brittany, Nor- had carried out no less easily at those epochs in which a title,
mandy, and Anjou who in 1793 rebelled being always attached to a piece of land, used to follow it from
in the west of France against the Revo- one family to another, so much so that, for example, in the fine
lutionary Convention. After 1793, the
movement joined forces with other feudal structure that is the title of Duc de Nemours or Duc de
royalists fighting on behalf of the mon- Chevreuse, I was able to discover successively hidden, as in the
archy. hospitable abode of a hermit-­crab, a Guise, a Prince of Savoy, an
Orléans, a Luynes. Sometimes several remained in competition
for a single shell: for the Principality of Orange, the Royal House
of the Netherlands and MM. de Mailly-­Nesle; for the Duchy of
Brabant the Baron de Charlus and the Royal House of Belgium;
various others for the titles of Prince of Naples, Duke of Parma,
Duke of Reggio.360 Sometimes it was the other way; the shell had
been so long uninhabited by proprietors long since dead that it
had never occurred to me that this or that name of a château could
have been, at an epoch that after all was comparatively recent,
the name of a family. And so, when M. de Guermantes replied
to a question put to him by M. de Monserfeuil: “No, my cousin
was a fanatical royalist; she was the daughter of the Marquis de
Féterne, who played a certain part in the Chouan uprising,”361
on seeing this name Féterne, which had been for me, since my
stay at Balbec, the name of a château, become, what I had never
dreamed that it could possibly be, a family name, I felt the same
astonishment as in reading a fairy tale, where turrets and a terrace
come to life and turn into men and women. In this sense of the
words, we may say that history, even mere family history, gives
life to old stones. There have been in Parisian society men who
played as considerable a part in it, who were more sought after
for their distinction or for their wit, who were equally well born
as the Duc de Guermantes or the Duc de La Trémoïlle. They have
now fallen into oblivion because, as they left no descendants, their

596 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

name, which we no longer hear, sounds like a name unknown; at 362. The actual château de Guermantes
most, the name of a thing beneath which we never think to dis- is located in the département of Seine-­
et-­Marne.
cover the name of any person, it survives in some château, some 363. Charlotte-­Élisabeth de Bavière
remote village. The day is not distant when the traveler who, in (1652–1722), called la Palatine, was the
the heart of Burgundy, stops in the little village of Charlus to look daughter of Louis, the Palatine Elector
of the Rhine, and the second wife of
at its church, if he is not studious enough or is in too great a Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans, brother of
hurry to examine its tombstones, will go away ignorant that this Louis XIV. Her letters, describing life
name, Charlus, was that of a man who ranked with the highest in at the court, were published posthu-
mously in 1863 as Correspondance com-
the land. This thought reminded me that it was time to go, and plète de Madame Duchesse d’Orléans née
that while I was listening to M. de Guermantes talking pedigrees, Princesse Palatine.
the hour was approaching at which I had promised to call upon 364. Françoise Bertaut, Dame Langlois
de Motteville (c. 1615–89), was lady-­
his brother. “Who knows,” I continued to muse, “whether one in-­waiting and confidant of Queen
day Guermantes itself may appear as nothing more than a place-­ Anne of Austria. She is the author of
name,362 save to the archaeologists who, stopping by chance at Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Anne
d’Autriche de 1615 à 1666, published in
Combray and standing beneath the window of Gilbert the Bad, 1723.
have the patience to listen to the account given them by Théo- 365. Charles-­Joseph, Prince de Ligne
dore’s successor or to read the Curé’s guidebook?” But so long (1735–1814), diplomat and Belgian
writer, made numerous voyages
as a great name is not extinct, it keeps in the full light of day throughout Europe and kept company
those men and women who bear it; and there can be no doubt with the most important personali-
that, to a certain extent, the interest that the illustriousness of ties of his day: Frederick II of Prussia,
Catherine the Great of Russia, Voltaire,
these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact that one can, Rousseau, Goethe, and others. His
starting from today, follow their ascending course, step by step, writings have been collected under the
to a point far beyond the fourteenth century, recover the diaries title Mélanges militaires, littéraires et
sentimentaires (34 vols: 1795–1811).
and correspondence of all the forebears of M. de Charlus, of the
Prince d’Agrigente, of the Princesse de Parme, in a past in which
an impenetrable night would cloak the origins of a middle-­class
family, and in which we make out, in the luminous backward pro-
jection of a name, the origin and persistence of certain nervous
characteristics, certain vices, the disorders of one or another Guer-
mantes. Almost identical pathologically with their namesakes of
the present day, they excite from century to century the startled
interest of their correspondents, whether these be anterior to the
Princesse Palatine363 and Mme de Motteville,364 or subsequent to
the Prince de Ligne.365
However, my historical curiosity was faint in comparison with

Chapter 2 597
 The Guermantes Way

366. The Damas family was from Bur- my esthetic pleasure. The names cited had the effect of disincar-
gundy and has been known since the nating the duchess’s guests, whom, for all they might call them-
eleventh century as one of the oldest
and most prominent noble families of selves Prince d’Agrigente or de Cystira, their mask of flesh and un-
France. intelligence or vulgar intelligence had transformed into ordinary
367. The Duchy of Modena was con- mortals, so much so that I had made my landing on the ducal
stituted in 1452 to the benefit of
the House of Este. The last Duke of doormat not as upon the threshold (as I had supposed) but as
Modena, François V (1819–75), reigned at the termination of the enchanted world of names. The Prince
until the annexation of the duchy by the d’Agrigente himself, as soon as I heard that his mother had been a
Kingdom of Italy in 1859. In the 1890s,
the Marquis de Modène was living in Damas,366 a granddaughter of the Duke of Modena,367 was deliv-
Paris at 17, rue Marbeuf in the eighth ered, as from an unstable chemical alloy, from the face and speech
arrondissement. that prevented one from recognizing him, and went to form with
368. Antoine de Bourbon (1518–62),
Duc de Vendôme, became King of Damas and Modena, which themselves were only titles, a com-
Navarre in 1555 by his marriage to bination infinitely more seductive. Each name displaced by the
Jeanne d’Albret. Henri IV was their attractions of another, with which I had never suspected it of
son. Antoine converted to Catholicism,
fought his brother Louis I de Condé, having any affinity, left the unalterable position that it had occu-
and died during the siege of Rouen. pied in my brain, where familiarity had dulled it, and, speeding
369. Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-­ to join the Mortemarts, the Stuarts, or the Bourbons, traced with
Condé (1619–79), sister of the Grand
Condé, married Henri II, Duc de them branches of the most graceful design and an ever-­changing
Longueville. She had a famous lit- color. The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful
erary salon and was the mistress of La names—extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled—with
Rochefoucauld, author of the Maximes.
After the death of her son, she retired which I learned only now that it was connected, a new sense and
to the convent of the Carmelites. purpose, purely poetical. At the most, at the extremity of each
370. The Tree of Jesse is the gene- spray that burgeoned from the exalted stem, I could see it flower
alogical tree of Jesse, father of David
from whose ancestral line Jesus was in some face of a wise king or illustrious princess, like the father
born: “And there shall come forth a of Henri IV368 or the Duchesse de Longueville.369 But as these
rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a faces, different in this respect from those of the guests around
Branch shall grow out of his roots”:
Isaiah 11:1. Many artists of the Middle me, were not coated for me by any residue of physical experi-
Ages imagined a great tree growing ence or social mediocrity, they remained, in their handsome out-
out of the stomach of a sleeping Jesse, lines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names
with the Kings of Judah strung along
the stem with Jesus at the top. One that at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached them-
finds the Tree of Jesse depicted in the selves from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed
stained-­glass windows of the cathedrals with no foreign or opaque matter the buds—translucent, alter-
of Chartres and Beauvais and in the
Sainte-­Chapelle in Paris. nating, multicolored—that, like the ancestors of Jesus in the old
Jesse windows,370 blossomed on either side of the tree of glass.

598 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Already I had made several attempts to slip away, on account,

more than for any other reason, of the triviality that my presence
at it imparted to the gathering, although it was one of those that
I had long imagined as being so beautiful—as it would doubt-
less have been had there been no inconvenient witness present. At
least my departure would permit the other guests, once the pro-
fane intruder was no longer among them, to constitute themselves
at last into a secret conclave. They would be free to celebrate the
mysteries for the celebration of which they had met together, for it
could obviously not have been to talk of Franz Hals or of avarice,
and to talk of them in the same way as people talk in bourgeois
society. They uttered nothing but trivialities, doubtless because
I was in the room, and I felt with some compunction, on seeing
all these pretty women kept apart, that I was preventing them by
my presence from carrying on, in the most precious of its drawing
rooms, the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain. But
this departure that I was trying at every moment to effect, M. and
Mme de Guermantes carried the spirit of self-­sacrifice so far as to
postpone by detaining me. A more curious thing still, several of
the ladies who had come hurrying, delighted, beautifully dressed,
with constellations of jewels, to be present at a party that, through
my fault only, differed in no essential point from those that are
given elsewhere than in the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, no more
than one feels oneself at Balbec to be in a town that differs from
what one’s eyes are accustomed to see—several of these ladies re-
tired not at all disappointed, as they had every reason to be, but
thanking Mme de Guermantes most effusively for the delightful
evening that they had spent, as though on the other days, those on
which I was not present, nothing more occurred.
Was it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all these
people dressed themselves up and refused to allow the penetration
of middle-­class women into their exclusive drawing rooms—for
dinners such as this? Identical, had I been absent? The suspicion
flashed across my mind for a moment, but it was too absurd. Plain

Chapter 2 599
 The Guermantes Way

common sense enabled me to brush it aside. And then, if I had

adopted it, what would have been left of the name Guermantes,
already so degraded since Combray?
It struck me that these flower maidens were, to a strange ex-
tent, easily pleased with another person or eager to please that
person, for more than one of them, to whom I had not uttered,
during the whole course of the evening, more than two or three
casual remarks, the stupidity of which had left me blushing, made
a point, before leaving the drawing room, of coming to tell me,
fastening on me her fine caressing eyes, straightening as she spoke
the garland of orchids that followed the curve of her bosom, what
an intense pleasure it had been to her to make my acquaintance,
and to speak to me—a veiled allusion to an invitation to dinner—
of her desire to “arrange something” after she had “fixed a day”
with Mme de Guermantes. None of these flower ladies left the
room before the Princesse de Parme. The presence of that latter—
one must never depart before royalty—was one of the two rea-
sons, neither of which I had guessed, for which the duchess had
insisted so strongly on my remaining. As soon as Mme de Parme
had risen, it was like a deliverance. Each of the ladies having made
a genuflection before the princess, who raised her up from the
ground, they received from her, in a kiss, and like a benediction
that they had craved kneeling, the permission to ask for their
cloaks and carriages. With the result that there followed, at the
front door, a sort of stentorian recital of great names from the
History of France. The Princesse de Parme had forbidden Mme de
Guermantes to accompany her downstairs to the hall for fear of
her catching cold, and the duke had added: “There, Oriane, since
Madame gives you leave, remember what the doctor told you.”
“I am sure the Princesse de Parme was very pleased to dine with
you.” I knew the formula. The duke had come the whole way
across the drawing room in order to utter it before me with an
obliging, earnest air, as though he were handing me a diploma or
offering me a plateful of petits fours. And I guessed from the plea-
sure that he appeared to be feeling as he spoke, and which brought

600 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

so sweet an expression momentarily into his face, that the effort

that this represented for him was of the kind that he would con-
tinue to make to the very end of his life, like one of those honorific
and easy posts that, even when senile, one is still allowed to retain.
Just as I was about to leave, the lady-­in-­waiting reappeared
in the drawing room, having forgotten to take away some won-
derful carnations, sent up from Guermantes, that the duchess had
presented to Mme de Parme. The lady-­in-­waiting was somewhat
flushed, and one felt that she had just been receiving a scolding,
for the princess, so kind to everyone else, could not contain her
impatience at the stupidity of her attendant. And so the latter
picked up the carnations and ran quickly, but to preserve her air
of ease and independence flung at me as she passed: “The princess
says I’m keeping her waiting; she wants to be gone, and to have
the carnations as well. Well, I’m not a little bird, I can’t be in sev-
eral places at once.”
Alas! The rule of not leaving before royalty was not the only
one. I could not depart at once, for there was another: this was
that the famous lavishness, unknown to the Courvoisiers, with
which the Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, ex-
celled in entertaining their friends, was not only a material lav-
ishness, of the kind that I had often experienced with Robert de
Saint-­L oup, but also a lavish display of charming words, of cour-
teous actions, a whole system of verbal elegance supplied from a
veritable treasure-­house within. But since this last, in the idle-
ness of fashionable existence, must remain unemployed, it over-
flowed at times, sought an outlet in a sort of fugitive effusion, all
the more intense, which might, in Mme de Guermantes, have led
one to suppose a genuine affection for oneself. Which she did,
for that matter, feel at the moment when she let it overflow, for
she found then in the society of the friend, man or woman, with
whom she happened to be, a sort of intoxication, in no way sen-
sual, similar to the one that music produces in certain people;
she would suddenly detach a flower from her corsage, or a medal-
lion, and present it to someone with whom she would have liked

Chapter 2 601
 The Guermantes Way

371. Franz Schubert composed, in 1828, to prolong the evening, with a melancholy feeling all the while
six short pieces for piano: Musikalische that such a prolongation could have led to nothing but idle talk,
Momente (Musical Moments).
into which nothing could have passed of the nervous pleasure,
the fleeting emotion, similar to the first warm days of spring in
the impression they leave behind them of lassitude and regret. As
for the friend, it did not do for him to put too implicit a faith in
the promises, more exhilarating than anything he had ever heard,
tendered by these women who, because they feel with so much
more force the sweetness of a moment, make of it, with a delicacy,
a nobility of which normally constituted creatures are incapable,
a compelling masterpiece of grace and kindness, and no longer
have anything of themselves left to give when the next moment
has arrived. Their affection does not outlive the exaltation that has
dictated it; and the subtlety of mind that had then led them to
divine all the things that you wished to hear and to say them to
you will permit them just as easily, a few days later, to seize hold of
your absurdities and use them to entertain another of their visitors
with whom they will then be in the act of enjoying one of those
“musical moments” that are so brief.371
In the hall where I asked a footman for my snowboots, which
I had brought as a precaution against the snow, several flakes of
which had already fallen, to be converted rapidly into slush, not
having realized that they were hardly fashionable, I felt, at the con-
temptuous smile on all sides, a shame that rose to its highest pitch
when I saw that Mme de Parme had not gone and was watching
me put on my American “rubbers.” The princess came toward me.
“Oh! What a good idea,” she exclaimed, “it’s so practical! There’s
a sensible man for you. Madame, we will have to get a pair of
those,” she said to her lady-­in-­waiting, while the mockery of the
footmen turned to respect and the other guests crowded around
me to inquire where I had managed to find these marvels. “With
those on, you will have nothing to fear even if it starts snowing
again and you have a long way to go. You’re independent of the
weather,” the princess said to me.
“Oh! If it comes to that, your Royal Highness can be re-

602 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

assured,” broke in the lady-­in-­waiting with a knowing air, “it will 372. Proust heard this absurd expla-
not snow again.” nation in the salon of the Princesse
Mathilde.
“What do you know about it, Madame?” came witheringly 373. Pelure in the original, which can
from the excellent Princesse de Parme, whom nothing could so mean skin or peel, and in colloquial
exasperate as the stupidity of her lady-­in-­waiting. usage coat or an article of clothing.
This is another example of the some-
“I can assure your Royal Highness, it cannot snow again. It is a times astonishing vocabulary of the
physical impossibility.” Duc de Guermantes.
“But why?”
“It cannot snow anymore, they have taken the necessary steps
to prevent it, they have spread salt in the streets!”372
The simpleminded lady did not observe either the anger of the
princess or the mirth of the rest of her audience, for instead of re-
maining silent she said to me with a genial smile, paying no heed
to my repeated denials of any connection with Admiral Jurien de
la Gravière: “Not that it matters, after all. Monsieur must have
stout sea legs. What’s bred in the bone!”
Then, having escorted the Princesse de Parme to her carriage,
M. de Guermantes said to me, taking hold of my greatcoat: “Let
me help you into your skin.”373 He had ceased even to smile when
he employed this expression, for those that were most vulgar had
for that very reason, because of the Guermantes affectation of
simplicity, become aristocratic.
An elation that sank only into melancholy, because it was arti-
ficial, was what I also, although quite differently from Mme de
Guermantes, felt once I had finally left her house, in the carriage
that was taking me to that of M. de Charlus. We can as we choose
abandon ourselves to one or other of two forces, of which one rises
in ourselves, emanates from our deepest impressions, the other
comes to us from without. The first carries with it naturally a joy,
the joy that springs from the life of those who create. The other cur-
rent, the one that endeavors to introduce into us the movement by
which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is not accompanied
by pleasure; but we can add a pleasure to it, by a sort of backlash,
in an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom,
into melancholy, whence the gloomy faces of so many men of

Chapter 2 603
 The Guermantes Way

374. See Swann’s Way, 207–8. fashion, and all those nervous conditions that may lead to suicide.
375. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in Now, in the carriage that was taking me to M. de Charlus, I was a
Flower, 322–25.
prey to this second sort of elation, widely different from that given
to us by a personal impression, such as I had received in other car-
riages, once at Combray, in Dr. Percepied’s gig, from which I had
seen painted against the setting sun the steeples of Martinville,374
another day at Balbec, in Mme de Villeparisis’s barouche, when I
strove to identify the reminiscence that was suggested to me by
an avenue of trees.375 But in this third carriage, what I had before
my mind’s eye were those conversations that had seemed to me so
tedious at Mme de Guermantes’s dinner table, for example Prince
Von’s stories about the German emperor, General Botha, and the
British army. I had just slipped them into the internal stereoscope
through the lenses of which, once we are no longer ourselves, as
soon as, endowed with a worldly spirit, we wish to receive our life
only from other people, we cast into relief what they have said
and done. Like a tipsy man filled with tender feeling for the waiter
who has been serving him, I marveled at my good fortune, a good
fortune not noticed by me, it is true, at the actual moment, in
having dined with a person who knew Wilhelm II so well, and had
told stories about him that were—upon my word—really witty.
And, as I repeated to myself, with the prince’s German accent, the
story of General Botha, I laughed out loud, as though this laugh,
like certain kinds of applause that increase one’s inward admira-
tion, were necessary to the story as a corroboration of its comic
element. Through the magnifying lenses even those of Mme de
Guermantes’s pronouncements that had struck me as being stupid
(as for example the one about the Hals paintings that one ought
to see from the top of a streetcar) took on a life, a depth that were
extraordinary. And I must say that, even if this elation was quick
to subside, it was not altogether unreasonable. Just as there may
always come a day when we are glad to know the person whom
we despise more than anyone in the world because he happens to
be connected with a girl with whom we are in love, to whom he
can introduce us, and thus offers us both utility and gratification,

604 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

attributes in each of which we would have supposed him to be 376. Proust gives the autobiographical
permanently lacking, so there is no conversation, any more than sources for this in a letter to Bertrand
de Fénelon written in July 1904 de-
there are personal relations, from which we can be certain that we scribing a recent dinner that he had
will not one day derive some benefit. What Mme de Guermantes attended: “When I arrived the Duc de
had said to me about the paintings that it would be interesting to Gramont asked me to sign the visitors’
book which had already been signed
see, even from a streetcar, was untrue, but it contained a germ of by the other guests of that evening,
truth that was of value to me later on. and I was about to append my signa-
Similarly the verses of Victor Hugo that I had heard her quote ture underneath a tiny Gutman fol-
lowed by an enormous Fitz-­James . . .
were, it must be admitted, of a period earlier than that in which when the Duc . . . filled with anxiety by
he became something more than a new man, in which he brought my humble and confused demeanor
to light, in the order of evolution, a literary species till then un- (in addition to the fact that he knew
I wrote), addressed me in a tone at
known, endowed with more complex organs. In these early once imploring and peremptory these
poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting him- lapidary words: ‘Your name, Mon-
self, like Nature, with giving food for thought. His “thoughts” he sieur Proust, but no thoughts!’” Proust,
Selected Letters 2: 61–62.
at that time expressed in the most direct form, almost in the sense
in which the duke employed the word when, feeling it to be out
of date and a nuisance that the guests at his big parties at Guer-
mantes should, in the visitors’ book, append to their signatures a
philosophico-­poetical reflection, he used to warn newcomers in
an imploring tone: “Your name, my dear fellow, but no ‘thoughts’
please!”376 Now, it was these “thoughts” of Victor Hugo (almost
as entirely absent from La Légende des siècles as “tunes,” as “melo-
dies” are from Wagner’s later manner) that Mme de Guermantes
admired in the early Hugo. Nor was she altogether wrong. They
were touching, and already around about them, without their
form’s having yet the depth that it was to acquire only in later
years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes
rendered them unassimilable to the verses that one can discover
in a Corneille, for example, verses in which a Romanticism that is
intermittent, restrained, and so all the more moving, nevertheless
has not at all penetrated to the physical sources of life, modified
the unconscious and generalizable organism in which the idea is
latent. And so I had been wrong in confining myself, hitherto, to
the later volumes of Hugo. Of the earlier ones, of course, it was
only a fractional part that Mme de Guermantes used to embellish

Chapter 2 605
 The Guermantes Way

377. Hugo’s collections of poems Les her conversation. But simply by quoting in this way an isolated
Orientales (1829) and Les Chants du line, one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold. The lines that
crépuscule (1835), whose publications
are important dates in the history of had entered or returned to my memory during this dinner magne-
Romanticism. tized in turn, summoned to themselves with such force the poems
378. Balzac did not write a preface to in the heart of which they were normally embedded, that my elec-
the Charterhouse of Parma but did pub-
lish an article praising it in La Revue trified hands could not hold out for longer than forty-­eight hours
parisienne on September 25, 1840. That against the force that drew them toward the volume in which were
article was published as the preface in bound up Les Orientales and Les Chants du crépuscule.377 I cursed
an 1846 edition of Stendhal’s novel,
along with the author’s letter to Balzac Françoise’s footman for having made a present to his native village
thanking him. Proust objected to of my copy of Les Feuilles d’automne, and sent him off without a
Stendhal’s placing literature below the moment’s delay to buy me another. I reread these volumes from
vain pleasures of life.
379. Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), author cover to cover and found peace of mind only when I suddenly
of Pensées, essais et maximes. came across, awaiting me in the light in which she had bathed
them, the lines that Mme de Guermantes had quoted to me. For
all these reasons, conversations with the duchess resembled the
discoveries that we make in the library of a château, out of date,
incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, lacking in almost every-
thing that we value, but offering us now and then some curious
scrap of information, and even the quotation of a fine passage that
we did not know and as to which we are glad to remember in
after years that we owe our knowledge of it to a stately seignorial
dwelling. We are then, by having found Balzac’s preface to the
Chartreuse,378 or some unpublished letters of Joubert,379 tempted
to exaggerate the value of the life we led there, the sterile frivolity
of which, for this windfall of a single evening, we forget.
From this point of view, if the fashionable world had been
unable, at the first moment, to correspond to what my imagi-
nation expected, and must consequently strike me first of all by
what it had in common with all the other worlds rather than by
its difference, still it revealed itself to me little by little as some-
thing quite distinct. Great noblemen are almost the only people
from whom one learns as much as one does from peasants; their
conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land,
dwellings as people used to live in them long ago, old customs,
everything of which the world of money is profoundly ignorant.

606 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

Even supposing that the aristocrat most moderate in his aspi- 380. The Ducs de Bouillons are a
rations has finally caught up with the period in which he lives, branch of the La Tour d’Auvergne
family.
his mother, his uncles, his great-­aunts keep him in touch, when 381. Eugène Carrière (1849–1906)
he recalls his childhood, with the conditions of a life almost un- painted many portraits and family
known today. Attending a funeral today, Mme de Guermantes scenes. Among Proust’s acquain-
tances whose portraits Carrière painted
would not have pointed out, but would immediately have per- are Anatole France and Edmond de
ceived, all the lapses from traditional customs. She was shocked to Goncourt.
see at a funeral women mingling with the men, when there was a 382. André-­Charles Boule (1642–
1732), usually spelled Boulle, was a
particular ceremony that ought to be celebrated for the women. cabinetmaker who produced furniture
As for the pall, the use of which Bloch would doubtless have be- “covered with marquetry of leather,
lieved to be confined to coffins, on account of the pallbearers of pewter, and shell, and highly orna-
mented with gilded bronze,” which rep-
whom one reads in the reports of funerals, M. de Guermantes resents the triumph of Louis XIV style.
could remember the time when, as a child, he had seen it borne Vogely, A Proust Dictionary, 99.
at the wedding of M. de Mailly-­Nesle. While Saint-­L oup had sold 383. We do not know to what Proust is
referring here. Perhaps these were ties
his priceless “genealogical tree,” old portraits of the Bouillons,380 worn by Catholic boys in homage to
letters of Louis XIII, in order to buy Carrières381 and Art Nou- Saint Joseph.
veau furniture, M. and Mme de Guermantes, moved by a sen- 384. These were children devoted to
the Virgin Mary, whose symbolic color
timent in which a passionate love of art may have played only a is blue.
minor part, and which left them themselves more ordinary, had
kept their marvelous Boule furniture,382 which presented an en-
semble more attractive in a different way to an artist. A literary
man would similarly have been enchanted by their conversation,
which would have been for him—for one hungry man has no
need of another to keep him company—a living dictionary of all
those expressions that every day are becoming more and more for-
gotten: Saint-­Joseph ties,383 children dedicated to the Blue,384 and
so forth, which one finds today only among those people who have
constituted themselves the amiable and benevolent custodians of
the past. The pleasure that a writer, far more than among other
writers, feels among them is not without danger, for there is a risk
of his coming to believe that the things of the past have a charm
in themselves, of his transferring them bodily into his work, still-
born in that case, exhaling a tedium for which he consoles himself
with the reflection: “It is attractive because it’s true; that’s how
people do talk.” These aristocratic conversations had moreover the

Chapter 2 607
 The Guermantes Way

385. See page 131. charm, with Mme de Guermantes, of being couched in excellent
386. Siegfried Bing (1838–1905) was an French. For this reason they made permissible on the duchess’s
art expert, collector, and importer of
Japanese art who published the review part her hilarity at the words “vatic,”385 “cosmic,” “Pythian,” “su-
Le Japon artistique from 1888 to 1891. pereminent,” which Saint-­L oup used to employ—as, similarly, at
He was cofounder in 1895 of the review his Bing furniture.386
L’Art nouveau Bing. He admired Japa-
nese and Chinese styles and introduced When all was said, very different in this respect from what I
Art Nouveau in furniture. Marie Nord- had been able to feel in front of the hawthorns,387 or when I tasted
linger, Reynaldo Hahn’s cousin, worked a madeleine,388 the stories that I had heard at Mme de Guer-
for a while in Bing’s workshop L’Art
Nouveau, at 22, rue de Provence. mantes’s remained alien to me. Entering for a moment into me,
387. See Swann’s Way, 159–60. who was only physically possessed by them, one would have said
388. See Swann’s Way, 49–54. that, being of a social, not an individual nature, they were im-
patient to escape. I writhed in my seat in the carriage like the
priestess of an oracle. I looked forward to another dinner party
at which I might myself become a sort of Prince X to Mme de
Guermantes, and repeat them. In the meantime they made my
lips quiver as I stammered them to myself, and I tried in vain to
bring back and concentrate a mind that was vertiginously carried
away by a centrifugal force. And so it was with a feverish impa-
tience not to have to bear the whole weight of them any longer
by myself in a carriage where, for that matter, I made up for the
lack of conversation by soliloquizing aloud, that I rang the bell at
M. de Charlus’s door, and it was in long monologues with myself,
in which I rehearsed everything that I was going to tell him and
gave scarcely a thought to what he might have to say to me, that
I spent the whole of the time during which I was kept waiting in
a drawing room into which a footman showed me and where I
was incidentally too excited to look at what it contained. I felt so
urgent a need for M. de Charlus to listen to the stories that I was
burning to tell him that I was bitterly disappointed to think that
the master of the house was perhaps in bed, and that I might have
to go home to sleep off by myself my drunkenness of words. I had
just noticed, in fact, that I had been twenty-­five minutes—that
they had perhaps forgotten about me—in this drawing room of
which, despite this long wait, I could at the most have said that
it was immense, greenish in color, and contained some portraits.

608 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but 389. François-­Louis de Bourbon, Prince
from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description de Conti (1664–1709), whose desire to
please everyone is portrayed by Saint-­
of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my Simon in his Mémoires (1709).
internal state. I was about to leave the room to try to get hold of
someone, and, if I found no one, to make my way back to the hall
and have myself let out, when, just as I had risen from my chair
and taken a few steps across the mosaic parquet of the floor, a
valet came in, with a troubled expression: “Monsieur le Baron has
been engaged all evening, Monsieur,” he told me. “There are still
several people waiting to see him. I am doing everything I possibly
can to get him to receive you, I have already telephoned up twice
to the secretary.”
“No; please don’t bother. I had an appointment with M. le
Baron, but it is very late already, and if he is busy this evening I
can come back another day.”
“Oh no, Monsieur, you must not go away,” cried the valet.
“M. le Baron might be vexed. I will try again.”
I was reminded of the things I had heard about M. de Char-
lus’s servants and their devotion to their master. One could not
quite say of him as of the Prince de Conti389 that he sought to give
pleasure as much to the valet as to the minister, but he had shown
such skill in making of the least thing that he asked of them a sort
of personal favor that at night, when, his valets assembled around
him at a respectful distance, after running his eye over them he
said: “Coignet, the candlestick!” or “Ducret, the nightshirt!”
it was with an envious murmur that the rest used to withdraw,
jealous of the one who had been singled out by his master’s favor.
Two of them, indeed, who could not abide one another, used to
try to snatch the favor each from his rival by going on the most
flimsy pretext with a message to the baron, if he had gone upstairs
earlier than usual, in the hope of being invested for the evening
with the charge of candlestick or nightshirt. If he addressed a few
words directly to one of them on some subject outside the scope
of his duty, still more if in winter, in the garden, knowing that one
of his coachmen had caught cold, he said to him, after ten min-

Chapter 2 609
 The Guermantes Way

utes: “Put your cap on!” the others would not speak to the fellow
again for two weeks, in their jealousy of the great distinction that
had been conferred on him.
I waited ten minutes more, and then, after requesting me not
to stay too long since M. le Baron was tired and had had to send
away several most important people who had made appointments
with him many days before, they admitted me to his presence.
This theatrical setting with which M. de Charlus surrounded him-
self seemed to me a great deal less impressive than the simplicity
of his brother Guermantes, but already the door stood open, I
could see the baron, in a Chinese dressing gown, with his throat
bare, lying upon a sofa. My eye was caught at the same moment
by a top hat, its nap flashing like a mirror, that had been left on
a chair with a cape, as though the baron had but recently come
in. The valet withdrew. I supposed that M. de Charlus would rise
to greet me. Without moving a muscle he fixed on me a pair of
implacable eyes. I went toward him, I said good evening; he did
not hold out his hand, made no reply, did not ask me to take a
chair. After a moment’s silence I asked him, as one would ask an
ill-­mannered doctor, whether it was necessary for me to remain
standing. I said this without any spiteful intention, but my words
seemed only to intensify the cold fury on M. de Charlus’s face.
I was not aware, moreover, that at home, in the country, at the
Château de Charlus, he was in the habit, after dinner (so much
did he love to play the king) of sprawling in an armchair in the
smoking room, letting his guests remain standing around him. He
would ask for a light from one, offer a cigar to another and then,
after a few minutes, would say: “But Argencourt, why don’t you
sit down? Take a chair, my dear fellow,” and so forth, having made
a point of keeping them standing simply to remind them that it
was from himself that permission came to them to be seated. “Put
yourself in the Louis XIV seat,” he answered me with an imperious
air, as though rather to force me to move away farther from him-
self than to invite me to be seated. I took an armchair that was
comparatively near. “Ah! so that is what you call a Louis XIV seat,

610 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

is it? I can see you have been well educated,” he cried in derision. 390. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
I was so much taken aback that I did not move, either to leave the Flower, 377–78.
391. See In the Shadow of Young Girls in
house, as I ought to have done, or to change my seat, as he wished. Flower, 378.
“Monsieur,” he next said to me, weighing each of his words, to
the more impertinent of which he prefixed a double yoke of con-
sonants, “the interview that I have condescended to grant you at
the request of a person who desires to be nameless, will mark the
final point in our relations. I make no secret of the fact that I had
hoped for better things! I would perhaps be forcing the meaning
of the words a little, which one ought not to do, even with people
who are ignorant of their value, simply out of the respect due to
oneself, were I to tell you that I had felt a certain liking for you.
I think, however, that benevolence, in its most effectively patron-
izing sense, would exceed neither what I felt nor what I was pro-
posing to display. I had, immediately on my return to Paris, given
you to understand, while you were still at Balbec, that you could
count on me.” I who remembered with what a torrent of abuse
M. de Charlus had parted from me at Balbec390 made an instinc-
tive gesture of denial. “What!” he screamed angrily, and indeed
his face, convulsed and white, differed as much from his ordinary
face as does the sea when on a stormy morning, one sees instead
of its customary smiling surface innumerable serpents writhing in
spray and foam, “do you mean to pretend that you did not receive
my message—almost a declaration—that you were to remember
me? What was there in the way of decoration around the cover of
the book that I sent you?”391
“Some very pretty twined garlands with tooled ornaments,” I
told him.
“Ah!” he replied, with an air of scorn, “these young Frenchmen
know little of the treasures of our land. What would be said of
a young Berliner who had never heard of the Walküre? Besides,
you must have eyes to see and see not, since you yourself told me
that you had stood for two hours in front of that particular trea-
sure. I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do
about styles; don’t protest that you know about styles,” he cried

Chapter 2 611
 The Guermantes Way

392. A chauffeuse is a low armchair. The in a shrill scream of rage, “you can’t even tell me what you are sit-
name comes from chauffer (to warm) ting on. You offer your derrière a Directory chauffeuse392 as a Louis
and originally meant a seat in which to
warm oneself by the fire. XIV bergère. One of these days you’ll be mistaking Mme de Ville-
393. Myosotis is a plant of the genus parisis’s knees for the toilet seat, and who knows what you might
that includes forget-­me-­nots. do in it. It’s precisely the same; you didn’t even recognize on the
394. This painting (1634–35) by Veláz-
quez is also known as The Surrender binding of Bergotte’s book the lintel of Myosotis over the door of
of Breda. One sees Justin de Nassau Balbec church. Could there be any clearer way of saying to you:
give the keys of his city to the victor, ‘Forget me not!’?”393
General Spinola, who is advancing
toward him. It is sometimes called The I looked at M. de Charlus. Undoubtedly his magnificent head,
Lances because of the raised lances in though repellent, yet far surpassed that of any of his relatives; you
the background of the painting. The would have called him an Apollo grown old; but an olive-­hued,
painting is in the Prado museum in
Madrid. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y bilious juice seemed ready to start from the corners of his mali-
Velázquez (1599–1660) was a Spanish cious mouth. As for intellect, one could not deny that his, over a
painter and an especially fine por- vast compass, had taken in many things that must always remain
traitist. In Proust’s day, the Louvre
exhibited his portraits of two infantas unknown to the Duc de Guermantes. But whatever the fine words
(daughters of ruling Iberian monarchs), with which he colored all his hatreds, one felt that, even if there
Margarita Maria and Margarita Teresa. was now an offended pride, now a disappointment in love, or a
395. The model here, as for many other
aspects of Charlus, is Robert de Mon- rancor, or sadism, a love of teasing, a fixed obsession, this man was
tesquiou, creator of the test that he capable of committing murder, and of proving by dint of logic
called the “test of excessive friendli- that he had been right in doing it and was still head and shoulders
ness.” See Correspondance 1: 410; 20:
327. above his brother, his sister-­in-­law, etc., etc.
“Just as, in Velázquez’s The Lances,”394 he went on, “the victor
advances toward the one who is the humbler in rank, as is the
duty of every noble nature, since I was everything and you were
nothing, it was I who took the first steps toward you. You have
made an idiotic reply to what it is not for me to describe as an
act of grandeur. But I did not allow myself to be discouraged.
Our religion preaches patience. The patience I have shown toward
you will be counted, I hope, to my credit, and also my having
only smiled at what might be denounced as impertinence, were it
within your power to offer any impertinence to one who is head
and shoulders above you; but after all, Monsieur, all this is now
neither here nor there. I have subjected you to the test that the
one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test
of excessive friendliness,395 and that he rightly declares to be the

612 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

most terrible of all, the only one that can separate the wheat from 396. Thomas Chippendale (1718–79)
the chaff. I could scarcely reproach you for having undergone it was an English cabinetmaker who in-
vented a style of furniture that devel-
without success, for those who emerge from it triumphant are very oped the rococo elements of the Louis
few. But at least, and this is the conclusion that I am entitled to XV style and borrowed elements from
draw from the last words that we will exchange on this earth, at Chinese art and flamboyant Gothic.

least I intend to protect myself against your calumnious fabrica-

tions.”
So far, I had never dreamed that M. de Charlus’s rage could
have been caused by an unflattering remark that had been re-
peated to him; I searched my memory; I had not spoken about
him to anyone. Some malicious person had invented the whole
thing. I protested to M. de Charlus that I had said absolutely
nothing about him. “I don’t think I can have annoyed you by
saying to Mme de Guermantes that I was a friend of yours.” He
gave a disdainful smile, raised his voice to the supreme pitch of its
highest register, and there, attacking softly the shrillest and most
insolent note:
“Oh! Monsieur,” he said, returning by the most gradual stages
to a natural intonation, and seeming to revel, as he went, in the
oddities of this descending scale, “I think that you are doing
yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that
we were ‘friends.’ I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in
anyone who could readily mistake a piece of Chippendale396 for a
rococo chair, but really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal
caresses that grew more and more mocking and brought to hover
over his lips what was actually a charming smile, “I do not be-
lieve that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were friends!
As for your having boasted that you had been presented to me,
had talked to me, knew me slightly, had obtained, almost without
solicitation, the prospect of becoming one day my protégé, I find
it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done
so. The extreme difference in age that there is between us enables
me to recognize without absurdity that that presentation, those
talks, that vague prospect of future relations were for you, it is not
for me to say an honor, but still, when all is said and done, an ad-

Chapter 2 613
 The Guermantes Way

397. Saint Bonaventure, born Giovanni vantage as to which I consider that your folly lay not in divulging
di Fidanza (1221–74), was one of the it but in not having had the sense to keep it. I will even go so far
great theologians of the Middle Ages.
His theological books include a Life of as to say,” he went on, passing abruptly for a moment from his
Saint Francis. Alberto Beretta Anguis- arrogant wrath to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I
sola has shown that the anecdote de- expected him to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered
rives not from Saint Bonaventure but
from one of his contemporaries, Saint the proposal I made to you here in Paris it seemed to me so un-
Thomas Aquinas, and that it is not an believable on your part, coming from you who had struck me as
ox that flies but a donkey. À la recherche well brought up and of a good bourgeois family” (on this adjective
du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard
[Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 845, n. 2. alone his voice sounded a little hiss of impertinence), “that I was
naïve enough to imagine all the excuses that never really happen,
letters miscarrying, addresses copied down wrong. I can see that
it was very naïve of me, but Saint Bonaventure preferred to be-
lieve that an ox could fly rather than that his brother was capable
of lying.397 Anyhow, that is all finished now, the idea did not ap-
peal to you, there is no more to be said. It seems to me only that
you might have brought yourself ” (and there were genuine tears
in his voice), “were it only out of consideration for my age, to
write to me. I had conceived and planned for you infinitely seduc-
tive things, which I had taken good care not to tell you. You have
preferred to refuse without knowing what they were; that is your
affair. But, as I say, one can always write. In your position, and in-
deed in my own, I would have done so. I like my position, for that
reason, better than yours—I say ‘for that reason’ because I believe
that we are all equal, and I have more fellow feeling for an intelli-
gent laborer than for many of our dukes. But I can say that I prefer
my position, because what you have done, in the whole course of
my life, which is beginning now to be a pretty long one, I am con-
scious that I have never done.” (His head was turned away from
the light, and I could not see whether tears were falling from his
eyes as I might have supposed from his voice.) “I told you that I
had taken a hundred steps toward you; the only effect of that has
been to make you take two hundred away from me. Now it is for
me to withdraw, and we will know one another no longer. I will
retain not your name but your case, so that at moments when I
might be tempted to believe that men have good hearts, good

614 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

manners, or simply the intelligence not to allow an unparalleled

opportunity to escape them, I may remember that that is ranking
them too highly. No, that you should have said that you knew
me, when it was true—for henceforward it will cease to be true—
I regard that as only natural, and I take it as an act of homage,
that is to say something agreeable. Unfortunately, elsewhere and
in other circumstances, you have uttered remarks of a very dif-
ferent nature.”
“Monsieur, I swear to you that I have said nothing that could
offend you.”
“And who says that I am offended?” he screamed in fury, flinging
himself into an erect posture on the couch on which hitherto he
had been reclining motionless, while, as the pale, frothing ser-
pents stiffened in his face, his voice became alternately shrill and
grave like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The force with which
he habitually spoke, which used to make strangers turn around in
the street, was multiplied a hundredfold, as is a musical forte if,
instead of being played on the piano, it is played by an orchestra,
and changed into a fortissimo as well. M. de Charlus roared.) “Do
you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You evi-
dently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine
that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of
your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering
so much as the tips of my august toes?”
A moment before this my desire to persuade M. de Charlus that
I had never said nor heard anyone else speak any ill of him had
given place to a mad rage, caused by the words that were dictated
to him solely, to my mind, by his colossal pride. Perhaps they were
indeed the effect, in part at any rate, of this pride. Almost all the
rest sprang from a feeling of which I was then still ignorant, and
for which I could not therefore be blamed for not making due
allowance. I could at least, failing this unknown element, have
mingled with his pride, had I remembered the words of Mme
de Guermantes, a trace of madness. But at that moment the idea
of madness never even entered my mind. There was in him, ac-

Chapter 2 615
 The Guermantes Way

398. The author himself is the model cording to me, only pride, in me there was only fury. This fury
here. In 1902, when he was thirty-­one, (at the moment when M. de Charlus ceased to shout, in order to
Proust, in a fit of anger, demolished
a new hat belonging to Bertrand de refer to his august toes, with a majesty that was accompanied by a
Fénelon. For his description of this, grimace, a vomit of disgust at his obscure blasphemers), this fury
see Proust, Selected Letters 1: 281. could contain itself no longer. With an impulsive movement, I
399. This is a partial quotation from
Psalms 2:10 (Vulgate): Et nunc, reges, wanted to strike something, and, a lingering trace of discernment
intelligite: erudimini, qui judicatis terram making me respect the person of a man so much older than my-
(Be wise now therefore, o ye kings; be self, and even, in view of their dignity as works of art, the pieces of
instructed, ye judges of the earth).
German porcelain that were grouped around him, I grabbed the
baron’s new silk hat, threw it to the ground, trampled it, began
blindly pulling it to pieces, ripped off the brim, tore the crown in
two,398 without heeding the vociferations of M. de Charlus, which
continued to sound, and, crossing the room to leave it, I opened
the door. One on either side of it, to my intense stupefaction,
stood two footmen, who moved slowly away, so as to appear only
to have been casually passing in the course of their duty. (I later
learned their names; one was called Burnier, the other Charmel.) I
was not taken in for a moment by this explanation that their non-
chalant gait seemed to offer me. It was highly improbable; three
others appeared to me to be less so; one that the baron some-
times entertained guests against whom, as he might happen to
need assistance (but why?), he deemed it necessary to keep re-
inforcements posted close at hand. The second was that, drawn by
curiosity, they had stopped to listen at the keyhole, not thinking
that I would come out so quickly. The third, that, the whole of the
scene which M. de Charlus had made with me having been pre-
pared and acted, he had himself told them to listen, from a love
of the spectacular combined, perhaps, with a nunc erudimini399
from which each would derive a suitable profit.
My anger had not calmed that of the baron, and my depar-
ture from the room seemed to cause him acute distress; he called
me back, made his servants call me back, and finally, forgetting
that a moment earlier, when he spoke of his “august toes,” he had
thought to make me a witness of his own deification, came run-
ning after me at full speed, overtook me in the hall, and stood bar-

616 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ring the door. “There, now,” he said, “don’t be childish; come back 400. This is from a Latin proverb: Qui
for a minute; he who loveth well chasteneth well,400 and if I have bene amat bene castigat. Proust may
have had in mind Proverbs 13:​24: He
chastened you well it is because I love you well.” My anger had that spareth his rod hateth his son: but
subsided; I let the word “chasten” pass, and followed the baron, he that loveth him chasteneth him be-
who, summoning a footman, ordered him without a trace of self-­ times.

consciousness to clear away the remains of the demolished hat,

which was replaced by another.
“If you will tell me, Monsieur, who it is that has treacherously
maligned me,” I said to M. de Charlus, “I will stay here to learn
his name and to confound the impostor.”
“Who? Do you not know? Do you retain no memory of the
things you say? Do you think that the people who do me the ser-
vice of informing me of those things do not begin by demanding
secrecy? And do you imagine that I am going to betray a person to
whom I have given my promise?”
“Monsieur, is it impossible then for you to tell me?” I asked,
racking my brains in a final effort to discover (and discovering no
one) to whom I could have spoken about M. de Charlus.
“You did not hear me say that I had given a promise of secrecy
to my informant?” he said in a snapping voice. “I see that with
your fondness for abject utterances you combine one for futile
persistence. You ought to have at least the intelligence to profit by
a final conversation and try to say something that does not mean
precisely nothing.”
“Monsieur,” I replied, moving away from him, “you insult me;
I am unarmed, because you are several times my age, we are not
equally matched; on the other hand, I cannot convince you; I have
already sworn to you that I have said nothing.”
“So I’m lying, then, am I?” he cried in a terrifying tone, and
with a bound forward that brought him within a yard of myself.
“Someone has misinformed you.”
Then in a gentle, affectionate, melancholy voice, as in those
symphonies that are played without any break between the dif-
ferent movements, in which a graceful scherzo, amiable and idyllic,
follows the thunder bolts of the opening part: “It is quite pos-

Chapter 2 617
 The Guermantes Way

sible,” he said. “Generally speaking, a remark repeated at second

hand is rarely true. It is your fault if, not having profited by the
opportunities of seeing me that I had held out to you, you have
not furnished me, by that open speech of daily intercourse that
creates confidence, with the unique and sovereign remedy against
a spoken word that made you out a traitor. Either way, true or
false, the remark has done its work. I can never again rid my-
self of the impression it made on me. I cannot even say that he
who chasteneth well loveth well, for I have chastened you well
enough but I no longer love you.” While saying this he had forced
me to sit down and had rung the bell. A different footman ap-
peared. “Bring something to drink and order the brougham.” I
said that I was not thirsty, that it was late, and besides had a car-
riage waiting. “They have probably paid him and sent him away,”
he said, “you needn’t worry about that. I am ordering a carriage
to take you home. . . . If you’re anxious about the time . . . I could
have given you a room here . . .” I said that my mother would be
worried. “Ah! Of course, yes. Well, true or false, the remark has
done its work. My affection, a trifle premature, had flowered too
soon, and, like those apple trees of which you spoke so poeti-
cally at Balbec, it has been unable to withstand the first frost.”
If M. de Charlus’s affection for me had not been destroyed, he
could hardly have acted differently, since, while assuring me that
we had fallen out, he made me sit down, drink, asked me to stay
the night, and was going now to send me home. He even seemed
to be dreading the moment at which he must part from me and
find himself alone, that sort of slightly anxious fear that his sister-­
in-­law and cousin Guermantes had appeared to me to be feeling
an hour ago when she had tried to force me to stay a little longer,
with something of the same momentary fondness for me, of the
same effort to prolong the passing minute.
“Unfortunately,” he went on, “I do not have the gift to make
blossom again what has once been destroyed. My affection for
you is quite dead. Nothing can revive it. I believe that it is not
unworthy of me to confess that I regret it. I always feel myself to

618 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

be a little like Victor Hugo’s Boaz: ‘I am widowed and alone, and 401. This line ( Je suis veuf, je suis seul,
darkness gathers over me.’”401 et sur moi le soir tombe) is from Hugo’s
poem “Booz endormi.”
I passed again with him through the big green drawing room. 402. César Bagard (1620–1709), a
I told him, speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. sculptor from Nancy, who was known
“Isn’t it?” he replied. “It’s a good thing to be fond of something. as the Grand César for his wood panels
that decorated certain Paris mansions.
The paneling is by Bagard.402 What is rather charming, you see, 403. The Hinnisdal house, formerly
is that it was made to match the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. the Hôtel du Prat, built in 1728, was
You observe, it repeats the same decorative design. There used located at 60, rue de Varenne in the
seventh arrondissement.
to be only two places where you could see this, the Louvre and 404. The Hôtel Chimay, located at
M. d’Hinnisdal’s house.403 But naturally, as soon as I had decided 15–17, quai Malaquais, was built in 1640
to come and live in this street, there cropped up an old family by Mansart and embellished by Charles
Le Brun and Le Nôtre.
hotel of the Chimays404 that nobody had ever seen before because 405. Pierre Mignard (1612–95) spent
it came here expressly for me. On the whole, it’s good. It might more than twenty years in Italy, where
perhaps be better, but after all it’s not bad. Some pretty things, he learned the art of portrait painting.
When he returned to France he made
aren’t there? These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland portraits of personages at the court of
and the King of England, by Mignard.405 But why am I telling Versailles. His brother Nicolas (1606–
you all this? You must know it as well as I do, you were waiting 68) painted the famous portrait of
Louis XIV.
in this room. No? Ah, then they must have put you in the blue 406. Mme Élisabeth (1764–94), the
drawing room,” he said with an air that might have been either im- sister of Louis XVI, was guillotined
pertinence, on the score of my lack of interest, or personal superi- during the Reign of Terror.
407. Marie-­Thérèse Louise de Savoie-­
ority, in not having taken the trouble to ask where I had been kept Carignan, Princesse de Lamballe (1749–
waiting. “Look now, in this cabinet I have all the hats worn by 92), was brutally murdered during the
Madame Élisabeth,406 by the Princesse de Lamballe,407 and by the September Massacres.
408. Marie-­Antoinette (born 1755) was
queen.408 They don’t interest you, one would think you couldn’t guillotined on October 16, 1793.
see. Perhaps you are suffering from an affection409 of the optic 409. Proust and Scott Moncrieff used
nerve. If you like this kind of beauty better, here is a rainbow by the word in its medical meaning of
“malady.”
Turner410 beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, 410. Proust is probably thinking of
as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear: Beethoven has come to Turner’s Plymouth Harbor, of which
join him.” And indeed one could hear the first chords of the third Ruskin wrote that it depicts “the
brightest rainbow he ever painted, to
part of the Pastoral Symphony, “Joy after the Storm,”411 performed my knowledge; not the best, but the
somewhere not far away, on the first floor no doubt, by a band of most dazzling.” Ruskin is quoted by
musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be playing Vogely in A Proust Dictionary, 710.
411. Beethoven’s “Joy after the Storm”
that, and who the musicians were. “Ah, well, one doesn’t know. is actually in the fifth and final move-
One never does know. They are invisible music. It’s pretty, isn’t it?” ment of his Sixth Symphony. It is
he said to me in a slightly impertinent tone, which nevertheless marked allegretto.

Chapter 2 619
 The Guermantes Way

412. Scott Moncrieff translated this suggested somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “But you
idiom literally, no doubt because it care about as much for it as a fish does for an apple.412 You want
works as well in English as in French,
indicating that one cares nothing about to go home, even if it shows lack of respect for Beethoven and
a thing. for me. You are pronouncing your own judgment and condemna-
413. This is an allusion to the last line tion,” he added, with an affectionate and mournful air, when the
of Victor Hugo’s poem “La Fête chez
Thérèse” from the collection Les Con- moment had come for me to go. “You will excuse my not accom-
templations: Le clair de lune bleu qui bai- panying you home, as good manners ordain that I should,” he said.
gnait l’horizon. “Since I have decided not to see you again, spending five minutes
more in your company would make very little difference to me.
But I am tired, and I have a great deal to do.” And then, seeing
that it was a fine night: “Very well, then! Yes, I will come in the
carriage, there is a superb moon that I will go on to admire from
the Bois after I have taken you home. What, you don’t know how
to shave; even on a night when you’ve been dining out, you have
still a few hairs here,” he said, taking my chin between two fingers,
which seemed so to speak magnetized, which after a moment’s re-
sistance ran up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. “Ah! It would
be pleasant to look at the ‘blue light of the moon’413 in the Bois
with someone like yourself,” he said to me with a sudden and al-
most involuntary gentleness, then, in a sad tone: “For you are nice,
all the same; you could be nicer than anyone,” he went on, laying
his hand in a fatherly way on my shoulder. “Originally, I must say
that I found you quite insignificant.” I ought to have reflected that
he must find me so still. I had only to recall the rage with which
he had spoken to me, barely half an hour before. In spite of this I
had the impression that he was, for the moment, sincere, that his
kindness of heart was prevailing over what I regarded as an almost
delirious condition of susceptibility and pride. The carriage was
waiting beside us, and still he prolonged the conversation. “Come
along,” he said abruptly, “jump in, in five minutes we will be at
your door. And I will bid you a goodnight that will cut short our
relations, and for all time. It is better, since we must part forever,
that we should do so, as in music, on a perfect chord.” Despite
these solemn affirmations that we would never see one another
again, I could have sworn that M. de Charlus, annoyed at having

620 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

forgotten himself earlier in the evening and afraid of having hurt 414. The Congress of Vienna that as-
my feelings, would not have been displeased to see me once again. sembled to establish peace after the
Napoleonic wars lasted from Sep-
Nor was I mistaken, for, a moment later: “There, now,” he said, tember 1814 until June 1815.
“if I hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all. In memory 415. In 1888, James MacNeill Whis-
of your grandmother, I have had bound for you a rare edition of tler published his lecture Ten o’clock,
of which Marie Nordlinger later gave
Mme de Sévigné. That is what is going to prevent this from being Proust a copy. The passage that Charlus
our last meeting. One must console oneself with the reflection that apparently has in mind begins: “And
complicated affairs are rarely settled in a day. Just look how long when the evening mist clothes the
riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and
they took over the Congress of Vienna.”414 the poor buildings lose themselves in
“But I could send for it without disturbing you,” I said oblig- the dim sky, and the tall chimneys be-
ingly. come campanili, and the warehouses
are palaces in the night, and the whole
“Will you hold your tongue, you little fool,” he replied angrily, city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-­
“and not give yourself the grotesque appearance of regarding as a land is before us—then the wayfarer
small matter the honor of being probably (I do not say certainly, hastens home; the working man and
the cultured one, the wise man and the
for it will perhaps be one of my servants who hands you the vol- one of pleasure, cease to understand,
umes) received by me.” Then, regaining possession of himself: “I as they have ceased to see, and Nature,
do not wish to part from you on these words. No dissonance; be- who, for once, has sung in tune, sings
her exquisite song to the artist alone,
fore the eternal silence, the dominant chord!” It was for his own her son and her master . . .” Lawrence
nerves that he seemed to dread an immediate return home after Manley, The Cambridge Companion to
harsh words of dissension. “You would not care to come to the the Literature of London (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 134.
Bois?” he said to me in a tone not so much interrogative as affir- 416. The story of the royal family of
mative, and not, as it seemed to me, because he did not wish to Tahiti was well known in the nineteenth
make me the offer but because he was afraid that his self-­esteem century. Queen Pomaré expelled the
French missionaries in 1836 but in 1842
might meet with a refusal. “Oh, very well,” he went on, still post- accepted the protection of France. Her
poning our separation, “it is the moment when, as Whistler says, son, Pomaré V, relinquished his rights
the bourgeois go to bed” (perhaps he wished now to capture me in 1880, three years after having suc-
ceeded his mother, and Tahiti then be-
by my self-­esteem) “and the right time to begin to look at things. came a French colony.
But you don’t even know who Whistler is!”415 I changed the sub-
ject and asked him whether the Princesse d’Iéna was an intelligent
person. M. de Charlus stopped me, and, adopting the most con-
temptuous tone that I had yet heard him use.
“Ah! there, Monsieur, you are alluding to an order of nomencla-
ture with which I have no concern. There is perhaps an aristocracy
among the Tahitians,416 but I must confess that I know nothing
about it. The name that you have just pronounced, strangely

Chapter 2 621
 The Guermantes Way

417. The Panther of Batignolles is the enough, did sound in my ears only a few days ago. Someone asked
name of a club formed around 1880 by me whether I would condescend to allow them to present to me
a group of anarchists who met on the
rue de Lévis, in the quarter of Batig- the young Duc de Guastalla. The request astonished me, for the
nolles. Duc de Guastalla has no need to be introduced to me, for the
418. The Steel King is an allusion to simple reason that he is my cousin, and has known me all his life;
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) who
dominated the American iron and he is the son of the Princesse de Parme, and, as a young kinsman
steel industry. Proust found such titles of good upbringing, he never fails to come and pay his respects
amusing. to me on New Year’s Day. But, on making inquiries, I discov-
419. In 1908, Proust began using the
services of a stockbroker by the name ered that it was not my relative who was meant but the son of the
of Gustave Guastalla. “Proust, who had person in whom you are interested. Since there exists no princess
just embarked on his genealogical re- of that title, I supposed that my friend was referring to some poor
search, discovered Guastalla to be a
minor Italian dukedom seized by Napo- wanton sleeping under the Pont d’Iéna, who had picturesquely
léon from the Duke of Parma to give assumed the title of Princesse d’Iéna, just as one talks about the
to his sister Pauline. For the purposes Panther of the Batignolles,417 or the Steel King.418 But no, the ref-
of the novel he supposed that the title
had descended through both families, erence was to a rich person who possesses some remarkable furni-
thereby setting the scene for one of the ture that I had seen and admired at an exhibition, and which has
Duchesse de Guermantes’s famous the superiority over the name of its owner of not being fake. As
‘audacities’: in front of the Princesse de
Parme and other guests she enthuses for this self-­styled Duc de Guastalla, he, I supposed, must be my
over the magnificent Empire furniture secretary’s stockbroker;419 one can procure so many things with
owned by the Iénas—who were, for money. But no; it was the emperor, it appears, who amused him-
the Princess, ‘rank usurpers, their son
bearing like her own the title of Duc self by conferring on these people a title that simply was not his to
de Guastalla.’” Proust, Selected Letters give. It was perhaps a sign of power, or of ignorance, or of malice;
2: 415 and n. 1. in any case, I consider, it was an exceedingly scurvy trick to play
on these unwitting usurpers. But really, I cannot throw any light
on the matter; my knowledge begins and ends with the Faubourg
Saint-­Germain, where, among all the Courvoisiers and Gallar-
dons, you will find, if you can manage to secure an introduction,
plenty of mangy old shrews taken straight out of Balzac who will
amuse you. Naturally, all that has nothing to do with the prestige
of the Princesse de Guermantes, but without me and my ‘Open,
Sesame’ her portals are unapproachable.”
“It is really very beautiful, isn’t it, Monsieur, the Princesse de
Guermantes’s hotel?”
“Oh, it’s not very beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing in the
world. Next to the princess herself, of course.”

622 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

“The Princesse de Guermantes is superior to the Duchesse de 420. Les Halles was for centuries
Guermantes?” Paris’s central market in the first arron-
dissement.
“Oh! There’s no comparison.” (It is to be observed that, when- 421. Pauline Sandoz, Princesse de Met-
ever people in society have the least touch of imagination, they will ternich (1836–1921), whose husband
crown or dethrone, to suit their affections or their quarrels, those was ambassador to France during the
Second Empire. She was one of the
whose position appeared most solid and unalterably fixed.) “The leading society figures of her time and
Duchesse de Guermantes” (perhaps, in not calling her “Oriane,” Wagner’s most influential patron at the
he wished to set a greater distance between her and myself ) “is court of Napoléon III when the com-
poser came to Paris in 1860–61.
delightful, far superior to anything you can have guessed. But 422. Victor Maurel (1848–1923) was a
after all, she is incommensurable with her cousin. The princess is famous baritone who sang Wagnerian
exactly what the people in les Halles420 might imagine Princess roles in London but not in Paris. He en-
joyed the patronage of the Princesse de
Metternich to have been, but old Metternich421 believed she had Metternich.
launched Wagner, because she knew Victor Maurel.422 The Prin- 423. Esther’s garden is apparently a
cesse de Guermantes, or rather her mother, knew the man him- reference to the one mentioned as
being “superb” in Racine’s play, Esther,
self. Which is a distinction, not to mention the incredible beauty act 3, scene 1.
of the lady. And the Esther gardens alone!”423 424. Balzac’s book L’Histoire des Treize
“One can’t visit them?” contains two novels, Ferragus and La
Duchesse de Langeais, and a novella, La
“No, you would have to be invited, but they never invite anyone Fille aux yeux d’or, published by Balzac
unless I intervene.” But at once withdrawing, after casting it at from 1833 to 1835. The title The History
me, the bait of this offer, he held out his hand, for we had reached of the Thirteen refers to the members
of a rich, powerful, and unscrupulous
my door. “My role is ended, Monsieur, I will simply add these few secret society.
words. Another person will perhaps someday offer you his affec- 425. In Alexandre Dumas père’s fa-
tion, as I have done. Let the present example serve for your in- mous novel (1844), the original three
musketeers are joined by Gascon d’Ar-
struction. Do not neglect it. Affection is always precious. What tagnan, who becomes the book’s hero.
one cannot do by oneself in this life, because there are things that D’Artagnan was an ancestor of Robert
one cannot ask, nor do, nor wish, nor learn by oneself, one can de Montesquiou.

do in company, and without needing to be thirteen, as in Balzac’s

story,424 or four, as in The Three Musketeers.425 Goodbye.”
He must have been feeling tired and have abandoned the idea
of going to look at the moonlight, for he asked me to tell his
coachman to drive home. At once he made a sharp movement
as though he had changed his mind. But I had already given the
order, and, so as not to lose any more time, went across now to
ring the doorbell, without its entering my mind that I had been
meaning to tell M. de Charlus about the German emperor and

Chapter 2 623
 The Guermantes Way

426. The footman’s letter is riddled General Botha, stories that had been an hour ago such an obses-
with spelling, grammatical, and punc- sion but which his unexpected and crushing reception had sent
tuation errors as well as phrases from
famous poems. This letter may have flying far from my mind.
been inspired by one that Robert On entering my room I saw on my desk a letter that Françoise’s
Ulrich, who was in Proust’s service young footman had written to one of his friends and had left lying
for a time, wrote to his mistress and
that Proust found lying on a table. See there. Now that my mother was away, there was no liberty that he
Proust, Correspondance 7: 284. had the least hesitation in taking; I was the more to blame of the
427. From Musset’s “La Nuit d’oc- two for taking the liberty of reading the letter that, without an en-
tobre”: “Ces reliques du cœur ont aussi
leur poussière / Sur leurs restes sacrés velope, lay spread out before me and (which was my sole excuse)
ne portons pas les mains.” seemed to offer itself to my eyes.
428. From Hugo’s Les Chansons des rues
et des bois: “L’insecte est au bout du
brin d’herbe / Comme un matelot au Dear Friend and Cousin,426
grand mât.” I hope this finds you in good health, and the same with all the
429. The “dark valley” was a cliché young folk, particularly my young godson Joseph who I have not
in Romantic poetry that one finds in
poems by Lamartine, Musset, and yet had the pleasure of meeting but who I prefer to you all as being
many others. my godson, these relics of the heart they have their dust also, upon
430. From Musset’s “La Nuit d’oc- their blest remains let us not lay our hands.427 Besides dear friend
tobre”: “À défaut du pardon, laisse
venir l’oubli.” and cousin who can say that tomorrow you and your dear wife my
cousin Marie, will not both of you be cast headlong down into the
bottom of the sea, like the sailor clinging to the mast on high,428 for
this life is but a dark valley.429 Dear friend I must tell you that my
principle occupation, which will astonish you Im certain, is now
poetry which I love passionately, for one must somehow pass the
time away. And so dear friend do not be too surprised if I have not
answered your last letter before now, in place of pardon let oblivion
come.430 As you are aware, Madame’s mother has passed away
amid unspeakable sufferings which fairly exhausted her as she saw
as many as three doctors. The day of her interment was a great day
for all Monsieur’s relations came in crowds as well as several Min-
isters. It took them more than two hours to get to the cemetery,
which will make you all open your eyes pretty wide in your village
for they certainly wont do as much for mother Michu. So all my
life to come can be but one long sob. Im amusing myself enormously
with the motorcycle of which I have recently learned. What would
you say, my dear friends, if I arrived suddenly like that at full speed

624 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

at Les Écorres. But on that head I will no more keep silence431 for 431. From Musset’s “La Nuit de mai”:
I feel that the frenzy of grief sweeps its reason away.432 Im associ- “Prends ton luth! je ne peux plus me
taire.”
ating with the Duchesse de Guermantes, people whose very names 432. From Musset’s Lettre à Monsieur
you have never heard in our ignorant villages. Therefore it is with de Lamartine: “L’ivresse du malheur
pleasure that I am going to send the works of Racine, of Victor emporte sa raison.”
433. Charles de Chênedollé (1769–1833)
Hugo, of Pages Choisies de Chenedolle,433 of Alfred de Musset, for was a minor poet and precursor of
I would cure the land in which I saw the light of ignorance which Romanticism.
leads unerringly to crime. I can think of nothing more to say to you 434. From Musset’s “La Nuit de mai”:
“Lorsque le pélican, lassé d’un long
and send you like the pelican wearied by a long flight 434 my best voyage . . .”
regards as well as to your wife my godson and your sister Rose. May 435. This line is not by Hugo but by a
it never be said of her: And Rose she lived only as live the roses,435 poet of the Renaissance, François de
Malherbe. The long title is Consolation
as has been said by Victor Hugo, the sonnet of Arvers,436 Alfred de à M. du Perier, Gentilhomme d’Aix-­en-­
Musset, all those great geniuses who for that cause have had to die Provence, sur la mort de sa fille (1599):
upon the blazing scaffold like Jeanne d’Arc. Hoping for your next “Et rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les
roses, / L’espace d’un matin.”
missive soon, receive my kisses like those of a brother Périgot Joseph 436. Félix Arvers (1806–50) was a play-
wright who is remembered for a single
We are attracted by every form of life that represents to sonnet from his collection Mes Heures
perdues (1833). The poem begins “Mon
us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still un- âme a son secret; ma vie a son mys-
shattered. In spite of this, the mysterious utterances by means tère” (My soul has its secret; my life
of which M. de Charlus had led me to imagine the Princesse de has its mystery).

Guermantes as an extraordinary creature, different from anyone

that I knew, were not sufficient to account for the stupefaction in
which I was plunged, speedily followed by the fear that I might
be the victim of some bad joke planned by someone who wanted
to get me thrown out of a house to which I had not been invited,
when, about two months after my dinner with the duchess and
while she was at Cannes, having opened an envelope the appear-
ance of which had not led me to suppose that it contained any-
thing out of the ordinary, I read the following words engraved
on a card: “The Princesse de Guermantes, née Duchesse en Ba-
vière, At Home, the—th.” No doubt to be invited to the Princesse
de Guermantes’s was perhaps not, from the social point of view,
any more difficult than to dine with the duchess, and my slight
knowledge of heraldry had taught me that the title of prince is
not superior to that of duke. Besides, I told myself that the intel-

Chapter 2 625
 The Guermantes Way

437. Louis II de Bourbon, called the ligence of a society woman could not be essentially so heteroge-
Grand Condé (1621–86), was the Duch- neous to the others of her kind as M. de Charlus made out, nor
esse de Longueville’s brother.
so heterogeneous to that of any one other woman in society. But
my imagination, like Elstir engaged upon rendering some effect
of perspective without reference to a knowledge of the laws of
physics, which he might quite well possess, depicted for me not
what I knew but what it saw; what it saw, that is to say what the
name showed it. Now, even before I had met the duchess, the
name Guermantes preceded by the title of princess, like a note or
a color or a quantity, profoundly modified from the surrounding
values by the mathematical or esthetic sign that governs it, had
already suggested to me something entirely different. With that
title one finds one’s thoughts straying instinctively to the memoirs
of the days of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the English Court, the
Queen of Scots, the Duchesse d’Aumale; and I imagined the hotel
of the Princesse de Guermantes as more or less frequented by the
Duchesse de Longueville and the great Condé,437 whose presence
there rendered it highly improbable that I would ever make my
way into it.
Many of the things that M. de Charlus had told me had driven
a vigorous spur into my imagination and, making it forget how
much the reality had disappointed me at Mme de Guermantes’s
(people’s names are in this respect like the names of places), had
swung it toward Oriane’s cousin. For that matter, M. de Charlus
misled me at times as to the imaginary value and variety of society
people only because he was himself at times misled. And this,
perhaps, because he did nothing, did not write, did not paint,
did not even read anything in a serious and thorough manner.
But, superior by several degrees to society peoples, if it was from
them and the spectacle they afforded that he drew the material
for his conversation, he was not for that reason understood by
them. Speaking as an artist, he could at the most reveal the fal-
lacious charm of society people. But reveal it to artists alone, in
relation to whom he might be said to play the part played by the
reindeer among the Eskimos; his precious animal plucks for them

626 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

from the barren rocks lichens and mosses that they themselves 438. The magnificent palace that
could neither discover nor utilize, but which, once they have been Aladdin had built for his bride is de-
scribed in night 760 of The Arabian
digested by the reindeer, become for the inhabitants of the far Nights in the Joseph Charles Mardrus
North a nourishing form of food. edition. It was Mardrus’s translation
To which I may add that the pictures that M. de Charlus drew that Proust knew and loved.
439. Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia
of society were animated with plenty of life by the blend of his (1828–85), nephew of Wilhelm I, was a
ferocious hatreds and his passionate affections. Hatreds directed general during the war of 1870 who was
mainly against the young men, adoration aroused principally by notorious for the brutality with which
he treated the French during the in-
certain women. vasion of France.
If among these the Princesse de Guermantes was placed by 440. Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Mar-
M. de Charlus upon the most exalted throne, his mysterious quise de Pompadour (1721–64), was
the favorite of Louis XV.
words about the “unapproachable Aladdin’s palace”438 in which 441. An Egeria is a woman who coun-
his cousin dwelled were not sufficient to account for my stupe- sels or advises, named after the wood
faction. nymph who advised the legendary
Roman king Numa Pompilius.
In spite of whatever may be due to the diverse subjective points
of view in these artificial magnifications, about which I will have
something to say later, the fact remains that there is a certain ob-
jective reality in all of these people, and consequently a difference
among them.
And how, when it comes to that, could it be otherwise? The
humanity with which we consort and which bears so little resem-
blance to our dreams is, for all that, the same that, in the mem-
oirs, in the letters of eminent persons, we have seen described and
have felt a desire to know. The entirely insignificant old man with
whom we are dining is the same who wrote that proud letter to
Prince Friedrich Karl, which we read with emotion in a book on
the war of 1870.439 We are bored at the dinner table because our
imagination is absent, and, because it is keeping us company, we
are interested in a book. But the people in question are the same.
We would like to have known Mme de Pompadour,440 who was
so valuable a patron of the arts, and we would have been as much
bored in her company as among the modern Egerias,441 at whose
houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so uninter-
esting do we find them. The fact remains that these differences
do exist. People are never exactly similar to one another, their be-

Chapter 2 627
 The Guermantes Way

442. Baudelaire, in fact, admired havior with regard to ourselves, at, one might even say, the same
Mérimée and compared him favorably level of friendship, reveals differences that, in the end, offer com-
to Eugène Delacroix, a painter much
esteemed by Baudelaire. Mérimée pensations. When I knew Mme de Montmorency, she liked to
defended Baudelaire against public say unpleasant things to me, but if I needed a favor she would
sanctions when some of the poems in squander, in the hope of obtaining it for me effectively, all the
Les Fleurs du mal were censored. How-
ever, after Baudelaire’s death, Mérimée credit at her disposal, without counting the cost. Whereas some
maintained that he was a bad poet. À la other woman, Mme de Guermantes for example, would never have
recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli- wished to hurt my feelings, never said anything about me except
mard [Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 858,
n. 1. what might give me pleasure, showered on me all those tokens of
friendship that formed the rich manner of living, morally, of the
Guermantes, but, had I asked her for the least thing above and be-
yond that, would not have moved an inch to procure it for me, as
in those châteaux where one has at one’s disposal an automobile
and a valet, but where it is impossible to obtain a glass of cider,
for which no provision has been made in the arrangements for a
party. Which was for me the true friend, Mme de Montmorency,
so glad always to offend me and always so ready to oblige, or Mme
de Guermantes, distressed by the slightest offense that might have
been given me and incapable of the slightest effort to be of use to
me? On the other hand, people said that the Duchesse de Guer-
mantes spoke only about frivolities, and her cousin, with the most
mediocre intellect, always about interesting things. The types of
the human mind are so varied, so opposite, not only in litera-
ture but in society, that Baudelaire and Mérimée442 are not the
only people who have the right to despise one another mutually.
These peculiarities form in everyone a system of attitudes, of dis-
course, of actions, so coherent, so despotic, that when we are in
his or her presence it seems to us superior to the rest. With Mme
de Guermantes, her words, deduced like a theorem from her type
of mind, seemed to me the only ones that could possibly be said.
And I was, at heart, of her opinion when she told me that Mme
de Montmorency was stupid and kept an open mind toward all
the things she did not understand, or when, having heard of some
malicious remark by that lady, she said: “That is what you call a
good woman; it is what I call a monster.” But this tyranny of the

628 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

reality that confronts us, this preponderance of the lamplight that

turns the dawn—already distant—as pale as the faintest memory,
disappeared when I was away from Mme de Guermantes, and a
different lady said to me, putting herself on my level and judging
the duchess as placed far below either of us: “Oriane takes no
interest, really, in anything or anybody,” or even (what in the pres-
ence of Mme de Guermantes it would have seemed impossible to
believe, so loudly did she herself proclaim the opposite): “Oriane
is a snob.” Seeing that no mathematical process would have en-
abled one to convert Mme d’Arpajon and Mme de Montpensier
into commensurable quantities, it would have been impossible for
me to answer, had anyone asked me, which of the two seemed to
me superior to the other.
Now, among the peculiar characteristics of the drawing room
of the Princesse de Guermantes, the one most generally quoted
was a certain exclusiveness, due in part to the royal birth of the
princess, but especially to the almost fossilized rigidity of the aris-
tocratic prejudices of the prince, prejudices that, incidentally, the
duke and duchess had made no scruple about deriding in front
of me, and which naturally were to make me regard it as more
improbable than ever that I would have been invited to a party
by this man who reckoned only in royalties and dukes, and at
every dinner party made a scene because he had not been put
in the place at the table to which he would have been entitled
under Louis XIV, a place that, thanks to his immense erudition
in matters of history and genealogy, he was the only person who
knew. For this reason, many of the people in society placed to the
credit of the duke and duchess the differences that distinguished
them from their cousins. “The duke and duchess are far more
modern, far more intelligent, unlike the other couple who think
of nothing but how many quarterings one has, their salon is three
hundred years ahead of their cousins,’” were customary remarks,
the memory of which made me tremble as I looked at the invita-
tion card, to which they gave a far greater probability of its having
been sent me by some practical joker.

Chapter 2 629
 The Guermantes Way

443. Georges Trévor Douglas Bernard, If the duke and duchess had not been still at Cannes, I might
Marquis d’Harcourt (1808–83), was have tried to find out from them whether the invitation that I had
a diplomat and political figure whose
daughter married the Comte d’Haus- received was genuine. This state of doubt in which I was plunged
sonville’s son. Hély refers to Élie de was not due, as I flattered myself for a time by supposing, to a sen-
Talleyrand-­Périgord, Duc de Périgord, timent that a man of fashion would not have felt and that, con-
Prince de Chalais (1809–89).
444. Valentine de Laborde (1806–94) sequently a writer, even if he belonged, apart from being a writer,
married, in 1824, Gabriel Delessert, pre- to the fashionable caste, ought to reproduce in order to be thor-
fect of police in Paris. She was the mis- oughly “objective” and to depict each class differently. I happened,
tress of Prosper Mérimée, Maxime du
Camp, and Charles de Rémusat. in fact, only the other day, in a charming volume of memoirs, to
445. Joseph-­Othenin-­Bernard de come upon the record of uncertainties analogous to those which
Cléron, Comte d’Haussonville (1809– the Princesse de Guermantes’s invitation card made me undergo.
84), was a diplomat and political figure
whose memoir, Ma Jeunesse (1814–30), “Georges and I” (or “Hély and I,”443 I have not the book at hand
is the source of Proust’s anecdote. to verify the reference) “were so keen to be admitted to Mme
446. Louis XI (1423–83), King of France Delessert’s444 salon that, having received an invitation from her,
1461–83, is depicted in a famous
miniature by Foucquet, Louis XI tenant we thought it prudent, each of us independently, to make cer-
chapitre de l’ordre de Saint-­Michel. In tain that we were not the victims of an April fool joke.” Now, the
the portrait, he is wearing a long satin- writer is none other than the Comte d’Haussonville445 (he who
like robe, shoulder to floor, covered by
an ermine-­trimmed cape, with a close-­ married the Duc de Broglie’s daughter), and the other young man
fitting brimless high hat. who “independently” makes sure that he is not having a practical
447. Isabel of Bavaria (1371–1435) was joke played on him is, according to whether he is called Georges
Queen of France and wife of Charles
VI (1368–1422), King of France (1380– or Hély, one or other of the two inseparable friends of M. d’Haus-
1442). sonville, either M. d’Harcourt or the Prince de Chalais.
The day on which the soirée was to be held at the Princesse de
Guermantes’s, I learned that the duke and duchess had returned
to Paris the evening before. The princess’s ball would not have
brought them back, but one of their cousins was seriously ill, and
moreover the duke was very eager to attend a costume ball, which
was to be held the same night, and at which he himself was to
appear as Louis XI446 and his wife as Isabel of Bavaria.447 And
I determined to go and see her that morning. But having gone
out early, they had not yet returned; I watched first of all from a
little room, which had seemed to me to be a good lookout post,
for the arrival of their carriage. As a matter of fact, I had made
a singularly bad choice in my observatory, from which I could
barely make out our courtyard, but I did see into several others,

630 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

and this, though of no value to me, distracted me for a time. It is 448. This description of the chimney
not only in Venice that one has these views on to several houses tops in Venice and the one hundred
Dutch paintings will be repeated nearly
at once which have proved so tempting to painters; it is just the word for word in The Fugitive.
same in Paris. Nor do I cite Venice at random. It is of its poorer
quarters that certain poor quarters of Paris make one think, in
the morning, with their tall, widemouthed chimneys to which
the sun imparts the most vivid pinks, the brightest reds; it is a
whole garden that flowers above the houses, and flowers in such a
variety of tints that one would call it, planted on top of the town,
the garden of a tulip fancier of Delft or Haarlem. And then also,
the extreme proximity of the houses, with their windows looking
opposite one another onto a common courtyard, makes of each
casement the frame in which a cook sits dreamily gazing down
at the ground below, in which farther off a girl is having her hair
combed by an old woman with the face, barely distinguishable in
the shadow, of a witch: thus each courtyard provides the neighbor
in the adjoining house, by suppressing all sound in its interval, by
leaving visible a series of silent gestures in a series of rectangular
frames, glazed by the closing of the windows, an exhibition of
a hundred Dutch paintings hung in rows.448 Certainly from the
Hôtel de Guermantes one did not have the same kind of view,
but one had curious views also, especially from the strange trigo-
nometrical point at which I had placed myself and from which
one’s gaze was arrested by nothing nearer than the distant heights
formed by the comparatively vague plots of ground that preceded,
on a steep slope, the hotel of the Marquise de Plassac and Mme
de Tresmes, very noble cousins of M. de Guermantes and whom I
did not know. Between me and this house (which was that of their
father, M. de Bréquigny) nothing but blocks of buildings of low
elevation, facing in every conceivable direction, which, without
blocking the view, increased the distance with their oblique
planes. The red-­tiled turret of the coachhouse in which the Mar-
quis de Frécourt kept his carriages did indeed end in a spire that
rose rather higher, but was so slender that it concealed nothing,
and made one think of those picturesque old buildings in Switzer-

Chapter 2 631
 The Guermantes Way

449. In 1802, Turner kept a sketchbook land that spring up in isolation at the foot of a mountain. All these
of scenes of Saint-­Gothard, a moun- vague and d ­ ivergent points on which my eyes rested made more
tain range in the south central Alps of
Switzerland. distant apparently than if it had been separated from us by several
450. This revelation will be the sub- streets or by a series of foothills the hotel of Mme de Plassac, actu-
ject of the first part of the next volume, ally quite near but chimerically remote as in an Alpine landscape.
Sodom and Gomorrah.
When its wide squared windows, glittering in the sunlight like
flakes of rock crystal, were thrown open so as to air the rooms, one
felt, in following from one floor to the next the footmen whom
it was impossible to see clearly but who were visibly beating car-
pets, the same pleasure as when one sees in a landscape by Turner
or Elstir a traveler in a stagecoach, or a guide, at different degrees
of altitude on the Saint-­Gothard.449 But from this “point of view”
where I had placed myself I would have been in danger of not
seeing M. or Mme de Guermantes come in, so that when in the
afternoon I was free to resume my watch I simply stood on the
staircase, from which the opening of the porte-­cochère could not
escape my notice, and it was on this staircase that I posted my-
self, although I could not see from there, so entrancing with their
footmen rendered minute by distance and busily cleaning, the
Alpine beauties of the Bréquigny-­Tresmes Hotel. Now this wait
on the staircase was to have for me consequences so considerable,
and to reveal to me a landscape no longer Turneresque but moral,
of so great importance, that it is preferable to postpone the ac-
count of it for a little while450 by interposing first that of my visit
to the Guermantes when I knew that they had come home. It
was the duke alone who received me in his library. As I went in
there came out a little man with snow-­white hair, a shabby ap-
pearance, a little black tie such as was worn by the notary at Com-
bray and by several of my grandfather’s friends, but of a more
timid aspect than they, who, making me a series of deep bows,
refused absolutely to go downstairs until I had passed him. The
duke shouted after him from the library something that I did not
understand, and the other responded with more bows, addressed
to the wall, for the duke could not see him, but endlessly repeated
nevertheless, like the purposeless smiles on the faces of people

632 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

who are talking to you on the telephone; he had a falsetto voice, 451. The order of the Hospitaliers de
and saluted me afresh with the humility of a businessman. And he Saint-­Jean-­de-­Jérusalem was founded
in 1113 to defend the Latin kingdom of
might, for that matter, have been a businessman from Combray, Jerusalem. It was constituted at the end
so much was he in the style, provincial, old-­fashioned, and mild, of the First Crusade (1099) to welcome
of the small folk, the modest elders of those parts. the pilgrims to the Holy Land. Expelled
from Palestine in 1291, the Hospital-
“You will see Oriane in a moment,” the duke told me when I iers took refuge first at Cyprus (1291),
had entered the room. “Since Swann is coming in presently and then at Rhodes, where they took the
bringing her the proofs of his essay on the coinage of the Order of title Knights of Rhodes (1309), and still
later at Malta, where they became the
Malta, and, what is worse, an immense photograph he has had Knights of Malta (1530).
taken showing both sides of each of the coins, Oriane preferred to 452. The Knights Templar was a reli-
get dressed first in order to stay with him until it’s time to go out gious and military order founded in
1119. Its riches and independence
to dinner. We’re already so cluttered with things in the house that aroused envy and maliciousness. As it
we don’t know where to put them all, and I ask myself where on gained power, it became a menace to
earth we are going to stick this photograph. But I have too good-­ the church and the states. It was dis-
banded by Pope Clement V in 1312.
natured a wife, who is too fond of obliging people. She thought it 453. The Lusignan family reigned over
would be nice to ask Swann to let her see side by side on one sheet Cyprus from 1192 to 1489.
the heads of all those Grand Masters of the Order whose medals
he found at Rhodes. I said Malta, didn’t I, it is Rhodes, but it’s all
the same Order of Saint John of Jerusalem.451 As a matter of fact,
she is interested in them only because Swann makes a hobby of it.
Our family is very much mixed up in the whole story; even today,
my brother, whom you know, is one of the highest dignitaries in
the Order of Malta. But if I had talked to Oriane about all that,
she simply wouldn’t have listened to me. On the other hand, it
was quite enough that Swann’s researches into the Templars (it’s
astonishing the passion that people of one religion have for
studying others) should have led him on to the history of the
Knights of Rhodes, who succeeded the Templars,452 for Oriane at
once to insist on seeing the heads of these knights. They were very
small fry indeed compared with the Lusignans, Kings of Cyprus,453
from whom we descend in a direct line. But so far, Swann hasn’t
taken them up, so Oriane doesn’t care to hear anything about the
Lusignans.” I could not at once explain to the duke why I had
come. What happened was that several relatives or friends, in-
cluding Mme de Silistrie and the Duchesse de Montrose, came to

Chapter 2 633
 The Guermantes Way

454. The family’s nickname for the pay a call on the duchess, who was often at home before dinner,
cousin. This is similar to their nick- and not finding her there stayed for a short while with the duke.
name for Charlus: Mémé.
The first of these ladies (the Princesse de Silistrie), simply attired,
with a curt but friendly manner, carried a stick in her hand. I was
afraid at first that she had injured herself, or was a cripple. She was
on the contrary most alert. She spoke sadly to the duke about a
first cousin of his own—not on the Guermantes side, but more
illustrious still, were that possible—whose health, which had been
in a grave condition for some time, had grown suddenly worse.
But it was evident that the duke, while sympathizing with his
cousin’s lot, and repeating “Poor Mama!454 He’s such a good
fellow!” had formed a favorable prognosis. The fact was that the
duke knew he would enjoy the dinner that he was to attend, and
he did not mind going to the big soirée at the Princesse de Guer-
mantes’s, but above all he was to go on at one o’clock in the
morning with his wife to a great supper and costume ball, with a
view to which a costume of Louis XI for himself, and one of Isabel
of Bavaria for his wife were waiting in readiness. And the duke was
determined not to be disturbed amid all these gaieties by the suf-
ferings of the worthy Amanien d’Osmond. Two other ladies
carrying sticks, Mme de Plassac and Mme de Tresmes, both
daughters of the Comte de Bréquigny, came in next to pay Basin
a visit, and declared that cousin Mama’s state left no room now
for hope. The duke shrugged his shoulders, and to change the sub-
ject asked whether they were going that evening to Marie-­
Gilbert’s. They replied that they were not, in view of the state of
Amanien, who was at the point of death, and indeed they had ex-
cused themselves from the dinner to which the duke was going,
the other guests at which they proceeded to enumerate to him: the
brother of King Theodosius, the Infanta Maria Concepción, etc.
Since the Marquis d’Osmond was less closely related to them than
he was to Basin, their “defection” appeared to the duke to be a sort
of indirect reproach aimed at his own conduct. And so, although
they had come down from the heights of the Bréquigny hotel to
see the duchess (or rather to announce to her the alarming char-

634 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

acter, incompatible for his relatives with attendance at social

gatherings, of their cousin’s illness), they did not stay long, and,
each armed with her alpenstock, Walpurge and Dorothée (such
were the first names of the two sisters) retraced the craggy path to
their citadel. I never thought to ask the Guermantes what was the
meaning of these sticks, so common in a certain part of the Fau-
bourg Saint-­Germain. Possibly, looking upon the whole parish as
their domain, and not caring to hire cabs, they were in the habit
of taking long walks, for which some old fracture, due to immod-
erate indulgence in the hunt, and to the falls from horseback that
are often the fruit of that indulgence, or simply rheumatism
caused by the dampness of the Left Bank and of old châteaux
made a stick necessary. Perhaps they had not set out on any such
long expedition through the quarter, but, having merely come
down into their garden (which lay at no distance from that of the
duchess) to pick the fruit required for their compotes, had looked
in on their way home to bid good evening to Mme de Guer-
mantes, though without going so far as to bring a pair of shears or
a watering can into her house. The duke appeared touched that I
should have come to see them so soon after their return to Paris.
But his face grew dark when I told him that I had come to ask his
wife to find out whether her cousin really had invited me. I had
touched upon one of those services that M. and Mme de Guer-
mantes were not fond of rendering. The duke explained to me that
it was too late, that if the princess had not sent me an invitation it
would make him appear to be asking her for one, that his cousins
had refused him one once before, and he had no wish to appear
either directly or indirectly to be interfering with their visiting list,
be “meddling”; finally, he could not even be sure that he and his
wife, who were dining out that evening, would not come straight
home afterward, that in that case their best excuse for not having
gone to the princess’s party would be to conceal from her the fact
of their return to Paris, instead of hastening to inform her of it, as
they must do if they sent her a note, or spoke to her over the tele-
phone about me, and certainly too late to be of any use, since, in

Chapter 2 635
 The Guermantes Way

all probability, the princess’s list of guests would certainly be

closed by now. “You’ve not fallen foul of her in any way?” he asked
in a suspicious tone, the Guermantes living in a constant fear of
not being informed of the latest society quarrels, and so of people’s
trying to climb back into favor on their shoulders. Finally, as the
duke was in the habit of taking upon himself all decisions that
might seem not very good-­natured: “Listen, my boy,” he said to
me suddenly, as though the idea had just come into his head, “I
would really rather not mention at all to Oriane that you have
been speaking to me about it. You know how kindhearted she is;
besides, she’s enormously fond of you, she would insist on sending
to ask her cousin, in spite of anything I might say to the contrary,
and if she is tired after dinner, there will be no getting out of it, she
will be forced to go to the soirée. No, decidedly, I will say nothing
to her about it. Anyhow, you will see her yourself in a minute. But
not a word about that matter, I beg of you. If you decide to go to
the soirée at my cousins’, I have no need to tell you what a plea-
sure it will be to us to spend the evening there with you.” Human
motives are too sacred for the one before whom they are invoked
not to bow to them, whether he believes them to be sincere or not;
I did not wish to appear to be weighing in the balance for a mo-
ment the relative importance of my invitation and the possible
tiredness of Mme de Guermantes, and I promised not to speak to
her of the object of my visit, exactly as though I had been taken in
by the little farce that M. de Guermantes had performed for my
benefit. I asked him if he thought there was any chance of my
seeing Mme de Stermaria at the princess’s.
“Why, no,” he replied with the air of a connoisseur; “I know
the name you mention, from having seen it in the club directories;
it isn’t at all the type of person who goes to Gilbert’s. You will see
no one there who is not excessively comme il faut and intensely
boring, duchesses bearing titles that one thought were extinct
years ago and that they have trotted out again for the occasion,
all the ambassadors, heaps of Coburgs, foreign royalties, but you
mustn’t hope for the ghost of a Stermaria. Gilbert would be taken

636 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

ill at the mere thought of such a thing. “Wait now, you’re fond 455. Philippe de Champaigne (or
of painting, I must show you a superb picture I bought from my Champagne), 1602–74, was a Flemish
painter who moved to Paris in 1621 and
cousin, partly in exchange for the Elstirs, which frankly did not did portraits of Cardinal Richelieu, King
appeal to us. It was sold to me as a Philippe de Champaigne,455 Louis XIII, and other prominent per-
but I believe myself that it’s by someone even greater. Would you sonages.

like to know my idea? I believe it to be a Velázquez, and of the

best period,” said the duke, looking me boldly in the eyes, whether
to learn my impression or in the hope of enhancing it. A footman
came in.
“Madame la Duchesse would like to know, Monsieur le Duc,
if Monsieur le Duc will be so good as to see M. Swann, since
Madame la Duchesse is not quite ready.”
“Show M. Swann in,” said the duke, after looking at his watch
and seeing that he had still a few minutes before he needed to go
dress. “Naturally, my wife, who told him to come, is not ready.
There’s no use saying anything in front of Swann about Marie-­
Gilbert’s soirée,” said the duke. “I don’t know whether he’s been
invited. Gilbert likes him immensely, because he believes him to
be the natural grandson of the Duc de Berry, but that’s a long
story. (Otherwise, you can imagine! My cousin, who falls in a fit
if he sees a Jew a mile off.) But now, you see, the Dreyfus Affair
has made things more serious. Swann ought to have realized that
he more than anyone must drop all connection with those fellows,
instead of which he says the most regrettable things.”
The duke called back the footman to know whether the man
who had been sent to inquire at cousin Osmond’s had returned.
His plan was as follows: since he believed, and rightly, that his
cousin was dying, he was anxious to obtain news of him before his
death, that is to say before he was obliged to go into mourning.
Once covered by the official certainty that Amanien was still alive,
he could go without a thought to his dinner, to the prince’s soirée,
to the midnight revel where he would appear as Louis XI, and
had made the most exciting assignation with a new mistress, and
would make no more inquiries until the following day, when his
pleasures would be at an end. Then one would put on mourning if

Chapter 2 637
 The Guermantes Way

456. A daily newspaper that was pub- the cousin had passed away in the night. “No, M. le Duc, he is not
lished from 1861 to 1942. back yet.” “What in the name of God! Nothing is ever done in this
457. Delion was a hatter who in 1900
had a regular shop in the passage Jouf- house until the last minute,” cried the duke, at the thought that
froy and a deluxe establishment at 24, Amanien might still be in time to “croak” for an evening paper,
boulevard des Capucines. and so make him miss his revel. He sent for the Le Temps,456 in
458. Prince de Sagan (1832–1910) was
the name used by Charles-­Guillaume-­ which there was nothing.
Frédéric-­Boson de Talleyrand-­Périgord I had not seen Swann for a long time, and asked myself at first
until the death of his father in 1898, whether in the old days he used to clip his mustache, or did not
when he became the fourth Duc de
Talleyrand and Duc de Sagan. have his hair brushed up vertically in front, for I found in him
459. The Marquis de Modène was one something changed; it was simply that he was indeed greatly
of the most fashionable society men of “changed” because he was very ill, and illness produces in the
his era. In the 1890s, he lived in Paris
at 17, rue Marbeuf. face modifications as profound as are created by growing a beard
460. Charles Haas (1832–1902), son or by changing the line of one’s parting. (Swann’s illness was the
of a stockbroker, was, apart from the same that had killed his mother, who had been stricken by it at
Rothschilds, the only Jew who belonged
to the Jockey Club. Although he was precisely the age that he had now reached. Our existences are in
a friend of Geneviève Straus, Proust truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic
knew him only slightly but used him castings as if there really were sorcerers in the world. And just as
as the primary model for Swann. See
Correspondance 12: 387, where Proust there is a certain duration of life for humanity in general, so there
writes about this appropriation. James is one for families in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for
Tissot’s 1868 painting Le Cercle de la rue the members of it who resemble one another.) Swann was dressed
Royale shows Charles Haas and other
members of the club on the balcony with an elegance which, like that of his wife, associated with what
looking over the rue Royale and the he now was what he once had been. Buttoned up in a pearl-­gray
place de la Concorde. frock coat, which emphasized the tallness of his figure, slender,
461. Comte Louis de Turenne was a
friend of Charles Haas. his white gloves stitched in black, he carried a gray top hat of a
specially wide shape that Delion457 had ceased now to make ex-
cept for him, the Prince de Sagan,458 the Marquis de Modène,459
M. Charles Haas,460 and Comte Louis de Turenne.461 I was sur-
prised at the charming smile and affectionate handclasp with
which he replied to my greeting, for I had imagined that after so
long an interval he would not recognize me at once; I told him of
my astonishment; he received it with a burst of laughter, a trace of
indignation and a further grip of my hand, as if it were throwing
doubt on the soundness of his brain or the sincerity of his affec-
tion to suppose that he did not know me. And yet that was what
had happened; he did not identify me, as I learned long afterward,

638 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

until several minutes later when he heard my name mentioned.

But no change in his face, in his speech, in the things he said
to me betrayed the discovery which a chance word from M. de
Guermantes had enabled him to make, with such mastery, with
such absolute sureness did he play the social game. He brought
to it, moreover, that spontaneity in manners and personal initia-
tive, even in his style of dress, that characterized the Guermantes
type. Thus it was that the greeting that the old clubman, without
recognizing me, had given me was not the cold and stiff greeting
of the man of the world who was a pure formalist, but a greeting
full of a real friendliness, of a true charm, such as the Duchesse de
Guermantes, for instance, possessed (carrying it so far as to smile
at you first, before you had bowed to her, if she met you in the
street), in contrast to the more mechanical greeting customary
among the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain. In the same
way, again, the hat that, in conformity with a custom that was
beginning to disappear, he laid on the floor by his feet, was lined
with green leather, a thing not usually done, because, according
to him, this kept the hat much cleaner, in reality because it was
highly becoming.
“Now, Charles, you’re a great expert, come and see what I’ve
got to show you, after which, my boys, I’m going to ask your per-
mission to leave you together for a moment while I go and change
my clothes. Besides, I expect Oriane won’t be long now.” And
he showed his “Velázquez” to Swann. “But it seems to me that I
know this,” said Swann with the grimace of a sick man for whom
the mere act of speaking requires an effort.
“Yes,” said the duke, turned serious by the time that the expert
took in expressing his admiration. “You have probably seen it at
Gilbert’s.”
“Oh, yes, of course, I remember.”
“What do you suppose it is?”
“Oh, well, if it comes from Gilbert’s, it is probably one of your
ancestors,” said Swann with a blend of irony and deference toward
a grandeur that he would have felt it impolite and absurd to dis-

Chapter 2 639
 The Guermantes Way

462. Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) parage, but to which for reasons of good taste he preferred to
was a painter at the court of Louis XIV. make only a playful reference.
His specialty was the formal portrait of
members of the royal family and of the “To be sure, it is,” said the duke bluntly. “It’s Boson, the I forget
nobility. how manyeth de Guermantes. Not that I care a damn about that.
463. The quip is made by Bracony, a You know I’m not as feudal as my cousin. I’ve heard the names
character in Le Passé, a comedy by
Georges de Porto-­Riche (1849–1930). mentioned of Rigaud,462 Mignard, Velázquez even!” he went on,
fastening on Swann the gaze of an inquisitor and torturer in an at-
tempt at once to read into his mind and to influence his response.
“Well,” he concluded (for when he was led to provoke artificially
an opinion which he desired to hear, he had the faculty, after a few
moments, of believing that it had been spontaneously uttered),
“come, now, none of your flattery. Do you think it’s by one of
those big masters I’ve mentioned?”
“Nnnnno,” said Swann.
“Well, of course, I know nothing about these things, it’s not
for me to decide who daubed the canvas. But you’re a dilettante, a
master of the subject. What would you put it down as?”
Swann hesitated for a moment before the picture, which obvi-
ously he thought atrocious. “A bad joke!”463 he replied with a
smile at the duke who could not check an impulsive movement of
rage. When this had subsided: “Be good fellows, both of you, wait
a moment for Oriane, I must go and put on my swallowtails and
then I’ll join you. I’ll send word to the missus that you’re both
waiting for her.”
I chatted for a minute or two with Swann about the Dreyfus
Affair, and asked him how it was that all the Guermantes were
anti-­Dreyfusards. “In the first place because at heart all these
people are anti-­Semites,” replied Swann, who, all the same, knew
very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like
everyone who supports any cause with ardor, preferred, to explain
the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in
them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was
nothing to be done, rather than reasons that might permit of dis-
cussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life,

640 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these
persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers.
“Yes, the Prince de Guermantes,” I said, “it is true, I’ve been
told that he is anti-­Semitic.”
“Oh, that fellow! I wasn’t even thinking about him. He carries
it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful
toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the
only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on
he allowed a wing of his château that had caught fire to be burned
to the ground, because he would have had to send for water pumps
to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds.”
“Are you going to be there this evening, by any chance?”
“Yes,” Swann replied, “although I am far too tired. But he sent
me a wire to tell me that he has something to say to me. I feel that
I will be too unwell in the next few days to go there or to receive
him at home; it will upset me, so I prefer to get it over at once.”
“But the Duc de Guermantes is not anti-­Semitic?”
“You can see quite well that he is, since he’s an anti-­Dreyfusard,”
replied Swann, without noticing that he was begging the question.
“That doesn’t prevent my being very sorry that I disappointed this
man—what am I saying—this duke, I mean—by not admiring
his Mignard or whatever he calls it.”
“But at any rate,” I went on, reverting to the Dreyfus Affair,
“the duchess, she, now, is intelligent.”
“Yes, she is charming. To my mind, however, she was even more
charming when she was still known as the Princesse des Laumes.
Her mind has become somehow more angular, it was all much
softer in the juvenile great lady, but after all, young or old, men
or women, what can you expect, all these people belong to a dif-
ferent race, one can’t have a thousand years of feudalism in one’s
blood with impunity. Naturally they imagine that it counts for
nothing in their opinions.”
“All the same, Robert de Saint-­L oup is a Dreyfusard.”
“Ah! So much the better, all the more as you know that his

Chapter 2 641
 The Guermantes Way

464. On December 20, 1893, Paul mother is extremely ‘anti.’ I had heard that he was, but I wasn’t
Déroulède accused Georges Clemen- certain of it. That gives me a great deal of pleasure. It doesn’t sur-
ceau, then a député from Paris and
editor of the newspaper La Justice, of prise me, he’s highly intelligent. It’s a great thing, that is.”
having taken a bribe from Cornelius Dreyfusism had brought to Swann an extraordinary naïveté and
Herz, one of the financiers of the Suez had imparted to his way of looking at things an impulsiveness,
Canal. Clemenceau was allegedly to
launch a press campaign favorable to an inconsistency more noticeable even than had been the similar
the project. Herz had to seek refuge in effects of his marriage to Odette; this new loss declassing would
England in order to avoid prosecution. have been better described as a reclassing, and was entirely to his
Clemenceau was accused of being an
agent of England and lost his bid for credit, since it made him return to the ways in which his forebears
reelection in 1893. had trodden and from which he had turned aside to mix with the
465. Jean-­Joseph, called Jules, Cor- aristocracy. But Swann, just at the very moment when with such
nely (1845–1907) was the founder and
editor of the royalist newspaper Le lucidity it had been granted to him, thanks to the gifts he had
Clairon, which merged with Le Gaulois. inherited from his race, to perceive a truth that was still hidden
In December 1897, after having pub- from people of fashion, showed himself nevertheless quite comi-
lished an article favorable to Dreyfus
and against Général Mercier, he was cally blind. He subjected afresh all his admirations and all his con-
forced to resign and went to Le Figaro, tempts to the test of a new criterion, Dreyfusism. That the anti-­
where he remained until 1901. He is Dreyfusism of Mme Bontemps should have made him think her a
the author of a number of collections
of articles, including Notes sur l’affaire fool was no more astonishing than that, when he was first married,
Dreyfus. He campaigned for a retrial of he should have thought her intelligent. It was not very serious
Dreyfus. In his career, he evolved from either that the new wave reached also his political judgments and
royalist to radical.
466. Maurice Barrès (1862–1907) was made him lose all memory of having treated as a man with a price,
an important writer and political figure. a British spy (this latter was an absurdity of the Guermantes set),
Proust reproaches him for having aban- Clemenceau,464 whom he declared now to have always stood up
doned literature in favor of politics. In
Barrès’s writings, he lauds tradition for conscience, to be a man of iron, like Cornely.465 “No, no, I
and defends nationalist positions. He never told you anything of the sort. You’re thinking of someone
was a staunch anti-­Dreyfusard: “It was else.” But sweeping past his political judgments, the wave over-
undoubtedly Barrès who, through the
articles he published during the Af- turned Swann’s literary judgments also, and even affected his way
fair and in his electoral ‘programs,’ of pronouncing them. Barrès had lost all his talent, and even the
gave national anti-­Semitism its most books of his early days were feeble, one could hardly read them
forceful expression.” Jean-­Denis Bredin,
The Affair, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New again.466 “You try, you’ll find you can’t struggle to the end. What
York: George Braziller, 1986), 295. a difference from Clemenceau! Personally, I am not anticlerical,
but when you compare them together you must see that Barrès
is invertebrate. He’s a very great fellow, is old Clemenceau. How
he knows the language!” However, the anti-­Dreyfusards were in
no position to criticize these follies. They explained that one was

642 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

a Dreyfusard only because one was of Jewish origin. If a prac-

ticing Catholic like Saniette also favored a new trial, that was be-
cause he was buttonholed by Mme Verdurin, who behaved like a
wild radical. She was out above all things against the “frocks.” Sa-
niette was more fool than knave, and had no idea of the harm that
the mistress was doing him. If you pointed out that Brichot was
equally a friend of Mme Verdurin and was a member of the “Patrie
Française,” that was because he was more intelligent.
“You see him occasionally?” I asked Swann, referring to Saint-­
Loup.
“No, never. He wrote to me the other day hoping that I would
ask the Duc de Mouchy and various other people to vote for him
at the Jockey, where for that matter he got through like a letter
through the post.”
“In spite of the Affair!”
“The question was never raised. However I must tell you that
since all this business began I never set foot in the place.”
M. de Guermantes returned, and was presently joined by his
wife, all ready now for the evening, tall and proud in a gown of
red satin the skirt of which was bordered with spangles. She had
in her hair a long ostrich feather dyed purple, and over her shoul-
ders a tulle scarf of the same red as her dress. “How nice it is to
have one’s hat lined with leather,” said the duchess, who missed
nothing. “However, with you, Charles, everything is always
charming, whether it’s what you wear or what you say, what you
read or what you do.” Swann meanwhile, without apparently lis-
tening, was considering the duchess as he would have studied the
canvas of a master, and then sought her eyes, making with his lips
the grimace that implies: “Wow!” Mme de Guermantes rippled
with laughter. “So my clothes please you? I’m delighted. But I
must say that they don’t please me much,” she went on with a
sulking air. “Good Lord, what a bore it is to have to dress up and
go out when one would ever so much rather stay at home!”
“What magnificent rubies!”
“Ah! my dear Charles, at least one can see that you know what

Chapter 2 643
 The Guermantes Way

467. In the original, tout le ban et you’re talking about, you’re not like that brute Monserfeuil, who
l’arrière-­ban, which means the convo- asked me if they were real. I must say that I’ve never seen anything
cation of a particular group, such as all
the vassals by the lord or all the nobles quite like them. They were a present from the grand duchess.
and their entourage. It means simply They’re a little too large for my liking, a little too like claret glasses
everybody and his brother. Scott Mon- filled to the brim, but I’ve put them on because we will be seeing
crieff, in his choice of words, may have
been thinking of the parable of the ban- the grand duchess this evening at Marie-­Gilbert’s,” added Mme
quet at Luke 14:23: “And the lord said de Guermantes, never suspecting that this assertion destroyed the
unto the servant, Go out into the high- force of those previously made by the duke.
ways and hedges, and compel them to
come in, that my house may be filled.” “What’s on at the princess’s?” inquired Swann.
468. In fact, the Narrator does not “Practically nothing,” the duke hastened to reply, the question
meet the princess until the next having made him think that Swann was not invited.
volume, Sodom and Gomorrah.
“What’s that, Basin? When all the highways and hedgerows
have been scoured?467 It will be a deathly crush. What will be
pretty, though,” she went on, looking wistfully at Swann, “if the
storm I can feel in the air now doesn’t break, will be those mar-
velous gardens. You know them, of course. I was there a month
ago, at the time when the lilacs were in flower, you can’t have any
idea how lovely they were. And then the fountain, really, it’s Ver-
sailles in Paris.”
“What sort of person is the princess?” I asked.
“Why, you know quite well, you’ve seen her here,468 she’s as
beautiful as the day, also rather an idiot. Very nice, in spite of
all her Germanic high-­and-­mightiness, full of good nature and
gaffes.”
Swann was too shrewd not to perceive that the duchess, in
this speech, was trying to show the “Guermantes wit,” and at no
great cost to herself, for she was only serving up in a less perfect
form some old bons mots of her own. Nevertheless, to prove to
the duchess that he appreciated her intention to be funny, and as
though she had really succeeded in being funny, he smiled with
a slightly forced air, causing me by this particular form of insin-
cerity the same embarrassment that used to disturb me long ago
when I heard my parents discussing with M. Vinteuil the corrup-
tion of certain sections of society (when they knew very well that
a corruption far greater sat enthroned at Montjouvain), Legrandin

644 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

coloring his utterances for the benefit of fools, choosing delicate 469. Marie Pauline Cécile Dupont-­
epithets that he knew perfectly well would not be understood by White (1841–98), daughter of a famous
economist, married François Sadi
a rich or chic but illiterate public. Carnot (1837–94), who was president
“Come now, Oriane, what on earth are you saying?” broke in of France from 1887 until his assassi-
M. de Guermantes. “Marie a fool? Why, she has read everything, nation by an anarchist. It was she who
began the tradition of society recep-
she’s as musical as a violin.” tions at the Palais de l’Élysée, the presi-
“But, my poor little Basin, you’re as innocent as a newborn dential residence.
babe. As if one could not be all that, and rather an idiot as well! 470. During Sadi Carnot’s presidency
there were two British ambassadors to
Idiot is too strong a word; no, she’s in the clouds, she’s Hesse-­ France: Robert Edward Bulwer, Count
Darmstadt, Holy Roman Empire, and blah-­blah-­blah. Her pro- Lytton (1831–91), appointed in 1887,
nunciation alone gets on my nerves. But I quite admit that she’s and Frederick Temple Blackwood, Mar-
quess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902),
a charming loony. Simply the idea of stepping down from her appointed in 1892. The latter’s wife was
German throne to go and marry, in the most bourgeois way, a pri- Hariot Georgina Hamilton-­Temple-­
vate citizen. It is true that she chose him! Yes, it’s quite true,” she Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin
and Ava. She published her memoirs,
went on, turning to me, “you don’t know Gilbert. Let me give you based on the letters she had written to
an idea of him, he took to his bed once because I had left a card her mother: Our Viceregal Life in India
on Mme Carnot . . .469 But my little Charles,” said the duchess, (1889) and My Canadian Journal (1891).

changing the subject when she saw that the story of the card left
on the Carnots appeared to irritate M. de Guermantes, “you
know, you’ve never sent me that photograph of our Knights of
Rhodes, whom I’ve learned to love through you and with whom I
am so eager to become acquainted.”
The duke meanwhile had not taken his eyes from his wife’s
face. “Oriane, you might at least tell the story properly and not
cut out half. I ought to explain,” he corrected, addressing Swann,
“that the British ambassadress470 at that time, who was a very
worthy woman, but lived rather with her head in the clouds and
was in the habit of making up these odd combinations, conceived
the distinctly quaint idea of inviting us with the president and his
wife. We were—Oriane herself was rather surprised, especially as
the ambassadress knew quite enough of the people we knew not
to invite us, of all things, to so ill-­assorted a gathering. There was
a minister there who is a swindler, however I pass over all that, we
had not been warned in time, were caught in the trap, and, I’m
bound to admit, all these people behaved most civilly to us. Only,

Chapter 2 645
 The Guermantes Way

471. During the Revolution, Lazare once was enough. Mme de Guermantes, who does not often do
Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot me the honor of consulting me, felt it incumbent upon her to
(1753–1823), was a member of the Na-
tional Convention and the Committee leave a card in the course of the following week at the Élysée.
of Public Safety. This committee was Gilbert may perhaps have gone rather far in regarding it as a stain
created in April 1793 by the National upon our name. But it must not be forgotten that, politics apart,
Convention and formed the de facto
executive government during the Reign M. Carnot, who for that matter filled his post quite adequately,
of Terror (1793–94). In the Convention was the grandson of a member of the revolutionary tribunal that
of 1792, he voted for the death of King caused the death of eleven of our people in a single day.”471
Louis XVI.
472. Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc d’Or- “In that case, Basin, why did you go every week to dine at
léans, known during the Revolution as Chantilly? The Duc d’Aumale was just as much the grandson
Philippe-­Égalité (1747–93), father of of a member of the revolutionary tribunal, with this difference,
the future Louis-­Philippe, adhered to
the revolutionary cause due to political that Carnot was a brave man and Philippe Égalité472 a wretched
expediency. He voted for the death of scoundrel.”
his cousin Louis XVI. Later accused of “Excuse my interrupting you to explain that I did send the
treason himself, he was condemned
and guillotined. photograph,” said Swann. “I can’t understand how it hasn’t
reached you.”
“It doesn’t altogether surprise me,” said the duchess, “my ser-
vants tell me only what they think fit. They probably do not ap-
prove of the Order of Saint John.” And she rang the bell.
“You, know, Oriane, that when I used to go to Chantilly it was
without enthusiasm.”
“Without enthusiasm, but with a nightshirt in a bag, in case
the prince asked you to stay, which for that matter he very rarely
did, being a perfect cad like all the Orléans lot. Do you know
who else we are to dine with at Mme de Saint-­Euverte’s?” Mme de
Guermantes asked her husband.
“Besides the people you know already, she’s asked at the last
moment King Theodosius’s brother.”
At these tidings the duchess’s features breathed contentment
and her speech boredom. “Oh, good Lord, more princes!”
“But that one is nice and intelligent,” Swann suggested.
“Not altogether, though,” replied the duchess, apparently
seeking for words that would give more novelty to the thought
expressed. “Have you ever noticed with princes that the nicest

646 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

among them are not really nice? They must always have an
opinion about everything. Then, as they have none of their own,
they spend the first half of their lives asking us ours and the other
half serving them up to us again. They positively must be able to
say that one piece has been well played and the next not so well.
When there is no difference. Listen, this little Theodosius junior
(I forget his name) asked me what one called an orchestral motif.
I replied,” said the duchess, her eyes sparkling while a laugh broke
from her beautiful red lips: “‘One calls it an orchestral motif.’
I don’t think he was any too well pleased, really. Oh, my dear
Charles,” she went on with a languishing air, “what a bore it can
be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It
is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we
don’t know what it’s like.”
A servant appeared. It was the young fiancé who used to have
trouble with the concierge, until the duchess, in her kindness of
heart, brought about an apparent peace between them.
“Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M. le Marquis d’Os-
mond?” he asked.
“Most certainly not, nothing before tomorrow morning. In
fact I don’t want you to remain in the house tonight. The first
thing that will happen will be that his footman, whom you know,
will come to you with the latest report and send you out after us.
Go out, go anywhere you like, live it up, have a woman, sleep out,
but I don’t want to see you here before tomorrow morning.”
An immense joy overflowed from the footman’s face. He would
at last be able to spend long hours with his betrothed, whom he
had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the
concierge, the duchess had considerately explained to him that it
would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at
all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last,
on a happiness that the duchess saw and guessed its reason. She
felt, so to speak, a tightening of the heart and an itching in all
her limbs at the sight of this happiness that an amorous couple

Chapter 2 647
 The Guermantes Way

were snatching behind her back, concealing themselves from her,

which left her irritated and jealous. “No, Basin, let him stay here;
I say, he’s not to stir out of the house.”
“But, Oriane, that’s absurd, the house is crammed with servants,
and you have the costumier’s people coming as well at twelve to
dress us for this show. There’s absolutely nothing for him to do,
and he’s the only one who’s a friend of Mama’s footman; I would a
thousand times rather get him right away from the house.”
“Listen, Basin, let me do what I want, I will have a message for
him to take in the evening, as it happens, I can’t tell yet at what
time. In any case you’re not to budge from here for a single in-
stant,” she said to the despairing footman.
If there were continual quarrels, and if servants did not stay
long with the duchess, the person to whose charge this guerrilla
warfare was to be laid was indeed irremovable, but it was not the
concierge. No doubt for the rougher tasks, for the martyrdoms
that it was more tiring to inflict, for the quarrels that ended in
blows, the duchess entrusted the heavier instruments to him; but
even then he played his part without the least suspicion that he
had been cast for it. Like the household servants, he admired the
duchess for her kindness; and footmen of little discernment who
often came back, after leaving her service, to visit Françoise used
to say that the duke’s house would have been the finest “place”
in Paris if it had not been for the concierge’s lodge. The duchess
“played” the lodge on them, just as at different times clericalism,
Freemasonry, the Jewish peril, etc., have been played on the
public. Another footman came into the room.
“Why haven’t they brought up the package that M. Swann sent
here? And, by the way (you’ve heard, Charles, that Mama is seri-
ously ill?), Jules went up to inquire for news of M. le Marquis
d’Osmond: has he come back yet?”
“He’s just arrived this instant, M. le Duc. They’re expecting at
any moment for M. le Marquis to pass away.”
“Ah! He’s alive!” exclaimed the duke with a sigh of relief.
“They’re expecting, they’re expecting! The hell you say! While

648 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

there’s life there’s hope,” the duke said to us cheerfully. “They’ve 473. Count Robert de Montesquiou re-
been talking about him as though he were dead and buried. In a lates in his memoirs a similar reaction
by his cousin Aimery de La Rochefou-
week from now he’ll be fitter than I am.” cauld when Montesquiou’s brother
“It’s the doctors who said that he wouldn’t last out the evening. Gontran was in agony. Proust certainly
One of them wanted to call again during the night. The head one must have heard this story from the
count. There is also an example of
said it was no use. M. le Marquis would be dead by then; they’ve identical behavior that is related in the
only kept him alive by injecting him with camphorated oil.” memoir of Mme de Boigne involving
“Hold your tongue, you damned fool,” cried the duke in a the death of the Duc de Kent and a
grand ball given by the Duc de Berry at
paroxysm of rage. “Who the devil asked you to say all that? You the Palais de l’Élysée. À la recherche du
haven’t understood a word of what they told you.” temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade
“It wasn’t me they told, it was Jules.” edition], 1988), 2: 876, n. 1.

“Will you hold your tongue!” roared the duke, and, turning to
Swann, “What a blessing he’s still alive! He will regain his strength
gradually, don’t you know. Still alive, after being in such a critical
state. That in itself is an excellent sign. One mustn’t expect every-
thing at once. It can’t be at all unpleasant, a little injection of
camphorated oil,” said the duke, rubbing his hands. “He’s alive;
what more could anyone want? After going through all that he’s
gone through, it’s a great step forward. Upon my word, I envy him
having such a constitution. Ah! these invalids, you know, people
do all sorts of little things for them that they don’t do for us. Now
today there was a devil of a cook who sent me up a leg of mutton
with béarnaise sauce—it was done to perfection, I must admit,
but just for that very reason I took so much of it that it’s still lying
on my stomach. However, that doesn’t make people come to in-
quire for me as they do for dear Amanien. We do too much in-
quiring. It only tires him. We must let him have room to breathe.
They’re killing the poor fellow by sending around to him all the
time.”473
“Well,” said the duchess to the footman as he was leaving the
room, “I gave orders for the envelope containing a photograph
that M. Swann sent me to be brought up here.”
“Madame la Duchesse, it is so large that I didn’t know if I
could get it through the door. We have left it in the hall. Does
Madame la Duchesse wish me to bring it up?”

Chapter 2 649
 The Guermantes Way

474. Darmstadt is a German city that “Oh, in that case, no; they ought to have told me, but if it’s so
was the capital of Hesse. big I will see it in a moment when I come downstairs.”
475. Kassel is a city in the province of
Hesse in western Germany and was the “I forgot to tell Mme la Duchesse that Mme la Comtesse Molé
residence of the landgraves of Hesse left a card this morning for Mme la Duchesse.”
from 1567. The two lines of the House “What, this morning?” said the duchess with an air of disap-
of Hesse were Hesse-­Darmstadt and
Hesse-­Kassel. proval, feeling that so young a woman ought not to take the lib-
476. Oscar II’s grandfather was Jean-­ erty of leaving cards in the morning.
Baptiste Bernadotte (1764–1844). “About ten o’clock, Madame la Duchesse.”
Born in Pau, this simple soldier distin-
guished himself in the Revolutionary “Show me the cards.”
wars and those of the Empire and “In any case, Oriane, when you say that it was a funny idea on
became Maréchal de France. He was Marie’s part to marry Gilbert,” went on the duke, reverting to the
adopted by the King of Sweden, Charles
XIII, whom he succeeded in 1818, under original topic of conversation, “it is you who have an odd way of
the name Charles XIV John. writing history. If either of them was a fool, it was Gilbert, for
having married of all people a woman so closely related to the
King of the Belgians, who has usurped the name of Brabant that
belongs to us. To put it briefly, we are of the same blood as the
Hesses, and of the elder branch. It is always stupid to talk about
oneself,” he apologized to me, “but after all, whenever we have
been not only at Darmstadt,474 but even at Kassel475 and all over
Electoral Hesse, the landgraves have always, all of them, been most
courteous in giving us precedence as being of the elder branch.”
“But really, Basin, you don’t mean to tell me that a person who
was an honorary major in every regiment in her country, who, it
was believed, would become engaged to the King of Sweden . . .”
“Oh, Oriane, that is too much; anyone would think that you
didn’t know that the King of Sweden’s grandfather476 was tilling
the soil at Pau when we had been ruling the roost for nine hun-
dred years throughout the whole of Europe.”
“That doesn’t alter the fact that if somebody were to say in
the street: ‘Look, there’s the King of Sweden,’ everyone would at
once rush to see him as far as the place de la Concorde, and if he
said: ‘There’s M. de Guermantes,’ nobody would know who M. de
Guermantes was.”
“What an argument!”
“Besides, I never can understand how, once the title of Duke

650 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

of Brabant has passed to the Belgian Royal Family, you can con- 477. This is a reference to Virgil’s
tinue to claim it.” Aeneid, book 8: “Barking Anubis, slayer
of the dragon.” Anubis is the Egyptian
The footman returned with the Comtesse Molé’s card, or deity with the head of a dog. Latrator
rather what she had left in place of a card. Alleging that she had Anubis is the title of the second chapter
none on her, she had taken from her pocket a letter addressed to of Saint Mark’s Rest by John Ruskin.
Swann may be referring to earlier con-
herself, and keeping the contents had handed in the envelope that versations about the Knights of Rhodes
bore the inscription: “La Comtesse Molé.” Since the envelope was and later about the Knights of Malta.
rather large, following the fashion in notepaper that prevailed that The knights had elected in 1345 as their
grand master Dieudonné de Gozon,
year, this manuscript “card” was almost twice the size of an ordi- who, according to legend, had three
nary visiting card. years earlier, with the help of two dogs,
“That is what people call Mme Molé’s ‘simplicity,’” said the killed a dragon that was ravaging the
island. On his death in 1353, his tomb-
duchess sarcastically. “She wants to make us think that she had no stone was inscribed extinctor draconis,
cards on her to show her originality. But we know all about that, indicating that he was a new Saint
don’t we, my little Charles, we are quite old enough and quite George. It is also possible that Swann
is referring to a medal bearing Gozan’s
original enough ourselves to see through the tricks of a little lady likeness on one side and the two dogs
who has only been going about for four years. She is charming, on the other.
but she doesn’t seem to me, all the same, to be quite ‘big’ enough
to imagine that she can take the world by surprise with so little
effort as merely leaving an envelope instead of a card and leaving
it at ten o’clock in the morning. Her old mother mouse will show
her that she knows a thing or two about that.”
Swann could not help smiling at the thought that the duchess,
who was, incidentally, a trifle jealous of Mme Molé’s success,
would find it quite in accordance with the “Guermantes wit” to
make some impertinent retort to her visitor.
“So far as the title of Duc de Brabant is concerned, I’ve told you
a hundred times, Oriane . . .” the duke continued, but the duchess,
without listening, cut him short.
“But my little Charles, I’m longing to see your photograph.”
“Ah! Extinctor draconis latrator Anubis,”477 said Swann.
“Yes, it was so charming what you said about that when you
were comparing the Saint George at Venice. But I don’t under-
stand: why Anubis?”
“What’s the one like who was an ancestor of Babal?” asked
M. de Guermantes.

Chapter 2 651
 The Guermantes Way

478. In the original, baballe, which is a “You want to see his bauble?”478 retorted his wife, dryly, to
colloquial term for balloon or ball. show she herself despised the pun. “I want to see them all,” she
479. In 1241, Henri II, Duc de Brabant,
married Sophie, daughter of Louis IV, added.
landgrave of Thuringia and Hesse. The “Listen, Charles, let’s wait downstairs until the carriage comes,”
couple had no children. said the duke; “you can pay your call on us in the hall, because my
480. This battle cry commemorates the
victory won by Jean I de Brabant over wife won’t let us have any peace until she’s seen your photograph.
the Ducs de Limbourg at the battle of I am less impatient, I must say,” he added with a self-­satisfied
Worrigen in 1288. Worringen and Lim- air. “I am not easily excited myself, but she would see us all dead
bourg were annexed to Brabant. For
more of the Guermantes’ war cries, see rather than miss it.”
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, “I am entirely of your opinion, Basin,” said the duchess, “let’s
363. go into the hall; we’ll at least know why we have come down from
481. The House of Gramont retained
the coat of arms of the Vicomtes your study, while we will never know how we have come down
d’Aster, a Navarre family with whom from the Counts of Brabant.”
they were allied in 1534. À la recherche “I’ve told you a hundred times how the title came into the
du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard
[Pléiade edition], 1988), 2: 879, n. 3. House of Hesse,” said the duke (while we were going downstairs to
482. The domination of Spain over the look at the photograph, and I thought of those that Swann used
Netherlands and the Brabants dates to bring me at Combray), “through the marriage of a Brabant
from the epoch of the Holy Roman Em-
peror Charles V (1516–19) and lasted in 1241 with the daughter of the last landgrave of Thuringia and
until 1648. Hesse, so that really it is the title of Prince of Hesse that came to
the House of Brabant rather than that of Duke of Brabant to the
House of Hesse.479 You will remember that our battle cry was that
of the Dukes of Brabant: ‘Limbourg to her conqueror!’480 until
we exchanged the arms of Brabant for those of Guermantes, in
which I think myself that we were wrong, and the example of the
Gramonts will not make me change my opinion.”481
“But,” replied Mme de Guermantes, “since it is the King of the
Belgians who is the conqueror . . . Besides, the Belgian Crown
Prince calls himself Duc de Brabant.”
“But my dear child, your argument will not hold water for a
moment. You know as well as I do that there are titles of pre-
tension that can perfectly well exist even if the territory is occu-
pied by usurpers. For instance, the King of Spain describes him-
self equally as Duke of Brabant, claiming in virtue of a possession
less ancient than ours, but more ancient than that of the King of
the Belgians.482 He calls himself also Duke of Burgundy, King of

652 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

the West and East Indies, and Duke of Milan. Well, he is no more 483. Alphonso XIII and Franz Joseph I
in possession of Burgundy, the Indies, or Brabant than I possess each claimed for himself an impressive
list of titles. See À la recherche du temps
Brabant myself, or the Prince of Hesse either, for that matter. The perdu (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade edi-
King of Spain likewise proclaims himself King of Jerusalem, as tion], 1988), 2: 879, n. 5.
does the Austrian emperor, and Jerusalem belongs to neither one 484. The title of the seigneurie of Che-
vreuse passed into the House of Albert
nor the other.”483 through the marriage in 1617 of Charles
He stopped for a moment with an awkward feeling that the d’Albert, Duc de Luynes, to Marie de
mention of Jerusalem might have embarrassed Swann, in view of Rohan. She later married the Prince de
Joinville, who afterward acquired the
“current events,” but only went on more rapidly: title of Duc de Chevreuse. Thus Marie
“What you said just now might be said of anyone. We were at became Duchesse de Chevreuse.
one time Ducs d’Aumale, a duchy that has passed as regularly to 485. Joan the Mad (1479–1555) was
Queen of Castille.
the House of France as Joinville and Chevreuse have to the House 486. Since the early sixteenth century a
of Albert.484 We make no more claim to those titles than to that of dispute between the families resulted
Marquis de Noirmoutiers, which was at one time ours, and became in the eldest son of the La Trémoïlles
family bearing the title of Prince de
perfectly regularly the appanage of the House of La Trémoïlle, but Tarente. Napoléon granted the title
because certain cessions are valid, it does not follow that they all to Jacques Alexander MacDonald
are. For example,” he went on, turning to me, “my sister-­in-­law’s (1765–1840), of Scottish descent, who
took part in the Holland campaign in
son bears the title of Prince d’Agrigente, which comes to us from 1784 and became general in 1795. In
Joan the Mad,485 as that of Prince de Tarente comes to the La Tré- July 1809, his intervention determined
moïlles.486 Well, Napoléon went and gave this title of Tarente to Napoléon’s victory at Wagram. He
was named Maréchal de France on the
a soldier, who may have been an excellent trooper, but in doing battlefield, and later Napoléon gave
so the emperor was disposing of what belonged to him even less him the title of Duc de Tarente.
than Napoléon III when he created a Duc de Montmorency, since 487. The second son of Anne Louise
Charlotte Alix de Montmorency-­
Périgord had at least a mother who was a Montmorency,487 while Fosseux (1810–58), sister of Raoul, the
the Tarente of Napoléon I had no more Tarente about him than last Duc de Montmorency (1790–1862).
Napoléon’s wish that he should become so. That did not prevent 488. Gustave-­Chaix-­d’Est-­Ange (1800–
1876) was a political figure and famous
Chaix-d’Est-­Ange,488 alluding to our Uncle Condé, from asking lawyer during the Restoration.
the imperial attorney whether he had picked up the title of Duc 489. Suspected of having plotted
de Montmorency in the moat of Vincennes.”489 against Bonaparte, Louis Antoine Henri
de Bourbon-­Condé, Duc d’Enghien,
“Listen, Basin, I ask for nothing better than to follow you to born in 1772, was the only son of the
the ditches of Vincennes, or even to Tarante. And that reminds last of the Condés. He died before a
me, Charles, of what I was going to say to you when you were firing squad on March 21, 1804, in the
moat of the château de Vincennes.
telling me about your Saint George at Venice.490 We are plan- 490. A statue of St. George is in the
ning, Basin and I, to spend next spring in Italy and Sicily. If you church of San Giorgio Maggiore in
were to come with us, just think what a difference it would make! Venice.

Chapter 2 653
 The Guermantes Way

I’m not thinking only of the pleasure of seeing you, but imagine,
after all you’ve told me so often about the remains of the Norman
Conquest and antiquities, imagine what a trip like that would be-
come, if we made it with you! I mean to say that even Basin—
what am I saying, Gilbert—would benefit by it, because I feel that
even his claims to the throne of Naples and all that sort of thing
would interest me if they were explained by you in old Roman-
esque churches, or in little villages perched on hills as in primitive
paintings. But now we’re going to look at your photograph. Open
the envelope,” said the duchess to a footman.
“Come now, Oriane, not this evening; you can look at it
tomorrow,” implored the duke, who had already been making
signs of alarm to me on seeing the immense size of the photo-
graph.
“But it will be more fun to look at it with Charles,” said the
duchess, with a smile at once artificially concupiscent and psycho-
logically subtle, for in her desire to be amiable to Swann she spoke
of the pleasure that she would have in looking at the photograph
as though it were the pleasure an invalid feels he would find in
eating an orange, or as though she had arranged an escapade with
her friends and informed a biographer about tastes flattering to
herself.
“All right, he will come again just to see you,” declared the
duke, to whom his wife was obliged to yield. “You can spend three
hours in front of it, if that amuses you,” he added sarcastically.
“But where are you going to stick a toy of those dimensions?”
“Why, in my room, of course. I want to have it in front of me.”
“Oh, just as you please; if it’s in your room, there’s a good
chance I’ll never see it,” said the duke, without thinking of the
revelation he was thus blindly making of the negative character of
his conjugal relations.
“Very well, undo it with the greatest care,” Mme de Guermantes
told the servant, multiplying her instructions out of politeness to
Swann. “And see that you don’t crumple the envelope, either.”
“So even the envelope has got to be respected!” the duke mur-

654 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

mured to me, rolling his eyes. “But Swann,” he added, “I, who am
only a poor married man and thoroughly prosaic, what I wonder
at is how on earth you managed to find an envelope that size.
Where did you dig that up?”
“Oh, at the photographer’s; they’re always sending out things
like that. But the man is a fool, for I see he’s written on it ‘The
Duchesse de Guermantes,’ without putting ‘Madame.’”
“I’ll forgive him for that,” said the duchess carelessly, who, ap-
parently struck by an idea that amused her, repressed a faint smile;
but at once returning to Swann: “Well, you don’t say whether
you’re coming to Italy with us?”
“Madame, I am really afraid that it will not be possible.”
“Indeed! Mme de Montmorency is more fortunate. You went
with her to Venice and Vicenza. She told me that with you one
saw things one would never see otherwise, things no one had ever
thought of mentioning before, that you showed her things she
had never dreamed of, and that even in the well-­known things
she had been able to appreciate details that without you she might
have passed by a dozen times without ever noticing. Decidedly,
she has been more highly favored than we are to be . . . You will
take the big envelope from M. Swann’s photograph,” she said to
the servant, “and you will deposit it, from me, with the corner
turned down, this evening at half past ten at Mme la Comtesse
Molé’s.”
Swann burst out laughing.
“I would like to know, all the same,” Mme de Guermantes
asked him, “how, ten months in advance, you can tell that a thing
will be impossible.”
“My dear Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first
of all, you can see that I am very ill.”
“Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you look at all well. I’m
not pleased with your color, but I’m not asking you to come with
me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten months
one has time to get oneself cured, you know.”
At this point a footman came in to say that the carriage was at

Chapter 2 655
 The Guermantes Way

the door. “Come, Oriane, to horse,” said the duke, already pawing
the ground with impatience as though he were himself one of the
horses that stood waiting outside.
“Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come
to Italy,” the duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say goodbye
to us.
“But my dear friend, it’s because I will then have been dead for
several months. According to the doctors I consulted, by the end
of the year the illness I have—which may, for that matter, carry
me off at any moment—won’t in any case leave me more than
three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,”
replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glass-­
paneled door of the hall to let the duchess out.
“What’s that you say?” cried the duchess, stopping for a mo-
ment on her way to the carriage, and raising her beautiful blue
melancholy eyes, now clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first
time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting
into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing pity for a man
who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of con-
ventions that indicated the right line to follow and, not knowing
which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing
that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, in order to
follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort,
and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to
deny that any existed. “You’re joking,” she said to Swann.
“It would be a joke in charming taste,” he replied ironically. “I
don’t know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to
you before about my illness. But since you asked me, and since
now I may die at any moment . . . But whatever I do I mustn’t
make you late; you’re dining out, remember,” he added, because
he knew that for other people their own social obligations took
precedence over the death of a friend, and could put himself
in her place thanks to his instinctive politeness. But that of the
duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner
to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his

656 Part Two

 The Guermantes Way

own death. And so, while continuing on her way toward the car- 491. The duchess’s red dress and shoes
riage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: “Don’t worry about our were inspired by those worn by Gene-
viève Straus. Proust informed her in a
dinner. It’s not of any importance!” But this put the duke in a bad letter written in October 1912 that her
humor and he exclaimed: “Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chat- dress and matching shoes would not
tering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you appear in the first volume: “They’ll only
be in the second because the Duch-
know very well that Mme de Saint-­Euverte insists on sitting down esse de Guermantes makes only a very
to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know what you propose brief appearance in the first.” Proust,
to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg Selected Letters 3: 101. As we see, the
episode did not appear until this third
your pardon, Charles,” he went on, turning to Swann, “but it’s ten volume.
minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us
more than five minutes to get to old Saint-­Euverte’s.”
Mme de Guermantes advanced resolutely toward the carriage
and uttered a last farewell to Swann. “You know, we will talk about
that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but
we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright,
come to lunch, any day you like” (with Mme de Guermantes
things always resolved themselves into lunches), “you just let me
know your day and time,” and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot
on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this
foot exposed, the duke cried out in a terrifying voice: “Oriane,
what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your
black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red
shoes, or rather,” he said to the footman, “tell Madame la Duch-
esse’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.”491
“But my dear,” replied the duchess gently, embarrassed to see
that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood
back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, had heard,
“since we are late . . .”
“No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take
us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And after all, what
would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have
to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and
black shoes. Besides, we won’t be the last, I can tell you; the Sasse-
nages are coming, and you know they never arrive before twenty
to nine.”

Chapter 2 657
 The Guermantes Way

492. The Pont Neuf (New bridge), a The duchess went up to her room.
masterpiece of sixteenth-­century engi- “Well,” said M. de Guermantes to Swann and myself, “we
neering and architecture, is actually
the oldest bridge in Paris. It connects poor, down-­trodden husbands, people laugh at us, but we are of
the western point of the Île de la Cité some use all the same. But for me, Oriane would have been going
with the Right and Left Banks. Because out to dinner in black shoes.”
it is so sturdy and durable, the duke’s
expression indicates his convenient re- “It’s not unbecoming,” said Swann, “I noticed the black shoes
fusal to consider that Swann’s life is in and they didn’t offend me in the least.”
danger due to ill-health. “I don’t say you’re wrong,” replied the duke, “but it looks better
to have them to match the dress. Besides, you needn’t worry, she
would no sooner have got there than she’d have noticed them, and
I would have been obliged to come home and fetch the others. I
would have had my dinner at nine o’clock. Goodbye, my boys,”
he said, thrusting us gently from the door, “you must get away
before Oriane comes down again. It’s not that she doesn’t like
seeing you both. On the contrary, she’s too fond of your company.
If she finds you still here she will start talking again. She is very
tired already and she’ll reach the dinner table quite dead. Besides,
I tell you frankly, I’m dying of hunger. I had a wretched lunch
this morning when I came from the train. There was the devil of a
béarnaise sauce, I admit, but in spite of that I won’t be at all sorry,
not at all sorry to sit down to dinner. Five minutes to eight! Oh,
women, women! She’ll give us both indigestion before tomorrow.
She is not nearly as strong as people think.”
The duke felt no compunction at speaking thus of his wife’s
ailments and his own to a dying man, because the former inter-
ested him more and appeared to him more important. And so it
was simply from good breeding and merriment that, after politely
showing us out, he shouted “from off stage” in a stentorian voice
from the door to Swann, who was already in the courtyard:
“You, now, don’t let yourself be taken in by the nonsense of
those damn doctors. They’re fools. You’re as strong as the Pont
Neuf.492 You’ll live to bury us all!”

658 Part Two

Synopsis

Part One see Mme de Guermantes walk past (58). The disparity
between what I have imagined and what I see (60).
We have moved into an apartment in a wing of the The succession of different faces that Mme de Guer-
Hôtel de Guermantes (3). My grandmother needed mantes displays (61). Françoise’s strange power to dis-
to be in a neighborhood with cleaner air (4). Poetic cover anything unpleasant that could have happened to
dreams inspired by the name Guermantes (5). My us (63). Françoise’s words inspired by traditional local
dreams dispelled by Robert de Saint-­L oup (9). Thanks sentiment and governed by ancient laws (64). Servants’
to Françoise I come to know all about the Guer- characters offer me a sort of negative of my own (65).
mantes household. She reigns at the downstairs lunch Jupien later reveals that Françoise told him I was not
for the servants (11). Her nostalgia for Combray (12). worth the price of a rope to hang me (67).
Françoise’s friendship with Jupien and his niece (13). I am genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes.
My first impression of Jupien far from favorable (15). My infatuation with her prevents me from setting to
I soon discern in him a rare intelligence (16). Mme work (68). What does she do during the mysterious
de Guermantes has the most important position in daily life of the “Guermantes” (70)? I would like to dis-
the Faubourg Saint-­Germain (24). The Guermantes’ close to her Saint-­L oup’s admiration of me (70).
well-­worn doormat: the entry to the Faubourg Saint-­ I visit Saint-­L oup in the cavalry barracks (71). Saint-­
Germain (26). Loup’s diction (72). He leaves to have a word with the
A gala evening at the Opéra. I am to see Berma captain (74). I wait for Saint-­L oup in his room (75).
once more in Phèdre (33). The members of the Fau- Sound and silence (76–79). Saint-­L oup returns, having
bourg Saint-­Germain in their boxes (36). The Princesse obtained permission for me to spend the first night
de Guermantes’s baignoire. The water nymphs and the in his room (79). The Prince de Borodino (81). Saint-­
tritons (38). The Marquis de Palancy and his monocle Loup has adopted the social theories of his teachers
(41). The princess as a theatrical apparition (41). The and the worldly prejudices of his relatives (81). Saint-­
“declaration” scene from Phèdre (42). A great performer Loup’s photograph of his aunt (81). Mme de Guer-
is a window opening upon a great work of art (46). mantes’s mythological origin (82). I must sleep at the
Berma’s interpretation of Racine is a second work, also ancient Hôtel de Flandre. My dread of new bedrooms
quickened by genius (47). Berma in a modern piece (83). I was mistaken: I have no time to be sad (84). The
(49). Berma compared to Elstir (50). The arrival of the world of sleep and dreams (86–91). Saint-­L oup’s pres-
Duchesse de Guermantes in the baignoire of her cousin ence liberates me from my obsessions (92). More about
the Princesse de Guermantes (51). Comparison of the sleep and dreams (93). After a deep sleep, I feel full
toilettes of the two women (52). Mme de Cambremer’s of strength. I have reverted to the healthy tiredness of
social ambitions (54). The Duchesse de Guermantes my childhood at Combray. A good night’s sleep makes
recognizes me with a wave of her hand and showers on us descend into the garden where we used to play as a
me the celestial torrent of her smile (57). child (94).
Now every morning I wait in the street hoping to On days when Saint-­L oup has to stay in barracks, I

659
visit him there. I learn how popular he is (95). During from the Lord” (168). I marvel at the power of imagina-
my nocturnal walks, desire for a woman often seizes me tion (171). For a brief instant Saint-­L oup sees another
as long ago on the road to Méséglise (100). For the first Rachel (175). Saint-­ L oup’s jealousy (176). Rachel’s
time, forgetting Mme de Guermantes seems possible cruel treatment of a young actress (185). Rachel’s flirta-
(101). I meet Saint-­L oup and his friends at the hotel tion with a young dancer infuriates Saint-­L oup (190).
for dinner (101). I ask Saint-­L oup to let Mme de Guer- Saint-­L oup slaps a journalist (193–94). In the street, a
mantes know what he thinks of me (105). I ask that we man propositions Saint-­L oup. Saint-­L oup gives him a
call each other tu (106). I also ask him to give me her thrashing (195–96).
photograph. He replies that he must first ask her per- I am to meet Saint-­L oup later at Mme de Villepari-
mission (107). He pretends not to have heard a story I sis’s (197). Her long liaison with M. de Norpois (197).
had told him in order to give his friends a good idea Her Mémoires (199). Bloch arrives; he is now a rising
of my wit (108). He denies the rumor of his engage- playwright (204). The Dreyfus Affair is shortly to hurl
ment to Mlle d’Ambresac (109). Saint-­L oup and one the Jews down to the lowest rung of the social ladder
of his fellow soldiers are the only two men who sup- (204). Mme de Villeparisis tries the effect of her Mé-
port the reopening of the Dreyfus case (109). All men moires on a public typical of the one from which she
with similar ideas are alike (110, 125). Saint-­L oup tells will have to enlist her readers (208). Due to her Mé-
me that Elstir and I are the cleverest men he knows moires, her salon will be considered one of the most
(110). The art of war (114–23). Saint-­L oup’s quarrels brilliant of the nineteenth century (209). The Duch-
with his mistress (127). Captain de Borodino and his esse de Guermantes arrives (215). Legrandin, who has
coiffeur. How Saint-­L oup is granted a leave (134). I ask taken the trouble to call five times, is at last shown in
Saint-­L oup’s friends to classify the different officers ac- (215). Legrandin pours out a stream of flattery to Mme
cording to the degree of admiration (135). Borodino’s de Villeparisis (217). The duchess on Legrandin’s sister,
kinship to Napoléon (136). Saint-­L oup and I are in- Mme de Cambremer: she’s just as much of a toady as
vited to dine at Borodino’s (137). I am able to distin- he is, and just as annoying (219). The excellent writer G
guish the difference between the two aristocracies (137). arrives (222). He is one of the eminent men whom the
I receive a telephone call from my grandmother (140). duchess likes to entertain on the condition that they are
Without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first always bachelors, even when married (223). Greatly to
time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a the surprise of many of her friends, the duchess finds
lifetime (143). My grandmother, by telling me to stay, Bergotte wittier than M. de Bréauté (229). Everyone
fills me with an anxious, insensate longing to return gathers around to watch Mme de Villeparisis painting
(143). Saint-­L oup’s strange salute (146). (231). Bloch knocks over the vase containing the spray
I return home and find, sitting on the sofa, a of apple blossom (233). Bloch has already decided to
stricken old woman whom I do not know (150). Winter persuade two actresses to come and sing for nothing in
is drawing to an end. I resume my morning walk (152). Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing room (235). Bloch’s bad
Mme de Guermantes is now wearing lighter, brighter manners (236). Mme de Villeparisis refuses to allow him
clothes (153). I am still unable to write (159). Mme Sa- to open the windows (237). Bloch meets M. de Norpois
zerat’s coldness toward my parents explained: she is a (239). Norpois asks me whether I have anything in the
Dreyfusard (162). Legrandin’s diatribe against society works (240). I hope he will aid me in getting invited to
and snobs (164). I accompany Robert to the suburbs to Mme de Guermantes’s (241). The Duc de Guermantes
meet his mistress (165). I recognize her as “Rachel when arrives. His wealth, infidelities, and good looks (242–

660 Synopsis
43). I put in a word to Norpois about my father’s can- earlier by Charles Morel, son of my late great-­uncle’s
didacy for an academic chair. Norpois is opposed to my valet. A handsome young man of eighteen. He informs
father’s presenting himself (243). The duchess cannot me that he has won the first prize at the Conservatoire
understand how Robert ever came to fall in love with (287–88). The object of his visit to me is to bring me
Rachel (246). Bloch, hearing Saint-­L oup’s name men- Uncle Adolphe’s photographs of the famous actresses,
tioned, begins to malign him outrageously (247). The the notorious cocottes he had known (288). Among
duchess makes fun of Rachel’s ridiculous performance the photographs is one of the portrait of Miss Sacri-
in her salon (248). The duke and the duchess on Le- pant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir (290). M. de Charlus
grandin and his sister, Mme de Cambremer (251). The is seated by the side of Mme Swann. At every social
duke knows that his wife’s lively wit needs the stimulus gathering, he promptly attaches himself to the most
of contradiction (251). Norpois and Bloch discuss the elegant of the women (290). Mme Swann reveals to me
Dreyfus Affair (252–54). Norpois flatters Bloch’s vanity that M. de Norpois told those gathered at a party at the
and arouses his curiosity (253). Bloch’s attendance at Princesse de Guermantes’s that I am a hypocritical little
the Zola trial (253). The duke makes a show of his wife flatterer (296). M. de Charlus tells me that since I have
but does not love her. His anger at being interrupted by taken to going into society, I must give him the pleasure
her (255). The duke says: “When one goes by the name of coming to see him. As we are both about to leave,
of Marquis de Saint-­L oup one isn’t a Dreyfusard” (255). he asks me to walk a little way with him (302). Saint-­
Fearing that Bloch’s support of Dreyfus might com- Loup heaps on his mother the reproaches that perhaps
promise M. de Norpois, Mme de Villeparisis decides he feels that he himself deserves. He leaves to go to
to make it plain to him that he need not come to her his mistress, taking with him the splendid ornament
house again (269). A few days later, she receives him (306). He is unaware of almost all the infidelities of
in the most friendly fashion (270). Robert’s mother, his mistress and torments his mind over what are mere
Mme de Marsantes arrives. She is regarded in the Fau- nothings compared with the real life of Rachel (307).
bourg Saint-­Germain as a superior being (271). She is Mme de Villeparisis appears vexed on overhearing that
more than pleasant to me, both because I am Robert’s I am to leave with M. de Charlus (309). Charlus and I
friend and because I do not move in the same world as are to walk a little way on foot until he finds a fiacre that
he (273). Mme de Villeparisis warns the Duchesse de suits him (311). Charlus is curious to learn more about
Guermantes that she is expecting Swann’s wife (274). Bloch (313). Charlus on Dreyfus: he would have com-
Mme Swann, seeing the dimensions that the Dreyfus mitted a crime if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has
Affair has begun to assume, fears that her husband’s he to do with France (314)? Charlus informs me that
racial origin might be used against her (274). Robert the “Open Sesame” to the Guermantes house and any
arrives and probably speaks to the duchess about me others that are worthwhile rests with him (320). I ask
(276). She allows to rain on me the light of her azure him to tell me what the Villeparisis family is. His reply:
gaze (277). Prince von Faffenheim-­ Munsterburg-­ “It’s as if you had asked me to tell you what the nothing
Weinigen arrives (278). He has now only one ambition is” (320). He warns me that by going into society, I will
in life, to be elected a corresponding member of the only damage my position, warp my intellect and char-
Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, which was acter (321). He surprises me by selecting a fiacre whose
the reason for his coming to see Mme de Villeparisis driver seems to be tipsy (322). I arrive in our courtyard,
(280). The Duchesse de Guermantes leaves when Mme where a dispute over the Dreyfus Affair is taking place
Swann arrives (287). The visit paid to me a few days between our butler and the Guermantes’ (323). I go up-

Synopsis 661
stairs and find my grandmother even more unwell. Dr. 44). We may say that the hour of death is uncertain,
Cottard is called in and tries to sooth her with a milk but it never occurs to us that it can have any connec-
diet (325). She has a fever of 101 and for the first time tion with the day that has already dawned (344). Pro-
we feel some anxiety (326). Although I know that Dr. fessor E tells me she is doomed (348). We return home
du Boulbon is more of a specialist in nervous diseases, I (348). I go upstairs to warn my mother. Her silent de-
urge my mother to send for him. What determines her spair (349). My mother helps my grandmother to the
to do so is the fact that my grandmother no longer goes elevator with infinite precautions but cannot look at
out of doors and scarcely rises from her bed (328). Dr. her altered features (349). Françoise’s faultless minis-
du Boulbon discusses literature with her to see whether trations (350). Françoise cannot tolerate any assistance
her memory is in good order (329). He tells her that in her work (352). Her footman borrows volumes of
she will be quite well on the day on which she realizes poetry from my bookshelves (352). To ease the intense
that there is nothing wrong with her (330). He recom- pain caused by my grandmother’s uremia, Cottard pre-
mends that she go and sit in some quiet path in the scribes morphine, which relieves the pain but increases
Champs-­Élysées (330). Du Boulbon on maniacs. He the quantity of albumen (353). Pain and suffering as a
tells my grandmother that she should submit to being sculptor (355). On the advice of a relative, we send for
called a neurotic: “All the greatest things we know have Dr. X, who believes that everything, whether headache
come to us from neurotics” (333). Since I am to meet or colic, heart disease or diabetes, is a disease of the
some friends in the Champs-­Élysées and accompany nose that has been wrongly diagnosed (355–56). My
them later to have dinner in the Ville-d’Avray, it will grandmother’s illness gives occasion to various people
be easy for me to accompany my grandmother to the to manifest an excess or deficiency of sympathy (356).
Champs-­Élysées (336). I grow impatient with her for Bergotte comes every day and spends several hours
taking so long to get ready (337). We arrive at the little with me. He is very ill, now quite blind, and even his
old pavilion where my grandmother, without a word to speech is often muddled. His works, now grown in
me, turns aside and makes her way to the toilets (337). stature and strength in the eyes of all, have acquired
The “marquise” and the parkkeeper (337). The “mar- an extraordinary power of expansion among the gen-
quise” on her customers (338). She offers to open up eral public (357). I no longer have the same admira-
a little place for me. I decline. Shortly afterward, she tion for him as of old. In the books of Bergotte that I
turns away a shabbily dressed woman who seems in often reread, his sentences stand out as clearly before
urgent need (339). My grandmother emerges from the my eyes as my own thoughts (358). A new writer has
cabin and does not utter a word to me; she keeps her recently begun to publish works in which the relations
face turned the other way (340). Fearing that she is ill, I between things are so different that I can understand
suggest that we return home. She smiles at me sorrow- hardly anything of what he wrote. I feel for the new
fully, realizing that I have guessed that she has had a writer the admiration that an awkward boy feels when
slight stroke (341). he watches another more nimble. Bergotte’s limpidity
strikes me as insufficient (358). The world around us is
P a r t T wo , C h apt e r 1 created afresh as often as an original artist is born, ap-
pears to us entirely different from the old world, but
In the avenue Gabriel I encounter the famous Pro- perfectly clear (359). When I do succeed in following
fessor E, who, although in a hurry to attend a social the writer to the end of his sentence, what I see there is
engagement, agrees to examine my grandmother (343– always of a humor, a truth, and a charm similar to those

662 Synopsis
that I had found long ago in reading Bergotte (359). I that reflects time (387). She has grown and matured
ask myself whether there is indeed any truth in the dis- (389). I wish but do not dare to ascertain whether now
tinction that we are always making between art, which she will let herself be kissed (390). My optimistic hy-
is no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and sci- pothesis is based on certain words that now form part
ence, with its continuous progress (360). In spite of my of her vocabulary (391). On hearing the words “to
grandmother’s illness, Françoise’s code does not allow my mind” I draw Albertine toward me, and at “I re-
her to send away the electrician (362). My grandmother gard” sit her down on my bed (393). The door opens
loses first her sight and then her hearing, although and Françoise, carrying a lamp, enters (395). Françoise
both return (364–65). Her impediment of speech that speaks like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus
prevents our understanding anything she says (365). (397). Françoise leaves the room and Albertine sits
Françoise’s cruelty in insisting that my grandmother’s once again on my bed (398). I feel that it is possible for
hair be properly combed (366). Leeches are applied to me, by kissing the girl’s two cheeks, to kiss the whole of
my grandmother (367). Her condition worsens (368). the beach at Balbec (400). I would certainly like, before
Françoise is constantly absent because she must be kissing her, to be able to fill her again with the mystery
fitted for the mourning dress that she had ordered that she had had for me on the beach (401). Man, a
(368). The news that my grandmother is at the point of creature obviously less rudimentary than the sea urchin
death spreads like wildfire through the house (369). The or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number
Duc de Guermantes, as a mark of sympathy, wishes to of essential organs, and possesses none that will serve
shake hands with my father (370). My grandmother’s for kissing (402). I learn, from these detestable signs,
brother-­in-­law, a monk, arrives from Austria (372). The that I am kissing Albertine’s cheek (403). After Alber-
doctor gives my grandmother an injection of morphine tine leaves, Françoise brings me a letter from Mme de
(373). Françoise, in any great sorrow, feels the need but Stermaria, who accepts my invitation to dinner (409).
does not possess the art to give it expression (374). For I call on Mme de Villeparisis but arrive after the
several nights my father, my grandfather, and a cousin play has ended (409). I no longer hang about the
keep vigil (374). Dr. Dieulafoy arrives (376). My grand- streets trying to meet Mme de Guermantes (410). She
mother is dead. On that funeral couch, death, like a comes toward me, reproducing the smile she had worn
sculptor of the Middle Ages, lays her down in the form that evening at the Opéra, and sits beside me (413). I
of a young maiden (379). decline two invitations to dine at Mme de Villepari-
sis’s (413). Mme de Guermantes invites me to a small
P a r t T wo , C h apt e r 2 dinner party (415). People in society are so accustomed
to being sought after that the person who shuns them
A Sunday in autumn. I am born again. A change in seems to them a phoenix and at once monopolizes their
the weather is sufficient to create the world and our- attention (416). Mme de Guermantes is surprised to
selves anew (381). Memories of “Mornings at Don- learn that I know Charlus (418). She admires him im-
cières” (382). Saint-Loup tells me that Mlle de Ster- mensely but says that he is at times a trifle mad (419).
maria, recently divorced, has agreed to dine with me To possess Mme de Stermaria on the island in the Bois
(384). Saint-­L oup has broken up with Rachel (384). de Boulogne is the pleasure that I picture to myself at
Albertine pays me a surprise visit. She contains in the every moment (423). The Île des Cygnes is to represent
plenitude of her body the days we had spent together at for me something like that Breton island whose marine
Balbec. She is like an enchantress handing me a mirror and misty atmosphere always enwraps in my mind the

Synopsis 663
pale silhouette of Mme de Stermaria (426). Françoise in châteaux their hostesses gave them communicating
announces the arrival of Albertine. I have her shown bedrooms, with the result that rumors circulate as
in at once, indifferent to her finding me disfigured by a to the extent of their intimacy (447). Saint-­L oup ar-
bristling chin, her for whom at Balbec I had never felt rives and chastises the proprietor for putting me in the
handsome enough and who had cost me then as much drafty room (449). The Jews (450). I study Saint-­L oup’s
agitation and distress as Mme de Stermaria is now. I features and say to myself that it is a thing to be glad of
ask Albertine to come with me to the island to choose when there is no lack of physical grace to prepare one
the menu (427). Saint-­L oup’s letter is clear: Mme de for the graces within. The true opus francigenum con-
Stermaria will give herself to me on the very first eve- sists not so much in the stone angels of Saint-­André-­
ning (429). The next day the driver I sent to fetch her des-­Champs as in the young sons of France (451).
returns with a note from Mme de Stermaria: “Am so Saint-­L oup’s acrobatics to bring me the Prince de Foix’s
sorry—am unfortunately prevented from dining with vicuña coat (453). For him, as for me, this is the evening
you this evening on the island in the Bois” (432). Later of friendship (455). The light-­footed course that Robert
I learn of an absurd love match that she has made with pursues along the wall is as intelligible and charming as
a young man that presumably made her forget my invi- those of horsemen on a marble frieze (456).
tation (433). When I arrive at the Guermantes’ the duke him-
The unexpected arrival of Saint-­ L oup (435). On self receives me (459). The imagined remoteness of
friendship (435). But whatever might be my opinion the past (460). The Elstir paintings (461). Once I am
of friendship . . . there is no brew so deadly that it face to face with the Elstirs, I completely forget about
cannot at certain moments become precious and in- dinner and the time (462). Elstir’s effort had often been
vigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was nec- to break up that aggregate of impressions that we call
essary, the warmth that we cannot generate in our- vision (462). Elstir: “There is no such thing as Gothic,
selves (436). We set off to dine (436–37). The invisible there is no such thing as a masterpiece; a hospital with
vocation (438). I have submitted to Le Figaro my little no style is just as good as the glorious porch” (464).
sketch of the steeples of Martinville (438). The evening I learn afterward that I kept them waiting for nearly
of the fog: Robert on arriving had indeed warned me three-­quarters of an hour (466). The duke seems con-
that there was a good deal of fog outside (439). This res- cerned only about the impression that his other guests
taurant is where Bloch and his friends—for coffee and will make on me (467). The Princesse de Parme: the
the satisfaction of political curiosity—have long been second princess of the royal blood to whom I have been
in the habit of meeting (441). Young noblemen and presented (469). The presence at a social gathering of
the Dreyfus Affair (442). I enter the restaurant and sit anyone not personally known to a royal personage is
down in the room reserved for the nobility, from which an intolerable state of affairs (469). The order to serve
the proprietor at once expels me, indicating to me a dinner is given (478). Mme de Guermantes advances
place in the smaller room (443). The Prince de Foix be- toward me so that I may lead her to the table (479).
longs to an aristocratic group for whom the practice When he wishes to give pleasure to someone, M. de
of impertinence seems the sole possible occupation Guermantes possesses, for making him on that par-
(444). The young princes hope to retrieve their for- ticular day the principal personage, an art that makes
tunes by means of a rich marriage (445). Prince de Foix the most of the circumstances and the place (480). The
and Saint-­L oup belong to an exclusive group known as Princesse de Parme is convinced beforehand that every-
the four gigolos, who are always to be seen together; thing that she sees at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s is

664 Synopsis
of a quality superior to anything that she has at home fallen in love with the Marquise de Surgis-­le-­Duc (543).
(482). The Guermantes wit (483). The uniqueness of The duchess proclaims that Zola is a poet, the Homer
the Guermantes’ demeanor and gestures (482–84). The of the sewers (550). The duke refuses to buy Elstir’s
Guermantes are no less idiomatic from the intellectual Bundle of Asparagus (552). How Charlus mourns for his
than from the physical point of view (484). The Guer- wife. The duchess says that Charlus has a warmth of
mantes family genie (485–86). The Courvoisiers, the heart that one doesn’t as a rule find in men (559). The
rival faction of the Guermantes family (486–89). The duchess is reluctant to intercede on Saint-­L oup’s be-
art of marking distances (490). Mlle de Guermantes’s half to obtain for him a posting other than Morocco
(Oriane) scandalous behavior (492). The Guermantes (560). I am revolted by the genuine malice of the
can find no man clever or a woman charming who has duchess (567). Her rare plant that requires fecundation
no social value, actual or potential (497). The Guer- by a particular insect (569). The duchess claims always
mantes adopt an entirely different attitude toward to have loved the Empire style (570). Her defense of
intelligence than the Courvoisiers (498). The quality Manet’s Olympia (576). On paintings by Hals seen at
of a “salon” is based on the cornerstone of sacrifice The Hague (577). What Mme de Guermantes believes
(499). The survival of politeness in an egalitarian so- to be disappointing my expectations is what saves my
ciety would be no more miraculous than the practical evening from becoming a complete disappointment:
success of the railways or the use of the airplane in war the duke and the general go on to discuss genealogies
(501). Having the duchess in her house is for the Prin- without stopping (587). The Turkish ambassadress is
cesse de Parme a source of endless perplexity (504). devoured by social ambition (589). The aristocracy, in
Men of wit regard themselves as superior to men of its heavy structure, pierced with rare windows shows
genuine worth (507). Oriane’s shocking pun: Teaser the same incapacity to soar but also the same massive
Augustus (512). The Courvoisiers are incapable of rising and blind force as Romanesque architecture, embodies
to the level of the spirit of innovation that the Duch- all our history, immures it, and frowns upon it (592).
esse de Guermantes introduces into the life of society Is it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all
(516). The utter impossibility of finding pleasure when these people dress themselves up and refuse to allow
one is content to do nothing else than seek it (519). The the penetration of middle-­class women into their ex-
Duc de Guermantes relishes showing off his wife’s wit clusive drawing rooms (599)? The lady-­in-­waiting ex-
(520). The duchess is about to leave on a cruise among plains why it cannot possibly snow again (603). The
the Norwegian fjords (526). The duke has a taste for carriage ride to M. de Charlus’s (603–8). After making
large women, at once statuesque and loose-­limbed, me wait for a while, the valets admit me to his presence:
of a type halfway between the Venus of Milo and the I can see the baron, in a Chinese dressing gown, with
Victory of Samothrace (528). In love it often hap- his throat bare, lying upon a sofa (610). His accusa-
pens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, make tions and insults (611–15). But whatever the fine words
us generous beyond the limits of what hope and self-­ with which he colors all his hatreds, one feels that this
interest could have anticipated (529). The duchess seeks man is capable of committing murder (612). My desire
an ally in the mistress of her husband. The duke fails to persuade M. de Charlus that I had never said, nor
in his outward relations with his wife to observe what heard anyone else speak, any ill of him gives place to
are called “the forms” (529). The duke confesses that a mad rage, caused by the words that are dictated to
in literature and in music he is terribly old-­fashioned him solely by his colossal pride (615). I grab the baron’s
(540). Mme d’Arpajon bores the duke because he has new silk hat, throw it to the ground, trample it, pull it

Synopsis 665
to pieces, rip off the brim, without heeding the vocif- eager to attend a costume ball that evening (630). Views
erations of M. de Charlus (616). My departure causes from the Hôtel de Guermantes (631). A revelation so
him acute distress; he overtakes me in the hall: “Come important to me that I prefer to postpone the account
back for a minute; he who loveth well chasteneth well, of it (632). Swann is to bring his proofs of his essay
and if I have chastened you well it is because I love on the coinage of the Order of Malta (633). The duke’s
you well” (617). His solemn affirmations that we will painting of Philippe de Champaigne that he believes
never see each other again (620). I ask him whether the to be by one of the old masters (637). Swann arrives; I
Princesse de Guermantes is superior to the Duchesse de find him greatly “changed” (638). Swann’s Dreyfusism
Guermantes. His answer: “Oh! There’s no comparison” and his social standing (642). How the duke intends
(623). To my question as to whether one can visit the to avoid news of his cousin’s death until after the ball
Prince and Princesse de Guermantes, he replies that (647). The duchess insists that Swann tell her why he
they never invite anyone unless he intervenes (623). cannot come to Italy with them in the spring (655). He
I return home and find lying in my room a letter that reveals that he is terminally ill. Swann knows that for
Françoise’s young footman has written to his cousin other people their own social obligations take prece-
(624). An invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes dence over the death of a friend (656). The duchess’s
(625). I pay a visit to the duke and duchess (630). Ama- red shoes (657). As they leave, the duke assures Swann
nien, one of their cousins, is seriously ill, yet the duke is that he will live to bury them all (658).

666 Synopsis