In Search of Lost Time Page 5

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  Thoughts like these, tending in some cases to diminish, in others to increase my regret at not having a talent for literature, never crossed my mind throughout the long years, during which I had anyway completely renounced the project of writing, which I spent being treated far away from Paris in a sanatorium, until the time, at the beginning of 1916, when it became impossible any longer to obtain medical staff.

  I then came back to a Paris very different from the one to which I had already returned on an earlier occasion, as we shall see shortly, in August 1914, to undergo a medical examination, after which I had re-entered my sanatorium. On one of the first evenings after my return in 1916, wanting to hear people’s views on the only matter that interested me at that time, the war, I went out after dinner to visit Mme Verdurin, for she was, with Mme Bontemps, one of the queens of that wartime Paris so reminiscent of the Directory.18 Rather as if they had been sprinkled with a small quantity of yeast, apparently of spontaneous generation, young women went about all day with tall cylindrical turbans on their heads as a contemporary of Mme Tallien19 might have done, and, out of civic responsibility, wearing straight, dark-coloured Egyptian tunics, very ‘wartime’, over very short skirts; on their feet they wore thong-laced boots, reminiscent of Talma’s20 buskins, or long gaiters, recalling those of our dear boys at the front; it was, they said, because they never forgot that they had to gladden the eyes of those boys at the front, that they still adorned themselves not only in (loose) dresses, but also with jewellery which by its decorative subjects suggested the army, if indeed its raw material did not come from, and had not been worked by the army; but instead of Egyptian ornaments commemorating the campaign in Egypt, they wore rings or bracelets made out of shell fragments or the bands from seventy-five-millimetre ammunition, or carried cigarette-lighters made out of two English pennies to which a soldier in his dug-out had managed to impart a patina so fine that their profiles of Queen Victoria might have been traced by Pisanello. It was also because they never stopped thinking about them, they said, that, when somebody close to them fell, they hardly ever wore mourning, on the pretext that their grief was ‘mingled with pride’, which permitted them to wear a bonnet of white English crêpe (to most graceful effect and ‘justifying every hope’ in the invincible certainty of final victory), to replace the traditional cashmere with satin and chiffon, and even to retain their pearls, ‘while continuing to observe the tact and correctness of which Frenchwomen have no need to be reminded’.

  The Louvre and all the other museums were closed, and when one read, above a newspaper article, ‘A sensational exhibition’, one could be sure this referred to an exhibition not of paintings but of dresses, and dresses moreover designed as ‘those delicate artistic joys of which Parisian women had for too long been deprived’. It was in this form that elegance and pleasure had returned; elegance, in the absence of the arts, seeking to excuse itself in the same way as happened in 1793, the year when the artists exhibiting at the revolutionary Salon proclaimed that it would be wrong for it to seem ‘strange to austere Republicans that we should concern ourselves with the arts when the coalition of European powers is laying siege to the land of liberty’. This is just what the couturiers did in 1916, in addition asserting, with a proud consciousness of themselves as artists, that ‘seeking the new, eschewing the ordinary, emphasizing individuality, preparing for victory, and defining a new pattern of beauty for the post-war generations, was the ambition that drove them forward, the chimera they pursued, as would be appreciated by anybody visiting their delightfully appointed salons in the rue de la –, where the watchword seems to be, by striking a bright and cheerful note, to wipe away the heavy sorrows of the time, all the while observing, of course, the discretion that circumstances impose.’

  ‘The sorrows of the time’, it is true, ‘might have overborne feminine energies had we not so many lofty examples of courage and endurance to contemplate. Therefore, as we think of our fighting boys in their trenches, dreaming of better comforts and finer dresses for the girl they left at home, let us not cease to be ever more inventive in our creation of dresses responsive to the needs of the moment. The vogue’, understandably enough, ‘is for the English fashion-houses, thus for our allies, and this year the barrel-dress is all the rage, the pleasant unconstraint of which gives us all an entertaining air of uncommon distinction. One of the happier consequences of this sorry war, added the charming chronicler, may even be’ (and one expected ‘the repossession of our lost provinces, the re-awakening of national sentiment’) ‘one of the happier consequences of this sorry war may even be that we have achieved some pleasing results in the way of fashion, without mindless and inappropriate extravagance, from the slenderest resources, that we have created stylish dresses out of almost nothing. Instead of a dress from a grand designer, produced in a number of copies, women at this time prefer dresses made at home, as asserting the intelligence, taste and personal preference of each individual.’

  As for charity, given all the miseries caused by the invasion, and the numbers of wounded and disabled, it was quite natural that it should be obliged to become ‘more ingenious than ever’, which obliged the women with tall turbans to spend the late afternoons having ‘tea’ round a bridge-table, commenting on the news from the ‘front’, while outside the door their cars waited for them, with a handsome soldier on the seat who chatted to the footman. Nor was it only the headdresses crowning the faces with their unfamiliar cylinders which were new. The faces themselves were also new. These women in the latest hats were young ladies, one did not know quite from where, who had been the flower of fashion, some for six months, some for two years, some for four. These differences, moreover, had for them as much importance as had, at the time I first entered society, between two families like the Guermantes and the La Rochefoucaulds, three or four centuries of proven antiquity. The lady who had known the Guermantes since 1914 regarded the one who was introduced to them in 1916 as a parvenue, acknowledged her with the distant air of a dowager, stared at her through her lorgnette and, pursing her lips, declared that nobody really even knew whether or not the lady was married. ‘It is all rather sickening,’ concluded the lady of 1914, who could have wished the cycle of new admissions to have ended with her own. These new ladies, whom the young men found rather ancient, and whom, moreover, certain older men, who had not moved exclusively in the best circles, were sure that they recognized as being not so new as all that, did not provide society merely with the pleasures of political conversation and music in suitably intimate surroundings: it was also that they had to be the ones who provided them, because for things to seem new, even if they are old, indeed even if they are actually new, there must in art, as in medicine, as in fashionable society, be new names. (They were, in fact, new in some matters. Thus Mme Verdurin had visited Venice during the war, but, like those people who try to avoid talking about distressing or emotional matters, when she said that it was wonderful, what she was admiring was not Venice, nor St Mark’s, nor the palaces, all of which had delighted me so much and for which she had cared very little, but the effect of the searchlights in the sky, searchlights about which she provided information supported by figures. Thus from age to age is reborn a certain realism as a reaction against the art previously admired.)

  The reputation of the Saint-Euverte salon had faded, and the presence at it of the greatest artists, the most influential ministers, would have attracted nobody. On the other hand, people would rush to listen to the utterances of a secretary of the former, or an under-secretary in the office of the latter, in the homes of the new turbaned ladies whose winged and chattering invasion was filling Paris. The ladies of the first Directory had a queen who was young and fair called Mme Tallien. Those of the second had two, who were old and ugly and called Mme Verdurin and Mme Bontemps. Who could have continued to hold it against Mme Bontemps that her husband had played a role in the Dreyfus Affair which had been harshly criticized by the Écho de Paris? The whole Chamber
having at a certain point become revisionist, it was necessarily from among the former revisionists, as from among the former socialists, that the party of social order, religious toleration and military preparedness had been obliged to draw its recruits. At one time M. Bontemps would have been reviled, because then the anti-patriots went under the name of Dreyfusards. But that name had been quickly forgotten and replaced by that of ‘opponent of the Three Years Law’.21 M. Bontemps, however, was one of the architects of this law, and consequently he was a patriot.

  In society (and this social phenomenon is merely one application of a much more general psychological law), novelties, blameworthy or not, arouse horror only if they have not been assimilated and surrounded by reassuring elements. This was as true of Dreyfusism as it was of Saint-Loup’s marriage to Odette’s daughter, which initially produced such an outcry. Now that one met everybody ‘one knew’ at the Saint-Loups’, Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself, and people would still have gone there and endorsed Gilberte’s dowager-like condemnation of as yet unassimilated moral changes. Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things. As for wondering what intrinsic merit it had, nobody gave it any greater consideration now, in accepting it, than formerly, when they had condemned it. It was no longer shocking. That was all that mattered. People scarcely remembered that it ever had been, just as they no longer know, after a lapse of time, whether a girl’s father was a thief or not. At a pinch one can say: ‘No, you’re thinking of the brother-in-law, or someone with the same name. Nobody has ever had anything to say against the father.’ In the same way, there had unquestionably been Dreyfusism and Dreyfusism, and somebody who was received at the Duchesse de Montmorency’s and was helping to pass the Three Years Law could not be bad. In any case, no sin but should find mercy. The forgiveness granted to Dreyfusism was extended, a fortiori, to Dreyfusards. Besides, there were no longer any Dreyfusards left in politics, since at one time everybody who wanted to be in the government had been one, even those who represented the opposite of all that Dreyfusism, in its shocking novelty, had incarnated (at the time when Saint-Loup had been on the slippery slope): anti-patriotism, irreligion, anarchy, etc. Thus the Dreyfusism of M. Bontemps, invisible and constitutive like that of all politicians, was no more evident than the bones beneath his skin. Nobody even remembered that he had been a Dreyfusard, partly because people in society are inattentive and forgetful, also because it had all been a very long time ago, a time which people affected to believe was even longer ago, as one of the most fashionable ideas was the claim that the pre-war period was separated from the war by something as deep, something seemingly as long-lasting, as a geological period, and Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say: ‘In those prehistoric times’.

  (Truth to tell, this profound change brought about by the war was in inverse ratio to the quality of the minds affected by it, at least above a certain level. Right at the bottom of the scale the utterly foolish, the pure pleasure-seekers, took no notice of the fact that there was a war on. But at the top end, too, those who have made for themselves an environing interior life have little regard for the importance of events. What profoundly modifies the pattern of their thoughts is much more likely to be something that seems quite unimportant in itself but which reverses their experience of the order of time by making them contemporaneous with another period of their life. One may appreciate this in practice from the beauty of the writing this inspires: the song of a bird in the park at Montboissier, or a breeze heavy with the scent of mignonette, are obviously events of less consequence than the epoch-making dates of the Revolution and the Empire. They none the less inspired Chateaubriand to write pages of infinitely greater value in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe.22) The words Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard no longer had any meaning, yet the very people who maintained this would have been dumbfounded and outraged if one had told them that probably in a few centuries, perhaps even sooner, the term Boche would have merely the same curiosity value as words like sans-culotte or chouan or bleu.23

  M. Bontemps was unwilling to hear any talk of peace before Germany had been reduced to the same fragmented state as in the Middle Ages, the fall of the House of Hohenzollern pronounced, and Kaiser Wilhelm put up before a firing squad. In a word, he was what Brichot called a ‘diehard’, the highest warrant of good-citizenship that could be conferred upon him. For the first three days Mme Bontemps must have felt a little bewildered at being surrounded by people who had asked Mme Verdurin to introduce them to her, and it was with a note of mild asperity that Mme Verdurin replied: ‘No, my dear, the Comte’ to Mme Bontemps’s comment ‘That was the Duc d’Haussonville you just introduced to me, wasn’t it?’, whether out of complete ignorance and failure to associate the name Haussonville with any title at all, or, on the contrary, as a result of having been given too much information and associating it in her head with the ‘Ducs’ Party’ in the Academy, of which she had heard that M. de Haussonville was a member.24

  But by the fourth day she had begun to be firmly established in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Occasionally one still saw around her the unrecognized fragments of an unfamiliar social world, but to those who knew the egg from which Mme Bontemps had hatched this was no more surprising than the debris of shell around a chick. After a fortnight, however, she had shaken them off, and before the end of the first month, when she said ‘I’m going to the Lévis’,’ everybody understood, without her needing to be more specific, that she meant the Lévi-Mirepoix, and there was not a duchess who would have gone to bed without having learned from Mme Bontemps or Mme Verdurin, at least by telephone, the contents of the evening communiqué, what had been left out, how matters stood with Greece, what offensive was being prepared, in a word all the news that the public would know only the next day or later, and of which she thus had, as it were, a sort of dress rehearsal. In conversation, Mme Verdurin, when imparting news, would say ‘we’ when speaking of France. ‘Now listen: we demand of the King of Greece that he withdraw from the Peloponnese, etc., we send him, etc.’ And in all these stories the GHQ cropped up constantly (‘I telephoned the GHQ’), an abbreviation which she uttered with the same pleasure that, a little while before, women who did not know the Prince d’Agrigente took in asking with a smile, when people were talking about him, to show they were in the swim: ‘Grigri?’, a pleasure which in less agitated times is known only to fashionable society, but which in great crises becomes available to all classes. Our butler, for example, if someone mentioned the King of Greece, was able, thanks to the newspapers, to say ‘Tino?’ like Kaiser Wilhelm; whereas his familiarity with kings had hitherto remained at the more vulgar level of his own invention, as when he once referred to the King of Spain as ‘Fonfonse’. It was also noticeable that, as the number of socially glittering people making advances to Mme Verdurin increased, so the number of those she called ‘bores’ diminished. By a sort of magical transformation, every ‘bore’ who came to pay a visit and solicited an invitation instantly became somebody charming and intelligent. In short, by the end of a year the number of bores was proportionately so far reduced that ‘the fear of being unbearably bored’, which had occupied such a considerable place in Mme Verdurin’s conversation and played such a large part in her life, had almost entirely disappeared. It seemed that, late in life, this intolerance of boredom (which anyway she claimed never to have suffered from in her first youth) afflicted her less, just as some kinds of headache or nervous asthma lose their power as one becomes older. And the terror of being bored would probably have deserted Mme Verdurin completely, in the absence of any bores, had she not, to some slight extent, replaced those who were no longer boring with others drawn from the ranks of the former faithful.