Precious and Rare

Marcel finally gets to mix with the aristocracy when invited to a dinner party by Madame la Duchesse, as she insists the butler address her. As in all cases where imagination is corrected by experience, imagination is killed.

To a certain extent, it is true, though not nearly enough to justify this state of mind, the Guermantes were different from the rest of society; they were more precious and rare. They had given me at first sight the opposite impression; I had found them vulgar, similar to all other men and women, but that was because before meeting them I had seen them, as I saw Balbec, Florence or Parma, as names. Naturally enough, in this drawing-room, all the women whom I had imagined as being like Dresden figures were after all more like the great majority of women. But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after first disappointing the imagination because they resembled their fellow-men rather more than their name, could subsequently, though to a lesser degree, hold out to one’s intelligence certain distinctive characteristics. (III,599)

Let’s take a look at those “distinctive characteristics.” First, consider the Princesse de Parme, a person so grounded in her blue-blood and wealth, that she takes genuine delight in radiating a benevolence on those lesser endowed.

Well before I arrived in her vicinity, the lady had begun to flash at me continuously from her large, soft, dark eyes the sort of knowing smiles which we address to an old friend who perhaps has not recognised us. As this was precisely the case with me and I could not for the life of me remember who she was, I averted my eyes as the Duke propelled me towards her, in order not to have to respond until our introduction should have released me from my predicament. Meanwhile the lady continued to maintain in precarious  balance the smile she was aiming at me. She looked as though she was in a hurry to be relieved of it and hear me say: “Ah, Madame, of course! How delighted Mamma will be to hear that we’ve met again!” I was as impatient to learn her name as she was to see that I did finally greet her with every indication of recognition, so that her smile, indefinitely prolonged like the note of a tuning fork, might at length be given a rest. (III,580)

By the same token, in a fragmentary survival of the old life of the court which is called social etiquette and is by no means superficial, wherein, rather, by a sort of outside-in reversal, it is the surface that becomes essential and profound, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes regarded as a duty more essential and more inflexible than those (all too neglected by one at least of the pair) of charity, chastity, pity and justice, that of rarely addressing the Princesse de Parme save in the third person. (III,583)

As the traveller discovers, almost unaltered, the houses roofed with turf, the terrace which may have met the eyes of Xenophon or St Paul, so in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who was heart-warming in his graciousness and revolting in his hardness, a slave to the pettiest obligations and derelict as regards the most solemn pacts. I found still intact after more than two centuries that aberration, peculiar to the life of the court under Louis XIV, which transfers the scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality to questions of pure form. (III,598)

The Discrete Charm of the Aristocracy

Marcel continues to be intrigued by the aristocracy. The bourgeoisie, though having drawn ahead in wealth, have yet to acquire the self-assurance of the hereditary caste.

For, apart from individual characteristics, there was still at this period a very marked difference between any rich and well-dressed man of that section of the aristocracy and any rich and well-dressed man of the world of finance or “big business.” Where one of the latter would  have thought he was giving proof of his exclusiveness by adopting a sharp and haughty tone in speaking to an inferior, the nobleman, affable and mild, gave the impression of considering, of practising  an affectation of humility and patience, a pretence of being just an ordinary member of the audience, as a prerogative of his good breeding. (III,40)

A budding genius who has taken a stall in order to see Berma thinks only of not soiling his gloves, of not disturbing, of conciliating the neighbour whom chance has put beside him, of pursuing with an intermittent smile the fleeting glance, and 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 endless indecision, he makes up his mind to go and talk just as the three knocks from the stage, resound before he has had time to reach this friend, force him to take flight, like the Hebrews in the Red Sea, through a heaving tide of spectators and spectatresses whom he has forced to rise to their feet and whose dresses he tears and boots he crushes as he passes. (III,42)

The nobility, though, is quite at home here, leaving them free to enjoy the performance, save one small deficit.

…it was because they rested an indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the columns which upheld this temple of the lyric art–it was because they remained unmoved by the extravagant honours  which seemed to be being paid them by a pair of carved figures which held out towards the boxes branches of palm and laurel, that  they alone would have had the equanimity of mind to listen to the play, if only they had had minds. (III,43)

 

 

 

The Remorse of Friendship

Marcel is hardly ever so miserable as when he experiences friendship. It is at once the promise of the end of his loneliness and the betrayal of his self.

…I told myself that I had a good friend, that a good friend was a rare thing, and I savoured, when I felt myself surrounded by assets that were difficult to acquire, what was precisely the opposite of the pleasure that was natural to me, the opposite of the leisure of having extracted from myself and brought to light something that was hidden in my inner darkness. If I had spent two or three hours in conversation with Saint-Loup and he had expressed his admiration of what I had said to him, I felt a sort of remorse, or regret, or weariness at not having remained alone and settled down to work at last. (II,431)

Leaving aside the feeling of wasting his time instead of being a creative writer, which was an empty concern, he felt guilt because he was in a sense using Saint-Loup, using him as creative fuel.

He was no more than an object the properties of which, in my musings, I sought to explore. The discovery in him of the pre-existent, this immemorial being, this aristocrat who was precisely what Robert aspired not to be, gave me intense joy, but a joy of the mind rather than the feelings. (II,432)

And Saint-Loup explains why Marcel is so attracted to the aristocracy. At their best, they simple are, without aspiration, noble.

…I sense in it above all the certainty or the illusion in the minds of those great lords of being “better than other people,” thanks to which they had not been able to hand down to Saint-Loup that  anxiety to show that one is “just as good as the next man,” that dread of seeming too assiduous of which he was indeed wholly innocent and which mars with so much stiffness and awkwardness the most sincere plebeian civility. Sometimes I reproached myself for thus taking pleasure in considering my friend as a work of art, that is to say in regarding the play of all the parts of his being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea from which they depended but of which he was unaware and which consequently added nothing to his own qualities, to that personal value, intellectual and moral, which he prized so highly. (II,431)