In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [107]
exercise of one’s social relations. I had seen Mme de Villeparisis at Balbec hemmed in by a bodyguard of her own servants and not even glancing at the people sitting in the hall of the hotel. But I had had a presentiment that this abstention was not due to indifference, and it seemed that she had not always confined herself to it. She would get a sudden craze to know such and such an individual who had no claim to be received in her house, sometimes because she had thought him good-looking, or merely because she had been told that he was amusing, or because 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 Faubourg Saint-Germain. To this bohemian or bourgeois intellectual whom she had marked out with her favour she was obliged to address her invitations, the value of which he was unable to appreciate, with an insistence that gradually depreciated her in the eyes of the snobs who were in the habit of judging a salon by the people whom its mistress excluded rather than by those whom she entertained. True, if at some point in her youth Mme de Villeparisis, surfeited with the satisfaction of belonging to the flower of the aristocracy, had somehow amused herself by scandalising the people among whom she lived, and 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 the latter, except for those who were closely related to her, had ceased to call, she felt herself diminished, and sought once more to reign, but with another sceptre than that of wit. She would have liked to attract to her house all those whom she had taken such pains to discard. How many women’s lives, lives of which little enough is known (for we all live in different worlds according to our age, and the discretion of their elders prevents the young from forming any clear idea of the past and taking in the whole spectrum), have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds! Flung to the winds in what way? The young are all the less capable of imagining it, since they see before them an elderly and respectable Marquise de Villeparisis and have no idea that the grave memorialist of today, so dignified beneath her pile of snowy hair, can ever have been a gay midnight-reveller who was perhaps in those days the delight, 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 social position which 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 neurasthenic lives may be woven by him from morning to night without thereby seeming endurable, and while he is hastening to add another mesh to the net which holds him captive, it is possible that he is dreaming only of dancing, sport and travel. We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be. Mme Leroi’s disdainful bows might to some extent be expressive of the true nature of Mme de Villeparisis; they in no way corresponded to her ambition.
No doubt at the same moment in which Mme Leroi was—to use an expression dear to Mme Swann—“cutting” the Marquise, the latter could seek consolation in remembering how Queen Marie-Amélie had once said to her: “You are just like a daughter to me.” But such royal civilities, secret and unknown to the world, existed for the Marquise alone, as dusty as the diploma of an old Conservatoire