In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [135]
“The Dreyfus case.”
“The devil they are. By the way, do you know who is a rabid supporter of Dreyfus? I give you a thousand guesses. My nephew Robert! I can tell you that when they heard of his goings-on at the Jockey there was a fine gathering of the clans, a regular outcry. And as he’s coming up for election next week . . .”
“Of course,” broke in the Duchess, “if they’re all like Gilbert, who’s 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,” put in M. d’Argencourt.
The Duke showed off his wife, but did not love her. Extremely self-important, he hated to be interrupted, and was moreover in the habit of being rude to her at home. Quivering with the twofold rage of a bad husband when his wife speaks to him, and a glib talker when he is not listened to, he stopped short and transfixed the Duchess with a glare which made everyone feel uncomfortable.
“What makes you think we want to hear about Gilbert and Jerusalem?” he said at last. “That’s got nothing to do with it. But,” he went on in a gentler tone, “you must admit that if one of our family were to be black-balled at the Jockey, especially Robert whose father was president for ten years, it would be the limit. What do you expect, my dear, it’s caught ’em on the raw, those fellows, it made them roll their eyes. I don’t blame them, either; personally, you know that I have no racial prejudice, all that sort of thing seems to me out of date, and I do claim to move with the times; but damn it all, when one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup one isn’t a Dreyfusard. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
M. de Guermantes uttered the words “when one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup” 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 exaggerate 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 prompted him thus to diminish it. Each of us sees in brighter colours what he sees at a distance, what he sees in other people. For the general laws which govern perspective in imagination apply just as much to dukes as to ordinary mortals. And not only the laws of imagination, but those of speech. Now, one or other of two laws of speech might apply here. One of them demands that we should express ourselves like others of our mental category and not of our caste. Under this law M. de Guermantes might, in his choice of expressions, even when he wished to talk about the nobility, be indebted to the humblest little tradesman, who would have said: “When one goes by the name of Duc de Guermantes,” whereas an educated man, a Swann, a Legrandin, would not have said it. A duke may write novels worthy of a grocer, even about life in high society, titles and pedigrees being of no help to him there, and the writings of a plebeian may deserve the epithet “aristocratic.” Who in this instance had been 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 diseases appear and then vanish of which nothing more is ever heard, there come into being, no one knows how, spontaneously perhaps or by an accident like that which introduced into France a certain weed from America the seeds of which, caught in the wool of a travelling rug, fell on a railway embankment, modes of expression which one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have not in any way combined together to that end. 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 and agreeable, whom they could not do without—namely Bloch,” and heard the same remark used by countless other young men who did not know him and