In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [169]
Since M. de Charlus had mentioned this visit to Mme de Villeparisis’s, I wanted to ask him his exact relationship to the Marquise, the latter’s birth, and so on, but the question took another form on my lips than I had intended, and I asked him instead what the Villeparisis family was.
“Dear me, it’s not an easy question to answer,” M. de Charlus replied in a voice that seemed to skate over the words. “It’s as if you had asked me to tell you what nothing was. My aunt, who is capable of anything, took it into her whimsical head to plunge the greatest name in France into oblivion by marrying for the second time a little M. Thirion. This Thirion thought that he could assume an extinct aristocratic name with impunity, as people do in novels. History doesn’t relate whether he was tempted by La Tour d’Auvergne, whether he hesitated between Toulouse and Montmorency. At all events he made a different choice and became Monsieur de Villeparisis. Since there have been no Villeparisis since 1702, I thought that he simply meant to indicate modestly that he was a gentleman from Villeparisis, a little place near Paris, that he had a solicitor’s practice or a barber’s shop at Villeparisis. But my aunt didn’t see things that way—as a matter of fact she’s reaching the age when she can scarcely see at all. She tried to make out that such a marquisate existed 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 which one has no right, it’s best not to make too much fuss, like our excellent friend the so-called Comtesse de M. who, against the advice of Mme Alphonse Rothschild, refused to swell the coffers of the State for a title which would not have been made more authentic thereby. The joke is that ever since then my aunt has claimed a monopoly of all the paintings connected with the real Villeparisis family, to whom the late Thirion was in no way related. My aunt’s country house has become a sort of repository for their portraits, genuine or not, under the rising flood of which several Guermantes and several Condés who are by no means small beer have had to disappear. The picture dealers manufacture 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 marriage to a M. de Villeparisis, as if the author of the Memoirs hadn’t perhaps other claims to the interest of visitors than not to have been the great-grandfather of M. Thirion.”
Mme de Villeparisis being merely Mme Thirion completed the decline and fall in my estimation of her which had begun when I had seen the mixed composition of her salon. It seemed to me to be unfair that a woman whose title and name were of quite recent origin should be able thus to delude her contemporaries and might similarly delude posterity by virtue of her friendships with royal personages. 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 by whom she was surrounded struck me as somehow extraneous 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 belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and if I had wanted any information about it she was one of the last people to whom I should have applied.
“At present,” M. de Charlus went on, “by going into society you will only damage your position, warp your intellect and character. Moreover, you must be particularly careful in choosing your friends. Keep mistresses if your family have no objection—that doesn’t concern me, and indeed I can only encourage it, you young rascal—a young rascal who will soon have to start shaving,” he added,