In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [17]
“Oh, if it wasn’t for these cursed legs of mine! On the plain I can still get along” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in the streets, where Françoise was not averse from walking, in other words on flat ground), “but it’s these confounded stairs. Good day to you. Perhaps we’ll meet again this evening.”
She was all the more anxious to continue her conversations with the footman after learning from him that the sons of dukes often bore a princely title which they retained until their fathers were dead. Evidently the cult of the nobility, blended with and accommodating itself to a certain spirit of revolt against it, must, springing hereditarily from the soil of France, be very strongly implanted still in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of the genius of Napoleon or of wireless telegraphy without succeeding in attracting her attention, and without her pausing for a moment in the job she was doing, whether clearing the grate or laying the table, if she learnt of these peculiarities and that the younger son of the Duc de Guermantes was generally called the Prince d’Oléron, would exclaim: “Now isn’t that nice!” and stand there bemused, as though in front of a stained-glass window.
Françoise learned also from the Prince d’Agrigente’s valet, who had become friends with her by often calling round with notes for the Duchess, that he had been hearing a great deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d’Ambresac, and that it was practically settled.
That villa, that opera-box, into which Mme de Guermantes transfused the current of her life, must, it seemed to me, be places no less magical than her home. The names of Guise, of Parme, of Guermantes-Bavière, differentiated from all possible others the holiday places to which the Duchess resorted, the daily festivities which the track of her carriage wheels linked to her mansion. If they told me that the life of Mme de Guermantes consisted of a succession of such holidays and such festivities, they brought no further light to bear on it. Each of them gave to the life of the Duchess a different determination, but merely brought it a change of mystery without allowing any of its own mystery to evaporate, so that it simply floated, protected by a watertight covering, enclosed in a bell, amid the waves of others’ lives. The Duchess might have lunch on the shore of the Mediterranean at Carnival time, but in the villa of Mme de Guise, where the queen of Parisian society was no more, in her white piqué dress, among numberless princesses, than a guest like any other, and on that account more moving still to me, more herself by being thus made new, like a star of the ballet who in the intricacies of a dance figure takes the place of each of her humbler sisters in succession; she might look at shadow-theatre shows, but at a party given by the Princesse de Parme; listen to tragedy or opera, but from the Princesse de Guermantes’s box.
Since we localise in the body of a person all the potentialities of his or her life, the memory of the people he or she knows and has just left or is on the way to join, if, having learned from Françoise that Mme de Guermantes was going on foot to luncheon with the Princesse de Parme, I saw her emerge from the house about midday in a gown of flesh-coloured satin above which her face was of the same shade, like a cloud at sunset, it was all the pleasures of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that I saw before me, contained in that small compass, as though between the glossy pearl-pink valves of a shell.
My father had a friend at the Ministry, one A. J. Moreau, who, to distinguish himself from the other Moreaus, took care always to prefix his name with these two initials, with the result that people called him “A.J.” for short. For some reason or other, this A.J. found himself in possession of a stall for a gala night