In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [217]
A few minutes earlier I should have been amazed had anyone told me that Mme de Guermantes was going to ask me to come and see her, let alone to dine with her. However much I might be aware that the Guermantes salon could not present those distinctive features which I had extracted from the name, the fact that it had been forbidden territory to me, by obliging me to give it the same kind of existence that we give to the salons of which we have read the description in a novel or seen the image in a dream, made me, even when I was certain that it was just like any other, imagine it as quite different; between myself and it was the barrier at which reality ends. To dine with the Guermantes was like travelling to a place I had long wished to see, making a desire emerge from my head and take shape before my eyes, making acquaintance with a dream. At least I might have supposed that it would be one of those dinners to which the hosts invite someone by telling him: “Do come; there’ll be absolutely nobody but ourselves,” pretending to attribute to the pariah the alarm which they themselves feel at the thought of his mixing with their friends, and seeking indeed to convert into an enviable privilege, reserved for their intimates alone, the quarantine of the outcast, involuntarily unsociable and favoured. I felt on the contrary that Mme de Guermantes was anxious for me to taste the most delightful society that she had to offer me when she went on to say, projecting before my eyes as it were the violet-hued loveliness of a visit to Fabrice’s aunt and the miracle of an introduction to Count Mosca:
“You wouldn’t be free on Friday, now, for a small dinner-party? It would be so nice. There’ll be the Princesse de Parme, who’s charming, not that I’d ask you to meet anyone who wasn’t agreeable.”
Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in a perpetual climbing movement, the family still plays an important part in certain stationary grades, such as the middle class and the semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing. The friendship shown me by her “aunt Villeparisis” and Robert had perhaps made me, for Mme de Guermantes and her friends, living always upon themselves and in the same little circle, the object of an attentive curiosity of which I had no suspicion.
With these two kinsfolk she had a familiar, everyday, homely relationship of a sort, very different from what we imagine, in which, if we happen to be included, so far from our actions being ejected therefrom like a speck of dust from the eye or a drop of water from the windpipe, they are capable of remaining engraved, and will still be related and discussed years after we ourselves have forgotten them, in the palace in which we are astonished to find them preserved like a letter in our own handwriting among a priceless collection of autographs.
People who are merely fashionable may close their doors against undue invasion. But the Guermantes door did not suffer from that. Hardly ever did a stranger have occasion to appear at it. If, for once in a way, the Duchess had one pointed out to her, she never dreamed of troubling herself about the social distinction that he might bring, since this was a thing that she conferred and could not receive. She thought only of his real merits. Both Mme de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup had testified to mine. And doubtless she would not have believed them if she had not at the same time observed that they could never manage to secure me when they wanted me, and that therefore I attached no importance to society, which seemed to the Duchess a sign that a stranger was to be numbered among what she called “agreeable people.”
It was worth seeing, when one spoke to her of women for whom she did not