• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1887 0

on” their parents-in-law, and for the rest of the year lived down in the country in the midst of a society that was unadulterated but undistinguished. Whereas Saint-Loup, who was up to the eyes in debt, dazzled Doncières with his carriage-horses, a Courvoisier who was extremely rich always went by tram. Similarly (though of course many years earlier) Mlle de Guermantes (Oriane), who had scarcely a penny to her name, created more stir with her clothes than all the Courvoisiers put together. The very scandalousness of her remarks was a sort of advertisement for her style of dressing and doing her hair. She had had the audacity to say to the Russian Grand Duke: “Well, sir, it appears you would like to have Tolstoy assassinated?” at a dinner-party to which none of the Courvoisiers, in any case ill-informed about Tolstoy, had been asked. They were no better informed about the Greek authors, if we may judge by the Dowager Duchesse de Gallardon (mother-in-law of the Princesse de Gallardon who at that time was still a girl) who, not having been honoured by Oriane with a single visit in five years, replied to someone who asked her the reason for this abstention: “It seems she recites Aristotle” (meaning Aristophanes) “in society. I won’t tolerate that sort of thing in my house!”

One can imagine how greatly this “sally” by Mlle de Guermantes on the subject of Tolstoy, if it enraged the Courvoisiers, delighted the Guermantes, and beyond them everyone who was not merely closely but even remotely attached to them. The Dowager Comtesse d’Argencourt (née Seineport), who entertained more or less everyone because she was a blue-stocking and in spite of her son’s being a terrible snob, retailed the remark to her literary friends with the comment: “Oriane de Guermantes, you know, she’s as sharp as a needle, as mischievous as a monkey, gifted at everything, does water-colours worthy of a great painter, and writes better verses than most of the great poets, and as for family, you couldn’t imagine anything better, her grandmother was Mlle de Montpensier, and she’s the eighteenth Oriane de Guermantes in succession, without a single misalliance; it’s the purest, the oldest blood in the whole of France.” And so the sham men of letters, the pseudo-intellectuals whom Mme d’Argencourt entertained, picturing Oriane de Guermantes, whom they would never have an opportunity of knowing personally, as something more wonderful and more extraordinary than Princess Bedr-el-Budur, not only felt ready to die for her on learning that so noble a person glorified Tolstoy above all others, but felt also a quickening in their hearts of their own love of Tolstoy, their longing to resist Tsarism. These liberal ideas might have languished in them, they might have begun to doubt their importance, no longer daring to confess to them, when suddenly from Mlle de Guermantes herself, that is to say from a girl so indisputably cultured and authoritative, who wore her hair flat on her forehead (a thing that no Courvoisier would ever have dreamed of doing), came this vehement support. A certain number of realities, good or bad in themselves, gain enormously in this way by receiving the adhesion of people who are in authority over us. For instance, among the Courvoisiers the rites of civility in a public thoroughfare consisted in a certain form of greeting, very ugly and far from affable in itself, which people nevertheless knew to be the distinguished way of bidding a person good-day, with the result that everyone else, suppressing their instinctive smiles of welcome, endeavoured to imitate these frigid gymnastics. But the Guermantes in general and Oriane in particular, while more conversant than anyone with these rites, did not hesitate, if they caught sight of you from a carriage, to greet you with a friendly wave, and in a drawing-room, leaving the Courvoisiers to give their stiff, self-conscious salutes, offered the most charming bows, held out their hands as though to a comrade with a smile from their blue eyes, so that suddenly, thanks to the Guermantes, there entered