In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [329]
In spite of whatever may stem from various subjective points of view, of which I shall have something to say later, in these artificial magnifications, the fact remains that there is a certain objective reality in all these people, and consequently a difference between them.
How, in any case, could it be otherwise? The humanity with which we consort and which bears so little resemblance to our dreams is none the less the same that, in the memoirs and in the letters of eminent persons, we have seen described and have felt a desire to know. The utterly insignificant old man we meet at dinner is the same who wrote that proud letter to Prince Friedrich-Karl which we read with such emotion in a book about the war of 1870. We are bored at the dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and, because it is keeping us company, we are interested in a book. But the people in question are the same. We should like to have known Mme de Pompadour, who was so valuable a patron of the arts, and we should have been as bored in her company as among the modern Egerias at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so mediocre do we find them. The fact remains that these differences do exist. People are never completely alike; their behaviour with regard to ourselves, at, one might say, the same level of friendship, reveals differences which, in the end, counter-balance one another. When I knew Mme de Montmorency, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things to me, but if I asked her a favour she would use all her influence as unstintingly and as effectively as possible in order to obtain what I needed. Whereas another woman, Mme de Guermantes for example, would never have wished to hurt my feelings, never said anything about me except what might give me pleasure, showered on me all those tokens of friendship which formed the rich texture of the Guermantes’s moral life, but, if I asked her for the smallest thing above and beyond that, would not have moved an inch to procure it for me, as in those country houses where one has at one’s disposal a motor-car and a valet but where it is impossible to obtain a glass of cider for which no provision has been made in the arrangements for a party. Which was for me the true friend, Mme de Montmorency, so happy to ruffle my feelings and always so ready to oblige, or Mme de Guermantes, distressed by the slightest offence that might have been given me and incapable of the slightest effort to be of use to me? Similarly, it was said that the Duchesse de Guermantes spoke only about frivolities, and her cousin, intellectually so mediocre, invariably about interesting things. Types of mind are so varied, so conflicting, not only in literature but in society, that Baudelaire and Mérimée are not the only people who have the right to despise one another mutually. These distinctive characteristics form in each person a system of looks, words and actions so coherent, so despotic, that when we are in his or her presence it seems to us superior to the rest. With Mme de Guermantes, her words, deduced like a theorem from her type of mind, seemed to me the only ones that could possibly be said. And at heart I was of her opinion when she told me that Mme de Montmorency was stupid and kept an open mind towards all the things she did not understand, or when, having heard of some malicious remark made by that lady, she said: “So that’s what you call a kind woman. I call her a monster.” But this tyranny of the reality which confronts us, this self-evidence of the lamplight which turns the already