Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [50]
The street hawkers outside his window were “an orchestra that returned every morning to charm me.” Their cries seemed like a recitative in an opera, “where an initial intonation is barely altered by the inflexion of one note which rests upon another …” When he heard the cry “Les escargots, ils sont frais, ils sont beaux … On les vend six sous la douzaine,” it reminded him of parts of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The practical Albertine interrupted his reverie to say: “Do make Françoise go out and buy some.… It will be all the sounds that we hear, transformed into a good dinner.”
In counterpoint to the aristocracy with which Remembrance is mainly concerned, Proust shows us the little people of Paris, like the street vendors and the rouged lady called the “Marquise,” who operates the public toilet on the Champs-Élysées. Someone asks the Marquise why she does not retire, and she replies: “Will you kindly tell me where I shall be better off than here … my little Paris, I call it; my customers keep me in touch with everything that’s going on. Just to give you an example, there’s one of them who went out not more than five minutes ago; he’s a magistrate, in the very highest position there is … for the last eight years … regularly on the stroke of three he’s been here, always polite … never making any mess; and he stays half an hour and more to read his papers and do his little jobs.… And besides … I choose my customers, I don’t let everyone into my little parlours …” The instinct for social stratification, Proust shows us, exists at every level.
Another of Paris’s multiple functions is to evoke distant places where the narrator has never been, canceling the need to travel. He imagines “that the Seine, flowing between the twin semicircles of the span and the reflection of its bridges, must look like the Bosporus.” There was a room from which he saw “across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs … a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest ‘prints’ which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome.”
This room was Proust’s own bedroom on the boulevard Haussmann, but the narrator, more elegant, and for the requirements of the plot, lives in a wing of the Duc de Guermantes’s town house, the address of which is never specified. “It was one of those old town houses, a few of which are perhaps still to be found, in which the court of honour—whether they were alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered round the overlord—is flanked by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s for instance, or a tailor’s …”
Just as Proust’s Paris is more than a city, the Duc de Guermantes’s town house is more than an address—it is the symbolic fortress of an inaccessible caste, for the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes are the social leaders of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which is less a location than a state of mind. It is not limited to the fine old houses clustered around the boulevard Saint-Germain. The Guermantes town house, for instance, is on the other side of the river, on the right bank. It has everything to do with belonging to the ancien régime aristocracy, still conscious of its privileges, still royalist, certain of its superiority and contemptuous of outsiders, surviving thanks to an exclusiveness that makes it seem the custodian of a rare and desirable way of life, and to the rigid enforcement of a complicated social code.
The Baron de Charlus, the Duc de Guermantes’s younger brother (that brothers should have different family names is one of the arcana of the Faubourg), says: