Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [51]
To the narrator, viewing it at first from afar, the Faubourg is a sublime enigma. He is incapable of imagining what it can be like, what these remote minor deities say to one another, what language they use. The guests arriving at the Duc de Guermantes’s house “might have been made of some precious matter; they are the columns that hold up the temple.” “Alas,” he says, “those picturesque sites … I must content myself with a shiver of excitement as I sighted, from the deep sea (and without the least hope of ever landing there) like an outstanding minaret, like the first palm, like the first signs of some exotic industry or vegetation, the well-trodden doormat of its shore.”
The narrator discovers, however, that the boundaries of the Faubourg are more flexible than he thought. A few outsiders are given “naturalization papers,” little ways in which they know they have become accepted. Proust, like his narrator, gained access to the reputedly unapproachable world of the Faubourg because he was witty, kind, and solicitous, and above all, because he passionately wanted to. It is hard to resist true passion. After having been its distant admirer, the narrator becomes the chronicler of the Faubourg. The focus of Proust’s Paris shifts, and centers on this tiny minority with an inflated sense of its own importance, absorbed in matters of rank and social exclusion, indifferent to the world outside its gates.
Familiarity makes the narrator lose the sense of ecstasy he felt when the Faubourg was out of reach. He becomes aware of the malice and foolishness that exclusiveness conceals. He tests the walls of the temple, and they give a hollow sound. The exquisite politeness is calculated: “The ladies of the Faubourg build up a credit of amiability in anticipation of the dinner and garden party where they will not invite you, and are particularly nice in prevision of the day when they will overlook you.” The men are convinced that no greater honor exists than that of being accepted by them. Charles Swann, an outsider who has been thus honored, is by birth neither an aristocrat nor a Gentile. When the fate of Captain Dreyfus intrudes on the smugness of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Duc de Guermantes cannot understand how Swann, after having received a friendly reception from the Faubourg, can be sympathetic to the Jewish officer convicted of treason.
The elegance, the refinement, the courtliness are screens that mask unfeeling hearts. The narrator, although still awed by the Faubourg’s splendor, exposes its callousness, as in the famous scene where Swann arrives at the Guermantes town house and announces that he is dying to the Duchesse, who is late for dinner. “ ‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and shewing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.”
The Faubourg carries within it the seeds of its decline. The narrator watches it founder, the victim of external circumstances such as the war, as well as of its inability to defend itself against the principal cause of infiltration—misalliances. When Robert de Saint-Loup, the Duc de Guermantes’s nephew, marries