Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [52]
Stunning reversals have hastened the Faubourg’s decline. The Prince de Guermantes (cousin of the Duc), ruined by the war, his wife dead, has married the rich Mme Verdurin, the incarnation of bourgeois pretentiousness, whom no lady of the Faubourg, a few years earlier, would have received. The Faubourg’s standard-bearers, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, have more or less abandoned it. The Duchesse now frequents social groups much further down the social scale, and has become particularly fond of the company of actresses. The Duc has become hopelessly infatuated with Swann’s widow, Odette, who has in the meantime been married to the Baron de Forcheville.
Thus Odette, who starts out a common courtesan, becomes in the end the wife of one member of the Faubourg and the mistress of another. The doddering Duc de Guermantes is so taken with Odette that he accepts in her home the presence of people he would in the past have disdained. Social boundaries have crumbled, and Odette shows off her relic of the Faubourg like a collector showing an antique. “All that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned …” the narrator remarks.
Running parallel to the decline of the Faubourg as a social bastion is the decline of the narrator’s friends caused by advancing years, and the transformation of the city owing to the war. On his way to a musical matinee at the Prince de Guermantes’s, the narrator sees Charlus in the street, recovering from an attack of apoplexy, bent, his hair and beard gone completely white, his eyes glazed, hardly able to walk. At the matinee, he sees the men and women he had known young arriving like phantoms, imprisoned in the thousand bonds of the past, age having marked their faces the way geologic change marks the surface of the earth.
The men were now elderly white-haired hermits. Women’s faces were crumbling like those of statues. Women who still seemed young from afar grew older as they were approached and one saw the wrinkles and the greasy spots on their skins, the deep erosion along their noses, the alluvial deposits on the edge of cheeks that filled the face with their opaque mass. Some faces seem covered by a plaster mask, others by a gauze veil. Gilberte, the narrator’s first love, has become a fat lady whom he fails to recognize, and then mistakes for her mother, Odette.
Wartime Paris causes the same sense of dislocation. Planes circle the city, little brown specks against the sky. The museums are closed, and from the doors of shops hang handwritten signs saying they will be open at some remote time in the future. The blackout begins at nine-thirty. Soldiers on leave fill the streets, looking into the windows of crowded restaurants and saying: “You’d never know there was a war on here.” Sirens announcing a Zeppelin raid seem to the narrator “Wagnerian, so natural to announce the arrival of the Germans.”
Although the Germans are an hour’s drive from Paris, receptions and dinners continue to be given, and fashionable women attend them wearing bracelets made from shell fragments, while the men carry cigarette cases made from English coins. The narrator feels “the surprise of a foreigner who knows Paris well but does not live there, and who, upon returning to the city for a few weeks, sees in the place of a little theatre where he has spent pleasant evenings, that a bank has been built in its place.”
The city’s permanence is merely another illusion, for nothing lasts, in cities as well as in hearts, and the very streets can alter