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High Society, Low Life

Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. There were two walks the family regularly took from the house, one in the direction of a property owned by a family friend, M. Swann, and the other in the direction of an estate owned by a very grand aristocratic family with local connections, the Guermantes. The Way by Swann’s, the first walk, is the name of the first book of Proust’s novel. The Guermantes Way, the second walk, is the name of the third, and with it the narrator and reader enter a new world, of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, and all the high society of Paris’s fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The narrator’s knowledge of the Guermantes, as with almost everything else in Proust’s vast but subtly constructed work, begins at a very early stage. They appear first in the form of a medieval ancestor, Geneviève de Brabant, in the magic-lantern slides projected on to the curtains of the young boy’s Combray bedroom. Another ancestor of this ancient French family is present in the local church, where Gilbert the Bad, a descendant of Geneviève, is depicted in one of the stained-glass windows. As a result, the name Guermantes is wrapped in mystery for the young boy, associated as it is with the remotest medieval past and with maidens awaiting rescue in the bedtime story read to him by his great-aunt. So when one day he catches a glimpse of the Duchesse de Guermantes in the flesh, at a wedding in the church where she is a guest of honour, he is disappointed to find that she looks little different from other women he knows, ‘a fair-haired lady with . . . a pimple at the corner of her nose’.

We step into the world of the Guermantes proper, however, when the narrator – now an adolescent – and his family move to their new apartment in Paris, in a wing of the Guermantes’ residence. The move takes place at the beginning of The Guermantes Way and here and in the succeeding book, Sodom and Gomorrah, we find ourselves in the brilliant (and not so brilliant) social world of the salons, a seemingly endless round of afternoon and evening receptions, gala opera performances and

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Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. There were two walks the family regularly took from the house, one in the direction of a property owned by a family friend, M. Swann, and the other in the direction of an estate owned by a very grand aristocratic family with local connections, the Guermantes. The Way by Swann’s, the first walk, is the name of the first book of Proust’s novel. The Guermantes Way, the second walk, is the name of the third, and with it the narrator and reader enter a new world, of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, and all the high society of Paris’s fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The narrator’s knowledge of the Guermantes, as with almost everything else in Proust’s vast but subtly constructed work, begins at a very early stage. They appear first in the form of a medieval ancestor, Geneviève de Brabant, in the magic-lantern slides projected on to the curtains of the young boy’s Combray bedroom. Another ancestor of this ancient French family is present in the local church, where Gilbert the Bad, a descendant of Geneviève, is depicted in one of the stained-glass windows. As a result, the name Guermantes is wrapped in mystery for the young boy, associated as it is with the remotest medieval past and with maidens awaiting rescue in the bedtime story read to him by his great-aunt. So when one day he catches a glimpse of the Duchesse de Guermantes in the flesh, at a wedding in the church where she is a guest of honour, he is disappointed to find that she looks little different from other women he knows, ‘a fair-haired lady with . . . a pimple at the corner of her nose’. We step into the world of the Guermantes proper, however, when the narrator – now an adolescent – and his family move to their new apartment in Paris, in a wing of the Guermantes’ residence. The move takes place at the beginning of The Guermantes Way and here and in the succeeding book, Sodom and Gomorrah, we find ourselves in the brilliant (and not so brilliant) social world of the salons, a seemingly endless round of afternoon and evening receptions, gala opera performances and glittering lunches and dinners, from select gatherings at the Duchesse de Guermantes’ to a less select five o’clock tea at Mme Swann’s or a musical evening at the wealthy but pedigreeless Mme Verdurin’s (where the love affair between Swann and his mistress Odette is played out). There are seven major parties of one kind or another in the course of Remembrance of Things Past, and they occupy in all 750 pages of the 3,000-page novel; if we included the smaller functions, a lunch at Mme Swann’s where the narrator meets his writer hero Bergotte, or the evening reception where Swann, hearing again the bewitching little phrase from the sonata by the composer Vinteuil, realizes his love for Odette is dead, the page count would be nearer one-third of the entire work. The life of the salons and their hostesses and regular guests, the finely graded relations between the different layers of the gratin, the upper crust, furnish the human raw material of Proust’s (fictional) history of his times. These salons are not the arena of action, of political negotiation and decision-making: the movers and shakers of contemporary events – Marshal MacMahon and General Boulanger, Kaiser Wilhelm and Clemenceau, Alfred Dreyfus, his defender Zola and the Army High Command – remain in the wings, mentioned only in conversation, or in connection with lesser-known relatives, or (as in the case of Dreyfus) as a cause of ruptured friendships, social disapproval or ostracism. The events that agitated the France of those decades – the Panama corruption scandal of the 1890s, the Dreyfus Affair, the Moroccan crisis of 1905, and not least the Great War – are visible only in the background, filtered through the personalities and attitudes, reactions and words of this privileged, distinguished, stylish, callous and ultimately (in the narrator’s view) vacuous social stratum. At the outset, though, the narrator is starstruck by the brilliance of this world, presided over by its wittiest and most elegant hostess, Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes. Through his friendship with the duchess’s nephew, the narrator gains his longed-for introduction to her; he now has his entrée into high society. What he finds there provides the material for a comedy of manners on the grand scale, and permits Proust, through a huge cast of characters from every level of salon life, to display the vanity, egotism, ambition, snobbery and enslavement to fashion of these privileged creatures, which he does with a mordant wit reminiscent of the Maxims of La Roche-foucauld. (Proust’s model for his portrayal of these latter-day kingless courtiers was a contemporary of La Rochefoucauld’s, the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose memoirs had provided just such a sharp and witty portrait of the court of Louis XIV.) The sharpest lens through which the attitudes and behaviour of these titled and moneyed glitterati are examined is the Dreyfus Affair which, during the 1890s, split not just the French upper classes but the whole of French society into two separate camps, centred on the court martial of a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, for passing military secrets to the Germans, and the campaign to prove his innocence. The Affair weaves in and out of the salon conversations, highlighting the mechanisms by which individuals and social groups coalesce around certain views – not at all for identical reasons, or for necessarily honourable motives – and then change their minds, perhaps because the facts have changed, perhaps simply not to seem out of step. The Duc de Guermantes is a case in point. Here he is commenting on the risk to his nephew Robert de Saint-Loup’s membership of the most exclusive club in Paris posed by his support for Dreyfus:
‘But,’ he went on in a gentler tone, ‘you’d be the first to admit that if one of our family were to be refused membership of the Jockey, especially Robert, whose father was president for ten years, it would be an outrage . . . Personally, I have no racial prejudice, you know that. That sort of thing is very out of date to me, and I like to be thought of as moving with the times. But God damn it! With a name like the Marquis de Saint-Loup, one isn’t a Dreyfusard. And that’s all there is to it.’
Never mind whether Dreyfus is innocent or not, it is the family name that counts. Later on, however, we learn that the duke has entirely reversed his views, not because of the merits of the case but because, during a visit to a spa, an Italian princess had told him that ‘nobody with a grain of intelligence can ever have believed for a moment’ that there was any evidence against Dreyfus. Swann’s shifting position in relation to the Guermantes, as the Affair deepens his identification with his Jewish roots, is one of the great threads running through the novel. It is paralleled within the Guermantes family itself by the fate of another prominent member, the duke’s brother, the Baron de Charlus. Charlus, who rejoices in the unusual name Palamède (one of a number of gloriously eccentric Christian names borne by Proust’s aristos), is the second of the great protagonists of the novel – a creature of huge contradictions, ferocious temper, sudden unpredictable kindnesses, who veers wildly from the most extreme rudeness to the grandest of society ladies to acts of enormous generosity to servants, shopkeepers and their children. The narrator’s first encounters with the Baron, who at one moment appears to offer him the most ardent friendship, only to withdraw it petulantly the next, leave him thoroughly bewildered. It is only when he catches sight of Charlus unawares, in a mysterious exchange of signals with the tailor who has a shop in the courtyard just below the narrator’s apartment, that he realizes there is a psycho-sexual basis for the Baron’s odd behaviour:
For what did I see! Face to face, in that courtyard where they had certainly not met before . . . the Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-shut eyes, was gazing with extraordinary attentiveness at the ex-tailor poised on the threshold of his shop, while the latter, rooted suddenly to the spot in front of M. de Charlus, implanted there like a tree, contemplated with a look of wonderment the plump form of the ageing Baron . . . The Baron, who now sought to disguise the impression that had been made on him, and yet, in spite of his affectation of indifference, seemed unable to move away without regret, came and went, looked vaguely into the distance in the way which he felt would most enhance the beauty of his eyes, and assumed a smug, nonchalant, fatuous air. Meanwhile Jupien [the ex-tailor] . . . had – in perfect symmetry with the Baron – drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.
The orchid and the bumblebee are not fortuitous. Before this scene of homoerotic courtship, the narrator has been keenly anticipating the arrival of a bee to fertilize an orchid in the courtyard. He is struck by the parallels between plant fertilization and human sexual activity, including between the self-fertilization of certain flowers and homosexual encounters of the kind he has just observed. In fact, the first part of the fourth book, Sodom and Gomorrah, consists of an extended reflection, sparked off by this incident, on the phenomenon of homosexuality (a term the narrator finds as inadequate as the other contemporary term he uses for a homosexual: ‘invert’) in humans and analogous phenomena in the world of plants. Orchids were extraordinarily fashionable in Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century and Proust uses the flower not only to provide a subtle and complex correspondence in the vegetable world to Charlus’s act of sterile fertilization with Jupien, but also as the emblem that Swann and his mistress choose for their physical love-making. From this point on, homosexual attraction and desire develop as major themes of the novel, one of their chief interests for the narrator being the way they act as a great leveller between the classes, exemplified by the Baron’s later reckless infatuation with a young man whose grandfather had been a manservant of the narrator’s great-uncle. As for Gomorrah, and the devotees of Sapphic love, the (heterosexual) narrator is allowed – except for one brief scene very early in the book – no direct access to this world. He can catch only half-glimpses of it from hints and suggestions, rumour and hearsay, which, when the tales and hints relate to the objects of his obsessive desire, reduce him (and Swann before him) to a near-manic state of jealousy. The fifth of the seven books of Remembrance of Things Past is largely devoted to the narrator’s tortured attempt to gain complete control of an impoverished orphan girl, Albertine, whom he maintains and keeps captive in his Paris apartment. The attempt is doomed to failure, since other human beings are unknowable:
I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.
By the end of the sixth book of Remembrance of Things Past, this ‘I’ for whom Albertine, and all others, are so unfathomable – our narrator – has learned that it is neither in society nor in love that he will find the key to the happiness he seeks. He must look elsewhere.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Anthony Wells 2018


About the contributor

Anthony Wells has spent the best part of a lifetime avoiding putting pen to paper, prevaricating with a number of occupations including monitoring East German radio for the BBC, librarianship and running a family business. He hopes it’s going to be a case of better late than never.

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