‘Veto’ thundered from the ancient Faculty, as solemn, as absurd and as terrible as the ‘Juro’ that spelled the death of Molière. So too with the painter permanently labelled man of fashion, when fashionable people who dabbled in art had succeeded in making themselves be labelled artists; so with the diplomat who had too many reactionary associations.
But this case was the rarest of all. The type of distinguished man who formed the main substance of the Guermantes drawing-room was that of people who had voluntarily (or so at least they supposed) renounced all else, everything that was incompatible with the wit of the Guermantes, with the courtesy of the Guermantes, with that indefinable charm odious to any ‘Corporation’ however little centralised.
And the people who were aware that in days gone by one of these frequenters of the Duchess’s drawing-room had been awarded the gold medal of the Salon, that another, Secretary to the Bar Council, had made a brilliant start in the Chamber, that a third had ably served France as Chargé d’Affaires, might have been led to regard as ‘failures’ people who had done nothing more now for twenty years. But there were few who were thus ‘well-informed,’ and the parties concerned would themselves have been the last to remind people, finding these old distinctions to be now valueless, in the light of this very Guermantes spirit of wit: for did not this condemn respectively as a bore or an usher, and as a counter-jumper a pair of eminent Ministers, one a trifle solemn, the other addicted to puns, of whose praises the newspapers were always full but in whose company Mme. de Guermantes would begin to yawn and shew signs of impatience if the imprudence of a hostess had placed either of them next to her at the dinner-table. Since being a statesman of the first rank was in no sense a recommendation to the Duchess’s favour, those of her friends who had definitely abandoned the ‘Career’ or the ‘Service,’ who had never stood for the Chamber, felt, as they came day after day to have luncheon and talk with their great friend, or when they met her in the houses of Royal Personages, of whom for that matter they thought very little (or at least they said so), that they themselves had chosen the better part, albeit their melancholy air, even in the midst of the gaiety, seemed somehow to challenge the soundness of this opinion.
It must be recognised also that the refinement of social life, the subtlety of conversation at the Guermantes’ did also contain, exiguous as it may have been, an element of reality. No official title was equivalent to the approval of certain chosen friends of Mme. de Guermantes, whom the most powerful Ministers had been unable to attract to their houses. If in this drawing-room so many intellectual ambitions, such noble efforts even had been for ever buried, still at least from their dust the rarest blossoms of civilised society had taken life. Certainly men of wit, Swann for instance, regarded themselves as superior to men of genuine worth, whom they despised, but that was because what the Duchesse de Guermantes valued above everything else was not intellect; it was, according to her, that superior, more exquisite form of the human intellect exalted to a verbal variety of talent — wit. And long ago at the Verdurins’ when Swann condemned Brichot and Elstir, one as a pedant and the other as a clown, despite all the learning of one and the other’s genius, it was the infiltration of the Guermantes spirit that had led him to classify them so. Never would he have dared to present either of them to the Duchess, conscious instinctively of the air with which she would have listened to Brichot’s monologues and Elstir’s hair-splittings, the Guermantes spirit regarding pretentious and prolix speech, whether in a serious or a farcical vein, as alike of the most intolerable imbecility.
As for the Guermantes of the true flesh and blood, if the Guermantes spirit had not absorbed them as completely as we see occur in, to take an example, those literary circles in which everyone shares a common way of pronouncing his words, of expressing his thoughts, and consequently of thinking, it was certainly not because originality is stronger in purely social groups or presents any obstacle there to imitation. But imitation depends not merely upon the absence of any unconquerable originality but also demands a relative fineness of ear which enables one first of all to discern what one is afterwards to imitate. Whereas there were several Guermantes in whom this musical sense was as entirely lacking as in the Courvoisiers.
To take as an instance what is called, in another sense of the word imitation, ‘giving imitations’ (or among the Guermantes was called ‘taking off’), Mme. de Guermantes might succeed in this to perfection, the Courvoisiers were as incapable of appreciating her as if they had been a tribe of rabbits instead of men and women, because they had never had the sense to observe the particular defect or accent that the Duchess was endeavouring to copy. When she ‘gave an imitation’ of the Duc de Limoges, the Courvoisiers would protest: “Oh, no, he doesn’t really speak like that! I met him again only yesterday at dinner at Bebeth’s; he talked to me all evening and he didn’t speak like that at all!” whereas the Guermantes of any degree of culture exclaimed: “Gad, what fun Oriane is! The odd part of it is that when she is copying him she looks exactly like him! I feel I’m listening to him. Oriane, do give us a little more Limoges!” Now these Guermantes (and not necessarily the few really outstanding members of the clan who when the Duchess imitated the Duc de Limoges, would say admiringly’ “Oh, you really have got him,” or “You do get him,”) might indeed be del void of wit according to Mme. de Guermantes (and in this respect she was right); yet, by dint of hearing and repeating her sayings they had come to imitate more or less her way of expressing herself, of criticising people of what Swann, like the Duke himself, used to call her ‘phrasing’ of things so that they presented in their conversation something which to the Courvoisiers appeared ‘fearfully like’ Oriane’s wit and was treated by them collectively as the ‘wit of the Guermantes.’ As these Guermantes were to her not merely kinsfolk but admirers, Oriane (who kept the rest of the family rigorously at arm’s-length and now avenged by her disdain the insults that they had heaped upon her in her girlhood) went to call on them now and then, generally in company with the Duke, in the season, when she drove out with him. These visits were historic events. The heart began to beat more rapidly in the bosom of the Princesse d’Epinay, who was ‘at home’ in her big drawing-room on the ground floor, when she perceived afar off, like the first glow of an innocuous fire, or the ‘reconnaissances’ of an unexpected invasion, making her way across the courtyard slowly, in a diagonal course, the Duchess crowned with a ravishing hat and holding atilt a sunshade from which there rained down a summer fragrance. “Why, here comes Oriane,” she would say, like an ‘On guard!’ intended to convey a prudent warning to her visitors, so that they should have time to beat an orderly retreat, to clear the rooms without panic. Half of those present dared not remain, and rose at once to go. “But no, why? Sit down again, I insist on keeping you a little longer,” said the Princess in a careless tone and seemingly at her ease (to shew herself the great lady) but in a voice that suddenly rang false. “But you may want to talk to each other.” “Really, you’re in a hurry? Oh, very well, I shall come and see you,” replied the lady of the house to those whom she was just as well pleased to see depart. The Duke and Duchess gave a very civil greeting to people whom they had seen there regularly for years, without for that reason coming to know them any better, while these in return barely said good day to them, thinking this more discreet. Scarcely had they left the room before the Duke began asking good-naturedly who they were, so as to appear to be taking an interest in the intrinsic quality of people whom he himself, owing to the cross-purposes of fate or the wretched state of Oriane’s nerves, never saw in his own house. “Tell me, who was that little woman in the pink hat?” “Why, my dear cousin, you have seen her hundreds of times, she’s the Vicomtesse de Tours, who was a Lamarzelle.” “But, do you know, she’s quite good-looking; she seems clever too; if it weren’t for a little flaw in her upper lip she’d be a regular charmer. If there’s a Vicomte de Tours, he can’t have any too bad a time. Oriane, do you know what those eyebrows and the way her hair grows reminded me of? Your cousin Hedwige de Ligne.” The Duchesse de Guermantes, who languished whenever people spoke of the beauty of any woman other than herself, let the conversation drop. She bad reckoned without the weakness her husband had for letting it be seen that he knew all about the people who did not come to his house, whereby be believed that he shewed himself to be more seriously minded than his wife. ‘“But,”