A fresh light upon Robert Saint-Loup
On the way home in the train, Marcel and his mother exchange the surprises revealed in their correspondence: Gilberte is marrying Saint-Loup, the nephew of the Baron de Charlus, (Marcel’s surprise) and “the Cambremer boy” (the son of Legrandin’s sister) is marrying Mlle D’Oloron, Jupien’s niece (mother’s surprise) – a marriage which it subsequently transpires was arranged by the Princess de Parme. They discuss the days when kings used to marry shepherdesses - a marriage from the last chapter of Mme Sand’s novels, says his mother; the reward of vice, a marriage from the end of a Balzac novel, responds Marcel.
Actually, Mlle de Forcheville’s hand was originally sought by the Prince of Silistrie, while Saint-Loup was seeking to marry Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter, but owing to various intrigues, these intended liaisons did not eventuate. And so Mlle de Forcheville became the Marquise de Saint-Loup (and ultimately the Duchesse de Guermantes), an achievement no as impressive as it might seem, because as the narrator is quick to point out, “the value of a title of nobility, like that of shares in a company, rises with the demand and falls when it is offered in the market”.
The one who profited least from these marriages was the young Mlle d’Oloron, who was suffering from typhoid on the day of the religious ceremony, was barely able to crawl to the church and died a few days later. The list of grand names on the faire-part included the Compte de Méséglise and the Compte de Guermates, which should not be a surprise, so it was said, because the Méséglise way converges with the Guermantes way, old and noble families of the same region, it would appear, but appearances were deceptive for one had no connection with the other, since the Compte de Méséglise in this instance had no connection with the Guermantes.
About this time, Marcel was seeing once more a great deal of his old friend, Gilberte, and a little later he went to spend a few days at Tansonville. Gilberte was unhappy and were on the brink of a s4paration. Robert had ceased to enjoy women whom he could not love in a certain fashion and in the company of other women. Marcel recalls a conversation with Aimé whereby he recounts the tale that Robert shut himself up with his liftboy on some pretext. Marcel is sceptical, and convinced that Robert only turned to men as his preferred choice at a later point in time. Now, Odette smooths things out with Gilberte so that Robert can go off on a holiday with his new amour, Morel.
On this visit, by traversing together the walks they used to take to Combray in the opposite direction, Marcel now realises that the Guermantes way and the Méséglise way are linked, and that it is possible to go to Guermantes taking the road by Méséglise, meaning that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as he had supposed. She mentions their encounters in this area when they were children and the time she gave him a vulgar sign, which he rejected and indicated that he didn’t want it. She mentions that she was in the habit of playing with other girls and boys who took advantage of the darkened ruins of the keep of Roussainville. She would go there whenever she could, and wished he could come there too.
Years later, she recalls the time they crossed each other’s path at her aunt’s and she didn’t recognise him at first, though when she did, she felt the same longing she felt at Tansonville, and then there was the time at the Champs-Elysées when Gilberte was walking with what he supposed was another man. It turns out it was Léa in male attire. He ponders his lost opportunities with Gilberte (and indeed Albertine”), being incapable of understanding what her overtures meant, and failing to recapture the impression until much later. More than ever than he had supposed, she had been in those days truly part of the “Méséglise way”.
“And indeed on the day when I had passed her in a doorway, albeit she was not Mlle de l’Orgevile, the girl whom Robert had met in Houses of assignation.. , I had not been altogether mistaken as to the meaning of her glance, nor a s to the sort of woman that she was and confessed to me now that she has been”. But as she said “All that is a long time ago.. And let me tell you, that childish caprice is not the thing for which I blame myself most”.
Actually, Mlle de Forcheville’s hand was originally sought by the Prince of Silistrie, while Saint-Loup was seeking to marry Mlle d’Entragues, the Duc de Luxembourg’s daughter, but owing to various intrigues, these intended liaisons did not eventuate. And so Mlle de Forcheville became the Marquise de Saint-Loup (and ultimately the Duchesse de Guermantes), an achievement no as impressive as it might seem, because as the narrator is quick to point out, “the value of a title of nobility, like that of shares in a company, rises with the demand and falls when it is offered in the market”.
The one who profited least from these marriages was the young Mlle d’Oloron, who was suffering from typhoid on the day of the religious ceremony, was barely able to crawl to the church and died a few days later. The list of grand names on the faire-part included the Compte de Méséglise and the Compte de Guermates, which should not be a surprise, so it was said, because the Méséglise way converges with the Guermantes way, old and noble families of the same region, it would appear, but appearances were deceptive for one had no connection with the other, since the Compte de Méséglise in this instance had no connection with the Guermantes.
About this time, Marcel was seeing once more a great deal of his old friend, Gilberte, and a little later he went to spend a few days at Tansonville. Gilberte was unhappy and were on the brink of a s4paration. Robert had ceased to enjoy women whom he could not love in a certain fashion and in the company of other women. Marcel recalls a conversation with Aimé whereby he recounts the tale that Robert shut himself up with his liftboy on some pretext. Marcel is sceptical, and convinced that Robert only turned to men as his preferred choice at a later point in time. Now, Odette smooths things out with Gilberte so that Robert can go off on a holiday with his new amour, Morel.
On this visit, by traversing together the walks they used to take to Combray in the opposite direction, Marcel now realises that the Guermantes way and the Méséglise way are linked, and that it is possible to go to Guermantes taking the road by Méséglise, meaning that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as he had supposed. She mentions their encounters in this area when they were children and the time she gave him a vulgar sign, which he rejected and indicated that he didn’t want it. She mentions that she was in the habit of playing with other girls and boys who took advantage of the darkened ruins of the keep of Roussainville. She would go there whenever she could, and wished he could come there too.
Years later, she recalls the time they crossed each other’s path at her aunt’s and she didn’t recognise him at first, though when she did, she felt the same longing she felt at Tansonville, and then there was the time at the Champs-Elysées when Gilberte was walking with what he supposed was another man. It turns out it was Léa in male attire. He ponders his lost opportunities with Gilberte (and indeed Albertine”), being incapable of understanding what her overtures meant, and failing to recapture the impression until much later. More than ever than he had supposed, she had been in those days truly part of the “Méséglise way”.
“And indeed on the day when I had passed her in a doorway, albeit she was not Mlle de l’Orgevile, the girl whom Robert had met in Houses of assignation.. , I had not been altogether mistaken as to the meaning of her glance, nor a s to the sort of woman that she was and confessed to me now that she has been”. But as she said “All that is a long time ago.. And let me tell you, that childish caprice is not the thing for which I blame myself most”.
332 For optimism is the philosophy of the past. The events that have occurred being, among all those that were possible, the only ones which we have known, the harm that they have caused seems to us inevitable, and, for the slight amount of good that they could not help bringing with them, it is to them that we give the credit, imagining that without them, it would not have occurred.
348 The value of a title of nobility, like that of shares in a company, rises with the demand and falls when it is offered in the market. Everything that seems to us imperishable tends to destruction; a position in society, like anything else, is not created once and for all time, but, just as much as the power of an empire reconstructs itself at every moment by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social or political history in the course of half a century. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day. 350 (Of Gilberte's 'accidental' succession to the nobility) We are always ready to despise a goal which we have not succeeded in reaching, or have permanently reached. |
357-8 What is more, people whose own hearts are not directly engaged, always regard unfortunate entanglements, disastrous marriages as though we were free to choose the inspiration of our , and do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom we are in love that the ‘folly’ with which a man is charged who marries his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence.
358 She moved in those circles in which the inbreeding of incessantly crossed strains and a gradual impoverishment bring to the surface at every moment in the realm of passions as in that of pecuniary interest, inherited vices and compromises. 373 The two ways meld into the same "We should be at the Guermantes": to touch the intangible. "Go to Guermantes taking the road by Méséglise, it is the nicest walk", a sentence which upset all my childish ideas by informing me that the two "ways" were not as irreconcilable as I had supposed. 376 For there is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief. |