V - The Guermantes Way, Part 1, Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
Context: Moving from the intimacy of the first books of the saga, the Guermantes Way "opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons". In the process, the Narrator and his family, Françoise included of course, repair from Combray to take up a residence in a new apartment in Paris in close proximity to Mm de Villeparisis, a close friend of his grandmother. Their apartment happens to share a courtyard with the private residence of the Guermantes family, who have unwittingly provided the narrator with a store of romantic private childhood memories.
The Narrator is trying to make an entry into the world of Parisian society, and with this i.ntent he stakes out the street where Mme de Guermantes goes for her daily walks which she does not appreciate. He enlists the service of her nephew, the Marquis de Saint-Loup to secure an introduction. He meets and attends dinners with Saint-Loup's fellow officers where discussion on the intricacies of the Dreyfus affair ensues.
In furtherance of his societal ambitions, he attends an afternoon tea party at the residence of one Mme de Villeparisis, although this does not rate very highly, being rated somewhat down the scale so far as these things go. There, inevitably, the Dreyfus affair inevitably rears its head again, and a wide range of views are aired. The Narratoor himself adopts somewhat of a neutral stance, being content to simply observe and report.
The book closes with the Narrator going for a walk with his grandmother when she suffers a slight stroke. Her health is deteriorating.
The Narrator is trying to make an entry into the world of Parisian society, and with this i.ntent he stakes out the street where Mme de Guermantes goes for her daily walks which she does not appreciate. He enlists the service of her nephew, the Marquis de Saint-Loup to secure an introduction. He meets and attends dinners with Saint-Loup's fellow officers where discussion on the intricacies of the Dreyfus affair ensues.
In furtherance of his societal ambitions, he attends an afternoon tea party at the residence of one Mme de Villeparisis, although this does not rate very highly, being rated somewhat down the scale so far as these things go. There, inevitably, the Dreyfus affair inevitably rears its head again, and a wide range of views are aired. The Narratoor himself adopts somewhat of a neutral stance, being content to simply observe and report.
The book closes with the Narrator going for a walk with his grandmother when she suffers a slight stroke. Her health is deteriorating.
Romantic childhood memories of the Guermantes family 6 Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save - as we learn things that happened before we were born - from the accounts given to me by other people. The Rue Chanoinesse, adjacent to Notre Dame 22 Chanoine .. Chanoinesse. There is still a street near Notre-Dame called Rue Chanoinesse, a name which must have been given to it (since it was never inhabited by any but male Canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise was, properly speaking, the contemporary. A night at the Opera The Narrator describes one of the common people trying to get back to his seat when three hammer-blows are heard from the stage, and on the other hand, the society people sitting in comfort in their boxes ... 43 .. (forcing) him to take flight, like the Hebrews in the Red Sea, through a heaving tide of spectators and spectatresses whom he has obliged to rise and whose dresses he tears as he passes, or tramples on their boots. 44 But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against those shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared... The narrator turns to Saint-Loup, Mme de Guermantes nephew, to intercede with Mme de Guermantes on his behalf, and visits Saint-Loup at his military base. There he encounters a variety of opinions among the military on Dreyfus' guilt or innocence: |
The Dreyfus affair divides military opinion
136 Saint-Loup and his friend were the only 2 advocates of the retrial of Dreyfus in their mess. 137-8 A newly made friend of the narrator in the mess comments to the Narrator about someone he knows, and the factors influencing his thinking: "At first he used to say: 'Just wait a little, there's a man I know well, a clever, kind-hearted fellow, General de Boisdeffre (Chief of the General Staff); you will have no hesitation in accepting his decision'. But as soon as he heard that Boisdeffre had pronounced Dreyfus guilty, Boisdeffre ceased to count: clericalism, staff prejudices prevented his forming a candid opinion, although there is no one in the world (or was, rather, before this Dreyfus business) half so clerical as our friend. Next he told us that we were sure to get the truth, the case had been put in the hands of Saussier, and he, a soldier of the Republic (our friend coming of an ultra-monarchist family, if you please), was a man of bronze, a stern unyielding conscience. But when Saussier pronounced Esterhazy innocent, he found fresh reasons to account for the decision, reasons damaging not to Dreyfus but to General Saussier. It was the militarist spirit that blinded Saussier (and I must explain to you that our friend is just as much militarist as clerical, or at least he was: I don't know what to think of him now). His family are all broken-hearted at seeing him possessed by such ideas" . Another war 146 I can't say whether there is ever going to be another war, or what nations are going to fight in it, but if a war does come, you may be sure that it will include.. a Cannae, an Austerlitz, a Rosbach, a Waterloo. Some of our people say quite openly that Marshall von Schieffer and General Falkenhausen have prepared a battle of Cannae against France, in the Hannibal style, pinning their enemy down along his whole front, and advancing on both flanks, esp through Belgium while Bernhardi prefers the oblique order of Frederick the Great, Lenthen rather than Cannae. The repast 155.. (Isolated from all my external obsessions) by the warmth also of this little dining-room, by the savour of the well-chosen dishes that were set before us. They gave as much pleasure to my imagination as to my appetite; sometimes the little piece of still life from which they had been taken, the rugged holy water stoup of the oyster in which lingered a few drops of brackish water, or the knotted stem, the yellow leaves of a bunch of grapes still enveloped them, inedible, poetic and remote as a landscape, and producing at different points in the course of the meal, the impressions of rest in the shade of a vine and of an excursion out to sea... A fish cooked in wine was brought in on a long earthenware dish…surrounded by a circle of satellite creatures in their shells, crabs, shrimps and mussels, it had the appearance of being part of a ceramic design by Bernard Palissy. |
The influence of one's intellectual environment
156.. What a curious thing it was that, living in so military an atmosphere, he (Saint-Loup) was so keen a Dreyfusard, almost an anti-militarist. "The reason is", I suggested, "that the influence of the environment is not so important as people think”. ... Saint-Loup: "The real influence is that of one's intellectual environment! One is the man of one's idea!" (and) "All men with similar ideas are alike".
In front of Saint-Loup's friends, the narrator deliberately drops the name Elstir, the painter, as if in passing ...
166 I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscapes and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects.. and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art. .. One of those mirrors of the world which Elstir's pictures were.
And then on another occasion, as Saint-Loup tells him to he anticipate a telephone call from his grandmother, he muses on the wonders of the this new piece of technology ...
176-7 .. and then the person to whom we have been wishing to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother's case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is going to inform us, suddenly finds himself transported hundred of miles within reach of our ear. We are like the person in a fairy-tale to whom a sorceress.. makes appear with supernatural clearness his grand-mother or his betrothed.. quite close to the spectator yet ever so remote. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke ..the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our Guardian Angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously keep; the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Danaids of the Unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence to a friend, in the hope that no one was listening, cry brutally: "I hear you!"; the ever infuriated servants of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.
....and in the same vein:
181 ..to invoke once more the Daughters of the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the Deities without form or feature. .
And then the conversation returns to the Dreyfus affair as it divides social groups and families
196 My cousin Poictiers. "I Don't go so far as to say she's a Dreyfusard..but she did say to me: 'If he is innocent, how ghastly for him to be shut up on Devil's Isle'.
203-4 But Mme Sazerat, alone of her kind at Combray, was a Dreyfusard. My father, a friend of M Meline, was convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. He had flatly refused to listen to some of his colleagues who had asked him to sign a petition demanding a fresh trial. He never spoke to me for a week, after learning that I had chosen to take a different line. His opinions were well known. He came near to being looked upon as a Nationalist. My grandmother, whenever anyone spoke to her of the possible innocence of Dreyfus, she gave a shake of her head, the meaning of which we did not at the time understand, but which was like the gesture of a person who had been interrupted while thinking of more serious things. My mother, torn between her love for my father, and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence. Grandfather adored the Army. Mrs Sazerat - As soon as she knew my father to be an Anti-Dreyfusard she set between him and herself continents and centuries.
... of Rachel, the prostitute and Saint-Loup's mistress
211 This woman.. whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a Tabernacle..
220-1 Tears sprang to the young woman's eyes; I had been rash enough to refer to Dreyfus. "The poor martyr!" she almost sobbed; "it will be the death of him in that dreadful place" . .. Robert's mother, a pious woman, says he ought to be left on Devil's Isle, even if he is innocent.
223 Aime (the waiter) having recognised us, it was he who came to take our order, while the procession of operatic high priests swept past us to other tables.
The same issues surface at Mme de Villeparisis' (the old friend of his grandmother) tea party which the narrator attends
257 It was true that the social kaleidoscope was in fact in the act of turning and that the Dreyfus case was shortly to hurl Jews down to the lowest rung of the social ladder. But, for one thing, the anti-Dreyfus cyclone might rage as it would, it is not in the first hour of a storm that the waves are highest. In the 2nd place, Mme de Villeparisis, leaving a whole section of her family to fulminate against the Jews had hitherto kept herself entirely aloof from the case and never gave it a thought. Lastly, a young man like Bloch, whom no one knew, might pass unperceived, whereas leading Jews, representatives of their party, were already threatened.
290 A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing azure which froze the well-meaning historian.
156.. What a curious thing it was that, living in so military an atmosphere, he (Saint-Loup) was so keen a Dreyfusard, almost an anti-militarist. "The reason is", I suggested, "that the influence of the environment is not so important as people think”. ... Saint-Loup: "The real influence is that of one's intellectual environment! One is the man of one's idea!" (and) "All men with similar ideas are alike".
In front of Saint-Loup's friends, the narrator deliberately drops the name Elstir, the painter, as if in passing ...
166 I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscapes and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects.. and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art. .. One of those mirrors of the world which Elstir's pictures were.
And then on another occasion, as Saint-Loup tells him to he anticipate a telephone call from his grandmother, he muses on the wonders of the this new piece of technology ...
176-7 .. and then the person to whom we have been wishing to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother's case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is going to inform us, suddenly finds himself transported hundred of miles within reach of our ear. We are like the person in a fairy-tale to whom a sorceress.. makes appear with supernatural clearness his grand-mother or his betrothed.. quite close to the spectator yet ever so remote. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke ..the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our Guardian Angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously keep; the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Danaids of the Unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence to a friend, in the hope that no one was listening, cry brutally: "I hear you!"; the ever infuriated servants of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.
....and in the same vein:
181 ..to invoke once more the Daughters of the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the Deities without form or feature. .
And then the conversation returns to the Dreyfus affair as it divides social groups and families
196 My cousin Poictiers. "I Don't go so far as to say she's a Dreyfusard..but she did say to me: 'If he is innocent, how ghastly for him to be shut up on Devil's Isle'.
203-4 But Mme Sazerat, alone of her kind at Combray, was a Dreyfusard. My father, a friend of M Meline, was convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. He had flatly refused to listen to some of his colleagues who had asked him to sign a petition demanding a fresh trial. He never spoke to me for a week, after learning that I had chosen to take a different line. His opinions were well known. He came near to being looked upon as a Nationalist. My grandmother, whenever anyone spoke to her of the possible innocence of Dreyfus, she gave a shake of her head, the meaning of which we did not at the time understand, but which was like the gesture of a person who had been interrupted while thinking of more serious things. My mother, torn between her love for my father, and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence. Grandfather adored the Army. Mrs Sazerat - As soon as she knew my father to be an Anti-Dreyfusard she set between him and herself continents and centuries.
... of Rachel, the prostitute and Saint-Loup's mistress
211 This woman.. whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a Tabernacle..
220-1 Tears sprang to the young woman's eyes; I had been rash enough to refer to Dreyfus. "The poor martyr!" she almost sobbed; "it will be the death of him in that dreadful place" . .. Robert's mother, a pious woman, says he ought to be left on Devil's Isle, even if he is innocent.
223 Aime (the waiter) having recognised us, it was he who came to take our order, while the procession of operatic high priests swept past us to other tables.
The same issues surface at Mme de Villeparisis' (the old friend of his grandmother) tea party which the narrator attends
257 It was true that the social kaleidoscope was in fact in the act of turning and that the Dreyfus case was shortly to hurl Jews down to the lowest rung of the social ladder. But, for one thing, the anti-Dreyfus cyclone might rage as it would, it is not in the first hour of a storm that the waves are highest. In the 2nd place, Mme de Villeparisis, leaving a whole section of her family to fulminate against the Jews had hitherto kept herself entirely aloof from the case and never gave it a thought. Lastly, a young man like Bloch, whom no one knew, might pass unperceived, whereas leading Jews, representatives of their party, were already threatened.
290 A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing azure which froze the well-meaning historian.
A digression on political truth but very much in context
330 Now, even when a political truth does take the form of written documents, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient's disease is inscribed in so many words, when, as a matter of fact, the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be combined with a number of others, which the doctor's reasoning powers will take into consideration as a whole and upon them found his diagnosis. So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession, followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in opposite ways by the Dreyfusard Ministers, and by Cavaignac and Cuignet, who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery and conducted the examination; still more so among the Dreyfusard ministers themselves…
332 Bloch could not get M de Norpois to speak on the question of Dreyfus' guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the civil trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M de Norpois seemed only too ready to indicate the consequences of this judgment..
338-9 Bloch to the Duc de Chatellerault: “You are a Dreyfusard, of course; they are all, abroad". "It is a question that concerns only the French themselves, don't you think?" The young Duke "You must not ask me. Sir, to discuss the Dreyfus case with you; it is a subject which on principle, I never mention except to Japhetics”. (Japhetic: an obsolete historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible).
But Bloch's behaviour has consequences:
340 The Marquise decided therefore, to make it plain to Bloch that he need not come to the house again…
330 Now, even when a political truth does take the form of written documents, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient's disease is inscribed in so many words, when, as a matter of fact, the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be combined with a number of others, which the doctor's reasoning powers will take into consideration as a whole and upon them found his diagnosis. So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession, followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in opposite ways by the Dreyfusard Ministers, and by Cavaignac and Cuignet, who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery and conducted the examination; still more so among the Dreyfusard ministers themselves…
332 Bloch could not get M de Norpois to speak on the question of Dreyfus' guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the civil trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M de Norpois seemed only too ready to indicate the consequences of this judgment..
338-9 Bloch to the Duc de Chatellerault: “You are a Dreyfusard, of course; they are all, abroad". "It is a question that concerns only the French themselves, don't you think?" The young Duke "You must not ask me. Sir, to discuss the Dreyfus case with you; it is a subject which on principle, I never mention except to Japhetics”. (Japhetic: an obsolete historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible).
But Bloch's behaviour has consequences:
340 The Marquise decided therefore, to make it plain to Bloch that he need not come to the house again…
Mme Swann arrives at the soirée but has some misgivings ..
346 Mme Swann, seeing the dimensions that the Dreyfus case had begun to assume, and fearing that her husband's racial origin might be used against herself, had besought him never again to allude to the prisoner's innocence.. When he was not present she went farther and used to profess the most ardent Nationalism.. 361 . .as he (the Prince von Faffenheim) bowed, short, red, corpulent, over the hand of Mme de Villeparisis. 362 Mme Swann, who appeared considerably embarrassed at finding me in the room. She remembered, doubtless, that she had been the first to assure me that she was convinced of Dreryfus's innocence. St Loup:" I don't want my mother to introduce me to Mme Swann. She's an ex-whore. Her husband's a Jew, and she comes here to pose as a Nationalist". 371 The expression in Robert's eyes seemed every minute to reach a depth from which it rose at once like a diver who has touched bottom. The Narrator leaves the tea-party with M de Charlus 395-6 I replied to M de Charlus that Bloch was French. "Indeed", said M de Charlus, "I took him to be a Jew". His assertion of this incompatibility made me suppose that M de Charlus was more anti-Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. He protested, however, against the charge of treason levelled against Dreyfus. But his protest took this form: "I understand the newspapers to say that Dreyfus has committed a crime against his country... In any case, the crime is non-existent, your friend's compatriot would have committed a crime if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has he to do with France?" .. 397-8 M. Bloch paid no attention to us. He was occupied in greeting Mme. Sazerat with a series of sweeping bows, which were very favourably received. I was surprised at this, for in the old days at Combray she had been indignant at my parents for having young Bloch in the house, so anti-semitic was she then. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind, had, a few days before this, wafted M. Bloch to her feet. My father's friend had found Mme. Sazerat charming and was particularly gratified by the anti-semitism of the lady, which he regarded as a proof of the sincerity of her faith and the soundness of her Dreyfusard opinions, and also as enhancing the value of the call which she had authorised him to pay her. He had not even been offended when she had said to him stolidly: "M. Drumont has the imprudence to put the Revisionists in the same bag as the Protestants and the Jews. A delightful promiscuity!" |
401 M. d'Argencourt: well born but ill bred.
The Baron disapproves of the Narrator's ambition to enter society 402 De Charlus to the Narrator: "The first sacrifice that you must make for me .. is to give up going into society. It distressed me this afternoon to see you at that idiotic tea-party.. Later on" when you have established your position, if it amuses you to step down for a little into that sort of thing, it may, perhaps do you no harm”. 406 Relates a dispute between our butler, who believed in Dreyfus, and the Guermantes' who was an anti-Dreyfusard. The truths and counter-truths which came in conflict above ground, among the intellectuals of the rival leagues, the Patrie Francaise and the Droits de l’Homme, were fast-spreading downwards to the subsoil of popular opinion. Reinach: In 2 yrs he replaced a Billot by a Clemenceau Ministry, revolutionized public opinion from top to bottom, took Picquart from his prison to install him, ungrateful, in the Ministry of War… . 407 Bloch believed himself to have been led by a logical sequence to choose Dreyfusism, yet he knew that his nose, skin and hair had been imposed on him by his race.. The waves of the two currents of Dreyfusism and anti-Dreyfusism, which now divided France from end to end were, on the whole, silent, but the occasional echoes which they emitted were sincere. The narrator discusses the motives behind butlers' comments and those in the community at large. Musings on the status of medicine 409 For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were 'not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths. Neurotics 418 The doctor to his patient: "Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, a terror of death which is worse than any of these..” 420 "Fatigue is the organic realisation of a preconceived idea. Begin by not thinking it" |