26. Perhaps the most telling description of the Duchesse de Guermantes...

The twenty-sixth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero considers the true nature of the Duchess and reflects on the meaning of lost and wasted time.

Perhaps the most telling description of the Duchesse de Guermantes is left to one of the novel’s many minor characters, who pass by like so many faces on a speeding train…

It is the Comtesse d’Argencourt who says: ‘Oriane de Guermantes, you know, she’s as sharp as a needle, as mischievous as a monkey, gifted at everything, does watercolours worthy of a great painter, and writes better verses than most of the great poets, and as for family, you couldn’t imagine anything better, her grandmother was Mlle de Montpensier, and she’s the eighteenth Oriane de Guermantes in succession, without a single misalliance; it’s the purest, the oldest blood in the whole of France.’

This overblown hagiography perfectly captures the kind of social milieu, with its tendency towards grandiloquence and flattery, that the characters of Proust’s novel inhabit. But it is also a place of strict conformity, in which numerous unspoken rules and points of etiquette must be observed. It’s true that the Duchess possesses a freedom of spirit which often confounds social expectation, but only within the secure parameters of her status and wealth. As a younger woman, she famously spurned such conventions, professing a preference for talent, intelligence, and literary merit over mere breeding. But later, when it came to the important question of marriage, it seems her true colours were exposed, as she ruthlessly snared one of the most preeminent bachelors in Paris, the Prince des Laumes (later the Duc de Guermantes), cementing her place at the absolute pinnacle of the society she once so mercilessly condemned.

This kind of wilful calculation is closer to the true soul of Oriane, who prefers, and does her best to create, a world that revolves entirely around her. The iconoclastic approach she adopts toward the social shibboleths of the day, so appealing at first glance, is revealed as little more than her concerted attempt to always appear to be original. It speaks poorly of the people who surround her that she mostly pulls it off and is roundly considered the most desirable and brilliant woman in all France.

Only happy when her ego is being coddled, she’s almost completely devoid of empathy, understanding, and the ability to make the necessary sacrifices needed to foster the kind of love Gillian Rose speaks of. Instead, she lives in a loveless marriage with a heartless husband, cultivates the friendship of his many mistresses as allies against him, and relies on her caustic charm – the famous ‘Guermantes wit’ – which may impress the vacuous janissaries who hang on her every word, but cannot fool the attentive reader.

This vapid capriciousness is a weapon she wields against the world; its function is to set those around her on edge, and thus in continual search of her favour. And this is exactly how she wants it, especially where men are concerned, her own intelligence and sensibility ‘too vacillating for disgust not to follow pretty swiftly in the wake of infatuation (leaving her still ready to be attracted afresh by the kind of cleverness which she had alternately sought and abandoned) and for the charm which she had found in some warm-hearted man not to change, if he came too often to see her, sought too freely from her a guidance which she was incapable of giving him, into an irritation which she believed to be produced by her admirer but which was in fact due to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one’s time seeking it.’

Approaching the halfway point of the Search, the Duchess takes centre stage, even though the Narrator’s initial adulation of her has by now subsided, perhaps because her glorious monstrosity is far more fascinating than his first fabulous impressions, as she blossoms like some grim butterfly for all to see. The climax of this flowering involves the return of Swann – one of her oldest ‘friends’ – who has been more-or-less absent for a thousand pages, but appears bearing a gift for Oriane, just as she’s preparing to leave the house for a dinner party. Now in the final stages of terminal cancer, his proximity to death has imbued him with an enhanced capacity for straight talking, describing the Guermantes as ‘a different race’, with ‘a thousand years of feudalism in [their] blood’. She blithely ignores the obvious ravages of his illness and insists he join them on their holiday to Italy the following year. He graciously refuses and explains that the doctors have told him he’ll be dead by then.

‘“What’s that you say?” cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage and raising her beautiful, melancholy blue eyes, now clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow; not knowing which to choose, she felt obliged to pretend not to believe that the latter alternative need seriously be considered, in order to comply with the first, which at the moment demanded less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. “You’re joking,” she said to Swann.’

She’s only outdone by the even more abysmal thoughtlessness of her awful husband, who, insisting that she change her shoes before they leave, ushers her upstairs and then says to Swann and the Narrator, ‘off you go before Oriane comes down again. It’s not that she doesn’t like seeing you both. On the contrary, she’s too fond of your company. If she still finds you here, she’ll start talking again. She’s already very tired and she’ll reach the dinner-table quite dead. Besides, I tell you frankly, I’m dying of hunger.’ And off they go, leaving their old friend behind, and us as readers open mouthed at the level of deluded callousness they’ve just displayed. Such is the impunity enjoyed by the rich, who possess the means to retreat into palaces of denial at their own convenience and casually brush aside the depravations and despairs of far lesser creatures, whose lives they barely recognise.

After inhabiting Proust’s world for so long – what must have been several months of reading – I felt like I was coming a little closer to understanding the essence of what he meant by the term ‘temps perdu’. Endless hours spent making polite conversation at dinner parties, agonising hours spent dwelling over the imagined or actual betrayals of lovers, weeks of indecision, procrastination and not saying the things we mean, months of self-indulgent hedonism in Berlin, or Paris, or wherever we find ourselves, a complete lack of willpower and slavish devotion to the comforts of habit; the totality of all those years spent sat in front of televisions, or computers, when there was so much else to do, so much else to think or say, must always strike us as so many missed opportunities, such that we begin to lament a life of squander no matter who we are and what we’ve supposedly ‘achieved’.

Of course, temps perdu means both ‘lost time’ and ‘wasted time’, which is what comes to shape our sense of the past, and maybe even the present, constituted in part by the accretion of that same past, raked over and dwelt upon to the detriment of the moment in which we exist, and felt in the ceaseless self-recriminations dished up by the super ego. Like a pack-horse weighed down with memory, we’re left with an ever-shortening vista of existence, condemned, like Swann, to take second place to somebody’s lunch appointment or change of shoes; to disappear entirely, and then to live as a trace of what we once were, a phantom flung into the psychic realm of the still-living, an uneasy inconvenience and reminder of the fate that awaits them.

Because, truth be told, there is no life without wasted time, and without the sense of loss that comes with getting older and of cycling through everything we could or should have done when we’d had the chance. And there’s no winning it back and no making different decisions (which would have most likely also been the wrong ones). But what I found in reading Proust was the gift of recalibration, a way of transforming this lost and wasted time, of sculpting it like clay into new structures and new meanings, which if you think about it, is a way to save yourself, at least as far as posterity goes. This was where my note taking came in; scrawls in margins and on endpapers that were in fact marks of defiance against the part of myself that wanted to throw in the towel; the beginnings of a narrative that might gainsay my ghost; temporary hope in the face of eternal annihilation.

And in this I took C.K. Scott Moncrieff and George Painter as my inspiration. Moncrieff, who spent the final eight years of his life translating In Search of Lost Time into English, and Painter, who once said: ‘Biography is often thought of as the vampire act… for me, it’s the exact opposite. My subject [Proust] has fed upon me… I’ve sacrificed my own life, I’ve sacrificed my personality, and I’ve done it willingly.’

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.