Simone Blakeslee-Smith

May 3

In Search of Lost Time

The Guermantes Way (pp. 244-250)

The section from pages 244-255 starts with the narrator attending one of the salons hosted by Mme. de Villeparisis. It illustrates the ways in which she is different than that of Mme. de Guermante and how she has deviated from the normal behavior and personality of society people. These passages are important because they give the reader a greater understanding of the workings of this society and demonstrate a common human behavior of rebellion and redemption.

“Mme de Villeparisis was one of those women who, born of an illustrious house, entering by marriage into another no less illustrious house, do not for all that enjoy any great position in the social world…” (p.244)

Despite having the family and marital background to have a strong societal standing, she is still not enjoying that kind of life. Her salons consist of people who may be of a high social position, but are family or are attained by family connections, or that of “third-rate people.” This is evidence for the shift in how one’s class was determined; social position no longer depended as much on what family one was a part of, but instead on the opinions of other people. This section again makes me question the place of the narrator’s family?

“But this wit and grace, in the degree to which they were developed in her, became themselves- on another plane, and even though they were employed to belittle the noblest masterpieces- true artistic qualities” (p.246).

Mme de Villeparisis does not understand great art, but the way in which she makes light of this is in itself an artistic expression. Normally, things gain beauty and importance when the narrator can compare them to some painting or sculpture, but here he allows character to be art. Is this his way of maintaining respect for her?

“Now the effect of such qualities on any social position is a morbid activity of the kind which doctors call elective, and so disintegrating that the most firmly established can hardly resist it for any length of time. What artists call intelligence seems pure presumption to the fashionable world which, incapable of adopting the angle of vision from which they, the artists, judge things, incapable of understanding that particular attraction to which they yield when they choose an expression or draw a parallel, feel in their company an exhaustion, an irritation, from which antipathy rapidly springs” (p.246).

I take this as meaning that the qualities of wit and grace that Villeparisis exhibits, and the narrator calls artistic, are so strong that they push her out of what society deems “normal.” This further demonstrates the power of the crowd’s opinion. If they deem that someone is not one of them, for whatever trivial reason, then they are quickly downgraded no matter the firmness of their families historical social standing. There is also a distinction made between what artists call intelligence and what the society people deem acceptable and appropriate. What they cannot wrap their minds around, they develop strong dislike for. Through the narrator’s comparison of the qualities of Villeparisis and art, he puts her in this category of “unable to understand,” and therefore, in the fashionables world’s distaste.

“A bluestocking Mme de Villeparisis had perhaps been in her earliest youth, and, intoxicated with her learning, had perhaps been unable to resist applying to people in society, less intelligent and less educated than herself, those cutting taunts which the injured party never forgets” (pp.247-248).

A bluestocking is defined as a literary or intellectual woman. Through the combination of her youth, and therefore, naivety, and the intellect that she had, she made the other society people deem her rude and not appropriate. In this scene it sounds as if she is unaware of her sharpness, but on page 249 the word “deliberate” is used.

“True, if at some point in her youth Mme de Villeparisis, surfeited with the satisfaction of belonging to the flower of the aristocracy, had somehow amused herself by scandalizing the people among whom she lived, and deliberately impairing her own position in society, she had begun to attach importance to the position once she had lost it” (p.249).

In the first part of this sentence, the author illustrates that Villeparisis thought that her family name would bring her security despite her actions, which we know to be untrue. It is a changing time, and her behavior in her youth greatly impacts her social standing. It goes on,

“She had wished to show the dutchesses that she was better than they, by saying things that they dared not say or do” (p.249).

The young Villeparisis is full of intellect, and yet lacks the ability to truly see the consequences of her actions. She is intentionally rebellious and she finds pleasure in shocking the class of people she’s in and disrupting the social fabric…simply because she believes she can. It almost seems as if she thinks she is better than them because she is daring enough to do what they are afraid to do- and in this she finds their disapproval pleasurable instead of negative.

“But now the latter, except for those who were closely related to her, had ceased to call, she felt herself diminished, and sought once more to reign, but with another scepter than that of wit. She would have liked to attract to her house all those whom she had taken such pains to discard” (p.249).

When the people with whom she always found herself start to intentionally distance themselves, she regrets what has happened. This passage combined with the earlier, “she had begun to attach importance to the position once she had lost it,” there is a demonstration of the idea that one can only fully appreciate what one has until one has lost it, and in a bigger sense- people need some kind of distance from their situation to be able to see it clearly.

“That she should have set to work, with a persevering and natural industry, to destroy the social position which she owed to her high birth does not in the least imply that even at that remote period Mme de Villeparisis did not attach great importance to her position” (p.250).

Villeparisis was so caught up in her immediate emotions that, despite the value she attributed to her position, she was not able to have a wide enough reaching perspective. If she would have stepped back and looked at what she was doing, would she have continued in the same vein, to the same degree?

“How many women’s lives, lives of which little enough is known, have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds!” (p.249)

Maybe, despite her turning back to reclaim what she lost, the rebellious period was a necessary and natural step in her own unfoldment. In a way this passage is reminiscent of the Hero’s Journey. It has a seemingly cyclical nature to it. Starting in one place, in the second phase going away from this, and in the third coming back to the first, but having changed. This is also a tie into the narrator’s use of the word “journey” quite often. The going away from what it familiar is an essential step to be able to see that which one is traveling away from, and oneself, in the clear light of day. Identity is raveled up in the first phase, and it is only after breaking away in the second, that one can know themselves, and, in the case of Villeparisis, what in the end she values most.

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” -Nelson Mandela