With the dumbing down of America
Remembrance
of Mustaches Past
by Marcel
Proust
For a long time I used
to go to bed early, because my droopy and wispy mustache had made me the
laughingstock of all Paris and even its suburbs in all directions for a
distance of about a hundred kilometers, but one fateful afternoon while, within
hearing of saints and sinners alike, the bells at Notre-Dame du Bon Conseil
were tolling four o'clock, the hour at which I customarily indulged in my
nightcap of a madeline and a cup of tisane, both purchased at Francine’s
Fabulous Fondues on the rue des Italiens, a thoroughfare with otherwise bitter
associations for me, even more than the Champs-Élysées, where, in an outburst
of passion that was alternately pure and prurient, as is more or less normal
for French juveniles, more if they have attractive mothers who do not always
appear in their bedrooms for a good-night kiss,
I once gave both my heart and a
diamond friendship ring from Cartier’s on the Rue François 1er to Gilberte Swann and the very
next day she refused to let me play with her blue, splinter-proof hoop from Au
Bon Marché although she did extend that felicity, as desirable as a sip of cool
Perrier to a parched legionnaire on a dune in Morocco, to Emile Spangler, who
had never given her anything more valuable than a band from a cigar once puffed
by the Prince of Wales at Les Filles de Carmen, touted as the most discreet and
sanitary brothel on the rue Auber, I suddenly recalled, after three decades of
cerebral oblivion, the stiff and sturdy mustache of Pierre de Montiers, the
popular boulevardier, and his faithful ministrations of Sardieu's once-a-day,
shape-assured mustache wax, which was once, and still is, somehow, probably
through its unique and patented ingredients, repelling the usual obliterations
of time, available at better hairdressers in the Faubourg St. Germain and
throughout Paris and the provinces; immediately, even though it was for me a
late hour, and even though Maurice, my splendid valet from the Madame de
Pompadour Training School for Domestic Servants and Courtesans, had already
laid out my velvet bed jacket, silk
pajamas, and embroidered slippers, all imported from Khuzistan by Robert
Bourget et fils, my one and only haberdasher, established since 1801 upon the
rue du Tivoli, whose wares I esteem as highly as I do Lamontier’s organic
truffles from the heart of Perigord, for which the sommeliers at Maxim’s will
always have the perfect wine, depending on the year and season, I took leave of
my cork-lined apartment designed at a reasonable fee by the impeccable
Henriette Bizet, whose drapes and settees I am bequeathing to the Louvre if it
will have them, a doubtful eventuality, (but what human wish is not?) and,
risking an attack of asthma, rushed out for a social season's supply of M.
Sardieu's remarkable product, capable of transforming a country bumpkin who
didn’t know cow’s dung from court etiquette into a dandy fit for full
membership in the Jockey Club, or even for an intimate—as much as mere
commoners can be intimate with their betters, and, à forteriori, needless to say,
vice versa—soiree at the chateau of the Duc de Guermantes, in whose veins run
the blood—fortified , you may be sure, by daily doses of the new and improved Ferro-Forte liver tonic
with added chamomile and rose hips from his local San Souci Pharmacy—of Charlemagne
and Louis the Pious, all of which preceding persiflage reminds me that when I
once stooped from our usual lofty conversation about the deference due to the
nobility and aristocracy, whatever may be the alleged and de jure form of
government, whether a monarchy or that most futile of fantasies, a democracy,
and took the liberty of complimenting the Duchess on the sparkle and clarity—suggesting
the lost innocence we once had, or so we like to think we had (O vanity of
vanities!)—of the more than thousand windows of her chateau, she revealed, to
my great interest, for I delight in learning these tidbits concerning the
nonsexual preferences and practices of both royalty and the major and minor
nobility, even those elevated by those upstarts, the House of Orleans, that she
has ordered her servants to employ Monsieur Sanitaire, the only cleanser
recommended by Martine de Stewart, whose sage advice is disseminated in books
available at Barnes et Noblesse Oblige and other fine shops whose wares,
whatever their other virtues, can never enable us to retrieve and live once
again with greater sensitivity and discrimination, not even for a moment, the
lost time of our lives.
