PART I

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THE

GUERMANTES WAY

_CHAPTER ONE_

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise.

Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all

their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing.

In other words, we had moved. Certainly the servants had made no less

noise in the attics of our old home; but she knew them, she had made of

their comings and goings familiar events. Now she faced even silence

with a strained attention. And as our new neighbourhood appeared to be

as quiet as the boulevard on to which we had hitherto looked had been

noisy, the song (distinct at a distance, when it was still quite faint,

like an orchestral _motif_) of a passer-by brought tears to the eyes of

a Françoise in exile. And so if I had been tempted to laugh at her in

her misery at having to leave a house in which she was “so well

respected on all sides” and had packed her trunks with tears, according

to the Use of Combray, declaring superior to all possible houses that

which had been ours, on the other hand I, who found it as hard to

assimilate new as I found it easy to abandon old conditions, I felt

myself drawn towards our old servant when I saw that this installation

of herself in a building where she had not received from the

hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to

her moral wellbeing, had brought her positively to the verge of

dissolution. She alone could understand what I was feeling; certainly

her young footman was not the person to do so; for him, who was as

unlike the Combray type as it was possible to conceive, packing up,

moving, living in another district, were all like taking a holiday in

which the novelty of one’s surroundings gave one the same sense of

refreshment as if one had actually travelled; he thought he was in the

country; and a cold in the head afforded him, as though he had been

sitting in a draughty railway carriage, the delicious sensation of

having seen the world; at each fresh sneeze he rejoiced that he had

found so smart a place, having always longed to be with people who

travelled a lot. And so, without giving him a thought, I went straight

to Françoise, who, in return for my having laughed at her tears over a

removal which had left me cold, now shewed an icy indifference to my

sorrow, but because she shared it. The “sensibility” claimed by neurotic

people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by

others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention

in themselves. Françoise, who would not allow the least of her own

ailments to pass unnoticed, if I were in pain would turn her head from

me so that I should not have the satisfaction of seeing my sufferings

pitied, or so much as observed. It was the same as soon as I tried to

speak to her about our new house. Moreover, having been obliged, a day

or two later, to return to the house we had just left, to retrieve some

clothes which had been overlooked in our removal, while I, as a result

of it, had still a “temperature”, and like a boa constrictor that has

just swallowed an ox felt myself painfully distended by the sight of a

long trunk which my eyes had still to digest, Françoise, with true

feminine inconstancy, came back saying that she had really thought she

would stifle on our old boulevard, it was so stuffy, that she had found

it quite a day’s journey to get there, that never had she seen such

stairs, that she would not go back to live there for a king’s ransom,

not if you were to offer her millions—a pure hypothesis—and that

everything (everything, that is to say, to do with the kitchen and

“usual offices”) was much better fitted up in the new house. Which, it

is high time now that the reader should be told—and told also that we

had moved into it because my grandmother, not having been at all well

(though we took care to keep this reason from her), was in need of

better air—was a flat forming part of the Hôtel de Guermantes.

At the age when a Name, offering us an image of the unknowable which we

have poured into its mould, while at the same moment it connotes for us

also an existing place, forces us accordingly to identify one with the

other to such a point that we set out to seek in a city for a soul which

it cannot embody but which we have no longer the power to expel from the

sound of its name, it is not only to towns and rivers that names give an

individuality, as do allegorical paintings, it is not only the physical

universe which they pattern with differences, people with marvels, there

is the social universe also; and so every historic house, in town or

country, has its lady or its fairy, as every forest has its spirit, as

there is a nymph for every stream. Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its

name, the fairy is transformed to suit the life of our imagination by

which she lives; thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme. de

Guermantes existed in me, after having been for years no more than the

shadow cast by a magic lantern slide or the light falling through a

painted window, began to let its colours fade when quite other dreams

impregnated it with the bubbling coolness of her flowing streams.

And yet the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the real person

to whom her name corresponds, for that person the name then begins to

reflect, and she has in her nothing of the fairy; the fairy may revive

if we remove ourself from the person, but if we remain in her presence

the fairy definitely dies and with her the name, as happened to the

family of Lusignan, which was fated to become extinct on the day when

the fairy Mélusine should disappear. Then the Name, beneath our

successive “restorations” of which we may end by finding, as their

original, the beautiful portrait of a strange lady whom we are never to

meet, is nothing more than the mere photograph, for identification, to

which we refer in order to decide whether we know, whether or not we

ought to bow to a person who passes us in the street. But let a

sensation from a bygone year—like those recording instruments which

preserve the sound and the manner of the various artists who have sung

or played into them—enable our memory to make us hear that name with the

particular ring with which it then sounded in our ears, then, while the

name itself has apparently not changed, we feel the distance that

separates the dreams which at different times its same syllables have

meant to us. For a moment, from the clear echo of its warbling in some

distant spring, we can extract, as from the little tubes which we use in

painting, the exact, forgotten, mysterious, fresh tint of the days which

we had believed ourself to be recalling, when, like a bad painter, we

were giving to the whole of our past, spread out on the same canvas, the

tones, conventional and all alike, of our unprompted memory. Whereas on

the contrary, each of the moments that composed it employed, for an

original creation, in a matchless harmony, the colour of those days

which we no longer know, and which, for that matter, will still suddenly

enrapture me if by any chance the name “Guermantes”, resuming for a

moment, after all these years, the sound, so different from its sound

to-day, which it had for me on the day of Mlle. Percepied’s marriage,

brings back to me that mauve—so delicate, almost too bright, too

new—with which the billowy scarf of the young Duchess glowed, and, like

two periwinkle flowers, growing beyond reach and blossoming now again,

her two eyes, sunlit with an azure smile. And the name Guermantes of

those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been

filled with oxygen, or some such gas; when I come to explode it, to make

it emit what it contains, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year,

of that day, mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the

wind from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent

the sun packing, now let him spread himself over the red woollen carpet

to the sacristy, steeping it in a bright geranium scarlet, with that, so

to speak, Wagnerian harmony in its gaiety which makes the wedding

service always impressive. But even apart from rare moments such as

these, in which suddenly we feel the original entity quiver and resume

its form, carve itself out of the syllables now soundless, dead; if, in

the giddy rush of daily life, in which they serve only the most

practical purposes, names have lost all their colour, like a prismatic

top that spins too quickly and seems only grey, when, on the other hand,

in our musings we reflect, we seek, so as to return to the past, to

slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion by which we are borne along,

gradually we see once more appear, side by side, but entirely distinct

from one another, the tints which in the course of our existence have

been successively presented to us by a single name.

What form was assumed in my mind by this name Guermantes when my first

nurse—knowing no more, probably, than I know to-day in whose honour it

had been composed—sang me to sleep with that old ditty, _Gloire à la

Marquise de Guermantes_, or when, some years later, the veteran Maréchal

de Guermantes, making my nursery-maid’s bosom swell with pride, stopped

in the Champs-Elysées to remark: “A fine child, that!” and gave me a

chocolate drop from his comfit-box, I cannot, of course, now say. 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 me by other people.

But more recently I find in the period of that name’s occupation of me

seven or eight different shapes which it has successively assumed; the

earliest were the most beautiful; gradually my musings, forced by

reality to abandon a position that was no longer tenable, established

themselves anew in one slightly less advanced until they were obliged to

retire still farther. And, with Mme. de Guermantes, was transformed

simultaneously her dwelling, itself also the offspring of that name,

fertilised from year to year by some word or other that came to my ears

and modulated the tone of my musings; that dwelling of hers reflected

them in its very stones, which had turned to mirrors, like the surface

of a cloud or of a lake. A dungeon keep without mass, no more indeed

than a band of orange light from the summit of which the lord and his

lady dealt out life and death to their vassals, had given place—right at

the end of that “Guermantes way” along which, on so many summer

afternoons, I retraced with my parents the course of the Vivonne—to that

land of bubbling streams where the Duchess taught me to fish for trout

and to know the names of the flowers whose red and purple clusters

adorned the walls of the neighbouring gardens; then it had been the

ancient heritage, famous in song and story, from which the proud, race

of Guermantes, like a carved and mellow tower that traverses the ages,

had risen already over France when the sky was still empty at those

points where, later, were to rise Notre Dame of Paris and Notre Dame of

Chartres, when on the summit of the hill of Laon the nave of its

cathedral had not yet been poised, like the Ark of the Deluge on the

summit of Mount Ararat, crowded with Patriarchs and Judges anxiously

leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of God were yet

appeased, carrying with it the types of the vegetation that was to

multiply on the earth, brimming over with animals which have escaped

even by the towers, where oxen grazing calmly upon the roof look down

over the plains of Champagne; when the traveller who left Beauvais at

the close of day did not yet see, following him and turning with his

road, outspread against the gilded screen of the western sky, the black,

ribbed wings of the cathedral. It was, this “Guermantes”, like the scene

of a novel, an imaginary landscape which I could with difficulty picture

to myself and longed all the more to discover, set in the midst of real

lands and roads which all of a sudden would become alive with heraldic

details, within a few miles of a railway station; I recalled the names

of the places round it as if they had been situated at the foot of

Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me, as the physical

conditions—in the realm of topographical science—required for the

production of an unaccountable phenomenon. I saw again the escutcheons

blazoned beneath the windows of Combray church; their quarters filled,

century after century, with all the lordships which, by marriage or

conquest, this illustrious house had brought flying to it from all the

corners of Germany, Italy and France; vast territories in the North,

strong cities in the South, assembled there to group themselves in

Guermantes, and, losing their material quality, to inscribe

allegorically their dungeon vert, or castle triple-towered argent upon

its azure field. I had heard of the famous tapestries of Guermantes, I

could see them, mediaeval and blue, a trifle coarse, detach themselves

like a floating cloud from the legendary, amaranthine name at the foot

of the ancient forest in which Childebert went so often hunting; and

this delicate, mysterious background of their lands, this vista of the

ages, it seemed to me that, as effectively as by journeying to see them,

I might penetrate all their secrets simply by coming in contact for a

moment in Paris with Mme. de Guermantes, the princess paramount of the

place and lady of the lake, as if her face, her speech must possess the

local charm of forest groves and streams, and the same secular

peculiarities as the old customs recorded in her archives. But then I

had met Saint-Loup; he had told me that the castle had borne the name of

Guermantes only since the seventeenth century, when that family had

acquired it. They had lived, until then, in the neighbourhood, but their

title was not taken from those parts. The village of Guermantes had

received its name from the castle round which it had been built, and so

that it should not destroy the view from the castle, a servitude, still

in force, traced the line of its streets and limited the height of its

houses. As for the tapestries, they were by Boucher, bought in the

nineteenth century by a Guermantes with a taste for the arts, and hung,

interspersed with a number of sporting pictures of no merit which he

himself had painted, in a hideous drawing-room upholstered in

“adrianople” and plush. By these revelations Saint-Loup had introduced

into the castle elements foreign to the name of Guermantes which made it

impossible for me to continue to extract solely from the resonance of

the syllables the stone and mortar of its walls. And so, in the heart of

the name, was effaced the castle mirrored in its lake, and what now

became apparent to me, surrounding Mme. de Guermantes as her dwelling,

had been her house in Paris, the Hôtel de Guermantes, limpid like its

name, for no material and opaque element intervened to interrupt and

blind its transparence. As the word church signifies not only the temple

but the assembly of the faithful also, this Hôtel de Guermantes

comprised all those who shared the life of the Duchess, but these

intimates on whom I had never set eyes were for me only famous and

poetic names, and knowing exclusively persons who themselves also were

names only, did but enhance and protect the mystery of the Duchess by

extending all round her a vast halo which at the most declined in

brilliance as its circumference increased.

In the parties which she gave, since I could not imagine the guests as

having any bodies, any moustaches, any boots, as making any utterances

that were commonplace, or even original in a human and rational way,

this whirlpool of names, introducing less material substance than would

a phantom banquet or a spectral ball, round that statuette in Dresden

china which was Madame de Guermantes, kept for her palace of glass the

transparence of a showcase. Then, after Saint-Loup had told me various

anecdotes about his cousin’s chaplain, her gardener, and the rest, the

Hôtel de Guermantes had become—as the Louvre might have been in days

gone by—a kind of castle, surrounded, in the very heart of Paris, by its

own domains, acquired by inheritance, by virtue of an ancient right that

had quaintly survived, over which she still enjoyed feudal privileges.

But this last dwelling itself vanished when we had come to live beside

Mme. de Villeparisis in one of the flats adjoining that occupied by Mme.

de Guermantes in a wing of the Hôtel. It was one of those old town

houses, a few of which are perhaps still to be found, in which the court

of honour—whether they were alluvial deposits washed there by the rising

tide of democracy, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the

different trades were clustered round the overlord—is flanked by little

shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for instance, or a tailor’s, such as

we see nestling between the buttresses of those cathedrals which the

aesthetic zeal of the restorer has not swept clear of such accretions; a

porter who also does cobbling, keeps hens, grows flowers, and, at the

far end, in the main building, a “Comtesse” who, when she drives out in

her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which

seem to have escaped from the plot by the porter’s lodge (with, by the

coachman’s side on the box, a footman who gets down to leave cards at

every aristocratic mansion in the neighbourhood), scatters vague little

smiles and waves her hand in greeting to the porter’s children and to

such of her respectable fellow-tenants as may happen to be passing, who,

to her contemptuous affability and levelling pride, seem all the same.

In the house in which we had now come to live, the great lady at the end

of the courtyard was a Duchess, smart and still quite young. She was, in

fact, Mme. de Guermantes and, thanks to Françoise, I soon came to know

all about her household. For the Guermantes (to whom Françoise regularly

alluded as the people “below”, or “downstairs”) were her constant

preoccupation from the first thing in the morning when, as she did

Mamma’s hair, casting a forbidden, irresistible, furtive glance down

into the courtyard, she would say: “Look at that, now; a pair of holy

Sisters; that’ll be for downstairs, surely;” or, “Oh! just look at the

fine pheasants in the kitchen window; no need to ask where they came

from, the Duke will have been out with his gun!”—until the last thing at

night when, if her ear, while she was putting out my night-things,

caught a few notes of a song, she would conclude: “They’re having

company down below; gay doings, I’ll be bound;” whereupon, in her

symmetrical face, beneath the arch of her now snow-white hair, a smile

from her young days, sprightly but proper, would for a moment set each

of her features in its place, arranging them in an intricate and special

order, as though for a country-dance.

But the moment in the life of the Guermantes which excited the keenest

interest in Françoise, gave her the most complete satisfaction and at

the same time the sharpest annoyance was that at which, the two halves

of the great gate having been thrust apart, the Duchess stepped into her

carriage. It was generally a little while after our servants had

finished the celebration of that sort of solemn passover which none

might disturb, called their midday dinner, during which they were so far

taboo that my father himself was not allowed to ring for them, knowing

moreover that none of them would have paid any more attention to the

fifth peal than to the first, and that the discourtesy would therefore

have been a pure waste of time and trouble, though not without trouble

in store for himself. For Françoise (who, in her old age, lost no

opportunity of standing upon her dignity) would without fail have

presented him, for the rest of the day, with a face covered with the

tiny red cuneiform hieroglyphs by which she made visible—though by no

means legible—to the outer world the long tale of her griefs and the

profound reasons for her dissatisfactions. She would enlarge upon them,

too, in a running “aside”, but not so that we could catch her words. She

called this practice—which, she imagined, must be infuriating,

“mortifying” as she herself put it, “vexing” to us—“saying low masses

all the blessed day.”

The last rites accomplished, Françoise, who was at one and the same

time, as in the primitive church, the celebrant and one of the faithful,

helped herself to a final glass, undid the napkin from her throat,

folded it after wiping from her lips a stain of watered wine and coffee,

slipped it into its ring, turned a doleful eye to thank “her” young

footman who, to shew his zeal in her service, was saying: “Come, ma’am,

a drop more of the grape; it’s d’licious to-day,” and went straight

across to the window, which she flung open, protesting that it was too

hot to breathe in “this wretched kitchen”. Dexterously casting, as she

turned the latch and let in the fresh air, a glance of studied

indifference into the courtyard below, she furtively elicited the

conclusion that the Duchess was not ready yet to start, brooded for a

moment with contemptuous, impassioned eyes over the waiting carriage,

and, this meed of attention once paid to the things of the earth, raised

them towards the heavens, whose purity she had already divined from the

sweetness of the air and the warmth of the sun; and let them rest on a

corner of the roof, at the place where, every spring, there came and

built, immediately over the chimney of my bedroom, a pair of pigeons

like those she used to hear cooing from her kitchen at Combray.

“Ah! Combray, Combray!” she cried. And the almost singing tone in which

she declaimed this invocation might, taken with the Arlesian purity of

her features, have made the onlooker suspect her of a Southern origin

and that the lost land which she was lamenting was no more, really, than

a land of adoption. If so, he would have been wrong, for it seems that

there is no province that has not its own South-country; do we not

indeed constantly meet Savoyards and Bretons in whose speech we find all

those pleasing transpositions of longs and shorts that are

characteristic of the Southerner? “Ah, Combray, when shall I look on

thee again, poor land! When shall I pass the blessed day among thy

hawthorns, under our own poor lily-oaks, hearing the grasshoppers sing,

and the Vivonne making a little noise like someone whispering, instead

of that wretched bell from our young master, who can never stay still

for half an hour on end without having me run the length of that wicked

corridor. And even then he makes out I don’t come quick enough; you’ld

need to hear the bell ring before he has pulled it, and if you’re a

minute late, away he flies into the most towering rage. Alas, poor

Combray; maybe I shall see thee only in death, when they drop me like a

stone into the hollow of the tomb. And so, nevermore shall I smell thy

lovely hawthorns, so white and all. But in the sleep of death I dare say

I shall still hear those three peals of the bell which will have driven

me to damnation in this world.”

Her soliloquy was interrupted by the voice of the waistcoat-maker

downstairs, the same who had so delighted my grandmother once, long ago,

when she had gone to pay a call on Mme. de Villeparisis, and now

occupied no less exalted a place in Françoise’s affections. Having

raised his head when he heard our window open, he had already been

trying for some time to attract his neighbour’s attention, in order to

bid her good day. The coquetry of the young girl that Françoise had once

been softened and refined for M. Jupien the querulous face of our old

cook, dulled by age, ill-temper and the heat of the kitchen fire, and it

was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity and modesty that she

bestowed a gracious salutation on the waistcoat-maker, but without

making any audible response, for if she did infringe Mamma’s orders by

looking into the courtyard, she would never have dared to go the length

of talking from the window, which would have been quite enough

(according to her) to bring down on her “a whole chapter” from the

Mistress. She pointed to the waiting carriage, as who should say: “A

fine pair, eh!” though what she actually muttered was: “What an old

rattle-trap!” but principally because she knew that he would be bound to

answer, putting his hand to his lips so as to be audible without having

to shout:

“_You_ could have one too if you liked, as good as they have and better,

I dare say, only you don’t care for that sort of thing.”

And Françoise, after a modest, evasive signal of delight, the meaning of

which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know; simplicity’s the rule

in this house,” shut the window again in case Mamma should come in.

These “you” who might have had more horses than the Guermantes were

ourselves, but Jupien was right in saying “you” since, except for a few

purely personal gratifications, such as, when she coughed all day long

without ceasing and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her

cold, that of pretending, with an irritating little titter, that she had

not got a cold, like those plants that an animal to which they are

wholly attached keeps alive with food which it catches, eats and digests

for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily assimilable

residue, Françoise lived with us in full community; it was we who, with

our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take on ourselves the

task of concocting those little sops to her vanity out of which was

formed—with the addition of the recognised rights of freely practising

the cult of the midday dinner according to the traditional custom, which

included a mouthful of air at the window when the meal was finished, a

certain amount of loitering in the street when she went out to do her

marketing, and a holiday on Sundays when she paid a visit to her

niece—the portion of happiness indispensable to her existence. And so it

can be understood that Françoise might well have succumbed in those

first days of our migration, a victim, in a house where my father’s

claims to distinction were not yet known, to a malady which she herself

called “wearying”, wearying in the active sense in which the word

_ennui_ is employed by Corneille, or in the last letters of soldiers who

end by taking their own lives because they are wearying for their girls

or for their native villages. Françoise’s wearying had soon been cured

by none other than Jupien, for he at once procured her a pleasure no

less keen, indeed more refined than she would have felt if we had

decided to keep a carriage. “Very good class, those Juliens,” (for

Françoise readily assimilated new names to those with which she was

already familiar) “very worthy people; you can see it written on their

faces.” Jupien was in fact able to understand, and to inform the world

that if we did not keep a carriage it was because we had no wish for

one. This new friend of Françoise was very little at home, having

obtained a post in one of the Government offices. A waistcoat-maker

first of all, with the “chit of a girl” whom my grandmother had taken

for his daughter, he had lost all interest in the exercise of that

calling after his assistant (who, when still little more than a child,

had shewn great skill in darning a torn skirt, that day when my

grandmother had gone to call on Mme. de Villeparisis) had turned to

ladies’ fashions and become a seamstress. A prentice hand, to begin

with, in a dressmaker’s workroom, set to stitch a seam, to fasten a

flounce, to sew on a button or to press a crease, to fix a waistband

with hooks and eyes, she had quickly risen to be second and then chief

assistant, and having formed a connexion of her own among ladies of

fashion now worked at home, that is to say in our courtyard, generally

with one or two of her young friends from the workroom, whom she had

taken on as apprentices. After this, Jupien’s presence in the place had

ceased to matter. No doubt the little girl (a big girl by this time) had

often to cut out waistcoats still. But with her friends to assist her

she needed no one besides. And so Jupien, her uncle, had sought

employment outside. He was free at first to return home at midday, then,

when he had definitely succeeded the man whose substitute only he had

begun by being, not before dinner-time. His appointment to the “regular

establishment” was, fortunately, not announced until some weeks after

our arrival, so that his courtesy could be brought to bear on her long

enough to help Françoise to pass through the first, most difficult phase

without undue suffering. At the same time, and without underrating his

value to Françoise as, so to speak, a sedative during the period of

transition, I am bound to say that my first impression of Jupien had

been far from favourable. At a little distance, entirely ruining the

effect that his plump cheeks and vivid colouring would otherwise have

produced, his eyes, brimming with a compassionate, mournful, dreamy

gaze, led one to suppose that he was seriously ill or had just suffered

a great bereavement. Not only was he nothing of the sort, but as soon as

he opened his mouth (and his speech, by the way, was perfect) he was

quite markedly cynical and cold. There resulted from this discord

between eyes and lips a certain falsity which was not attractive, and by

which he had himself the air of being made as uncomfortable as a guest

who arrives in morning dress at a party where everyone else is in

evening dress, or as a commoner who having to speak to a Royal Personage

does not know exactly how he ought to address him and gets round the

difficulty by cutting down his remarks to almost nothing. Jupien’s (here

the comparison ends) were, on the contrary, charming. Indeed,

corresponding possibly to this overflowing of his face by his eyes

(which one ceased to notice when one came to know him), I soon discerned

in him a rare intellect, and one of the most spontaneously literary that

it has been my privilege to come across, in the sense that, probably

without education, he possessed or had assimilated, with the help only

of a few books skimmed in early life, the most ingenious turns of

speech. The most gifted people that I had known had died young. And so I

was convinced that Jupien’s life would soon be cut short. Kindness was

among his qualities, and pity, the most delicate and the most generous

feelings for others. But his part in the life of Françoise had soon

ceased to be indispensable. She had learned to put up with understudies.

Indeed, when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a parcel or

message, while seeming to pay no attention and merely pointing vaguely

to an empty chair, Françoise so skilfully put to the best advantage the

few seconds that he spent in the kitchen, while he waited for Mamma’s

answer, that it was very seldom that the stranger went away without

having ineradicably engraved upon his memory the conviction that, if we

“did not have” any particular thing, it was because we had “no wish” for

it. If she made such a point of other people’s knowing that we “had

money” (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive

articles, and said simply “have money”, “fetch water”), of their

realising that we were rich, it was not because riches with nothing else

besides, riches without virtue, were in her eyes the supreme good in

life; but virtue without riches was not her ideal either. Riches were

for her, so to speak, a necessary condition of virtue, failing which

virtue itself would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so

little between them that she had come in time to invest each with the

other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to

discover something edifying in riches.

As soon as she had shut the window again, which she did

quickly—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on her “every

conceivable insult”—Françoise began with many groans and sighs to put

straight the kitchen table.

“There are some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my

father’s valet; “I had a friend who used to be with them; he was their

second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old pal, but his

brother-in-law, who did his time in the Army with one of the Baron de

Guermantes’s stud grooms. Does your mother know you’re out?” added the

valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to hum the popular airs of

the season, of peppering his conversation with all the latest

witticisms.

Françoise, with the tired eyes of an ageing woman, eyes which moreover

saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, made out not the

witticism that underlay the words, but that there must be something

witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of his speech and

had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a

joker. She smiled at him, therefore, with an air of benevolent

bewilderment, as who should say: “Always the same, that Victor!” And she

was genuinely pleased, knowing that listening to smart sayings of this

sort was akin—if remotely—to those reputable social pleasures for which,

in every class of society, people make haste to dress themselves in

their best and run the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed

the valet to be a friend after her own heart, for he never left off

denouncing, with fierce indignation, the appalling measures which the

Republic was about to enforce against the clergy. Françoise had not yet

learned that our cruellest adversaries are not those who contradict and

try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports which may

make us unhappy, taking care not to include any appearance of

justification, which might lessen our discomfort, and perhaps give us

some slight regard for a party which they make a point of displaying to

us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.

“The Duchess must be connected with all that lot,” said Françoise,

bringing the conversation back to the Guermantes of the Rue de la

Chaise, as one plays a piece over again from the andante. “I can’t

recall who it was told me that one of them had married a cousin of the

Duke. It’s the same kindred, anyway. Ay, they’re a great family, the

Guermantes!” she added, in a tone of respect, founding the greatness of

the family at once on the number of its branches and the brilliance of

its connexions, as Pascal founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on

the Authority of the Scriptures. For since there was but the single word

“great” to express both meanings, it seemed to her that they formed a

single idea, her vocabulary, like cut stones sometimes, shewing thus on

certain of its facets a flaw which projected a ray of darkness into the

recesses of her mind. “I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them that have

their castle at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they

must be kin to their cousin at Algiers, too.” My mother and I long asked

ourselves who this cousin at Algiers could be until finally we

discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of

Angers. What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite

near. Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly

unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never

heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and

especially that of place-names, was thickly strewn with errors. “I meant

to talk to their butler about it. What is it again you call him?” she

interrupted herself as though putting a formal question as to the

correct procedure, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course,

it’s Antoine you call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s

the one who could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great

scholar, you’ld say they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to

learn to speak. He makes no response when you talk to him,” went on

Françoise, who used “make response” in the same sense as Mme. de

Sévigné. “But,” she added, quite untruthfully, “so long as I know what’s

boiling in my pot, I don’t bother my head about what’s in other

people’s. Whatever he is, he’s not a Catholic. Besides, he’s not a

courageous man.” (This criticism might have led one to suppose that

Françoise had changed her mind about physical bravery which, according

to her, in Combray days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts. But it

was not so. “Courageous” meant simply a hard worker.) “They do say, too,

that he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all one

hears. The servants never stay long there because of the lodge; the

porters are jealous and set the Duchess against them. But it’s safe to

say that he’s a real twister, that Antoine, and his Antoinesse is no

better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing the name “Antoine” with

a feminine ending that would designate the butler’s wife, was inspired,

no doubt, in her act of word-formation by an unconscious memory of the

words _chanoine_ and _chanoinesse_. If so, she was not far wrong. 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. She proceeded, moreover, at once to furnish

another example of this way of forming feminine endings, for she went

on: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the Duchess that has

Guermantes Castle. And it’s she that is the Lady Mayoress down in those

parts. That’s always something.”

“I can well believe that it is something,” came with conviction from the

footman, who had not detected the irony.

“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why, for folk

like them to be Mayor and Mayoress, it’s just thank you for nothing. Ah,

if it was mine, that Guermantes Castle, you wouldn’t see me setting foot

in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a family who’ve got something to go

on with, like Monsieur and Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on

in this wretched town rather than get away down to Combray the moment

they’re free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off

retiring? They’ve got everything they want. Why wait till they’re dead?

Ah, if I had only a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to keep me

warm in winter, a fine time I’ld have of it at home in my brother’s poor

old house at Combray. Down there you do feel you’re alive; you haven’t

all these houses stuck up in front of you, there is so little noise at

night-time, you can hear the frogs singing five miles off and more.”

“That must indeed be fine!” exclaimed the young footman with enthusiasm,

as though this last attraction had been as peculiar to Combray as the

gondola is to Venice. A more recent arrival in the household than my

father’s valet, he used to talk to Françoise about things which might

interest not himself so much as her. And Françoise, whose face wrinkled

up in disgust when she was treated as a mere cook, had for the young

footman, who referred to her always as the “housekeeper”, that peculiar

tenderness which Princes not of the blood royal feel towards the

well-meaning young men who dignify them with a “Highness”.

“At any rate one knows what one’s about, there, and what time of year it

is. It isn’t like here where you won’t find one wretched buttercup

flowering at holy Easter any more than you would at Christmas, and I

can’t hear so much as the tiniest angelus ring when I lift my old bones

out of bed in the morning. Down there, you can hear every hour; there’s

only the one poor bell, but you say to yourself: ‘My brother will be

coming in from the field now,’ and you watch the daylight fade, and the

bell rings to bless the fruits of the earth, and you have time to take a

turn before you light the lamp. But here it’s day time and it’s night

time, and you go to bed, and you can’t say any more than the dumb beasts

what you’ve been about all day.”

“I gather Méséglise is a fine place, too, Madame,” broke in the young

footman, who found that the conversation was becoming a little too

abstract for his liking, and happened to remember having heard us, at

table, mention Méséglise.

“Oh! Méséglise, is it?” said Françoise with the broad smile which one

could always bring to her lips by uttering any of those names—Méséglise,

Combray, Tansonville. They were so intimate a part of her life that she

felt, on meeting them outside it, on hearing them used in conversation,

a hilarity more or less akin to that which a professor excites in his

class by making an allusion to some contemporary personage whose name

the students had never supposed could possibly greet their ears from the

height of the academic chair. Her pleasure arose also from the feeling

that these places were something to her which they were not for the rest

of the world, old companions with whom one has shared many delights; and

she smiled at them as if she found in them something witty, because she

did find there a great part of herself.

“Yes, you may well say so, son, it is a pretty enough place is

Méséglise;” she went on with a tinkling laugh, “but how did you ever

come to hear tell of Méséglise?”

“How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-known place; people have

told me about it—yes, over and over again,” he assured her with that

criminal inexactitude of the informer who, whenever we attempt to form

an impartial estimate of the importance that a thing which matters to us

may have for other people, makes it impossible for us to succeed.

“I can tell you, it’s better down there, under the cherry-trees, than

standing before the fire all day.”

She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since Eulalie’s

death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had loved her as

little in her life time as she loved every one whose cupboard was bare,

who was dying of hunger, and after that came, like a good for nothing,

thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put on airs”. It no longer pained

her that Eulalie had so skilfully managed, Sunday after Sunday, to

secure her “trifle” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never

left off singing her praises.

“But it was at Combray, surely, that you used to be, with a cousin of

Madame?” asked the young footman.

“Yes, with Mme. Octave—oh, a dear, good, holy woman, my poor friends,

and a house where there was always enough and to spare, and all of the

very best, a good woman, you may well say, who had no pity on the

partridges, or the pheasants, or anything; you might turn up five to

dinner or six, it was never the meat that was lacking, and of the first

quality too, and white wine, and red wine, and everything you could

wish.” (Françoise used the word “pity” in the sense given it by La

Bruyère.) “It was she that paid the damages, always, even if the family

stayed for months and years.” (This reflexion was not really a slur upon

us, for Françoise belonged to an epoch when the word “damages” was not

restricted to a legal use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell

you, people didn’t go empty away from that house. As his reverence the

Curé has told us, many’s the time, if there ever was a woman who could

count on going straight before the Throne of God, it was she. Poor

Madame, I can hear her saying now, in the little voice she had: ‘You

know, Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just

as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the

victuals, you may be quite sure. If you’d only seen her, she weighed no

more than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She would

never listen to a word I said, she would never send for the doctor. Ah,

it wasn’t in that house that you’ld have to gobble down your dinner. She

liked her servants to be fed properly. Here, it’s been just the same

again to-day; we haven’t had time for so much as to break a crust of

bread; everything goes like ducks and drakes.”

What annoyed her more than anything were the rusks of pulled bread that

my father used to eat. She was convinced that he had them simply to give

himself airs and to keep her “dancing”. “I can tell you frankly,” the

young footman assured her, “that I never saw the like.” He said it as if

he had seen everything, and as if in him the range of a millennial

experience extended over all countries and their customs, among which

was not anywhere to be found a custom of eating pulled bread. “Yes,

yes,” the butler muttered, “but that will all be changed; the men are

going on strike in Canada, and the Minister told Monsieur the other

evening that he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There

was no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself entirely

honest, but since he regarded all politicians as unsound the crime of

peculation seemed to him less serious than the pettiest larceny. He did

not even stop to ask himself whether he had heard this historic

utterance aright, and was not struck by the improbability that such a

thing would have been admitted by the guilty party himself to my father

without my father’s immediately turning him out of the house. But the

philosophy of Combray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that

the strikes in Canada could have any repercussion on the use of pulled

bread. “So long as the world goes round, look, there’ll be masters to

keep us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of

this theory of perpetual motion, for the last quarter of an hour my

mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time as

Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had been

saying:

“What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at least two hours at

their dinner.”

And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, “her” footman, the

butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no

thought of answering it, but rather like the first sounds of the

instruments being tuned when the next part of a concert is just going to

begin, and one knows that there will be only a few minutes more of

interval. And so, when the peals were repeated and became more urgent,

our servants began to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much

time left and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal

somewhat louder than the rest gave a collective sigh and went their

several ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette

outside the door, Françoise, after a string of reflexions on ourselves,

such as: “They’ve got the jumps to-day, surely,” going up to put her

things tidy in her attic, while the butler, having supplied himself

first with note-paper from my bedroom, polished off the arrears of his

private correspondence.

Despite the apparent stiffness of their butler, Françoise had been in a

position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes occupied

their mansion by virtue not of an immemorial right but of a quite recent

tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked on the side that I did

not know was quite small and just like all the gardens along the street;

and I realised at length that there were not to be seen there pit and

gallows or fortified mill, secret chamber, pillared dovecot, manorial

bakehouse or tithe-barn, dungeon or drawbridge, or fixed bridge either

for that matter, any more than toll-houses or pinnacles, charters,

muniments, ramparts or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when

the bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a

portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of salt

water distributed over the earth’s surface, had suddenly restored to it

a personality of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal

painted by Whistler in his “Harmonies in Blue and Silver”, so the name

Guermantes had seen perish under the strokes of Françoise’s hammer the

last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables when one day an

old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess: “She is the

first lady in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; hers is the leading house in

the Faubourg Saint-German.” No doubt the most exclusive drawing-room,

the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was little or nothing

after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed. And yet

in this one too, (and it was to be the last of the series) there was

something, however humble, quite apart from its material components, a

secret differentiation.

And it became all the more essential that I should be able to explore in

the drawing-room of Mme. de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery

of her name, since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave

the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage.

Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, she had appeared to me in

the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks irreducible to,

impenetrable by the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on

the banks of the Vivonne, taking the place of my shattered dream like a

swan or willow into which has been changed a god or nymph, and which

henceforward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be

shaken by the wind. And yet, when that radiance had vanished, hardly had

I lost sight of it before it formed itself again, like the green and

rosy afterglow of sunset after the sweep of the oar that has broken it,

and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had quickly appropriated to

itself my impression of the face. But now, frequently, I saw her at her

window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least if I

did not succeed in integrating in her the name Guermantes, I cast the

blame on the impotence of my mind to accomplish the whole act that I

demanded of it; but she, our neighbour, she seemed to make the same

error, nay more to make it without discomfiture, without any of my

scruples, without even suspecting that it was an error. Thus Mme. de

Guermantes shewed in her dresses the same anxiety to follow the fashions

as if, believing herself to have become simply a woman like all the

rest, she had aspired to that elegance in her attire in which other

ordinary women might equal and perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in

the street gaze admiringly at a well-dressed actress; and in the

morning, before she sallied forth on foot, as if the opinion of the

passers-by, whose vulgarity she accentuated by parading familiarly

through their midst her inaccessible life, could be a tribunal competent

to judge her, I would see her before the glass playing, with a

conviction free from all pretence or irony, with passion, with

ill-humour, with conceit, like a queen who has consented to appear as a

servant-girl in theatricals at court, this part, so unworthy of her, of

a fashionable woman; and in this mythological oblivion of her natural

grandeur, she looked to see whether her veil was hanging properly,

smoothed her cuffs, straightened her cloak, as the celestial swan

performs all the movements natural to his animal species, keeps his eyes

painted on either side of his beak without putting into them any glint

of life, and darts suddenly after a bud or an umbrella, as a swan would,

without remembering that he is a god. But as the traveller, disappointed

by the first appearance of a strange town, reminds himself that he will

doubtless succeed in penetrating its charm if he visits its museums and

galleries, so I assured myself that, had I been given the right of entry

into Mme. de Guermantes’s house, were I one of her friends, were I to

penetrate into her life, I should then know what, within its glowing

orange-tawny envelope, her name did really, objectively enclose for

other people, since, after all, my father’s friend had said that the

Guermantes set was something quite by itself in the Faubourg

Saint-Germain.

The life which I supposed them to lead there flowed from a source so

different from anything in my experience, and must, I felt, be so

indissolubly associated with that particular house that I could not have

imagined the presence, at the Duchess’s parties, of people in whose

company I myself had already been, of people who really existed. For not

being able suddenly to change their nature, they would have carried on

conversations there of the sort that I knew; their partners would

perhaps have stooped to reply to them in the same human speech; and, in

the course of an evening spent in the leading house in the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, there would have been moments identical with moments that

I had already lived. Which was impossible. It was thus that my mind was

embarrassed by certain difficulties, and the Presence of Our Lord’s Body

in the Host seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading

house in the Faubourg, situated here, on the right bank of the river,

and so near that from my bed, in the morning, I could hear its carpets

being beaten. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the

Faubourg Saint-Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was

purely ideal. I felt clearly that it was already part of the Faubourg,

when I saw the Guermantes doormat, spread out beyond that intangible

Equator, of which my mother had made bold to say, having like myself

caught a glimpse of it one day when their door stood open, that it was

in a shocking state. For the rest, how could their dining-room, their

dim gallery upholstered in red plush, into which I could see sometimes

from our kitchen window, have failed to possess in my eyes the

mysterious charm of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to form part of it in an

essential fashion, to be geographically situated within it, since to

have been entertained to dinner in that room was to have gone into the

Faubourg Saint-Germain, to have breathed its atmosphere, since the

people who, before going to table, sat down by the side of Mme. de

Guermantes on the leather-covered sofa in that gallery were all of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain. No doubt elsewhere than in the Faubourg, at

certain parties, one might see now and then, majestically enthroned amid

the vulgar herd of fashion, one of those men who were mere names and

varyingly assumed, when one tried to form a picture of them, the aspect

of a tournament or of a royal forest. But here, in the leading house in

the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the drawing-room, in the dim gallery,

there were only they. They were, wrought of precious materials, the

columns that upheld the temple. Indeed for quiet family parties it was

from among them only that Mme. de Guermantes might select her guests,

and in the dinners for twelve, gathered around the dazzling napery and

plate, they were like the golden statues of the Apostles in the

Sainte-Chapelle, symbolic, consecrative pillars before the Holy Table.

As for the tiny strip of garden that stretched between high walls at the

back of the house, where on summer evenings Mme. de Guermantes had

liqueurs and orangeade brought out after dinner, how could I not have

felt that to sit there of an evening, between nine and eleven, on its

iron chairs—endowed with a magic as potent as the leathern sofa—without

inhaling the breezes peculiar to the Faubourg Saint-Germain was as

impossible as to take a siesta in the oasis of Figuig without thereby

being necessarily in Africa. Only imagination and belief can

differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can

create an atmosphere. Alas, those picturesque sites, those natural

accidents, those local curiosities, those works of art of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, never probably should I be permitted to set my feet among

them. And I must content myself with a shiver of excitement as I

sighted, from the deep sea (and without the least hope of ever landing

there) like an outstanding minaret, like the first palm, like the first

signs of some exotic industry or vegetation, the well-trodden doormat of

its shore.

But if the Hôtel de Guermantes began for me at its hall-door, its

dependencies must be regarded as extending a long way farther, according

to the Duke, who, looking on all the other tenants as farmers, peasants,

purchasers of forfeited estates, whose opinion was of no account, shaved

himself every morning in his nightshirt at the window, came down into

the courtyard, according to the warmth or coldness of the day, in his

shirt-sleeves, in pyjamas, in a plaid coat of startling colours, with a

shaggy nap, in little light-coloured covert coats shorter than the

jackets beneath, and made one of his grooms lead past him at a trot some

horse that he had just been buying. More than once, indeed, the horse

broke the window of Jupien’s shop, whereupon Jupien, to the Duke’s

indignation, demanded compensation. “If it were only in consideration of

all the good that Madame la Duchesse does in the house, here, and in the

parish,” said M. de Guermantes, “it is an outrage on this fellow’s part

to claim a penny from us.” But Jupien had stuck to his point, apparently

not having the faintest idea what “good” the Duchess had ever done. And

yet she did do good, but—since one cannot do good to everybody at

once—the memory of the benefits that we have heaped on one person is a

valid reason for our abstaining from helping another, whose discontent

we thereby make all the stronger. From other points of view than that of

charity the quarter appeared to the Duke—and this over a considerable

area—to be only an extension of his courtyard, a longer track for his

horses. After seeing how a new acquisition trotted by itself he would

have it harnessed and taken through all the neighbouring streets, the

groom running beside the carriage holding the reins, making it pass to

and fro before the Duke who stood on the pavement, erect, gigantic,

enormous in his vivid clothes, a cigar between his teeth, his head in

the air, his eyeglass scrutinous, until the moment when he sprang on to

the box, drove the horse up and down for a little to try it, then set

off with his new turn-out to pick up his mistress in the Champs-Elysées.

M. de Guermantes bade good day, before leaving the courtyard, to two

couples who belonged more or less to his world; the first, some cousins

of his who, like working-class parents, were never at home to look after

their children, since every morning the wife went off to the Schola to

study counterpoint and fugue, and the husband to his studio to carve

wood and beat leather; and after them the Baron and Baronne de Norpois,

always dressed in black, she like a pew-opener and he like a mute at a

funeral, who emerged several times daily on their way to church. They

were the nephew and niece of the old Ambassador who was our friend, and

whom my father had, in fact, met at the foot of the staircase without

realising from where he came; for my father supposed that so important a

personage, one who had come in contact with the most eminent men in

Europe and was probably quite indifferent to the empty distinctions of

rank, was hardly likely to frequent the society of these obscure,

clerical and narrow-minded nobles. They had not been long in the place;

Jupien, who had come out into the courtyard to say a word to the husband

just as he was greeting M. de Guermantes, called him “M. Norpois,” not

being certain of his name.

“Monsieur Norpois, indeed! Oh, that really is good! Just wait a little!

This individual will be calling you Comrade Norpois next!” exclaimed M.

de Guermantes, turning to the Baron. He was at last able to vent his

spleen against Jupien who addressed him as “Monsieur,” instead of

“Monsieur le Duc.”

One day when M. de Guermantes required some information upon a matter of

which my father had professional knowledge, he had introduced himself to

him with great courtesy. After that, he had often some neighbourly

service to ask of my father and, as soon as he saw him begin to come

downstairs, his mind occupied with his work and anxious to avoid any

interruption, the Duke, leaving his stable-boys, would come up to him in

the courtyard, straighten the collar of his great-coat, with the

serviceable deftness inherited from a line of royal body-servants in

days gone by, take him by the hand, and, holding it in his own, patting

it even to prove to my father, with a courtesan’s or courtier’s

shamelessness, that he, the Duc de Guermantes, made no bargain about my

father’s right to the privilege of contact with the ducal flesh, lead

him, so to speak, on leash, extremely annoyed and thinking only how he

might escape, through the carriage entrance out into the street. He had

given us a sweeping bow one day when we had come in just as he was going

out in the carriage with his wife; he was bound to have told her my

name; but what likelihood was there of her remembering it, or my face

either? And besides, what a feeble recommendation to be pointed out

simply as being one of her tenants! Another, more valuable, would have

been my meeting the Duchess in the drawing-room of Mme. de Villeparisis,

who, as it happened, had just sent word by my grandmother that I was to

go and see her, and, remembering that I had been intending to go in for

literature, had added that I should meet several authors there. But my

father felt that I was still a little young to go into society, and as

the state of my health continued to give him uneasiness he did not see

the use of establishing precedents that would do me no good.

As one of Mme. de Guermantes’s footmen was in the habit of talking to

Françoise, I picked up the names of several of the houses which she

frequented, but formed no impression of any of them; from the moment in

which they were a part of her life, of that life which I saw only

through the veil of her name, were they not inconceivable?

“To-night there’s a big party with a Chinese shadow show at the

Princesse de Parme’s,” said the footman, “but we shan’t be going,

because at five o’clock Madame is taking the train to Chantilly, to

spend a few days with the Duc d’Aumale; but it’ll be the lady’s maid and

valet that are going with her. I’m to stay here. She won’t be at all

pleased, the Princesse de Parme won’t, that’s four times already she’s

written to Madame la Duchesse.”

“Then you won’t be going down to Guermantes Castle this year?”

“It’s the first time we shan’t be going there: it’s because of the

Duke’s rheumatics, the doctor says he’s not to go there till the hot

pipes are in, but we’ve been there every year till now, right on to

January. If the hot pipes aren’t ready, perhaps Madame will go for a few

days to Cannes, to the Duchesse de Guise, but nothing’s settled yet.”

“And to the theatre, do you go, sometimes?”

“We go now and then to the Opéra, usually on the evenings when the

Princesse de Parme has her box, that’s once a week; it seems it’s a fine

show they give there, plays, operas, everything. Madame refused to

subscribe to it herself, but we go all the same to the boxes Madame’s

friends take, one one night, another another, often with the Princesse

de Guermantes, the Duke’s cousin’s lady. She’s sister to the Duke of

Bavaria. And so you’ve got to run upstairs again now, have you?” went on

the footman, who, albeit identified with the Guermantes, looked upon

masters in general as a political estate, a view which allowed him to

treat Françoise with as much respect as if she too were in service with

a duchess. “You enjoy good health, ma’am.”

“Oh, if it wasn’t for these cursed legs of mine! On the plain I can

still get along” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in the

streets, where Françoise had no objection to walking, in other words “on

a plane surface”) “but it’s these stairs that do me in, devil take them.

Good day to you, sir, see you again, perhaps, this evening.”

She was all the more anxious to continue her conversations with the

footman after he mentioned to her that the sons of dukes often bore a

princely title which they retained until their fathers were dead.

Evidently the cult of the nobility, blended with and accommodating

itself to a certain spirit of revolt against it, must, springing

hereditarily from the soil of France, be very strongly implanted still

in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of the genius of

Napoleon or of wireless telegraphy without succeeding in attracting her

attention, and without her slackening for an instant the movements with

which she was scraping the ashes from the grate or laying the table, if

she were simply to be told these idiosyncrasies of nomenclature, and

that the younger son of the Duc de Guermantes was generally called

Prince d’Oléron, would at once exclaim: “That’s fine, that is!” and

stand there dazed, as though in contemplation of a stained window in

church.

Françoise learned also from the Prince d’Agrigente’s valet, who had

become friends with her by coming often to the house with notes for the

Duchess, that he had been hearing a great deal of talk in society about

the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle. d’Ambresac, and that

it was practically settled.

That villa, that opera-box, into which Mme. de Guermantes transfused the

current of her life, must, it seemed to me, be places no less fairylike

than her home. The names of Guise, of Parme, of Guermantes-Bavière,

differentiated from all possible others the holiday places to which the

Duchess resorted, the daily festivities which the track of her bowling

wheels bound, as with ribbons, to her mansion. If they told me that in

those holidays, in those festivities, consisted serially the life of

Mme. de Guermantes, they brought no further light to bear on it. Each of

them gave to the life of the Duchess a different determination, but

succeeded only in changing the mystery of it, without allowing to escape

any of its own mystery which simply floated, protected by a covering,

enclosed in a bell, through the tide of the life of all the world. The

Duchess might take her luncheon on the shore of the Mediterranean at

Carnival time, but, in the villa of Mme. de Guise, where the queen of

Parisian society was nothing more, in her white linen dress, among

numberless princesses, than a guest like any of the rest, and on that

account more moving still to me, more herself by being thus made new,

like a star of the ballet who in the fantastic course of a figure takes

the place of each of her humbler sisters in succession; she might look

at Chinese shadow shows, but at a party given by the Princesse de Parme,

listen to tragedy or opera, but from the box of the Princesse de

Guermantes.

As we localise in the body of a person all the potentialities of that

person’s life, our recollections of the people he knows and has just

left or is on his way to meet, if, having learned from Françoise that

Mme. de Guermantes was going on foot to luncheon with the Princesse de

Parme, I saw her, about midday, emerge from her house in a gown of flesh

coloured satin over which her face was of the same shade, like a cloud

that rises above the setting sun, it was all the pleasures of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain that I saw before me, contained in that small

compass, as in a shell, between its twin valves that glowed with roseate

nacre.

My father had a friend at the Ministry, one A. J. Moreau, who, to

distinguish him from the other Moreaus, took care always to prefix both

initials to his name, with the result that people called him, for short,

“A. J.” Well, somehow or other, this A. J. found himself entitled to a

stall at the Opéra-Comique on a gala night; he sent the ticket to my

father, and as Berma, whom I had not been again to see since my first

disappointment, was to give an act of _Phèdre_, my grandmother persuaded

my father to pass it on to me.

To tell the truth, I attached no importance to this possibility of

hearing Berma which, a few years earlier, had plunged me in such a state

of agitation. And it was not without a sense of melancholy that I

realised the fact of my indifference to what at one time I had put

before health, comfort, everything. It was not that there had been any

slackening of my desire for an opportunity to contemplate close at hand

the precious particles of reality of which my imagination caught a

broken glimpse. But my imagination no longer placed these in the diction

of a great actress; since my visits to Elstir, it was on certain

tapestries, certain modern paintings that I had brought to bear the

inner faith I had once had in this acting, in this tragic art of Berma;

my faith, my desire, no longer coming forward to pay incessant worship

to the diction, the attitudes of Berma, the counterpart that I possessed

of them in my heart had gradually perished, like those other

counterparts of the dead in ancient Egypt which had to be fed

continually in order to maintain their originals in eternal life. This

art had become a feeble, tawdry thing. No deep-lying soul inhabited it

any more.

That evening, as, armed with the ticket my father had received from his

friend, I was climbing the grand staircase of the Opera, I saw in front

of me a man whom I took at first for M. de Charlus, whose bearing he

had; when he turned his head to ask some question of one of the staff I

saw that I had been mistaken, but I had no hesitation in placing the

stranger in the same class of society, from the way not only in which he

was dressed but in which he spoke to the man who took the tickets and to

the box-openers who were keeping him waiting. For, apart from personal

details of similarity, there was still at this period between any smart

and wealthy man of that section of the nobility and any smart and

wealthy man of the world of finance or “big business” a strongly marked

difference. Where one of the latter would have thought he was giving

proof of his exclusiveness by adopting a sharp, haughty tone in speaking

to an inferior, the great gentleman, affable, pleasant, smiling, had the

air of considering, practising an affectation of humility and patience,

a pretence of being just one of the audience, as a privilege of his good

breeding. It is quite likely that, on seeing him thus dissemble behind a

smile overflowing with good nature the barred threshold of the little

world apart which he carried in his person, more than one wealthy

banker’s son, entering the theatre at that moment, would have taken this

great gentleman for a person of no importance if he had not remarked in

him an astonishing resemblance to the portrait that had recently

appeared in the illustrated papers of a nephew of the Austrian Emperor,

the Prince of Saxony, who happened to be in Paris at the time. I knew

him to be a great friend of the Guermantes. As I reached the attendant I

heard the Prince of Saxony (or his double) say with a smile: “I don’t

know the number; it was my cousin who told me I had only to ask for her

box.”

He may well have been the Prince of Saxony; it was perhaps of the

Duchesse de Guermantes (whom, in that event, I should be able to watch

in the process of living one of those moments of her unimaginable life

in her cousin’s box) that his eyes formed a mental picture when he

referred to “my cousin who told me I had only to ask for her box,” so

much so that that smiling gaze peculiar to himself, those so simple

words caressed my heart (far more gently than would any abstract

meditation) with the alternative feelers of a possible happiness and a

vague distinction. Whatever he was, in uttering this sentence to the

attendant he grafted upon a commonplace evening in my everyday life a

potential outlet into a new world; the passage to which he was directed

after mentioning the word “box” and along which he now proceeded was

moist and mildewed and seemed to lead to subaqueous grottoes, to the

mythical kingdom of the water-nymphs. I had before me a gentleman in

evening dress who was walking away from me, but I kept playing upon and

round him, as with a badly fitting reflector on a lamp, and without ever

succeeding in making it actually coincide with him, the idea that he was

the Prince of Saxony and was on his way to join the Duchesse de

Guermantes. And, for all that he was alone, that idea, external to

himself, impalpable, immense, unstable as the shadow projected by a

magic lantern, seemed to precede and guide him like that deity,

invisible to the rest of mankind, who stands beside the Greek warrior in

the hour of battle.

I took my seat, striving all the time to recapture a line from _Phèdre_

which I could not quite remember. In the form in which I repeated it to

myself it had not the right number of feet, but as I made no attempt to

count them, between its unwieldiness and a classical line of poetry it

seemed as though no common measure could exist. It would not have

surprised me to learn that I must subtract at least half a dozen

syllables from that portentous phrase to reduce it to alexandrine

dimensions. But suddenly I remembered it, the irremediable asperities of

an inhuman world vanished as if by magic; the syllables of the line at

once filled up the requisite measure, what there was in excess floated

off with the ease, the dexterity of a bubble of air that rises to burst

on the water’s brink. And, after all, this excrescence with which I had

been struggling consisted of but a single foot.

A certain number of orchestra stalls had been offered for sale at the

box office and bought, out of snobbishness or curiosity, by such as

wished to study the appearance of people whom they might not have

another opportunity of seeing at close quarters. And it was indeed a

fragment of their true social life, ordinarily kept secret, that one

could examine here in public, for, the Princesse de Parme having herself

distributed among her friends the seats in stalls, balconies and boxes,

the house was like a drawing-room in which everyone changed his place,

went to sit here or there wherever he caught sight of a woman whom he

knew.

Next to me were some common people who, not knowing the regular

subscribers, were anxious to shew that they were capable of identifying

them and named them aloud. They went on to remark that these subscribers

behaved there as though they were in their own drawing-rooms, meaning

that they paid no attention to what was being played. Which was the

exact opposite of what did happen. A budding genius who has taken a

stall in order to hear Berma thinks only of not soiling his gloves, of

not disturbing, of making friends with the neighbour whom chance has put

beside him, of pursuing with an intermittent smile the fugitive—avoiding

with apparent want of politeness the intercepted gaze of a person of his

acquaintance whom he has discovered in the audience and to whom, after a

thousand indecisions, he makes up his mind to go and talk just as the

three hammer-blows from the stage, sounding before he has had time to

reach his friend, force 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. On the other hand it was because the society people sat in

their boxes (behind the general terrace of the balcony, as in so many

little drawing-rooms, the fourth walls of which had been removed, or in

so many little cafés, to which one might go for refreshment, without

letting oneself be intimidated by the mirrors in gilt frames or the red

plush seats, in the Neapolitan style, of the establishment), it was

because they rested an indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the

columns which upheld this temple of the lyric art, it was because they

remained unmoved by the extravagant honours which seemed to be being

paid them by a pair of carved figures which held out towards the boxes

branches of palm and laurel, that they and they only would have had

minds free to listen to the play, if only they had had minds.

At first there was nothing visible but vague shadows, in which one

suddenly struck—like the gleam of a precious stone which one cannot

see—the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes, or, like a medallion

of Henri IV on a dark background, the bent profile of the Duc d’Aumale,

to whom an invisible lady was exclaiming “Monseigneur must allow me to

take his coat,” to which the Prince replied, “Oh, come, come! Really,

Madame d’Ambresac.” She took it, in spite of this vague prohibition, and

was envied by all the rest her being thus honoured.

But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who

inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against their

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 behind the gaily

breaking foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved,

beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of

the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it; this side of them,

began the orchestra stalls, abode of mortals for ever separated from the

transparent, shadowy realm to which, at points here and there, served as

boundaries, on its brimming surface, the limpid, mirroring eyes of the

water-nymphs. For the folding seats on its shore, the forms of the

monsters in the stalls were painted upon the surface of those eyes in

simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of

incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to

which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary,

that can be considered as analogous to our own, we should think

ourselves mad if we addressed a smile or a glance of recognition:

namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced. Beyond

this boundary, withdrawing from the limit of their domain, the radiant

daughters of the sea kept turning at every moment to smile up at the

bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or

towards some aquatic demi-god, whose head was a polished stone to which

the tides had borne a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of

rock crystal. They leaned towards these creatures, offering them

sweetmeats; sometimes the flood parted to admit a fresh Nereid who,

belated, smiling, apologetic, had just floated into blossom out of the

shadowy depths; then, the act ended, having no further hope of hearing

the melodious sounds of earth which had drawn them to the surface,

plunging back all in a moment the several sisters vanished into the

night. But of all these retreats, to the thresholds of which their mild

desire to behold the works of man brought the curious goddesses who let

none approach them, the most famous was the cube of semi-darkness known

to the world as the stage box of the Princesse de Guermantes.

Like a mighty goddess who presides from far aloft over the sports of

lesser deities, the Princess had deliberately remained a little way back

on a sofa placed sideways in the box, red as a reef of coral, beside a

big, glassy splash of reflexion which was probably a mirror and made one

think of the section cut by a ray of sunlight, vertical, clear, liquid,

through the flashing crystal of the sea. At once plume and blossom, like

certain subaqueous growths, a great white flower, downy as the wing of a

bird, fell from the brow of the Princess along one of her cheeks, the

curve of which it followed with a pliancy, coquettish, amorous, alive,

and seemed almost to enfold it like a rosy egg in the softness of a

halcyon’s nest. Over her hair, reaching in front to her eyebrows and

caught back lower down at the level of her throat, was spread a net upon

which those little white shells which are gathered on some shore of the

South Seas alternated with pearls, a marine mosaic barely emerging from

the waves and at every moment plunged back again into a darkness in the

depths of which even then a human presence was revealed by the

ubiquitous flashing of the Princess’s eyes. The beauty which set her far

above all the other fabulous daughters of the dusk was not altogether

materially and comprehensively inscribed on her neck, her shoulders, her

arms, her figure. But the exquisite, unfinished line of the last was the

exact starting point, the inevitable focus of invisible lines which the

eye could not help prolonging, marvellous lines, springing into life

round the woman like the spectrum of an ideal form projected upon the

screen of darkness.

“That’s the Princesse de Guermantes,” said my neighbour to the gentleman

beside her, taking care to begin the word “Princesse” with a string of

‘P’s, to shew that a title like that was absurd. “She hasn’t been

sparing with her pearls. I’m sure, if I had as many as that, I wouldn’t

make such a display of them; it doesn’t look at all well, not to my

mind.”

And yet, when they caught sight of the Princess, all those who were

looking round to see who was in the audience felt springing up for her

in their hearts the rightful throne of beauty. Indeed, with the Duchesse

de Luxembourg, with Mme. de Morienval, with Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, and

any number of others, what enabled one to identify their faces would be

the juxtaposition of a big red nose to a hare-lip, or of a pair of

wrinkled cheeks to a faint moustache. These features were nevertheless

sufficient in themselves to attract the eye, since having merely the

conventional value of a written document they gave one to read a famous

and impressive name; but also they gave one, cumulatively, the idea that

ugliness had about it something aristocratic, and that it was

unnecessary that the face of a great lady, provided it was

distinguished, should be beautiful as well. But like certain artists

who, instead of the letters of their names, set at the foot of their

canvas a form that is beautiful in itself, a butterfly, a lizard, a

flower, so it was the form of a delicious face and figure that the

Princess had put in the corner of her box, thereby shewing that beauty

can be the noblest of signatures; for the presence there of Mme. de

Guermantes-Bavière, who brought to the theatre only such persons as at

other times formed part of her intimate circle, was in the eyes of

specialists in aristocracy the best possible certificate of the

authenticity of the picture which her box presented, a sort of evocation

of a scene in the ordinary private life of the Princess in her palaces

in Munich and in Paris.

Our imagination being like a barrel organ out of order, which always

plays some other tune than that shewn on its card, every time that I had

heard any mention of the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection

of certain sixteenth century masterpieces had begun singing in my brain.

I was obliged to rid myself quickly of this association, now that I saw

her engaged in offering crystallised fruit to a stout gentleman in a

swallowtail coat. Certainly I was very far from the conclusion that she

and her guests were mere human beings like the rest of the audience. I

understood that what they were doing there was all only a game, and that

as a prelude to the acts of their real life (of which, presumably, this

was not where they spent the important part) they had arranged, in

obedience to a ritual unknown to me, they were feigning to offer and

decline sweetmeats, a gesture robbed of its ordinary significance and

regulated beforehand like the step of a dancer who alternately raises

herself on her toes and circles about an upheld scarf. For all I knew,

perhaps at the moment of offering him her sweetmeats the goddess was

saying, with that note of irony in her voice (for I saw her smile): “Do

have one, won’t you?” What mattered that to me? I should have found a

delicious refinement in the deliberate dryness, in the style of Mérimée

or Meilhac, of such words addressed by a goddess to a demi-god who,

conscious himself what were the sublime thoughts which they both had in

their minds, in reserve, doubtless, until the moment when they would

begin again to live their true life, consenting to join in the game, was

answering with the same mysterious bitterness: “Thanks; I should like a

cherry.” And I should have listened to this dialogue with the same

avidity as to a scene from _Le Mari de la Débutante_, where the absence

of poetry, of lofty thoughts, things so familiar to me which, I suppose,

Meilhac could easily, had he chosen, have put into it a thousand times

over, seemed to me in itself a refinement, a conventional refinement and

therefore all the more mysterious and instructive.

“That fat fellow is the Marquis de Ganançay,” came in a knowing tone

from the man next to me, who had not quite caught the name whispered in

the row behind.

The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long

neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was

moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and

appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts

past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall

of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, a venerable, wheezing monument,

and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep,

swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath. No one else aroused

in me so much envy as he, on account of his apparent familiarity with

this box and the indifference with which he allowed the Princess to hold

out to him her box of sweetmeats; throwing him, at the same time, a

glance from her fine eyes, cut in a pair of diamonds which at such

moments wit and friendliness seemed to liquefy, whereas, when they were

at rest, reduced to their purely material beauty, to their mineral

brilliance alone, if the least reflected flash disturbed them ever so

slightly, they set the darkness ablaze with inhuman horizontal splendid

fires. But now, because the act of _Phèdre_ in which Berma was playing

was due to start, the Princess came to the front of the box; whereupon,

as if she herself were a theatrical production, in the zone of light

which she traversed, I saw not only the colour but the material of her

adornments change. And in the box, dry now, emerging, a part no longer

of the watery realm, the Princess, ceasing to be a Nereid, appeared

turbanned in white and blue like some marvellous tragic actress dressed

for the part of Zaïre, or perhaps of Orosmane; finally, when she had

taken her place in the front row I saw that the soft halcyon’s nest

which tenderly shielded the rosy nacre of her cheeks was—downy,

dazzling, velvety, an immense bird of paradise.

But now my gaze was diverted from the Princesse de Guermante’s box by a

little woman who came in, ill-dressed, plain, her eyes ablaze with

indignation, followed by two young men, and sat down a few places from

me. At length the curtain went up. I could not help being saddened by

the reflexion that there remained now no trace of my old disposition, at

the period when, so as to miss nothing of the extraordinary phenomenon

which I would have gone to the ends of the earth to see, I kept my mind

prepared, like the sensitive plates which astronomers take out to

Africa, to the West Indies, to make and record an exact observation of a

comet or an eclipse; when I trembled for fear lest some cloud (a fit of

ill humour on the artist’s part or an incident in the audience) should

prevent the spectacle from presenting itself with the maximum of

intensity; when I should not have believed that I was watching it in the

most perfect conditions had I not gone to the very theatre which was

consecrated to it like an altar, in which I then felt to be still a part

of it, though an accessory part only, the officials with their white

carnations, appointed by her, the vaulted balcony covering a pit filled

with a shabbily dressed crowd, the women selling programmes that had her

photograph, the chestnut trees in the square outside, all those

companions, those confidants of my impressions of those days which

seemed to me to be inseparable from them. _Phèdre_, the “Declaration

Scene”, Berma, had had then for me a sort of absolute existence.

Standing aloof from the world of current experience they existed by

themselves, I must go to meet them, I should penetrate what I could of

them, and if I opened my eyes and soul to their fullest extent I should

still absorb but a very little of them. But how pleasant life seemed to

me: the triviality of the form of it that I myself was leading mattered

nothing, no more than the time we spend on dressing, on getting ready to

go out, since, transcending it, there existed in an absolute form, good

and difficult to approach, impossible to possess in their entirety,

those more solid realities, _Phèdre_ and the way in which Berma spoke

her part. Steeped in these dreams of perfection in the dramatic art (a

strong dose of which anyone who had at that time subjected my mind to

analysis at any moment of the day or even the night would have been able

to prepare from it), I was like a battery that accumulates and stores up

electricity. And a time had come when, ill as I was, even if I had

believed that I should die of it, I should still have been compelled to

go and hear Berma. But now, like a hill which from a distance seems a

patch of azure sky, but, as we draw nearer, returns to its place in our

ordinary field of vision, all this had left the world of the absolute

and was no more than a thing like other things, of which I took

cognisance because I was there, the actors were people of the same

substance as the people I knew, trying to speak in the best possible way

these lines of _Phèdre_, which themselves no longer formed a sublime and

individual essence, distinct from everything else, but were simply more

or less effective lines ready to slip back into the vast corpus of

French poetry, of which they were merely a part. I felt a discouragement

that was all the more profound in that, if the object of my headstrong

and active desire no longer existed, the same tendencies, on the other

hand, to indulge in a perpetual dream, which varied from year to year

but led me always to sudden impulses, regardless of danger, still

persisted. The day on which I rose from my bed of sickness and set out

to see, in some country house or other, a picture by Elstir or a

mediaeval tapestry, was so like the day on which I ought to have started

for Venice, or that on which I did go to hear Berma, or start for

Balbec, that I felt before going that the immediate object of my

sacrifice would, after a little while, leave me cold, that then I might

pass close by the place without stopping even to look at that picture,

those tapestries for which I would at this moment risk so many sleepless

nights, so many hours of pain. I discerned in the instability of its

object the vanity of my effort, and at the same time its vastness, which

I had not before noticed, like a neurasthenic whose exhaustion we double

by pointing out to him that he is exhausted. In the mean time my musings

gave a distinction to everything that had any connexion with them. And

even in my most carnal desires, magnetised always in a certain

direction, concentrated about a single dream, I might have recognised as

their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down

my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day dreams while I sat

reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the thought of

perfection.

I no longer felt the same indulgence as on the former occasion towards

the deliberate expressions of affection or anger which I had then

remarked in the delivery and gestures of Aricie, Ismène and Hippolyte.

It was not that the players—they were the same, by the way—did not still

seek, with the same intelligent application, to impart now a caressing

inflexion, or a calculated ambiguity to their voices, now a tragic

amplitude, or a suppliant meekness to their movements. Their intonations

bade the voice: “Be gentle, sing like a nightingale, caress and woo”; or

else, “now wax furious,” and then hurled themselves upon it, trying to

carry it off with them in their frenzied rush. But it, mutinous,

independent of their diction, remained unalterably their natural voice

with its material defects or charms, its everyday vulgarity or

affectation, and thus presented a sum-total of acoustic or social

phenomena which the sentiment contained in the lines they were repeating

was powerless to alter.

Similarly the gestures of the players said to their arms, to their

garments: “Be majestic.” But each of these unsubmissive members allowed

to flaunt itself between shoulder and elbow a biceps which knew nothing

of the part; they continued to express the triviality of everyday life

and to bring into prominence, instead of fine shades of Racinian

meaning, mere muscular attachments; and the draperies which they held up

fell back again along vertical lines in which the natural law that

governs falling bodies was challenged only by an insipid textile

pliancy. At this point the little woman who was sitting near me

exclaimed:

“Not a hand! Did you ever see such a get-up? She’s too old; she can’t

play the part; she ought to have retired ages ago.”

Amid a sibilant protest from their neighbours the two young men with her

succeeded in making her keep quiet and her fury raged now only in her

eyes. This fury could, moreover, be prompted only by the thought of

success, of fame, for Berma, who had earned so much money, was

overwhelmed with debts. Since she was always making business or social

appointments which she was prevented from keeping, she had messengers

flying with apologies along every street in Paris, and what with rooms

in hotels which she would never occupy engaged in advance, oceans of

scent to bathe her dogs, heavy penalties for breaches of contract with

all her managers, failing any more serious expense and being not so

voluptuous as Cleopatra, she would have found the means of squandering

on telegrams and jobmasters provinces and kingdoms. But the little woman

was an actress who had never tasted success, and had vowed a deadly

hatred against Berma. The latter had just come on to the stage. And

then—oh, the miracle—like those lessons which we laboured in vain to

learn overnight, and find intact, got by heart, on waking up next

morning, like, too, those faces of dead friends which the impassioned

efforts of our memory pursue without recapturing them, and which, when

we are no longer thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as

they were in life—the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought

so greedily to seize its essential quality, now, after these years of

oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the

force of a thing directly seen, on my admiration. Formerly, in my

attempts to isolate the talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I

heard the part itself, a part common to all the actresses who appeared

as Phèdre, which I had myself studied beforehand so that I might be

capable of subtracting it, of receiving in the strained residue only the

talent of Mme. Berma. But this talent which I sought to discover outside

the part itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great musician

(it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he played the

piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one cannot even be

certain whether the performer is a pianist at all, since (not

interposing all that mechanism of muscular effort, crowned here and

there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower of notes in

which at least the listener who does not quite know where he is thinks

that he can discern talent in its material, tangible objectivity) his

playing it become so transparent, so full of what he is interpreting,

that himself one no longer sees and he is nothing now but a window

opening upon a great work of art. The intentions which surrounded, like

a majestic or delicate border, the voice and mimicry of Aricie, Ismène

or Hippolyte I had been able to distinguish, but Phèdre had taken hers

into herself, and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction

and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly simplicity of their

unbroken surfaces those treasures, those effects of which no sign

emerged, so completely had they been absorbed. Berma’s voice, in which

not one atom of lifeless matter refractory to the mind remained

undissolved, did not allow any sign to be discernible around it of that

overflow of tears which one could feel, because they had not been able

to absorb it in themselves, trickling over the marble voice of Aricie or

Ismène, but had been brought to an exquisite perfection in each of its

tiniest cells like the instrument of a master violinist, in whom one

means, when one says that his music has a fine sound, to praise not a

physical peculiarity but a superiority of soul; and, as in the classical

landscape where in the place of a vanished nymph there is an inanimate

waterspring, a clear and concrete intention had been transformed into a

certain quality of tone, strangely, appropriately, coldly limpid.

Berma’s arms, which the lines themselves, by the same dynamic force that

made the words issue from her lips, seemed to raise on to her bosom like

leaves disturbed by a gush of water; her attitude, on the stage, which

she had gradually built up, which she was to modify yet further, and

which was based upon reasonings of a different profundity from those of

which traces might be seen in the gestures of her fellow-actors, but of

reasonings that had lost their original deliberation, and had melted

into a sort of radiance in which they sent throbbing, round the person

of the heroine, elements rich and complex, but which the fascinated

spectator took not as an artistic triumph but as a natural gift; those

white veils themselves, which, tenuous and clinging, seemed to be of a

living substance and to have been woven by the suffering, half-pagan,

half-Jansenist, around which they drew close like a frail, shrinking

chrysalis; all of them, voice, attitude, gestures, veils, were nothing

more, round this embodiment of an idea, which a line of poetry is (an

embodiment that, unlike our human bodies, covers the soul not with an

opaque screen which prevents us from seeing it, but with a purified, a

quickened garment through which the soul is diffused and we discover

it), than additional envelopes which instead of concealing shewed up in

greater splendour the soul that had assimilated them to itself and had

spread itself through them, than layers of different substances, grown

translucent, the interpolation of which has the effect only of causing a

richer refraction of the imprisoned, central ray that pierces through

them, and of making more extensive, more precious and more fair the

matter purified by fire in which it is enshrined. So Berma’s

interpretation was, around Racine’s work, a second work, quickened also

by the breath of genius.

My own impression, to tell the truth, though more pleasant than on the

earlier occasion, was not really different. Only, I no longer put it to

the test of a pre-existent, abstract and false idea of dramatic genius,

and I understood now that dramatic genius was precisely this. It had

just occurred to me that if I had not derived any pleasure from my first

hearing of Berma, it was because, as earlier still when I used to meet

Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, I had come to her with too strong a

desire. Between my two disappointments there was perhaps not only this

resemblance, but another more profound. The impression given us by a

person or a work (or a rendering, for that matter) of marked

individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought to it

the ideas of “beauty”, “breadth of style”, “pathos” and so forth which

we might, failing anything better, have had the illusion of discovering

in the commonplace show of a “correct” face or talent, but our critical

spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it

possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must detect and

isolate the unknown element. It hears a shrill sound, an oddly

interrogative intonation. It asks itself: “Is that good? Is what I am

feeling just now admiration? Is that richness of colouring, nobility,

strength?” And what answers it again is a shrill voice, a curiously

questioning tone, the despotic impression caused by a person whom one

does not know, wholly material, in which there is no room left for

“breadth of interpretation”. And for this reason it is the really

beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must

disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there

is none that corresponds to an individual impression.

This was precisely what Berma’s acting shewed me. This was what was

meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction. Now I could appreciate

the worth of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it

was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as

we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have no place

in classical mythology. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to

things in another; between the two we can establish a certain

correspondence, but not bridge the interval. It was quite narrow, this

interval, this fault that I had had to cross when, that afternoon on

which I went first to hear Berma, having strained my ears to catch every

word, I had found some difficulty in correlating my ideas of “nobility

of interpretation”, of “originality”, and had broken out in applause

only after a moment of unconsciousness and as if my applause sprang not

from my actual impression but was connected in some way with my

preconceived ideas, with the pleasure that I found in saying to myself:

“At last I am listening to Berma.” And the difference that there is

between a person, or a work of art which is markedly individual and the

idea of beauty, exists just as much between what they make us feel and

the idea of love, or of admiration. Wherefore we fail to recognise them.

I had found no pleasure in listening to Berma (any more than, earlier

still, in seeing Gilberte). I had said to myself: “Well, I do not admire

this.” But then I was thinking only of mastering the secret of Berma’s

acting, I was preoccupied with that alone, I was trying to open my mind

as wide as possible to receive all that her acting contained. I

understood now that all this amounted to nothing more nor less than

admiration.

This genius of which Berma’s rendering of the part was only the

revelation, was it indeed the genius of Racine and nothing more?

I thought so at first. I was soon to be undeceived when the curtain fell

on the act from _Phèdre_, amid enthusiastic recalls from the audience,

through which the old actress, beside herself with rage, drawing her

little body up to its full height, turning sideways in her seat,

stiffened the muscles of her face and folded her arms on her bosom to

shew that she was not joining the others in their applause, and to make

more noticeable a protest which to her appeared sensational though it

passed unperceived. The piece that followed was one of those novelties

which at one time I had expected, since they were not famous, to be

inevitably trivial and of no general application, devoid as they were of

any existence outside the performance that was being given of them at

the moment. But I had not with them as with a classic the disappointment

of seeing the infinity and eternity of a masterpiece occupy no more

space or time than the width of the footlights and the length of a

performance which would finish it as effectively as a piece written for

the occasion. Besides, at every fresh passage which, I felt, had

appealed to the audience and would one day be famous, in place of the

fame which it was prevented from having won in the past I added that

which it would enjoy in the future, by a mental process the converse of

that which consists in imagining masterpieces on the day of their first

thin performance, when it seemed inconceivable that a title which no one

had ever heard before could one day be set, bathed in the same mellow

light, beside those of the author’s other works. And this part would be

set one day in the list of her finest impersonations, next to that of

Phèdre. Not that in itself it was not destitute of all literary merit.

But Berma was as sublime in one as in the other. I realised then that

the work of the playwright was for the actress no more than the

material, the nature of which was comparatively unimportant, for the

creation of her masterpiece of interpretation, just as the great painter

whom I had met at Balbec, Elstir, had found the inspiration for two

pictures of equal merit in a school building without any character and a

cathedral which was in itself a work of art. And as the painter

dissolves houses, carts, people, in some broad effect of light which

makes them all alike, so Berma spread out great sheets of terror or

tenderness over words that were all melted together in a common mould,

lowered or raised to one level, which a lesser artist would have

carefully detached from one another. No doubt each of them had an

inflexion of its own, and Berma’s diction did not prevent one from

catching the rhythm of the verse. Is it not already a first element of

ordered complexity, of beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say

something which is at once similar to and different from the preceding

rhyme, which was prompted by it, but introduces the variety of a new

idea, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one

intellectual, the other prosodic? But Berma at the same time made her

words, her lines, her whole speeches even, flow into lakes of sound

vaster than themselves, at the margins of which it was a joy to see them

obliged to stop, to break off; thus it is that a poet takes pleasure in

making hesitate for a moment at the rhyming point the word which is

about to spring forth, and a composer in merging the various words of

his libretto in a single rhythm which contradicts, captures and controls

them. Thus into the prose sentences of the modern playwright as into the

poetry of Racine Berma managed to introduce those vast images, of grief,

nobility, passion, which were the masterpieces of her own personal art,

and in which she could be recognised as, in the portraits which he has

made of different sitters, we recognise a painter.

I had no longer any desire, as on the former occasion, to be able to

arrest and perpetuate Berma’s attitudes, the fine colour effect which

she gave for a moment only in a beam of limelight which at once faded

never to reappear, nor to make her repeat a single line a hundred times

over. I realised that my original desire had been more exacting than the

intentions of the poet, the actress, the great decorative artist who

supervised her productions, and that that charm which floated over a

line as it was spoken, those unstable poses perpetually transformed into

others, those successive pictures were the transient result, the

momentary object, the changing masterpiece which the art of the theatre

undertook to create and which would perish were an attempt made to fix

it for all time by a too much enraptured listener. I did not even make a

resolution to come back another day and hear Berma again. I was

satisfied with her; it was when I admired too keenly not to be

disappointed by the object of my admiration, whether that object were

Gilberte or Berma, that I demanded in advance, of the impression to be

received on the morrow, the pleasure that yesterday’s impression had

refused to afford me. Without seeking to analyse the joy which I had

begun now to feel, and might perhaps have been turning to some more

profitable use, I said to myself, as in the old days I might have said

to one of my schoolfellows: “Certainly, I put Berma first!” not without

a confused feeling that Berma’s genius was not, perhaps, very accurately

represented by this affirmation of my preference, or this award to her

of a “first” place, whatever the peace of mind that it might

incidentally restore to me.